Category: Uncategorized

Headliners:

Thoughts on Masking by Ruth Vinz

Three Poems by Ace Boggess

Atmospheric Perspective by Richard Helmling

 

Fiction:

Belly by Andi Grene

Little Dalmatia by Madeline Cash

Blight by Jeb Burt

Gravity by Nicholas Rombes

For Love of Stalin by Frederick Frankenberg

 

Reviews:

A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ni Ghriofa by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

The Chair by Pat Zumhagen

 

Nonfiction:

Me and Bobby Kennedy by Steve Slavin

Rose D by Steve Slavin

 

Poetry:

Six Poems by Tobi Alfier

Three Poems by John Grey

Four Poems by Lisa Simmons

One Poem by Mary Jane White

Six Poems by Jared Beloff

Six Poems by Bernadette Bowen

“She’s gone to the U.P,” they would say, or, “She gone up North.”

Despite the fact that, technically, up North and the U.P. were two distinct regions. When it came to where Marilyn had disappeared to everyone knew it was the U.P. even if some referred to it, not really correctly, as up North.

It’s late at Carl’s and James makes his joke about the things waiting outside in the trees, above the gravel parking lot. It’s not a joke, really, because there’s no punchline, but people think of it as James’s joke anyway even though it’s more like a refrain or a half-finished fairy tale. It’s been a tough year, and there’s an unspoken hope that things are about to turn around for the better.

And yet the subject of this evening’s small talk at Carl’s is, as usual, Marilyn, who has incrementally transformed her personal tragedy—the loss of her two boys in a snowmobile accident—into a legend, and herself into something beyond a martyr–something mythical. When she becomes too familiar, and her presence demythologizes her aura, she disappears into the U.P. There is only one practical way to get there and that is the five-mile-long bridge across the Mackinac Straits, the bridge from which just last year a woman—in her car— was blown by a 50-mile wind gust off the bridge to plunge into the November Lake Superior water 150-feet below.

“The creatures have enlarged themselves,” James begins. The Pepsi clock above the bar reads 11:28. The way it will go is that, depending on various stages of drunkenness people will let James talk. They will even be gracious and welcoming. They will encourage details. It will be, for a brief time, like a workshop: tell us more, hold on; give us more details; what do you mean “hanging” in trees;” how did they get there; where’d you get this idea.

“It’s not an idea,” James says. One of his large ears is either purple or tattooed.

“You can’t bullshit a bullshitter,” Frank, James’s half-brother, responds.

“Maybe Marilyn left because of the ‘creatures’,” someone says. Carl, the owner and bartender, has heard this all before and is bored but knows that, very soon, things will veer deeper yet into boredom and James and his posse will disperse into the cold night.

Lisa has been listening and finally has this to say.

“I don’t think she’s up North at all. I don’t think she ever left.”

Lisa is the youngest of the group and has been waiting for a very long time—almost a year—to interject and change the trajectory of the story. Her own mother was a borderline narcissist and she has no interest in the attraction to Marilyn’s supposed vanishings to some place in the U.P. Lisa wears silver and turquoise bracelets and rings that give some people the impression she is from Arizona or New Mexico. Her skin is dark, dark for this part of Michigan.

“Cold enough for you yet?” Frank asked her last winter, the coldest one on record. Lisa lives on Mercy Street above the hardware store and all year it smells like spring in her apartment because of the fertilizer.

“Lisa doesn’t think she’s up North,” James repeats to the group, signaling one last round with a thing he does with his fingers above his head. Then he says, apropos of nothing: “Lisa never smiles.”

“I bet she doesn’t believe in the tree-things either,” someone else shouts from down the bar. Then laughs. No one wants to describe them, the things in the trees, because to do so would sound downright foolish. What: long snouts? What: hunched backs? Yellow eyes? Sharp teeth? Who could say these things—even if they were true—and not come across as a halfwit?

Lisa has soft features and smooth black hair and drives a red Cherokee. Before she came to Michigan she worked in Dayton, Ohio at an accounting firm where a software error resulted in an unaccounted for one hundred and seventy-eight thousand dollars that she used to move here and begin, as they say, a new life. The possibility of erasing who she was and what she had done. Her soft campaign against Marilyn is strategic, although Lisa has no endgame in sight. Marilyn is known for two things: the tragedy re: her children and the fact that she is what they call an artist-type. She wears flowing robes or shawls and even sandals in winter. Her decorated cigar box phase gave way to her shadow box phase without anyone even noticing.

“Oh I believe in them all right,” Lisa says. “They’ve gotten bigger.” In Ohio she drank her beers in poured pints but here she knows better and now doesn’t even need to say anything to Carl for him to bring her a longneck of whatever is one dollar.

“Not bigger, enlarged,” James says.

If she had to guess Lisa would say James is in his fifties but the only time she sees him is in this bar and under its distorting conditions and dim lights. In the way certain men do, James possesses the space around him while others flounder.

“Has this ever happened before?” she asks him.

“What?”

“The enlargement.”

“It’s been happening,” he says, “over time. They gorge, they get bigger.”

“You tell her!” Frank says as if they’re having a debate.

Lisa always does this then: gets out a cigarette and a lighter as if to. But she won’t. She can’t. She’ll wait until she’s outside.

“Okay so if she’s not in the U.P. where is she?” James asks.

On the TV above the bar the extra inning Tigers game is just over and there’s the lonely clapping of one person. Can’t hit for hitting someone says. There is now fog drifting in the blue light of the sulfur lamp outside. And there is the soft rumble of a car or two starting up in the parking lot.

There’s a phone ringing behind the bar and Carl lifts the receiver and puts it down again. It’s near closing time and there’s no reason to talk on the phone. If it’s an emergency they can reach him on the second phone, the private line, beneath the counter at the other end of the bar.

“Who’s up there with who?” asks James.

“Marilyn. With them,” says Lisa.

If she wants to insert herself into the familiar narrative about Marilyn then she needs to make a space in it, a gap, and then use that gap to expand her own detoured version. Lisa suddenly misses Dayton and the fine, marbled museum she’d spend Sunday afternoons in during hot summer days. It was there she learned about perspective and vanishing points and, in a way, how to vanish herself. She could be very still on a bench for a very long time.

Lisa gets up, walks over to the window, leans in, cups her hands and looks up into the trees. She comes back to her stool. She’s only met Marilyn once, at a charity softball game for the burned down Elks Club; a fire started, it turns out, by a stove purchased with the funds from a previous charity softball game for the remodeling of the kitchen. It was clear to Lisa right away that Marilyn exerted a kind of gravity that gently pulled those around her into her orbit and that these satellite people, after a time, repeated her bullshit stories as if they were fact. Who would lie about losing two children in an accident? Why would anybody do that? Since there could be no good answer to questions like that; they weren’t questions that were asked. The wrecked snowmobile in Marilyn’s garage that she uncovered and showed to people when they came around was, Lisa knew, nothing more than a prop. And the place Marilyn disappeared to periodically in the U.P. was, Lisa also knew, not really a place at all. It didn’t exist.

How much of Marilyn’s life was a prop, a fake, an impersonation? Lisa didn’t have to think long about these questions to know the answer. She saw behind the façade right away, a façade betrayed by little gestures. Did Marilyn know she’d met her match in Lisa? Lisa wasn’t sure. How smart was this Marilyn woman? And what sort of smarts were we talking about?

It’s last call.

“Why would she be up there with them?” Frank asks, circling back to what someone said earlier.

Carl has already turned down the heat and cleaned the bathroom.

“Ask the expert,” James says, nodding to Lisa.

But Lisa has never actually seen things in the trees.

Lisa slips on her black leather jacket with the torn and stitched sleeve and looks ready to leave. This lends an air of expectancy to what she’s going to say and already she can feel the gravity shifting from Marilyn to her. If she can just hold off a little longer before saying anything, if she can just let the slight anticipation build, if she can just find the right words and the right cadence to address the question of why Marilyn might be up in the trees with the enlarged ones.

Above the bar is a framed picture of Osama bin Laden with an X of black electrical tape over his face. Last month, for the first time, someone asked who it was, and it was then that Lisa understood how easily history slips away. Like her own. She wants so hard to be new again. She is suddenly afraid to leave the bar and go outside and to her Jeep parked beneath those branches. The wind pushes against the windows. It seems to know something. Does Carl understand this? Does he appreciate the situation? Is that why, after last call, he cracks a bottle open for Lisa and sets it before her on the wiped-down-for-the-night bar? She wants to ask him to become her ally in displacing Marilyn, but she can’t be sure whose side he’s on and in this moment she is trapped between the bar and the empty parking lot.

Carl isn’t laughing but something about him suggests laughter. He has tucked in his green flannel shirt and Lisa notices all the rough, awkward, nail-sized holes punched in his leather belt. She is shocked. She looks away. Outside the window there is shadowy movement above the Jeep. In her mind, the trailer is burning. The trailer Marilyn is hiding in. Not someplace in the U.P. Not someplace up there with the enlarged ones in the trees, either. But rather in the abandoned trailer just a mile or so from here, in a cold swampy outwash plain, a concoction of put-together words Lisa’d never heard in Dayton.

She shudders and Carl puts his hand on hers, gently. She could go home with him tonight but those holes in his belt! She hears a scratching at the door and in a fleeting thought wonders if she could spend the night here, in the bar, in a back room or something, until the light comes up.
“Don’t worry, it’s locked,” Carl says but that just makes her worry more.

All the talk of the creatures in the trees has gotten to her. Plus the overheated bar, the beers, the black night. Plus Carl’s dangerous belt. And the Towers-eyes looming from above the bar. And the burning trailer, the enlarged ones waiting outside.

And that museum in Dayton, the way it held her in place, grounded. Lisa feels herself floating now, really, just above her barstool in a way that Carl senses but can’t understand.

“I’m right about Marilyn, right?” she says more than asks.

“In that?”

“In that everything. She never went up North. She never lost kids in a car wreck, she . . .”

“Snowmobile accident.”

“Okay: She never lost kids in a crash.”

“Snowmobile crash. Against a tree and into a ditch. Broken necks.”

Lisa turns the half-finished bottle of beer onto its side, watches it foam across the bar.

“Get out,” says Carl. He looks tired. He looks like he just wants to go home. “Get out.”

Lisa feels nothing beneath her.

“Fuckin’ annoyance,” she says.

“Get out. Get out!”

Lisa leaps, grabs the bottle, wants to scream, I’m already out, I’m already out! I’m out I’m out I’ve been out I’ve always been out help me bring me in God help me please I’m out I’m out I’m out!

*

She thinks about sleeping in the Jeep, recklessly. Bundled in the lumpy sleeping bag in the back. Instead, for now she sits still in the driver’s seat, her mittened hands on the steering wheel, the car keys on the seat between her legs, her breath slowly fogging the windshield, thinking back to her Dayton friend killed sophomore year in the drive-by shooting whose mother she, Lisa, looked upon with unaccountable disdain at the funeral, as if the stupid, wilting, palliative flowers at the casket were somehow her fault rather than the florist’s, as if she deserved the knock on the door at 1 am, and the young, pale-faced officer’s face as stunned-looking as if he were reporting his own daughter’s death to himself.

And then she does this. She crawls back over seat tops, deeper into the weirdly geometry-ed Jeep parked there outside Carl’s like some stupid hulking metal thing. She shudders, tunneling deeper yet into the jeep and then deeper still into the sleeping bag. What is she doing here, beneath the trees with those apocryphal creatures looming? Leaving Dayton was just another false move, she thinks, a misdirection. How many Marilyns must she slay?

In the morning, she is new. Somehow. Sore and cramped, but new. Outside the Jeep in the empty parking lot Lisa stretches. The sun is out, fierce and brilliant. There is a wind and she can hear Lake Michigan in the distance. She looks up into the trees and they are, of course, empty.

She smiles.

Fiction

It’s taxing isn’t it, not being in a real room anymore.

It’s like being in a virtual belly of a newly discovered underwater beast, water-handled, and mucked.

It is taxing, feeling so beneath the surface, so damp under the waterline. What is the measure of success now? 

There’s the bravado on the one side, and the blood-soaked climax on the other.

What tries, what edges forward, what renders lyrical, that is the threat of not-being in this Time of __________. 

It is taxing, but it is also overtaxing to feel what shouldn’t be felt: the empty, the quiet, the lag. The lag is always there, crude in what is fresh. What plagues this through, what parallels its cost, is all about our own narrative. 

Always behind us are those who risk and heal and fight and make and set and push and pull and dissect. It is their rendering that is taxing.

But we, too, are equally viced. Our fight or flight is nothing new. It’s the minutes between that sustain: the reactioning.

The instinct should happen in seconds.

Now, it’s just out there – a prolonged tragedy.

MONTH OF SUNDAYS, #31

Thirty women appear in the portrait 
because at the last minute Sunday #31, 
naughty last-born child, 
ducked under their wide skirts, 
hid under cascades of  chintz, satin and chambray, 
worsted, brilliantine, shantung, tricolette, 
every fabric under the sun stitched 
and gusseted as if such cosseting of the one 
who even now advances;  
as if such costumery in its wild dazzle  
would dizzy the one  
who even now comes closer;  
hid under those warm wide skirts  
of velveteen, taffeta, and worsted,  
wrapped himself in mousseline and dotted swiss,  
as if such swaddlings might save him, 
#31, boychild among women  
heating inside their magnificent textiles  
they think might woo the one 
who creeps ever nearer;  
hid among drapes of boucle and matelasse, 
organdie, velour and sateen 
cascading from hourglass waists they pray 
the one will close his hands around, 
his eyes dropped shut, face pressed 
into bodices stitched with hieroglyph 
and eroticisms; hid there, 
among billows of plisse and chiffon, 
between crepes and cottons, the crush of crinoline  
and rough linens they think might give him pause,  
whose breath the child can feel on his bare toes  
peeking beneath a hem 
as the eye of the one who even now has come,  
roves the row of women, and misses him.

 

FINALLY, TO SAY HEART

I dig one chamber, then another nearby. 
I shovel the dirt from the first one into it.  

Then I dig a third, and do the same,  
and a fourth and a fifth and go on like this 
the whole night long.  

With the stars wheeling on broken axles and a gong  
marking the hours.

Swell with pride, broken, faint of, and absence makes  
scribbled in red crayon, are crossed out in black.  

More chambers to dig, each one filled with the dirt of another.

I lay down my spade, my body, my raiment and sleep  
beside the last chamber dug, beside the little pile of dirt ready  
to fill the next.

The shush of backwash through the faulty aortic valve,  
the one-way gate into the left atrium damaged by old wars,  
the hitching gait of the relentless stars.

Blue pushes to red to blue again, from fire to quench to fire.  
Finally, to say heart.

 

PECCADILLO

I will be your little sin— 
a pebble skidded on, a knee skinned, 
a hailstone spat from an errant cloud. 
I’ll be the hint of furrow in your brow, 
an evil wish deep-sixed, 
an endearing gaffe. 
But I won’t be incursion 
without retreat, 
nor the pinprick of mortal illness— 
that gestation; 
nor the long scar of incision 
or the hitch of crippling. 
I will live for the nip 
in our last sweet kiss, the bloom 
of blood on a tender lip.

 

RANDOM ACCESS

To wit!  
A bee’s nest  
in a junked Mercedes Benz.  
How the bees got in –  
one by one  
through the windshield shatter 
where the guy, the drunk,  
the father sick at heart  
plunged through.  
Went off to death 
with just that slap,  
dispatched by the same god  
who let the bees into  
the wrecked Benz.  
Small comfort,  
that stingy buzz, 
the stinging prayers of us, 
our snub-nosed curse.

 

YOUR DISEMBODIED VOICE, LACKING ITS BODY, 
CANNOT LEAD ME TO WHERE YOU ARE.

— for C.D. Wright, 1949-2016

It sailed off lifted on a wind devil whirl that might have been 
spun from a fit of grief furnaced by rage. 
Went away just like that, the voice of your body leaving 
a vacancy that began looking for itself, inside the vacancy 
which is where you plunged, the first available vacancy 
was good enough and you down there you drew the long coils of sentences 
run on into amplitudes cut loose from the throat, bereft, down between 
thumb and forefinger and around your left elbow. 
I could follow you there hurriedly but then you fed the careful knotted skein 
of cadence and pulse to the coals blown to brief flame 
and thus rejoined and raised up you leapt away.

Spoiler Alert! –  This review discusses the ending of the book, albeit obliquely, so you may prefer to avoid reading the review until after reading the book. 

What is it like to be a bear? On Nastassja Martin’s In the Eye of the Wild:

The romance of the anthropologist has, I suspect, largely fallen out of favor, being as it is a way of telling stories of exotic people in far off places; an account of “discovering” and reveling in “Otherness.” Yet, there is something mesmerizing about the idea of being plunged into a world that is utterly different and slowly figuring out its mores, and a thrill, too, (a dangerous one perhaps?) in observing yourself gradually become changed. If it is no longer acceptable, however, to tell such stories about other cultures (unless in science fiction), it seems that another possibility remains open — to narrate an encounter with an animal. Nastassja Martin’s In the Eye of the Wild, translated from the French by Sophie Lewis, is a curious hybrid of the two forms, a compromise of sorts. Narrating the story of her rencontre with a bear and its aftermath, Martin, an anthropologist, also describes the nightmare world of hospitals and extensive surgeries, and her experiences among the Evens people in Kamchatka. As she moves through these various spaces and kinds of interaction, she grapples with the question of what is alien and what is familiar, seeking a place where she can belong without remainder.

Animals have long, maybe always, been, in addition to companions or food or tools of labor or food, a source of mystery and fascination. The increasing popularity of vegetarianism and the rise of Animal Studies, the popularity of J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello and Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, all attest in different ways to a larger cultural meditation on the nature of the human-animal dichotomy. What do we really know about what it is like to be an animal? How do we ethically co-exist with them, what agency do they have, what are our duties towards them?   

As it happened, I read Martin’s book (in one cozy sitting — it is well suited for curling up in front of a fire with) a few days before I was teaching an essay by Val Plumwood entitled “Being Prey,” which describes the experience of a crocodile attack. The pairing was apt: both writers narrate a (harrowing) encounter with a predatory creature, but seek to do so in a different kind of way, to call into question the standard assumptions and beliefs that underpin such tales. Plumwood writes of her struggle to resist the cultural pressure to describe what happened to her through the trope of the mythic struggle, or “masculinist monster myth.” Rather, she seeks to understand herself as prey, as part of the food chain. Her story, she says, “is a humbling and cautionary tale about our relationship with the earth, about the need to acknowledge our own animality and ecological vulnerability.”

Martin, too, gains a new sense of animality from her experiences, but one that is hers alone, rather than a shared property of all humans. She is now medka, an Even word for people who have been marked by the bear, who are half human, half bear. Already before, her Even title, matukha, she-bear, marked an affinity with the creature, but now she is changed. Maybe: she has met what was always awaiting her. Where Plumwood’s essay arrives at a new understanding of her place in a larger cycle of life, a feeling of belonging in the world, Martin’s, instead, is characterized by a profound sense of isolation from other people.

For indeed, the meeting, the animal’s grip on her face, her jaw in the bear’s own, is one of an intense intimacy, whereas her encounters with various medical professionals, first in Russia and then in France, are horrifically alien. She is tormented by doctors and nurses, subjected to various treatments that cause atrocious pain and seem never-ending, as complications arise and she is told that another surgery will be needed. She can trust, it seems, no one, particularly after her return to France, when she is all too aware of how she has become a mere pawn in complex rivalries between France and Russia, or different French hospitals. She is visited by a therapist whose counsel is based in cultural notions of identity that Martin has spent years critiquing, who seeks to help produce a particular kind of story of healing that is utterly unsuited to Martin’s narrative needs. Strangers, and even friends and family, look upon her altered face with pity. She feels, keenly, that she does not belong, and plots her return to Kamchatka.

But there, with the Even people whose understanding of her connection to animality seems so central to her efforts to make sense of events, too, she does not belong. An intriguing feature of both Plumwood’s essay and Martin’s book is that although the encounter with the animal takes center stage, at the margins there is also the insistent presence of another form of difference, another culture with an other concept of human-animal relationships. Plumwood’s awareness of the need for humility in relation to the natural world is partly inspired by Aboriginal thinking, but while the essay thoughtfully explores human-animal power dynamics, it remains relatively reticent on the topic of Indigenous-settler relations. Yet the traces of Indigenous people are all over the text: Plumwood sets out to see Aboriginal rock art; notes that she has not consulted with the Indigenous Gagadu owners of the land about her trip. The understanding she comes to by the end is heavily indebted to Indigenous beliefs, but is presented as her own. Similarly, Martin’s relationship to the Even people is central to her story, and her recounting of her experiences. The question of potential consequences that the publication of this text will have for them is not discussed. Ultimately, Martin’s allegiance is to her writing, to anthropology; this is where she belongs, what she does.

I say this, not to accuse either writer of cultural appropriation or exploitation (though I’m admittedly not not doing that either), but to ponder the question I began with — the romance of the anthropologist, the story of an encounter with otherness, and the residue of other kinds of encounter, other questions of power. “I go close, I am gripped, I move away again or I escape. I come back, I grasp, I translate. What comes from others, goes through my body, and then goes who knows where,” writes Martin. This is the experience of transformation, the work of writing. The endlessly tantalizing possibility of something truly different, truly other, that we could learn to know.

Joy Williams’s collection of flash fiction Ninety-nine Stories of God (Tin House Books, July 2016) begins with what might be called a ghost story.  In the first sentence of “Postcard,” the narrator speaks with Williams’s trademark craftsmanship: “A woman who adored her mother, and had mourned her death for years now, came across some postcards in a store that sold antiques and various other bric-a-brac.” I highlight this sentence because I hope it grips you as it did me when I first encountered it, but also because it nicely represents the concision and density of the rest of the book’s sentences. The story is revealed, the mood shifts, clause by careful clause. Further, these moods are understated. For all its sentence-level simplicity, Ninety-nine Stories is a book filled with subtleties and nuance, layered moods and complex ideas.

Reading Ninety-nine Stories can be a disjointed, disorienting experience. It’s accessible, subdivided into bite-sized, fast stories that serve to chill or humor or unsettle. But these segments, extreme in their brevity and hyper-precise in their language, are often deliberately contradictory, confusing the book’s own ideas and the reader’s understanding. “This Is Not a Maze” reads the title of story 18, below a cross-sectional diagram of a folded tarpaulin that resembles nothing so much as a maze.

And no element of the book is more complexly depicted than the titular God. The reader might find that, having finished the book, she’s left with many of the same questions prompted by the title. Is Ninety-nine Stories, at its heart, sincerely religious? Is it, to the contrary, intended as a criticism of religion? Who or what is the God found in the text? The sporadically appearing God of these stories is prone to the same confusion, limitations of knowledge, vanity, anxiety, and inattention that we all are. One of my favorite moments occurs in the 93rd story, “Father and Sons.” When a group of wolves, with whom God is talking, thank him for inviting them to participate in his plan, God “did not want to appear addled, but what was the plan His sons were referring to exactly?”

Ninety-nine Stories contains a tremendous amount of diversity, in both content and character. We receive stories about Kafka, stories of unsettling relationships between pets and their owners, stories of monks and mystics, photographers, humanists, naturalists. There is a certain associative logic to the organization of the pieces: an idea or link might appear for a few consecutive sections before making way for a new topic. For example, “See That You Remember,” a paragraph-long boast from God about giving Tolstoy a dream he would later write about, is followed by “Not His Best,” in which God denies ownership of Kafka’s more upsetting dreams. The story immediately following these is a kind of joke parable about two monks and a garden. A wealth of themes surface and dissipate this way, many of them dark: cruelty to animals, inexplicable acts of violence, madness, the death of children—often at the hands of their parents. And though they don’t all feature the character of God, they are still ostensibly of God; Williams complicates the intent of the book and the picture of God that she’s presenting.

“If Picked or Uprooted These Beautiful Flowers Will Disappear” begins with two women discussing a child’s drowning and ends with one woman impulsively murdering the other. The last sentence, as though to condemn the fact that no one will be held accountable for the child’s death, reads, “There were two funerals but one trial.” Just as frequent as troubled parent-child relationships (in “Moms,” two women discuss throwing an Anti-Mother’s Day party) is the theme of animal cruelty. Kafka’s vegetarianism is the topic of one story. Children visit a slaughterhouse, but are not permitted inside, in another. A gardener is haunted by his days hunting big game. Animals are often presented as noble, even heroic, or as victims of humans’ needless violence. If Ninety-nine Stories is ambiguous, here’s a thesis with little room for reader interpretation: animals have long suffered brutality at the hands of humans. And all these, too, are stories of God. Arbitrary tragedy permeates the universe and must be accounted for, but usually occurs with seemingly no one (visible) to blame.

The forms, too, that these pieces take are myriad: rumors, news items, biographical factoids, jokes, parables, meditations, tales of the supernatural. So various are their shapes that they become a kind of commentary on fiction and storytelling (and, more broadly, art) itself—its history, its methods. Anecdotes about artists, intellectuals, mystics, criminals, and (most frequently) writers compete with God for space in the book. Usually these anecdotes concern these figures’ relationship with God: the messages they thought they received, the visions they experienced, the madness that others later believed afflicted them. The lines between art, worship, and mental illness are repeatedly blurred. “Franz Kafka once called his writing a form of prayer” begins “Not His Best,” a story that proceeds to relate how Kafka also “frequently fretted that … what he bore on his body was not a human head.” Writers and thinkers are as much tortured by God as they are inspired by Him.

In “) (” we learn of Jakob Böhme, a German mystic who devoted years trying to articulate a divine revelation, in which he believed God revealed Himself in a ray of light reflected off a plate. This comes late in the book, the idea of the inexpressibility of God. In another story, “Essential Enough,” God struggles with phrasing who or what He is. “It sounded ridiculous,” notes the narrator, “He didn’t favor definitions.” In what might be the most earnestly contemplative moment of the book, “Naked Mind,” the narrator notes, “One should not define God in human language,” that we “can never speak about God rationally as we speak about ordinary things, but that does not mean we should give up thinking about God,” and finally that we must descend “ever deeper into the darkness of unknowing.” If there is any way to begin unwinding the tangled knot of these stories, it is here. The confusion, the inconsistencies—these appear to be crucial elements in any attempt to tell a story of God. Lacking a clear vocabulary to speak of the divine or the mystical, the stories themselves become the language needed to understand the non-understandable. In this way, the book as a whole almost functions as a long kōan.

I will grant that not every story is a thrilling read. The book has its flatter moments, but this is probably a matter of taste. If you are inclined to flash fiction in general, you may enjoy the one-sentence-long “Museum” (“We were not interested the way we thought we would be interested.”) more than I did. Regardless, the writing throughout the remaining 90% of the book more than makes up for these exceptions. It’s hard to believe Williams when she states her disdain for talking about craft, because one of the first things that flies off the page is the masterful craftsmanship of these painstakingly concise pieces.

Which is not to say that marks of artifice give Ninety-nine Stories of God an inorganic feel. Quite the contrary—there is a deep sense of reality residing in this book, owed in great part to the sheer, fractured breadth of its 99 segments. Whether to interpret that reality as God will be left as an exercise for the reader.

I Hope You’re Wonderful

These days, if I make my bed, I see your heart

untucking itself from my pillow and falling out

onto the defunct horse farm I only pretended to own

 

when you were around. Our respective continents

drift past each other in a planet of blood. You were

too beautiful to wear anything, and so you took off

 

my sunglasses. Now I live in the blinding weather

your eyes were two years ago. Would that they were a cloud.

Would that you were a self-conscious clown,

 

a slumped ambassador from the reticent side of the wall.

I wave at you with an irresponsible grin. Your hologram

waves back at me from a New England cranberry bog,

 

the only place where things made sense to you for a time.

On the world’s worst mountain, they still remember

the quickness of your eyes scanning the graves

 

of the almost-successful climbers. A mere outline of a man

climbed alongside you, lighter than a day off.

Later, when you whispered despair to me in the car,

 

love fell out of my ear into our shared coffee.

You climbed your ladder high enough

to see us both in the coffin.

 

None of this really matters.

Your shadows sprinkle the desert.

I never asked you the questions you were convinced

 

I swatted you with, never fitted my truck with trinkets of you.

Revisiting all the places we had tucked each other in,

I keep my hazard lights on. You wouldn’t want to

 

talk to me, anyway. I don’t care to meet

the horrid bird you plan to become this year.

I never thought of our intertwined fingers

 

as a ladder to anything other than ourselves.

 

He Takes His Coffee With No Half & Half

That shirt she wore the night he saw her with

that other man hangs on their kitchen chair

like mold on an archaic torso’s plinth:

“Until you change your life, I’m always there!”

 

She makes him deviled eggs and bubble tea,

spreads almost-butter on his salty toast.

Even her scowl is lovelier to see

than his own face last year, when he was lost,

 

when he equivocated every word,

smashed china every time she disappeared.

Now he’s still dying, but he isn’t bored.

He takes luxurious time brushing his beard.

 

He goes to work and doesn’t stab himself.

He drives his car not into other cars.

He knows there is no God. Is there a hell?

He leaves that to the Sgt. Pepper hearts.

 

He’s still the man. He’ll prove it to his wife.

Soon she’ll stop not coming home till four.

She’ll sit down next to him, remove his “Life

Is Good” T-shirt, and throw him on the floor.

 

After

We board the ferry with nothing further to hide

 

A passing truck means everything to someone

 

The ferryman of death stands by in his coma

 

Albatrosses hang everywhere

 

We spoke through tremors

 

You ate from the sky’s dead hands

 

Now fortunes hang in lanterns

 

Humans walk around without language

 

I fall asleep on the headstone of your hypocrisy

 

I’ve Sat on This Perch for Decades, and Now It’s Time to Get Up

I told him it wasn’t me bending into the world.

He was too busy rolling his eyes to hear.

He was a demolished movie theater

gone slightly radioactive. All the park benches were empty,

and all the road kill had been cleared away.

 

We ignore the dim bespectacled eyes. One day,

the departed play poker on their own monuments:

A haircut that looked like a pie. A scholar who stood

on his head. The eagle burrows into the center

of the earth and gets stuck there, victim of gravity.

 

But even after the militants destroy the statue

tears of blood appear every morning under

the empty pedestal. The poets with varicose veins

pirouette around the fire. The fall foliage is so seductive

in the glow. Dogs tap dance. Rearview mirrors reflect no past.

 

Lighthouses broadcast koans. More flash photography.

Temporary anathema. Mountains in the shapes

of missed handshakes. All the rotten bodies. Take your

boredom, sculpt a soulmate. You don’t know what’s hiding

beside the theatrical highway you drove all night.

 

To Remain Human

When the song ends and the light hits you, fall on the floor

and recall the way you laughed for hours the first time

I held you. I told the artist about your smile,

and he sketched the shadows under your eyes.

 

The last ice cream I bought you was left behind

on the bench for raccoons that never showed up.

And then the rain went on into the next month,

soaking the abstract paintings on the porch.

 

And all the cushions are covered with pictures of houses.

Humans spill out of their windows, roll down the slopes

and into the sun. An eclipse is coming.

Gestures turn to elegy in the dark.

Contents

• Preface • 4
• Introduction • 6
• “In the Very Air We Breathed” • 13
• Epilogue • 81
• References • 97

Preface

In 2001, at the age of 73, Maritza graduated summa cum laude from New York University with a double major in Art History and the Humanities. Even though her formal schooling had ended at fifteen when Nazi Germany occupied Budapest, she had been admitted to the University on the strength of an entrance essay she had submitted, “partly as a lark,” she has told me, when she chanced to hear on the radio that NYU was accepting “alternate experiences.”

Her thesis, entitled “Art and Artists of the Holocaust: Survival and Resistance,” opens with this description:

It was a cool November morning in 1944; we were a contingent of women of all ages, being marched to a slave labor camp. The early sun penetrated the mist and cast strange shadows, the fields were barren except for an occasional sunflower patch. The petals of the flowers matched the color of my yellow star. I promised myself to come back some day with my camera and catch the magic of this light. I now know that this ability to observe and reach within myself, the insistence of holding on to my identity and autonomy helped me to survive and was essential to my eventual escape.

In this passage we get a glimpse of the woman who was a keen observer, possessing a creative and courageous mind, determined to imagine a life beyond the horrific circumstance she found herself in.

In “Jewish Response to the Holocaust” another paper she wrote as a student, Maritza explores the concept of resistance and documents the multiple forms of resistance that Jews exhibited before and throughout the war. She extends Bauer’s1 definition of Jewish resistance as “any group [italics mine] action taken” (27) to “any act taken by an individual Jew to save his life or thwart a Nazi plan.” Maritza and other family and friends survived because of small and large acts of resistance, including, in her case, escaping from the death march that would have ended her life.

How did I come to know this remarkable woman, whose courage, ingenuity and foresight, as well as her determination to maintain her humanity in the most inhumane conditions continues to be an inspiration? Here is how our friendship began. 5

Bauer, Yehuda. The Jewish Emergence from Powerlessness. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ©1979

Introduction

One [wo]man’s experience may serve as a point of entry into one of the most appalling human tragedies of this century.

         — David Cesarani, Genocide and Rescue: The Holocaust in Hungary, 1944

 

Life may not be the easiest, but now, as always, I can find pleasure and beauty in it.

                                                                     — Maritza Shelley, email March 25, 2016

As a young woman in her late teens, I would often ride my bike into the small village where I lived on Eastern Long Island, New York, and down the main street toward the ocean. I would sometimes stop at a beautiful stucco Episcopal church that had two tennis courts behind the pastor’s rectory. I would stand outside the fence, watching the same group of people who played for hours every morning. I was an outsider, not only to the game, but to the cultural connections that in many ways bound them together. 

All of the players were owners of second homes, many highly educated, and several had grown up with considerable wealth and privilege. In most ways, their lives in no way mirrored my own. I was growing up one of six siblings, with parents whose formal education had ended when they graduated high school. A grandmother also lived full time with us, my two sisters and I shared one bedroom and my three brothers lived in our basement. In all ways our lives were modest.

These tennis players, however, were a very friendly lot, and would engage me in conversation, and one day, invited me to play with them. Even though I hadn’t played much tennis, they were so encouraging that I accepted their offer and showed up the next day in ragged cut off jean shorts over a yellow leotard with an old wooden racquet I’d found in our basement. I’m certain they were appalled but would never have even subtly suggested that I might don tennis attire. (Eventually, I made myself a white piquet tennis dress—and the fuss made over me the day I showed up in it made me realize how I looked beforehand!)

So began my decades long friendship with a group of people who profoundly affected my values and views of the world, those quite different from my Republican, largely agnostic family and conservative community. They were all liberal, non-religious Jews with leftist leanings, active politically and socially, and they nurtured those instincts in me. All had lived through the Second World War in various capacities and in various countries, including Poland, England, Holland and Hungary. Now they lived in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens and had summer homes in eastern Long Island.

Among these couples and a few single women, I met Maritza, a beautiful and graceful woman in her 40’s, a Hungarian born Jew, who grew up in Budapest and lived there until just after WWII. For most of the nearly 45 years I have known her, she rarely spoke of her experiences during the War and I came to understand that she, like many others who suffered at the hands of the Nazis and anti-Semitism, preferred not to relive such brutal memories.

Although I was always curious to know more about her history, I wanted to respect her privacy, so rarely “pried” into her life under Nazi occupation. When I was in my late 40’s, I realized one of my dreams. I flew to Budapest to meet Maritza while she was there visiting her family. By this time, we had been close friends for over 20 years. From our shared love of tennis, Maritza and our other friends nourished my growth with access to theatre, music, film and art, so central to all of their lives. Maritza seemed so accomplished to me! She was an artist, creating beautiful stained glass and watercolors, (which we have practiced together throughout the years) and worked as an airbrush artist in a studio in New York City. But she also volunteered one day a week at the Legal Aid Society instead of taking long weekends at the beach, gave talks for UNICEF and was always learning, taking classes at the New School on everything from movies to Chinese ink brush to repairing a motorcycle. Naturally, traveling to her childhood home was an honor to me!

At the time of my visit, her 95-year-old mother was still alive, but had just moved into a senior care facility from the tiny apartment she had lived in overlooking the Danube. Maritza’s older sister Dolly still taught ballet to young children, and her husband Pista was a director in the theatre. They had a two-bedroom ­apartment in Budapest, where Maritza preferred to stay. I was generously offered her mom’s vacant apartment, at the Danube near the bridge to Margit Island. Each day I would meet Maritza for part of the day, and she would help me explore Budapest with its famous bridges, and the beautiful countryside sur­rounding the city. We swam in beautiful public “wave pools” that replicated the movement of the ocean. We traveled by train through red fields of poppies to visit the studio of Margit Kovacs, one of Maritza’s favorite sculptors. I had recently read Kati Marton’s book Wallenberg and I was excited to see many of Imre Varga’s sculptures including the statue of Raul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who established “safe houses” and saved so many lives in Budapest during the Holocaust.

I met some of her childhood friends, and we drove with one named Stephen in an old VW Bus to the hills where their summer villas had stood close to one another. Although we did not glimpse any of their actual homes, I could imagine them as children running playfully around the orchards on long summer evening. Sometimes, walking the city together, she would recount some of the history of the city and her life growing up there. Still, I did not probe too deeply, letting Maritza take the lead on what she wanted to share.

Fast forward nearly twenty years to a late spring evening in 2015 and Maritza and I are having dinner together in an outdoor café in Sag Harbor, where she has a second home. That morning I had heard a piece on NPR about the dwindling generation who are still available to give first-hand accounts of the Holocaust. Although Maritza is healthy with an amazing intact mind and memory, she is now in her late 80’s. I say, “Maritza, I don’t know why it has always been so difficult for me to ask you this, but I’m really interested in hearing your life story.” She merely laughs and the conversation turns elsewhere. But a week later I call her. “I was serious about wanting to hear and write about your life,” I say cautiously. She demurs, saying her life is not all that interesting. I assure her that at least to me, it is. And this time she says,  “OK.”

Thus began a journey for both of us. We met weekly during the summer months, usually sitting under tall oak trees in her quiet backyard, and as summer waned, these interviews stretched into the winter months in various sites in New York City.

Four years have passed, as interviewing turned into re­searching, writing, and mutual reading of drafts. Maritza once asked, “What interests you about my life besides my experiences during the war?” “Everything!” I replied. For this is not just the story of one woman’s experiences during WWII, from when Germany invaded Hungary on March 19, 1944, and surrendered to the Allies on May 7, 1945. It is the story of a remarkable life, lived fully whether in times of great luxury or terrible deprivations, of continued accomplishments and tragic happenings. Her story has taken me deep into the history of Hungary, learning about the rich heritage that Hungarian Jews share not only in their own country, but in remarkable accomplishments that have enriched our world. I am deeply grateful for this opportunity and greatly humbled to be entrusted with her memories. 

In the Very Air We Breathed

A note about the text: While much of this story draws directly from transcripts of our interviews and conversations following those, I often used research to supply context and fill in historical information that a reader might not have. All the drafts were read by and approved of by Maritza, as agreed upon when we first began this project.

In March of 1938, when I was nine years old, the Anschluss happened=Germany annexed Austria, our closest ­neighbor to the West. Yet we still lived as we’d lived before. Yes, my father had to have some different kind of business—but he still made money. We continued with our schooling. Life remained largely the same for us in Budapest, even as the Germans were rounding up Jews and other “undesirables” across Europe and building their concentration camps, beginning with Dachau in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. 

Chapter One • Life Interrupted 

Although I knew some Bible stories from my mandatory religion classes in school, I never believed in God. In fact, I don’t think I ever heard the word God spoken in my home by any members of my family. However, had I been a believer, I’m sure my faith would have been sorely tested on a tranquil, sunny Sunday, March 19, 1944.

My older sister and myself, both teenagers, were attending a Bach concert at the beautiful Saint Teresa’s Church in Budapest. We emerged from its soaring ceilings and graceful arches, filled with Bach’s stirring melodies, and our world had changed. Massive gray steel tanks, their menacing long snouts leading the way, flooded the avenues along the Danube. Soldiers of the Wehrmacht with Third Reich armbands, boasting the Nazi swastika, strutted two by two in black boots, long belted overcoats and the distinctive German steel helmet, the Stahlhelm. Trucks overflowing with German soldiers rolled beside the tanks as well as smaller open motorcars, carrying two or three German military personnel. The expansive boulevard we so loved had become cramped and tense, filled to the margins with guns and soldiers. Adolf Eichmann and other SS officers were among them, sent by Hitler to accelerate the “final solution” for Hungary’s 750,000 Jews. Nazi Germany had invaded Hungary.

Having heard the news, my parents, who were hiking in the Buda mountains just outside of the city, hurried home, and when my sister Dolly and I arrived back at our apartment, my father was already on the phone working to procure false papers for us. He tried to secure as many lifelines as possible, knowing that might be our only chance of survival. We eventually had papers from the Vatican and Sweden as well, but our first papers changed our identities to Christians. Our false papers mirrored us—father, mother, and two teenage daughters. We lost the telltale “I” for Israelite, or Jew, which appeared on all our documents, and my father’s occupation went from owning and operating a textile factory to physical education teacher, about as far from anything we could imagine for him with his slight limp.

Could we have known that our fellow Hungarians, our neighbors and our countrymen, our police and our government would cooperate with the Nazis and betray us with such enthusiasm? We thought, naively, we might be spared the fate of so many other European Jews. After all, Hungarian Jews had always been proud patriots, enjoying a symbiotic relationship with our fellow Hungarians, and making major contributions to the prosperity of our country. We trusted that Regent Horthy, an aristocrat and not—we thought­—a Nazi, would protect us. There will always be debates about what Jews everywhere could have known or might have done had they known Hitler’s plans. But even as present day Hungarians attempt to whitewash their complicity—erecting in 2014 (under cover of night and with police guards) a controversial monument portraying themselves as “victims” of Nazi Germany, the truth is that most Hungarians turned their backs on us and cooperated fully with the German genocide.