Emery Ross

It’s the morning after they decided she was an albatross and Collette can’t remember what color Lee’s eyes are.

She could draw, with perfect detail, his hands: the shape, the shadows, the precise oval of his nails, the exact length of every single finger. But she absolutely cannot remember the shade of his eyes. This is how she knows it’s actual love of the transcendent variety. Something about this makes her realize which animal he is.

“You are a buffalo,” she tells Lee later.

“I’m not a goddamn buffalo,” he says. “Come with me.”

The winter rain stings as he guides her to the parking garage. In the car they are quiet. She drives, he directs her but won’t say where they’re going. She wants to tell him she can’t see very well at night, in the rain, but it seems like a significant weakness.

They arrive at the high desert and the rain stops. She had romanticized what it would actually look like based on his descriptions after he escaped here the week before. It’s actually not anything other than a regular desert marked by sagebrush and emptiness, dejected in its regularity. They get out of the car and walk to the edge of the sea of dirt. Fog hangs in angry wisps across the barren landscape.

“Can you see them?” He asks.

She can’t, so she says nothing. She hears the faint honking of the geese.

“Over there! See?”

The honking grows louder but she still can’t see them.

Collette’s eyes start to feel tired from all the looking. She remembers how, when they walked on the winding paths towards coffee shops and garages, the geese regarded them with deference. She understood then that the geese knew everything — they could see past the gap between them and see past the thinly veiled attempts at normalcy and into the deceptions and the wants that existed in those spaces. Now, the geese are right in front of her. She can hear their breathing and the soft chuffs they make. She knows that seeing these geese is of utmost importance, but she’s not sure why.

After a while, the desert chill has seeped into her bones. Lee unstiffens beside her, draws her to him. As his chest rises and falls in a pace to match hers, she thinks (not for the first time) how they don’t belong here. They are not of this world. Perhaps they belong to the moon, or to one of his galaxies. His arm tightens around her and she knows he heard all of her thoughts. She knows he has the same thoughts. Her sudden intense hatred for the unfairness of it all smothers everything else.

Lee starts to walk away from her, towards the goose sounds. The clouds part and moonlight tries to cut through the fog. He seems to be pushing through something, fighting to take a step. He struggles, then gets free and continues out into the vast, unending desert.

Collette tries to follow but smacks into an invisible barrier that knocks her back. She slips a little on the ice as the honking surrounds her. Indistinguishable creatures scream at her, and she knows what they are saying, they are urging her to hurry, hurry! She runs back and forth pounding her fists, jamming her toes against her boots as she kicks and shoves against the wall.

She hammers at the barrier and searches for an opening for hours. The geese take breaks from their screaming and sometimes hiss, but the quiet is unacceptable then, so she calls his name until she grows hoarse. Finally, her frozen hands crack and bleed and she can’t move them anymore. She slides down to the cold, hard ground and cries tears that freeze on her cheeks.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

A lone goose, head held high, approaches her. She stares at its sleek black neck, the texture of its back. It spreads its wings wide and arcs its neck back for a moment before inching closer and looking into her. She knows those eyes, those kaleidoscope, indeterminate irises. The remainder of the moon’s rays escape the fog, illuminating both of them and the shimmering dust beneath.

“You are a goose,” she whispers.

EMERY ROSS is a writer and graduate student living in Boise, Idaho.

Cecilia Aragon

Liuva’s gone crazy. And it’s the night Mama’s left for the banana festival.

Every year around this time, when the air’s thick and soggier than blankets left out overnight in the rain, Mama raises her old gray head and sniffs the air. Her left nostril flares and shrivels. Liuva used to watch her for hours just to catch a glimpse of her extraordinary nose in action.

There’s a certain scent the humidity squeezes from the gnarled old peach trees in our orchard at this time of year. Before I was nine I could tell almost to the day when Mama would disappear. She never failed to leave a note: “Gone to the _____ festival.”

Each year it was a different fruit, and Liuva and I, when we were still young and foolish, used to wonder what Mama was really doing. We hung out the wash as usual when she was gone, knowing the faded yellow floral sheets, pillowcases, and towels would be even wetter in the morning.

Liuva asked around the wooden clothespin in her mouth, “Where d’you think she’s wandered off to this time?”

I shrugged. “Last week she was complaining her feet hurt. Maybe she’ll bring us back some new shoes.”

“I remember the year she spent days talking about how lazy we were and ought to get the back end of the orchard weeded — ”

We shuddered in unison. We both know the back’s death for us. Whatever’s down there is locked tight only by the cage of tangled weeds.

Liuva went on, “She came back from the mango festival with a load of hoes and rakes and stuff. And what did she do? Throw ‘em all down the well. I don’t know where she gets the money, but I do know those festivals have never done us any good.”

“Then let’s just forget about it.” And that was that, I thought.

I still keep expecting Liuva to laugh and say it was just another one of her spells, one of those bad times that come upon all of us every now and then. But no, she keeps on chomping away at those peach trees. It’s been three hours and she’s polished off nine of them. If she keeps going at that rate she’ll run out of trees in the weeded area and have to go into the back end. I don’t want to be around when that happens.

Mama did say just last night, “You kids are too crazy for me. An old body like me needs some peace before she dies.”

What if Mama never comes back, and Liuva eats all the trees? How will I keep the house going? I don’t know, but it’s getting dark and I think I better hang out the wash. I don’t want to tell Liuva that Mama didn’t leave a note this time, but I found her hard and cold in the clothes basket we use to store bunches of green bananas.

CECILIA ARAGON’s six-word memoir reads: Programmer, pilot, professor, poet: what’s next? The daughter of immigrants, she lives in the only city she swore she’d never visit, where she teaches people the beauty of data. Her fiction has appeared in Cricket Magazine and the Purple Aardvark.

David S. Golding

I drink coffee watching the sun rise. In the reflection of the glass, I find that my eyes are no longer young. Wrinkles crease my cheeks. I must be dreaming. Out the window, which is now shaped like a tilted trapezoid, are hills of yellow grain. I see myself exploring their crests and trails between fields of wheat and maize. Someday I will pull up life from the fertile soil of those hills, give my mother a reason to have ever raised me. Knowing there is work to do, I wake.

I’m driving on a highway with no cars, the stereo playing every song that ever gave me chills. There is a thread that weaves together everything I will do in my life, the horizon tells me. I barely notice that the car pulls me onward, careening towards the coast, even though my feet do not touch the pedals. When I crash, my seatbelt grips me back, but my mom’s body continues through the windshield and soars out over the evergreen trees, a falcon before the sun.

It’s nighttime in a place where day never was. I tremble under the branches of a leafless tree. The ground is bare, the leaf fall long decayed, except for something that moves at my feet. A white claw pushes the dirt up, which I realize isn’t a claw but a hand with no flesh or muscles, followed by a skull that sees me with one red eye and one blue, alternating colors that flash so fast they encapsulate everything around me. I kick at the skeleton but it’s no use. It comes up from the ground until it’s free from the soil and I am the one who’s dead, or close to dead, although my body seems intact, and my fingers flex imperfectly. They must not be real.

There is only chatter, corridors, slams, crowds moving shoulder to shoulder. White comes down from above and blares out all color. Electricity courses the hallways above us and below us. Its currents form a system of interlocking circuits. Any of us nameless ones could, at any moment, find ourselves at the nexus of this machine’s powers, silent lenses closing in to surround, a light intensifying for a split second, just long enough to strip our body of its skin.

I’m outside and there’s not a cloud in the noon sky. In the dry storm drain at my feet, I remember that I haven’t seen the stars in far too long. I hold my flattened hand above my eyebrows and stare at the distant walls in every direction. Some people sit at a table, and another group gathers by a motionless tower. This is all I have left. I make my way towards the dark interior and get lost somehow, even though I do this every day. I end up in a tiny room with no sound and no door. My mother stands there. She has grown impossibly old and tall. I run to her and she picks me up, holds me for the first time in thirty years. Her fingers clutch my balding scalp, her other arm under my knees. She wants to sing to me but she doesn’t, nor does she look at me, because she doesn’t want me to see her tears.

Out the window, which is now a narrow slit, and through the muddy specks on the glass that no one ever cleans, I recognize the hills from my childhood dreams. The hills are the same, with the same rocky outcrops, except there is no more wheat. Everything is fallow. A white dust covers the ground, probably bone meal, or ash from an unseen eruption. Again I wake, again and again. I wake each morning to find myself here at the window.

DAVID S. GOLDING teaches peace studies and international development in Sri Lanka. After teaching, he takes the crowded night train home to the fishing village where he lives. His fiction can be found at www.dsgolding.com.