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Prism international 61:2 / Winter 2023
Prism international
The following description is provided by the publisher: CONTENTS 7 Tazi Rodrigues | groceries arrive at the light station | poetry 8 Courtney WZ | (coming out to) baba | poetry 9 Yasmina Jaksic | my daughter is an esl teacher | poetry 11 Alexandra Trnka | Czech is a Difficult Language | nonfiction 18 Lizzy Ke Polishan | 星星 (Xing Xing) | poetry 20 Katherine DeCoste | Doxology | poetry 21 Vicki McLeod | What Are You Doing Here? | nonfiction 29 Daniel Zomparelli | Jump Scare | poetry 34 Michelle Brown | Let's go around the table and each share one weird thing | poetry 36 Jack Lancaster | We left the AC on | poetry 37 Catriona Wright | Making Faces | fiction 49 Mormei Zanke | Ryōanji Rock Garden | poetry 51 William Bonfiglio | Klojer | poetry 53 Terese Brasen | The Thing That's Wrong With Me | nonfiction 64 Charlie Petch | In Sickness And In Death | poetry 65 Nadia Froese | Fall comes after a long time of nothing | poetry 67 Aefa Mulholland | An Unobstrusive Bird | nonfiction 73 Joan M. Baril | One Polka | fiction 76 Jo Gatford | You water the garden in the evening when the heat of the day has passed | poetry 79 Carolyn Chung | Hello, How Can I Help You? | fiction 92 Contributors
100 Pages
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PRISM international WINTER 2023 PRISM nternationa 2022 CREATIVE NONFICTION CONTEST FIRST PRIZE "Czech is a Difficult Language" by Alexandra Trnka RUNNER-UP "What Are You Doing Here" by Vicki McLeod SECOND RUNNER-UP "The Thing That's Wrong With Me" by Terese Brasen JUDGE Ivan Coyote READERS Oluwatoke Adejoye, Adrian Matias Bell,Warren Bowen, Andrew Calderone, Susan Carpenter, Morgan Charles, Jennifer Gruden, Rasma Haidri, Natalina Halas, Colleen Haughey Daniella Krisztan, Vivian Li, Sumaiya Matin, Margaret McCutcheon, Marianne K Miller, Eleanor Panno, Sofia Osborne, Larissa Piva, Chris Preston, Grace Regan, Jasmine RufF, Kulbir Saran, Marianna Schultz, Anna Shannon, Sierra Tan, San Lin Tun PRISM Internationa MANAGING EDITORS PROSE EDITOR POETRY EDITOR EXECUTIVE EDITORS EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS FACULTY ADVISOR DESIGNER TYPESETTER Oluwatoke Adejoye Adrian Matias Bell Vivian Li Jasmine RufF Andrew Calderone Eleanor Panno Jade Y. Liu Roshni Riar Mandy Len Catron andrea bennett Leslie Smith EDITORIAL BOARD Tanya Banerjee, Dylan Bach, Mark Cameron, Emily Cann, Samantha Chen, Chia-Hua Margaret Chu, Maggy Chu, Sonia Di Placido, Paul Dhillon, Joe Enns, Eleanor Fuller, Miriam Gallou, Rasma Haidri, Shelly Kawaja, Mimi Lam, Tena Laing, Dayna Mahannah, Kristen Morrison, Catherine Mwitta, Samantha Jones, Elisabeth Shenher, Colin Sterling, kathy thai, Bevan Thomas, Stacey Thomas, Fiona Revill, Claudine Yip PRISM international, a magazine of contemporary writing, is published four times a year by the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia, Buchanan E-462, 1866 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z1. Specific back issues can be ordered from the Managing Editor: circulation@prismmagazine.ca. PRISM is printed in Canada. Website: prismmagazine.ca Copyright © 2023 PRISM international. Content copyrights remain with authors. Cover image by Jim Darling. Subscription Rates: One-year individual Canadian $35, American $40, International $45; two-year individual Canadian $55, American $63, International $69; library and institutional one-year $46; two-year $72. Single issue by mail is $13. US and international subscribers, please pay in US dollars. Please note that US postal money orders are not accepted. Make cheques payable to PRISM international. All prices include GST and shipping and handling. PRISM occasionally exchanges subscriber lists with other literary magazines; please contact us if you wish to be excluded from such exchanges. Submission Guidelines: PRISM international purchases First North American Serial Rights at $45 per page for poetry and $40 per page for prose. Contributors receive two copies of the issue in which their work appears. Only electronic submissions are accepted. See our submission guidelines at prismmagazine.ca/submit, for exceptions. All submissions must adhere to our submission guidelines, which can be found at prismmagazine.ca/submit, or can be requested by mail at the address above. Advertising: For details on how to place an advertisement in PRISM, please visit our website at prismmagazine.ca/advertise. Our gratitude to Dean Dr. Gage Averill and the Dean of Arts Office at the University of British Columbia. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the UBC School of Creative Writing, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the British Columbia Arts Council. January 2023. ISSN 0032.8790 UBC m a place of mind <&, Cjfio Canada Council Conseil des Arts THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA ^p^ for the Arts du Canada UBC 9 THE UNIVERSITYOF BRITISH COLUMBIA BRITISH COLUMBIA School of Creative Writing XEaB^ arts council & CONTENTS Tazi Rodrigues | groceries arrive at the light station | poetry 8 Courtney WZ | (coming out to) baba | poetry 9 Yasmina Jaksic | my daughter is an esl teacher | poetry 11 Alexandra Trnka | Czech is a Difficult Language | nonfiction 18 Lizzy Ke Polishan | S.S. (Xing Xing) | poetry 20 Katherine DeCoste | Doxology | poetry 21 Vicki McLeod | What Are You Doing Here? | nonfiction 29 Daniel Zomparelli | Jump Scare | poetry 34 Michelle Brown | Let's go around the table and each share one weird thing | poetry 36 Jack Lancaster | We left the AC on | poetry 37 Catriona Wright | Making Faces | fiction 49 Mormei Zanke | RySanji Rock Garden | poetry 51 William Bonfiglio | Klojer | poetry 53 Terese Brasen | The Thing That's Wrong With Me | nonfiction 64 Charlie Petch | In Sickness And In Death | poetry 65 Nadia Froese | Fall comes after a long time of nothing | poetry 67 Aefa Mulholland | An Unobtrusive Bird | nonfiction 73 Joan M. Baril | One Polka | fiction 76 Jo Gatford | You water the garden in the evening when the heat of the day has passed | poetry 79 Carolyn Chung | Hello, How Can I Help You? | fiction 92 Contributors Tazi Rodrigues GROCERIES ARRIVE AT THE LIGHT STATION peaches bruised against the hull of the zodiac, welted in the cardboard box delivered each week to the island. sweetened sugars peeled from skin, we diced them into crumble, ate richly on mondays and tuesdays, made coleslaw for every other meal. the pantry was lined with cabbages and canned pea soup. we never ordered peaches. perhaps they were on sale, at the tide pools, the ones that were iron-tinted, we watched tiny insects twist their way to surface. i didn't know their names yet: called everything boatmen. otherwise we were quiet. Courtney WZ (COMING OUT TO) BABA I've imagined it a thousand times over, when you're cooking, silver hair spilling over the pot; pierogis swollen, water starch-clouded, golden cross swaying over the heat. or when you're making holopchi, fingers pulling cabbage heads from boiling brine, rolling in motions I never learned to mime. or when you push a plate towards me, when I fill my mouth faster than I could spill the truth, you constantly mutter to yourself, but speak to me in traced phrases— khorosha? yes, it's good, I tell you da day a lyublyu. I always love what you've made me. I've imagined it a thousand times over, but in these moments, my mouth cannot unearth a crypt; soil catches in my teeth, indigestible, our conversations are jilted, our tongues generational, unable to bridge an ocean or a diaspora. I do not know how to ask for a love as boundless as the land you left for us. PRISM 61.2 Yasmina Jaksic MY DAUGHTER IS AN ESL TEACHER i love you also, no say i love you too, i hate you also no, i said, say i hate you too. say usually, say womb say sixth, say rolling, say wool, i can't, but— why do we ride on the bus and not in it? i am standing inside- i am standing inside and the walls pulse, ridged and slick, blood-warm, we can't afford windows only rich people look outside, tell them the walls are inside my neck, the doctor doesn't understand me. it's already more voices than one skin should hold. say, we're not interested, the owner's not in, i do not speak English. i would say i miss you next to me on the mattress on the floor because down here it's not as hot. i miss eating rice soup with cold tap water and the other half of your duck egg. i saved the shells, freckled easter-green, until you threw them away, in your sleep sometimes the only English you speak is: don't close the door! don't close the door on me! you said in your dreams your mother is a glass door you pass through, you turn only to watch her shut, in her last days you tried to apply for a visa to see her but the officers couldn't process your case. say, it didn't turn out how you thought it would, dried-tongue begging for someone to hear you. but was it worth it say it was worth it say i didn't let you down say i didn't waste the years of your life say i love you also i hate you also. : yo yot 10 PRISM 61.2 Alexandra Trnka CZECH IS A DIFFICULT LANGUAGE "Medvedev's father was strict," my grandmother tells me, as we sit on a sunken white sofa, eyes fixed on the lanky Russian tennis player as he sprints across a grass court on her small flatscreen. It is late afternoon in Florida, and the horizon outside her apartment window is grey, the sky softening into the ocean. When my brother and I arrive from Canada, she tells us that the mornings in Florida are sunny and in the evenings it rains. She will say this again throughout the week, as if for the first time. This week she is right, and in the long wet evenings we watch tennis. My brother unpacks in the bedroom while Medvedev rallies with the French Gilles Simon for the chance to play Ivashka, a Belarusian. Tennis pros compete in this Dutch tournament to practise for Wimbledon, but Medvedev and Ivashka have both been banned from the British tournament this year on the basis of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. "He plays for Russia, but he learned tennis in France," my grandmother says. She can't remember the name of the restaurant she will bring us to later, or the names of some of our relatives, but she tells me the biogra- 11 phies of each of the tennis players as they appear on the screen. Names are the first things to go, she's told me, and the English ones fade before the Slavic, those more deeply imprinted in her memory from her life in Czechoslovakia. "Medvedev's family left Russia when he was still young," she says. "They moved to France, to a place..." She pauses, hands clasped in the air in front of her, searching for a word. When she can't find it, she draws a long, steady line through the air in front of her with her hand, to illustrate. "To the coast?" I ask. "The coast," she says. For roughly two years at the turn of the century, my grandmother and I were both bilingual. Days after 9/11, my parents moved my baby brother and I to Prague, where my father was born, for his academic sabbatical. The timing meant we began our trip sleeping for days in the Heathrow airport, on a layover, as airports processed the aftermath. We moved into a small two-bedroom walk-up on Nekazanka, and my grandparents rented a larger apartment around the corner, returning to Prague to spend the year with us. The apartment was their first home in the city since 1968, when they fled, with three children, first to London and later to Virginia, weeks before the Czechoslovak borders closed under Soviet occupation. Though my father hadn't lived in Prague since the age of four, he showed me around our new neighbourhood with the confidence of someone who had never left. That his audience was a kindergartner surely made it easier for him to conceal his inevitable disorientation. We walked to the famous Charles Bridge, and he lifted me to sit on the rock wall along its edge, away from the crowds of tourists. He said that the stones that made up the bridge on which we stood were held together only by raw eggs, and I was six so I believed him, believed that raw eggs were strong enough to bear the weight of thirty-four saints rendered in stone along its perimeter. The first word I learned in Czech was pomoc—help—and my dad told me to yell pomoc if I ever felt that I was being kidnapped. I was enrolled in a Czech school to expand my vocabulary and quickly learned the language, more from necessity than desire. Most of my memories of Prague exist at school: eating bread dumplings—knedliky—in the meal hall, with discs of veal and slices of hard boiled egg; a feeling of shame after saying the 12 PRISM 61.2 wrong word for milk—milka instead oimleko—when playing with a toy kitchen; the harsh light in the school bathroom, a communal room of toilets without dividers. Visiting the city for the first time as an adult, it was the chamomile-scented toilet paper in our hotel room that was my first, unanticipated, sense memory of having lived there. My attendance at school was reluctant, but I soon developed a routine. When my grandmother walked me to school, we stopped on our way to buy a bottle of fizzy lemonade. I rejected the herbal tea that the school offered, and my grandmother's small endorsement of my refusal to assimilate attracted concern from the teachers, who fretted over my lack of proper hydration (they were right—I would be bedridden with a kidney infection within months). My experience of Prague was the inverse of my grandmother's. While I was grappling with an unfamiliar culture and landscape, she was returning home. In North America, she existed on the edge of full comprehension. She was a foreign businessman's wife, shown around American cities by people who didn't get her jokes. In Prague, she became our tour guide, and my aversion to the city ebbed as she revealed to us its secrets. She knew the best place to buy ham—sunka—and brought my brother to eat it by the slice, handed piece by piece over the butcher's counter. She introduced me to my favourite pastry: a whole plum, the pit replaced with a sugar cube, folded into soft dough and boiled until the fruit is syrupy and hot. Prague began to feel familiar to me through the ease with which my grandmother navigated the city and its people. Eventually, I became friends with a girl in my class and slept over at her house, an event still cited by my parents and grandmother as proof of my Czech fluency, though I don't remember it. Once I became fluent, my mom brought me to cafes and bakeries, hoping that I would translate her coffee or grocery order. I refused to help her, a response that I can only guess was a mixture of shyness and a sly desire for my mother to experience the same fluster and disorientation that I had endured in school. I waited while she flipped through the pages of a Czech phrasebook that my grandmother had mysteriously written and published a decade prior and gifted to all of her family members. The strongest memory I have of my mother in Prague is of being carried in her arms as she ran through cobblestone streets on stylish four-inch heels to retrieve a wallet she left behind in a restaurant bathroom. Though my grandmother was exceptionally fond 13 of my mother, her daughter-in-law, she maintains that it was my mom's inability to adjust to life in the Czech Republic that caused the dissolution of my parents' relationship shortly after we returned to Canada, rather than any of my parents' more obvious incompatibilities. Though I was a child, I'm sure that my grandmother and I understood each other best during this time. With the drama of retrospect, it seems as if at the exact moment when I became comfortable in Prague and could speak fluently with my grandmother, my dad's sabbatical ended and I was whisked away Returning to Canada, I once again found myself in a class with students whose linguistic skills outpaced my own (my classmates had all learned French while I was away), and I let Czech melt from my brain as I struggled to catch up. In the years since, my Czech has deteriorated along with her English. As her memory recedes with age, I tell her that she remembers better in Czech than in English, though I'm not sure that this is true. I do know that her English vocabulary is smaller than it once was, and that when she can't find an English word, its Czech equivalent sits on her tongue, stuck, waiting for translation. In Prague, we had an infinite list of words available to us. Now, I wonder whether I miss the nuance of her descriptions when she whittles her diction down so that I can understand. Copies of her phrasebook scatter coffee tables and bookshelves, but she doesn't use them, opting instead for a more gestural form of communication, illustrating with a movement or facial expression the word she needs. We can speak to each other like this because we have done it for decades, rallying words back and forth and negotiating their definitions. She tells me while we watch Medvedev play against Simon that Czech is a difficult language. She knows this because she taught Czech to English- speaking expats in Prague before marrying my grandfather. Her first-hand experience is confirmed by listening to the American tennis commentators. "They can't say the names," she says, shaking her head, of the announcers speaking about the Slavic players. "It's very difficult for them." I say I understand and she extends a generous compliment, that my Czech accent remains perfect despite my lack of comprehension. "You can say them, because you still know, but they don't know," she shrugs empathetically 14 PRISM 61.2 She leans back, one knee crossed over the other, as Medvedev serves for a set point, and recites a list of words that czech-speakers can pronounce but Americans can't."Zrovna, zrejme, zmenit, zprava...you see! They can't say gentle sounds," she says, "like Nina." Her name. "They always get it wrong, because it's so difficult to say it softly" The commentators analyze Medvedev's backhand and she chuckles. "Medvedev, Medvedev, Medvedev. They say his name so many times, but they don't know what it means!" she says. I ask her. "Medved is the word. It is the same in Czech and Russian, Medved. It means..." She raises her arms in the air and frowns. "Something very big when you are unhappy," she says. Bear? Bear! We laugh and she leans back in her chair with a happy sigh. "They don't know what they're saying," she says, satisfied. Medvedev will win this match and lose in the final against the Dutch player Tim van Rijthoven, who will go on to play Wimbledon. I tell my grandmother that her hair is long. She says she already knows, and that I must cut it for her. She's worn her hair in a sleek, jaw-length bob since before I can remember. Photos of my grandparents from before I was born attest to the haircut's history She says that the last time she went to a salon, the stylist didn't understand what she wanted, left her hair long, and charged her one hundred dollars. "One hundred! Can you believe it! Some time, Alex, when you are in a really good mood, you can cut it for me," she says. I agree. I don't realize what I've gotten myself into until the too-blunt scissors cut through the first lock. Her hair is deceptively dense, thick layers of straight white, with strands of dark grey that are invisible unless observed closely, that she wants collected neatly at the nape of her neck. Her robot vacuum, whom she has named Megan, moves lazily around the room bumping into things while I cut. I manage something that doesn't measure up to her historic bob and probably wouldn't pass in a salon, but she admires herself in the mirror afterward and I know I've done better than the one-hundred-dollar stylist. The beige tile floor is covered with soft hair when we're done, and we corner Megan between us, arranging 15 our feet like ballet dancers to block her from zooming away, coaxing her to suck up the clippings. As my grandmother's vocabulary shrinks, she leans more heavily on certain words. The word possibility, fittingly, takes on many meanings. A possibility is an appointment (her doctor has a possibility next week), a road (turn on the first possibility to the right, she says, giving me directions), a restaurant (we will have lunch at the possibility under the bridge), a job (she and my grandfather were able to leave Czechoslovakia because my grandfather had a possibility in London). We walk along the beach one morning and the sand under our feet is dense from last night's rain. Sea foam collects on the shoreline and blows onto the beach. Sandpipers flicker past us, moving to the water and then running back with each wave. We walk for some time and turn back at an arbitrary point. She tells me while we climb the wooden stairs back to her apartment building that she will be sad, until the last possibility of when she is here, that she never visited Russia, where her father was born. This trip marks the first time my grandmother has believed me when I tell her I have my licence. She was sceptical the last time I visited, shaking her head and saying "maybe" when I told her I could drive, like she acknowledged that this could be true, but whomever it was that could confirm this information wasn't around to be asked. This time, she lets me drive her to the grocery store, and even borrow her car, but still frets when I'm out driving and it rains. On one of the last days of our trip, I drive my brother and I to a public court to play tennis in the thirty-degree Florida heat, both of us trying to connect with one of our neglected family pastimes (tennis, violin, speaking Czech). The rackets haven't been used in years, and the black tape wound around the handle of mine disintegrates as we practise, coating my palms in sticky black. It seemed when we left her apartment that it would rain, the sky darkening from the city and moving toward the coast. It doesn't, and the horizon is clear when we come back to her apartment. Our grandmother sits on a patio chair on her balcony She is facing away from us, the back of her chair against the glass veranda doors, looking out over the water as the sky lightens. A peach pit sits on the table next to her from the fruit I bought that 16 PRISM 61.2 morning. Her feet swing back and forth, a foot above the ground, and she smooths her hair with her hands. Body Topography by Joey Mok 17 Lizzy Ke Polishan (XING XING) When did I climb into this body? Stone fruits & citrus seeds scattered on the granite counter in the rental house I'm paying for with my full salary replace enchanted golden orchards rooted to cotton- candy clouds. If you plant a Persian Lime seed anything could grow, even the same sour-sweet sort of Mandarin saplings we grafted onto Rough Lemon tree stumps, then abandoned, unbloomed & untasted, when we sold the house. Do I have childhood memories, or stories grownups told me? Stars in Chinese sounds like 'sing,' sung twice, & priests say God hears each sung prayer twice, & maybe the stars Sartre says fell still never did, but bore silent witness to his unceasing inner monologue. Unspoken. Unsung. PRISM 61.2 Preserved, printed, voiceless on a page— the kind of thing that lasts forever & never really Was. Springtime Pair by Errol Cratt 19 Katherine DeCoste DOXOLOGY We learned our new creed in asbestos, her father translating Latin, the two of us with filthy potato-chip hands It took a year to get my tongue around the words clutching replacement hymnals to our chests, burning like brands I let her beg the holy spirit down hand on my shoulder gaze to the ground She told me to get on my knees said she'd make a prayer of me 20 PRISM 61.2 Vicki McLeod WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE? The last time I recall seeing my grandfather standing up, he was swaying in the doorway between the kitchen and living room of a house in Warf- ield. The Village of Warfield claims to be the Jewel of the Kootenays; it was originally built to house workers for the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company—the smelter in Trail, British Columbia. My grandfather, Bill, was one such worker. He lived in Warfield with my grandmother, Lizzie, where they raised my father and his two older sisters. The house was built in 1938, and I have no idea when my grandparents moved in. I believe they were the first owners. Their mortgage was considered a benevolent gift from the Company, provided through the workers' company pension plan. The village, some 300 acres situated above what was known as Smelter Flats, is affectionately known as Mickey Mouse Town. The unique houses resemble the ones in Disney's Mickey Mouse cartoons, brightly painted with sharply sloped peaked roofs and small windows and doors. The styles fall into two categories: Mickeys and Minnies. They share similar features. The developers built a few sample houses, interior designs were 21 settled on, and the materials used were proven to be cheap but durable. My grandparents' house was a Minnie. Warfield has literary street names like Tennyson, Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, and Kipling, strange choices for a site that started as an experimental farm to prove that the sulphur dioxide laden emissions from Cominco were benign. The experiment failed, livestock got sick, vegetables tasted odd, and fruit trees refused to grow. Cominco eventually reduced the volume of poisonous emissions, converting the sulphur-filled smoke into sulphuric acid. This gave birth to Elephant Brand chemical fertilizer, along with a breakthrough in heavy water that contributed to the Manhattan Project and its offspring, the atomic bomb. Cominco's prosperity grew, and the need for workers and housing grew as well. My grandparents' house was trim and tidy, its 150-foot lot covered by a lush lawn courtesy of free fertilizer provided by the Company The house was bordered by showy flowerbeds filled with proud dahlias, chrysanthemums, and gladiolas. The neat backyard boasted cherry trees and a short and stout wooden garage, with a cement walkway to the back door of the kitchen. There were finer and bigger houses up the hill, but the Minnie Mouse house at 805 Kipling was close to a palace for Bill and Lizzie, and they kept it gleaming. The floor plans were simple—a cement basement with a coal chute, a main floor with a living room, kitchen bathroom, and bedroom, and an unfinished upper floor with room for two bedrooms beneath the steep roof. The floors and main walls were fir, and the outside of the house was stucco. There was no interior door between the kitchen and living room in the house, and for this visit, my grandmother had carefully rigged a woolen blanket across the doorway using clothespins. I thought nothing of this arrangement, although I was puzzled to see her collection of tiny China figurines gathered in a plastic basin by the kitchen sink—painted collies, terriers, and poodles, delicate miniature houses, elves, and ballerinas jumbled together in the basin as though at a party Usually, these ornaments were precariously displayed throughout the living room on small tables laced with doilies and were prone to tipping. We children received clear instructions not to touch. Grandpa Laurie was what was called a well-made man, lean and muscular. He was thought of as handsome too, with a big well-shaped blonde head and hard blue eyes. His ears were overlarge and stuck out from his head. This is a Laurie family trait. I have the same. So does my brother. 22 PRISM 61.2 So did my father. Grandpa was tall, at least certainly to me then, but also tall by comparison to other men, and tall next to my Granny. I sit with her in the sunny warm kitchen. Granny has pulled the ruffled curtain across the small window and the light shines through them pale and watery The sun-heated cotton releases the smell of bleach into the air. Motes of dust float past. We are eating shortbread cookies. Granny has a cup of tea, and I am finishing a glass of apple juice, my mouth sweet and sticky. "There's a good gettle," says Granny "Put your glass in the sink and I'll see about the cookie crumbs." Her freckled hand sweeps the crumbs toward her across the Formica tabletop. I am caught halfway across the kitchen, on my way to the sink, when the wool blanket is thrown aside. Grandpa looms and sways in the kitchen doorway, pushing his big head past the wool blanket, clutching the doorframe. A dank blast from the dim living room behind him pushes into the bright kitchen. He squints against the light and the blonde stubble on his unshaven face sparkles. Wearing only a flannel pajama top, its pale brown stripes wrinkled and stained. He smells of vomit and piss, and something else—sweeter. This, I come to know later, is the smell of whiskey. A long penis dangles between his legs, purple and gray. I stare, shocked, not recalling having seen such a thing. Grandpa is what they call roaring drunk, and as he lunges through the doorway, Granny leaps from her chair. "Away, away!" shrieks my grandmother, flapping a kitchen towel with one hand and pushing at my grandfather with the other. He sways backward toward the living room, clutching at the door frames, his penis swinging between his long legs, Dingdong, the witch is dead the wicked witch is dead. The wicked witch is dead. "What are ye doing here?" he roars, the words breaking in his throat. My grandfather had been treated for throat cancer, no doubt from years of breathing sulphur fumes, and his voice was like that. Not so much a voice as a growl. I am so unused to adults directing remarks my way that I continue to stare, only flinching when I realize that it is me he is asking. What am I doing here? This is a very good question. I am just a wee girl and used to being put places. I have been put here, I suppose. For babysitting possibly, or perhaps I am here because I have come to stay with my father on a custody visit. Maybe he has dropped me to see my Granny because he has 23 a shift at Cominco. I do not know, so I have no answer for this growled question from the apparition that appears as my grandfather. Where is my mother? Where is my father? I do not know this either. I am frozen between the sink and the safety of my chair beside the fridge, the words from the Wizard of Oz movie repeating themselves in my head. The movie scared me, and I want the words to stop. I count the number of steps it will take to get me across the linoleum to the chair. Each time I visit I count the number of steps in each room. I know there is a total of twenty-two steps across my grandmother's kitchen. That leaves about nine more steps to the sink from where I am. Mathematically, the sink is closer than my chair. Also closer to Grandpa. I stand unmoving, small fingers tight around the empty juice glass. Suspended there, the image of my grandfather prints itself in my brain, lodging itself just over my left ear, developing like a photograph inside my skull. I try to stop it but fail. Even counting does not help. It was not long after this that Granny Laurie died. It was breast cancer that took her, a return of the carcinoma that first appeared the year I was born. My grandfather, unable to cope, went to live with my aunt's family just a little further up the hill in a slightly finer, larger Minnie on Dickens Street. Family rumour has it that he moved to my aunt's following a bender in a downtown hotel room where he set himself and the hotel on fire. While living at my aunt's, he suffered a paralyzing stroke and was confined to a wheelchair until his death in 1974. For almost a decade, whenever we went to Trail to see my father, we were obliged to visit my Grandpa Laurie at the extended care unit of the Trail-Tadanac Hospital, the same hospital where both my mother and father were born, and the same hospital where my brother and I were born. The hospital sits roasting on the side of the hill on Hospital Bench in East Trail. (They were not so fancy with the road names down in Trail as they were in Warfield.) When I was a girl, the landscape surrounding hospital hill looked scorched. Exposed escarpments of drab granite, slag, and gneiss, barren dark rocky slopes dotted with scrubby pines and struggling shrubs tower over the modernistic building. A few hardy species that can survive anything, even acid rain and sulphur dioxide—Oregon grape, mountain ash, chokecherries—bloom from soil scoured of every good thing. There is nothing left of the well-treed slopes that were once thick with the growth of Grand fir and Western White pine. Black cottonwood, black locust—all the black and darkly invasive species have taken hold. They offer patches of green relief amid a barren rock landscape. 24 PRISM 61.2 Today, broadleaf and conifer forests are re-establishing themselves along these terraces above the Columbia River that cuts through Trail B.C., but in the 1960s, the hillsides looked like they belonged on a hot black moon, the hospital shimmering in the poisoned landscape like a lunar outpost. Each time we came to Trail, my brother and I dressed up for visiting my grandparents. It was an occasion. I wore little dresses in mod colours with matching jackets, white ankle socks and black shoes with straps and buckles. My brother wore a shirt with a collar and pants with creases pressed into the middle of the legs. Shoelaces double knotted. I say we visited my grandparents, plural, because part of this circuit included a stop at Mountain View Cemetery to visit our dead Granny Laurie. There are many photographs of my brother and I at the graveside. In them, her headstone reads: Dear to our Hearts, and we sit beside it, legs folded neatly, looking solemnly at the camera. When I look at these pictures now, I remember how uncomfortable I was. I didn't know the correct way to feel, or how to convey that right feeling to my face for the photograph. I did not understand then why we might want to visit the dead and what was expected of us. Why did we have to wear good clothes? Dad fussed with the flowers he brought fresh every time—depending on the season, there might be tulips or lilacs from Aunty Betty's garden, sometimes store-bought flowers—miniature pink carnations, pretty and inexpensive. As Dad arranged the flowers or fiddled with the camera, I was plagued by the very same question posed to me by the drunken half- naked giant reeling in my grandmother's kitchen. What was I doing here? I understood better what we were doing when we visited Grandpa Laurie in the hospital. We park the car in the steaming parking lot, the hot West Kootenay sun beating onto the pavement. My legs stick to the vinyl seats as I peel myself out of the car, the dress I have been forced to wear bunched around my sticky thighs. My father frets, patting down the wrinkles on the skirt of my dress, smoothing my hair. He tucks in my brother's shirt. He looks into the side mirror of the car and runs his long hands along the sides of his slick hair. Composed, we walk together to the big glass doors of the hospital. The corridor of the extended care unit is cool and dim, a relief from the glare outside. We escape the tarry smell of the parking lot to be assailed by the smell of disinfectant and old bodies. Dingdong, the witch is dead, the wicked witch, the wicked witch... I start counting our footsteps as they echo down the hallway Nurses 25 bustle past in their crisp uniforms, white polished shoes squeaking on the linoleum. And from far down the hall comes Grandpa, pulling himself in his wheelchair along the corridor rail with his one good hand, his small slippered feet shuffling like fins under his chair. He stops immediately when he sees us and waits for us to come to him, eyes fixed on my father's tall frame. The sounds of our hard shoes tap-tap toward him. Close up, Grandpa smells like tobacco and urine. He is unshaven, in a robe and pajamas. My brother moves a little closer to me, and Grandpa's crablike hand gropes at my father's arm. Dad pushes his hand away. "Where is it?" rasps Grandpa as greeting, only half his mouth moving, his bad hand batting awkwardly at my dad. "The kids are here, Dad. Visiting. They're here to visit you. Vicki and Peter." On cue, we stand up straighter, preparing to be noticed. My legs are itchy The wrinkled dress is scratching. I resist staring at Grandpa's frozen mouth, his gimped hand. The witch is dead the witch is dead. I begin to count the stripes on his housecoat. "Have you got it, Al, have ye got it?" His paralyzed hand grasping towards my father's jacket pockets, finding only air as Dad steps back. "Say hello to the children," says my father slowly. Ten, eleven, twelve... the stripes are dark blue on a lighter blue background. Blue like my Granny's eyes used to be...thirteen, fourteen... My grandfather's nostrils flare and one side of his mouth curls. All gravel and spit, he says, "Alright then, hello, and give yer granda a wee kiss." Fiji...I am shocked out of counting and look wide-eyed to my dad. "Just the lass," he says. "Men dinnae kiss." My brother whips his head to look at me. Dad nudges me forward with the back of his hand. I lean in toward Grandpa's immobile cheek, harsh with stubble. I feel myself disappear. After the kiss, the true purpose of our visit is revealed. Dad slips the mickey from his coat pocket. My grandfather's good hand shoots out, grabbing the bottle and sliding it down beside the cushion of his wheelchair, out of sight. My dad leans in toward my grandfather—I don't know why—but Grandpa shoves him off with his shoulder, twisting to grab the corridor rail, and pushes himself away The message is clear. Beat it. This urgency to get to the bottle is one I came to know later in 26 PRISM 61.2 my life. Along with big ears and small hands and feet, this Laurie trait was passed along to me too. The closer we get to the exit, the brighter the corridor grows. Behind us, Grandpa Laurie scuttles his wheelchair back to his room as fast as his slippers and one good arm can take him. I focus on the light at the end of the hall, no longer counting anything, just putting one polished foot in front of the other. Even though its sourness sits in my throat, I am trying not to remember the close-up smell of Grandpa, the feel of his stiff cheek. My father drops his hand onto the top of my head, rests it there a moment. He whispers, "Race you to the car," and we break out running. Peter catches onto the game and runs too, past the startled nurses, and the carts of stacked up dinner trays, through the smells of canned string beans and starch, and busting through the glaring doors and out. Afterward, driving down from the parched hospital hill into the softer bowl of air around the Columbia, Dad would open the car windows wide and let the wind breeze through. My brother and I would lean our heads out the window like dogs, and fling our arms wide into the air, cupping our hands against the hot gust, feeling the muscles growing in our small arms. Later, there would be onion rings at the Tastee-Freez on McQuarrie in East Trail, with a dessert of soft ice cream cones for us and beer for Dad. There is a photograph. It is the last one taken of my grandmother while she was still living. It is taken in a hospital room, in the same hospital that housed the extended care unit. In the foreground of the photo is a huge bouquet of showy yellow chrysanthemums festooned with a bright orange ribbon. My grandmother lies in the hospital bed among the white sheets. She is thin and smiling prettily I have learned to do this kind of smiling, too. Grandpa Laurie is standing beside the hospital bed. He looks healthy and well, almost jolly He's wearing a V-neck sweater and a smart-looking shirt. Does she know she's going to die soon? I can't imagine that she does not. Does he know? I wonder because he looks unaccountably happy Perhaps he knows the dark animal that lives inside him will finally be free. No more pinning it up behind the wool blanket in the living room. It will be free to roam in the serene kitchen, free to roll around in the soft grass outside. They said he had a stroke and fell down the stairs at my aunt's house. There has been some confusion as to what came first, the stroke or the fall. Either way, I've never believed it to be true. I believe he was drunk, because he was always drunk, and he may have tripped and missed a 27 step, or, more likely, he might have been given a good shove. Maybe one my aunt saved up from all her childhood years and young adult years, and early married years, the shove my grandmother could never give him. A payback shove, for all the split lips, bruised arms, marks on the neck—finally pushing the storybook memories of Mickey Mouse Town over a cliff. I hope she went for tea afterward, dressed in something nice, maybe wearing a pair of pretty gloves. Drove down the long hill, away from Warfield into the heart of West Trail, and took herself to the Kresge's on the corner of Cedar Ave. and Spokane Street. Sat down at the lunch counter and ordered a side of fries and gravy I can almost see her there now. Her pale fine hair—the same colour as her mother's, the same colour as mine—a wild halo around her head. Removing her gloves, finger by finger, so she can dig into the steamy fries. Deciding on a strawberry milkshake instead of tea and using her fingers to wipe the last of the brown gravy from the dish. Satisfied. This is the version I like best. 28 PRISM 61.2 Daniel Zomparelli JUMP SCARE 1. Opening S enine scene A quiet suburb bubbles in the background when a kid gets choked from behind and we pull back to reveal a hole in the ground it opens until the world falls into it, then you appear. You move into a new home where the furnace wheezes in in the basement. A wind whisper in the attic, it knows your name the only one that talks to you in an empty home. Voices call out goodnight as the day slips away. You talk back to them, everyone says you talk in your sleep. 2. Through the dark Don't run down into the basement there is no exit, it's just cement and open walls, wood exposed, 29 nails poking from boards, it's all stolen toys from Target and text books, cut knees and concussions, hum and roar from the furnace and kissing and boys who will pretend this never happened and memory and loss and vomit and if you ever fucking tell someone and bloody mary bloody mary bloody mary, bright red blisters please turn the lights on. 3. We should split up This is where they say we should split up, even though you beg them to stick around. But there is only so long they can stay, better to split up and see where this goes and let your best friend, your boyfriend your sisters, your father, your mother go on without you. We start with everyone, every single person and we split up, cut in half, split down the earth, split in half we divide like atoms, until it's just one of us in every room in this haunted house. 30 PRISM 61.2 4. A Jump Scare It's the memories that keep you up at night, not the nightmares. The jump scare is the men who followed you out the club or the jump scare is the car you drove into the night or the jump scare is the memory that relocates itself in the bones or we watch as a clown jumps from a projector she drops from your ceiling he appears on the third try a hand punches out of a grave a knife plunges through a curtain an alien bursts through a body Jason leaps from the water you crawl from the tv screen thrash at the closet come through the mirror your head rips through my stomach intestines dangle from your face. 31 5. The last one They all logged out and it was just you on a screen, you alone in a house, each left through the door or a window, you in a forest with the only whispers from wind between trees, you calling for help from someone, anyone, you in the cabin in the woods staring into the corner, you wondering where they all went, how they figured out an exit. 6. The moment of relief and a potential sequel The credits roll text slips up the screen I don't want to write another poem I just want to sit in the basement and think of you. When I assume it's all over a red balloon floats up and I wait for you, and I wait for you and I wait for you. 32 PRISM 61.2 Michelle Brown LET'S GO AROUND THE TABLE AND EACH SHARE ONE WEIRD THING I'm nineteen but I look twenty. I once inserted a crystal into her. I met Murakami and Stallone at the same party. I walked into the ocean with a pocket full of rocks. I was born a faun. I just kissed her in the hallway. I'm the bassist. I'm the fire marshal and this close to arresting all of you. I bought a round and no one thanked me. I slide my finger underneath your bra strap. I drive a pick-up and no one knows where I go. I hear everything you say about me. I'm Michelle's mom? I'm returning to my planet. I just met you but you guys seem fun. I put my whole fist in her mouth. I have so much power, they won't believe you. 34 PRISM 61.2 I believed in god until she flicked her tongue. I'm the third person. I threw out my snow globes. I moved here a week ago. I'm a piece of beach glass, who are you? I'd like to borrow that extra chair? I saw you here yesterday. I'm your red heart and I heard it all. I just need to settle up. I pierced my own tongue. I was almost olympian. I dream of owning a high-yield investment. I'm bald underneath. I want to live inside your warm mouth. I'm a pilot to the stars. I watched my brother shower. I just need to settle up. I think I'll stay. You guys seem fun. I think you guys seem fun for now. 35 Jack Lancaster WE LEFT THE AC ON We both opt for skin contact, even though we are warned of its funkiness. He tried on my glasses, we laugh at what we can't see. Months fall away in the ambling heat. Blackouts loom white-hot drape soft blue shadows down his sharp edges, widening capillaries. A boy puts silly string in his hair. The air con drips out over our belonging. Paint prickles, peels, we leave it on. It becomes hard to distinguish para in paramour: as abnormal as paranoia, as paranormal, beyond love. We know, better. Words will fall out of our hands into someone else's. A psychic and a therapist will tell him the already-knowns. The sun and I burn, lying across his chest 36 PRISM 61.2 Catriona Wright MAKING FACES Amanda learned by watching YouTube tutorials of young women sitting in their pastel bedrooms, their faces bright and glowing, as they wielded their arsenals of beautifying implements. The palettes with their circles of shimmer, satin, matte powders. Fluffy brushes, slanted brushes, stiff bristled. Sponges and liquid liners. She ordered her own materials and practiced in the bathroom mirror—the bathroom was the only room in the apartment that locked—her laptop balanced on the edge of the tub. She paused the videos, listened, tried again. She took selfies before destroying her artistry with pre-moistened wipes. She repeated the secret vocabulary to herself like a spell: buttery, blendable, crease, waterline, fall out. Every evening, for five minutes, she was beautiful. Nobody had warned her a miscarriage could mean contractions, so much blood, days of pain. She knew, in a vague, incredulous way, that miscarriages were common, but after what she went through it seemed impossible. All these women, everywhere, on buses, at the gym, laughing in the grocery store, all these women cooking and cleaning and fucking, 37 all carrying the memory of their creations emptying out of them. Had they also been compelled to touch the greyish flesh, the clots of blood, looking for a face? For months afterward, she stopped sleeping, purple bags beneath her eyes. She learned to erase these shadows with concealer, then recreate them, sculpted and refined, right-side-up. A few times, maybe three, she'd almost sent Alex a photo of herself done up with a full face, hoping he'd be intrigued enough to reply That one time with the emerald shimmer, the dramatic cat-eye swoop of liner, the feathery lashes, that was the time she'd come closest. But in the end she deleted it. She didn't want to tamper with their time together, which she imagined existed in his mind as a pale pink room, clean, uncluttered, girlish. Surely, in his version, blood never streamed down the walls. The first time Alex took Amanda to his condo, she marvelled at its cleanliness. The white walls and huge windows and framed jazz concert posters seemed so adult and expensive. The sleek black leather couch, the marble kitchen island, the well-groomed monstera plant in a concrete pot. It looked staged, right out of a magazine, so unlike her Great-Aunt Gertrude's apartment, where every surface was covered in books or papers or old copies of the New Yorker, where dust clouded the patterns in the Persian rugs, where the houseplants all had sinister personalities, the branches jutting out to snag sweaters, the leaves oozing toxic sap. "What do you think?" Alex asked. "I just finished decorating. I was going for the minimalist thing." "It's so organized," Amanda said. "But in a non-threatening way" Alex laughed. "Like me, right?" Amanda nodded, blushing. It was true she'd never met anyone like Alex, so self-assured and driven yet somehow also naive. One night, her sister, Eileen, high on something, had stolen Amanda's phone and swiped right on his profile. When he responded with "Are you my missing semi-colon?" Eileen quipped back, "Depends. How big is your dangling modifier?" Eileen must have assumed, based on the pickup line, that he was a copyeditor like Amanda, but after some confusion he explained it was a programming joke. "Semi-colons are ever present in code. They provide structure and clarity, like micro-commitments." Eileen, bored, handed the phone back to Amanda. "Another tech bro." Amanda agreed, pretending to be disgusted, and, without telling Eileen or anyone else, set up a time to meet him. 38 PRISM 61.2 He'd spent their entire date enthusing about his start-up, explaining the intricacies of interface design, how he wanted to help people interact with the world in intuitive ways, open them up to possibilities. He'd asked her questions about her career aspirations, which she struggled to answer, redirecting the conversation back to him. She knew her friends would have rolled their eyes—only late capitalist apologists believed in "careers"—but Amanda found his optimism refreshing, if alien. When Alex said "television" in his loud, firm voice, a slit opened in the ceiling and a flat screen descended. Later, when he said "bedroom," she felt similarly compelled to obey She followed him, delighted by the upholstered headboard and heap of plump pillows. From his side table, he produced a smooth, sage-coloured silicone oblong and clicked on an invisible button. It purred reassuringly, promising a tidy orgasm. That first night it was the only thing that touched her. Eileen knocked on the bathroom door. "Are you almost done masturbating? I need to piss." "One minute." Amanda tapped the brush on the edge of the sink to dislodge excess product. A touch of burgundy on the outer lids to give her autumnal look extra dimension. Eileen rattled the handle. "One minute." Left eye complete, she turned her attention to her right. Louder, more insistent knocks. Stomping feet. "I can feel a UTI coming on." "Fine," Amanda opened the door. Eileen rushed in, her pants already down, sat on the toilet, and with a satisfied sigh, let out a gushing rush of urine. The sisters had been living together for two years, ever since their Great-Aunt Gertrude passed away and left them her apartment. There were still traces of Gertrude everywhere. The medicine cabinet overflowed with expired heart medication, hotel-sized shampoos and conditioners, rose-shaped soaps. On the counter, a crystal perfume bottle, the fragrance now a musty layer of amber gel at the bottom, the tasselled spray bulb too stiff to squeeze. Amanda, hoping Eileen wouldn't notice her face, hastily gathered her materials, looking away No such luck. "What's with your face?" Eileen said, wiping herself. Their mother rarely wore makeup, at most a hint of lipstick at a wedding or a dab of 39 concealer for a particularly belligerent zit. "You know those companies are evil, right? Animal testing, toxins, palm oil harvesting and rainforest deforestation..." She zipped up her pants and swayed toward the sink. She was either coming up or coming down. "I know," Amanda said, not wanting to hear it. "These brands are sustainable though." "Sustainable?" Eileen washed her hands, shaking her head and laughing. "What a crock of greenwashing bullshit. You're seriously stupider than I thought if you believe that." Amanda needed to shift the focus of the conversation if she wanted to avoid another fight. "You used to wear makeup, back when you worked at the firm." With no clean towels available, Eileen wiped her hands on the back of her pants. "I only wore it because my boss was a misogynistic, patriarchal trust fund asshole who said it was unprofessional not to. How about a little blush? A little mascara? And I was too brainwashed to argue. I went straight to the cosmetics counter after work and they covered me in slime. Did I tell you how he always sat me with the secretaries and paralegals at the Christmas gala?" "Tell me again," Amanda said, gently leading Eileen out of the washroom, toward the couch in the living room. The sisters took turns sleeping on the large green couch, which was more comfortable and forgiving than Gertrude's lumpy bed with its paisley sheets and stained yellow skirt. It was the preferred location for naps and blackouts. Months ago, in the moments after Amanda had peed on a stick and seen the two blue lines, her old life and her new one side by side, she'd laid down on that couch, sinking into the cushions, clutching her stomach, panicking. Her body hadn't felt any different. Her breasts weren't swollen and she didn't feel nauseated and she definitely wasn't glowing. There must be some mistake. Alex had broken up with her so kindly and efficiently she'd only realized what happened hours later, walking home from his condo, dazed. The whole relationship felt like a pleasant misunderstanding, destined to be corrected eventually, yet here it remained in the form of two blue lines. Had she ever loved him? It didn't matter. He didn't have time for a baby because he was too busy making the Internet feel familiar. 40 PRISM 61.2 Could she raise a baby on her own? She'd been accused all her life of being unemotional and secretive—surely those were the worst possible traits a mother could possess. And she didn't experience pangs of maternal longing when she saw onesies with woodland animal prints. Plastic in the ocean, deforestation, pandemics, widening inequality, so many reasons not to burden someone else with existing. The planet was already full. Besides, Gertrude's apartment was no place for a baby A deathtrap of rickety bookcases and choking-hazard tchotchkes, lead paint and leaks, haunted by two spinsters, three if you counted Great-Aunt Gertrude. She lay there for a long time, watching the sun set through the blinds, slashes of orange and pink illuminating the dust, reflecting off the glass cabinet doors. Two blue lines. Parallel. A proofreading mark. Or else a lane, narrowing her path. Giving her a new direction. After Eileen had tired herself out ranting about her vile former boss and fallen asleep on the couch, Amanda returned to the bathroom to finish her look. A pop of yellow in the inner corners of her eyes and a sweep of muted terracotta on her cheekbones. She looked like a harvest spirit, a promise of lush abundance, until she blinked and turned into a scarecrow, a lifeless decoy drooping amid warted squash, a crow unstitching her smile. What did others see when they looked at her? For the first time in months, she logged onto Reddit—she'd opened an account for lurking on miscarriage subreddits but never actually posted—and clicked through the makeup options until she found TodaysFace. She took a dozen photos from different angles, uploaded the one that made her look thin and confident, and waited. Moments later someone named TrashPanda wrote Obsessed with these fall vibes and your eyebrows. What palette did you use? After that, Amanda devoted herself to developing her skills. On breaks from copyediting reports, she read reviews of the latest cosmetic releases and articles about trends. She watched hours of YouTube tutorials. She ordered specialized products. Setting sprays, primers, loose pigments, mixing mediums. Her hand got steadier and her winged liner more aerodynamic. She posted selfies every few days, waiting, excited and anxious, for people to upvote or downvote or comment. "Love the blending, girl!" said sapphireprincess and "What do you use on your skin? Luminous," said makeupaddict. Each compliment calmed her, if only for a moment, assuring her she wasn't deluded or alone. There were other women who 41 spent hours scrutinizing their faces in the mirror, refining their technique, who encouraged each other to achieve their goals, recommending the perfect bronze eyeshadow to complete a halo eye or offering tips on how to achieve a dewy glow. She wondered if any of them actually wore makeup outside or if, like her, they protected these faces for people who could understand them. When Amanda found out that Great-Aunt Gertrude had left them the apartment in her will, she'd immediately felt guilty For years, Amanda had been scared of ending up like her. She hated when her mother said she had Gertrude's eyes or ears or smile. In family lore, Gertrude served the role of cautionary tale, living alone in the big city, barely scraping by. Apparently she'd had a brief, disastrous marriage to a successful painter in her youth, and after years of trying to paint herself, she'd accepted an administrative position at a nearby design college. No one ever explicitly told Amanda that Gertrude's life was sad, but every mention of her was suffused with pity. For Christmas, Gertrude gave the sisters age-inappropriate gifts, like The Diary ofAnais Nin or a partially used ami-aging skin cream. She was outspoken and prickly and had strong political convictions. When she was drunk, which was often, she would lecture them about the unacknowledged brilliance of female artists they'd never heard of. It was hard to believe that Gertrude was their grandmother's sister. Francine, their sweet, quietly competent, no-nonsense grandmother, the expert baker and de-escalator of family conflicts, who taught them how to make the world's flakiest pie crust and how to get period stains out of underwear. Their whole family would visit Gertrude once or twice a year. She would insist she was going to cook some outrageous feast, often involving quail, even inquiring about food allergies and preferences, only to end up ordering from Swiss Chalet. Amanda and Eileen would be enlisted to clean the greasy puddles of auburn sauce off the chipped dishes while the adults laughed and argued in the living room. During this ritual, Eileen would whisper made-up stories about Gertrude. She was a thousand years old. She astral projected into former lovers' bedrooms and sucked their lifeforce out of them (Eileen added a spooky half-whistle as a sound effect). If you glanced at her quickly, before she realized it, there was only a smooth blankness where a face should be. 42 PRISM 61.2 One morning Amanda's phone wouldn't unlock. No face detected, it said. Then: Face not a match. Probably some tweak to the facial recognition software. She had to use her password instead. She image-searched "baby" and scrolled through the chubby, wide-eyed, open-mouthed pictures. Babies on their tummies. Babies gazing into their mother's eyes. Babies strapped to fathers. Babies yawning, crying, grabbing their toes. After clicking on a thumbnail of a particularly cute one—cheeks covered in icing and sprinkles, chubby fingers clutching a silver cupcake wrapper—she somehow found herself on a webpage called Baby Face Predictor, where you could upload a photo of yourself and a partner—there were a variety of stock celebrity photos to choose from—to see what the algorithm thought your child would look like. Without thinking, she uploaded a bare-faced picture of herself and scrolled through her gallery for one of Alex. There he was smiling at her over his shoulder while he prepared food on his stove, probably a keto cauliflower stir fry from a meal kit. She chose Boy from the options, watched the loading wheel spin, and waited, at once expectant and ashamed by her expectations. It was a game an engineer had probably whipped up on a lunch break. The baby appeared on screen, smiling, a round expressive nose (Alex's), thin lips (hers), squinting blue eyes (Alex's), straight black hair (neither of theirs). She stared at him for a long time, indulging in the fantasy of the baby's soft skin and bunched up knees, until Eileen's wheezing snores wrenched her back to reality She shouldn't be doing this to herself, it wasn't healthy or helpful. She clicked on the Tinder app icon, a stylized flame. When she stepped into her date's condo, she paused, confused. There must be some mistake. This was Alex's condo, the same white walls and windows, the clean lines and kitchen island. After a moment, she detected the deviations—as though she was playing one of those 'spot the difference' children's games. The posters were for microbreweries, not jazz concerts. The leather on the couch was caramel-coloured, not black. The monstera plant was a fern, possibly fake. "Great place," Amanda said. "Very minimal." "Thanks," Evan said. "I've been getting into interior design lately I'm saving up for an Eames chair." "Cool," Amanda said. Her body conveyed her smoothly to the couch. Evan made her a Manhattan with expensive maraschino cherries, their 43 glossy red skin so dark, almost black, clots at the bottom of her glass. She popped one into her mouth, the thick syrup coating her tongue. She felt at ease, relaxed, as though she'd performed this date so many times she'd memorized the moves. Evan handed her another drink, stronger this time, while summarizing an article he'd read about artificial intelligence, the uncanny valley, how people look for faces everywhere. He wasn't as smart as Alex or as attractive. His eyes were too far apart. She got out her phone and checked for comments on her latest post, a departure for her, green and gold eyes with purple ombre lips. Nothing yet. Should she delete it? She guiltily glanced up to see if he'd noticed her staring at her phone, but he seemed content, and slightly drunk. "Engineers want to make robots that look human, but not too human, you know?" he said. Without answering, she finished her drink and he handed her another. "Television," she commanded at the ceiling. "Television." "I don't have one," Evan said, apparently unfazed by her outburst. "We could watch Netflix on my laptop." Amanda giggled, now thoroughly tipsy She knew she wouldn't see Evan again, there'd be no point and they didn't have any friends in common, so she decided to tell him. It would be like yelling it into a hole in the ground. Or telling it to an Alex alternate. "I had a miscarriage." Her self-assurance vanished. Waves of pain in her lower back and thighs, sticky fluid dribbling then gushing, a cold toilet seat, thinking it was over and hobbling to the bed, only for the cramping return, blood and tissue trailing behind her as she rushed back to the bathroom. Her voice wavered, cracked. "Six months ago." Evan inched closer to her, wrapping his arms around her, stroking her hair. He smelled like baby powder and musk. "We can take it slow." "Thank you." Amanda sank into his arms, overcome by an unexpected surge of relief, her eyes wet with tears, her body shaking. Maybe not every messy, bleeding thing needed to be hidden under the floorboards. "And don't worry," Evan said. "A quarter of pregnancies end in miscarriage." Amanda stiffened, pulling away. "My sister told me that," he continued, oblivious. "She had three and now she has a healthy baby You'll be a great mom one day" Amanda nodded, her eyelids heavy Two blue lines, bars trapping her inside, alone. "I'm going to call a Lyft." 44 PRISM 61.2 Halfway up the flight of stairs, she heard it. Carole King's heartbroken nasal crooning accompanied by Eileen's offkey butchering of the lyrics and the thumps and scrapes of furniture being moved. When she opened the door, she was greeted by a swarm of dust and noise. She went over to the record player and lifted its arm, which got Eileen's attention. "Darling, I'm home," Eileen said, directing her huge pupils at Amanda. Scanning the room, Amanda saw that Eileen must have been cleaning for hours. There were garbage bags full of papers, and boxes labelled 'Nope' and 'Maybe' and 'Feeling Lucky' The air stunk of cloying orange-scented cleaning spray The green couch had been moved to the middle of the living room, and Eileen was on her hands and knees in the couch-shaped patch of dust that had accumulated beneath it. "What are you doing?" Amanda said. "Guess," Eileen laughed. She lifted a massive dust bunny by its hair and shook it at her until it fell apart. Then, in an instant, she was on her feet. "I need to show you what I found! You'll never believe it." She dashed into the bedroom and returned with a dark oil painting in a gilded frame. "It says Self-Portrait in the corner there." Amanda leaned in and saw the title in white paint along with a signature. Gertrude. "I found it in the back of the closet," Eileen said. "I guess Gertrude was actually talented." Amanda stared at the painting, unsettled. The figure was a kind of chimera, part woman, part frog, all done in moody ochres and dark greens. She recognized Gertrude's arched eyebrows and smirk, a certain amphibian inscrutability, which was only now legible to her. High cheekbones, crooked nose. She was ugly, raw, and utterly familiar. "She looks like you," Eileen said, and maybe because she was exhausted, Amanda didn't object. The portrait did look like her, just not a version of her she'd ever seen before. The curve of the nose, the hint of coldbloodedness she'd always suspected herself of. A vulnerable tilt of the head she'd glimpsed in the mirror but never quite captured in a photo. The threat of a tongue darting out. Gertrude/Amanda's freckled neck gradually shaded into chartreuse shoulders, delicate dapples of gold. The blending was subtle, the lines exquisite and balanced. Amanda imagined posting it on TodaysFace. Gorgeous. Mona Lisa meets Kermit vibes. Gothic frog mother fantasy. Her womb was open, transparent; instead of amniotic fluid, green swamp water, clouded with mud and algae, and a tadpole-baby hybrid floating there, content, body curled around an umbilical lily pad stem. 45 Amanda closed her eyes, her chest tightening. "I meant that as a compliment," Eileen said. "She looks like a badass." "Can I show you something?" Amanda said, choking the words out. She opened her phone and showed Amanda her baby, the algorithm- generated one with the blue eyes and flushed skin. The one who lived in her phone. Eileen frowned. "What am I looking at here?" "It's mine," Amanda said, then corrected herself. "Or it would have been. Remember how I slept for a week back in June and blamed it on a hangover? I miscarried." Eileen took a deep breath, her face rapidly cycling through expressions. "Wait. Does that baby exist?" "No," Amanda said, annoyed. Why couldn't her sister keep up? "This baby is a prediction from an app. You upload your picture and the guy's picture and it spits out an idea of what your child might look like." Eileen considered this, confused, as though ransacking her mind for the meaning of the word miscarriage, and, having found it, launched into a frenzied interrogation. "Who's the guy? Are you okay? Why didn't you tell me? It's fine. I know why you didn't tell me. I'm a fucking mess. Are you okay? Did I already ask that? A miscarriage! I haven't had sex in years. Not since my boss at the firm, but you know all that. Are you okay?" "I'm fine. It was intense. But I'm fine. The guy's name is Alex. He doesn't know," Amanda said, feeling calmer in the face of her sister's panic. Then, surprising herself, "But I'm going to tell him. I just need to figure out how." Eileen nodded. "You don't owe him shit." "I know, but I owe myself." Amanda's attention returned to her body, specifically to her bladder, which was threatening to burst. "One minute," she said, hurrying toward the bathroom. She didn't bother shutting the door as she peed, closing her eyes, enjoying the release, a brief moment of calm and resolve. She was going to tell Alex. Let him carry some of this pain with her. In the living room, Eileen, a new ring of white highlighting her left nostril, threw Amanda's phone on the couch, as though it had scalded her. "So I maybe did something you might not like." "What?" Amanda said, her tongue thick and heavy in her mouth. Trust her sister to ruin a cathartic moment. "Hear me out. I know you, you know? And you say you're going to 46 PRISM 61.2 do something and then maybe you don't do it and you regret it and I wanted to speed up the process." Amanda lunged for her phone, which immediately began to beep and vibrate with incoming messages from Alex: Are you serious???? That's not funny. I assume this is a weird joke? If so, haha. Seriously. I'm worried about you. The phone rang. She panicked and hung up, turning off the volume so she'd have a moment to think. Her sister had texted Alex the photo of the baby along with the message: Congratulations Dadal Meet your son Reginald! "What the fuck, Eileen?" Amanda said. What was Alex thinking? She imagined the pink coils of his brain throbbing and short-circuiting. His life was so regimented and easy and here she was splashing buckets of shit and baby spit up all over his marble kitchen island. "I open up to you and less than a minute later you pull this? And you wonder why I don't tell you things!" "You don't tell me things because you're a repressed, uptight asshole." "I don't tell you things because you're an judgmental, self-righteous addict." She'd never said anything like that to her sister before. Even in the raw satisfaction of it, she knew she'd feel guilty later, ashamed. "I'm a bitch," Eileen said, shrugging and returning to her dusting. "But you want to talk to him, so you should. I'm helping you." Amanda sighed. It was too late to turn back. "But what should I say?" "Up to you." Eileen said, grinding her jaw. "I wouldn't fucking bother, but that's me." Amanda answered the next call and locked herself in the bathroom, which she now noticed was sparkling, clean, uncluttered. She explained to Alex about Baby Face Predictor and the miscarriage. He calmed down and said kind, supportive things about how brave she was, how sorry he was, how amazing that app was, seriously, the baby looked just like him. She agreed to go over to his place for coffee the next day She promised herself she wouldn't leave anything out, not even the aching, horrible parts. "But why Reginald?" Amanda said later that night, sitting on the vacuumed couch as Eileen continued to whir around the apartment, scrubbing and polishing. "Why not? I like the name Reginald. In fact, I call dibs." "Dibs?" "When you fall in love with some boring guy and move out and get married and have a kid, you can't call the kid Reginald. Because by then I'll be clean and I'll have enough money for a sperm bank baby or 47 a dog. I haven't decided which. Either way, I get Reginald. Promise." Staring into each other's eyes, they hooked their pinkie fingers together and shook on it. In the morning, Amanda put on makeup, nothing too extreme—concealer, mascara, taupe eyeliner, a swipe of peach blush—just enough so Alex could detect a difference, a slight, persistent unfamiliarity Holding her breath, she tip-toed past Eileen, who was splayed and snoring on the couch, and went downstairs. While waiting for the bus to Alex's condo, she watched a small drama unfold. A toddler in a Spiderman t-shirt was having a meltdown, something to do with wanting to play longer in the park. His face was scrunched, his fists balled, a wall of fury The mother crouched down to his eye-level, her expression taking on some of the boy's anguish (his tense mouth and furrowed brows), yet somehow remaining calm, as though she had already moved through and past the upset and was encouraging him to do the same. She spoke in soothing tones, her face smoothing out slowly He mirrored her, then went even further, a faint smile creeping into his lips. She mirrored him and smiled more broadly She stood up, and squeezing his hand, they continued on their way. 48 PRISM 61.2 Mormei Zanke RYOANJI ROCK GARDEN Watch carefully: millions of rocks. A pool. No, an ocean. Fifteen stones. Islands floating on the surface of smaller stones. Miniature versions. Everything is also everything else. Did the first Zen monk know we would all be here? And who rakes the pebbles when we're gone? Hundreds of years later it's exactly identical. I appreciate that, the birds can touch what we cannot. Absorbed by straight lines and concentric circles, from here I can see the order, understand silence is a way of letting all in. And the moss will still grow if we're watching or not. I'm told it is impossible to see every stone at the same time. 49 All is well, all is vile by Errol Cratt 50 PRISM 61.2 William Bonfiglio KLOJER ns, accountorizati manuscri ltractualibity and contractio: ms, inscriptions and superscriptions the personal ir ural, ornamental, si istance c autographs such as Bavaria. Karthaus Pruell 1895Steph. Klojer. icon letin's, a plan; tome lg, breviary sc hling, p ig literar) me edition, note "prosp." j lire register coi rnal r crib g alamanac writer an auth. etceteral table auth. bankruptcy d base o: II creation, a Lx = to sevenf maintains it oyment. C lown from higher sc Is and unions and woi I lack very frequency all decent wrii ^uage, rhetoric and eloquence. lersonally and ir dividually I assumed '. exemplary addresses and ti re connected wit] 51 Stephen Klojer only since August 18, 1895- Since that time I remain accordin maginary 1< t relationsh > a. born ai d from d :hwand Glassra I n the stats operated fools deranged nbecile sanatc g-Institute Pruell. Generally and completely suffering all disease epidemics plague systems painfully considered and subjected to I am since the 1 year of the adressatic assumption of the economic from industrial ural manufactural >rivate civilistic home farm and property personally prevailed I see myself corporeally and h ly sensually uningenious have rnnatural pheni ttle virtuoso ma[.. joy 2 since the end of May year any of the numerous economic agricultural, as well as industrial Lily ties any n ore. Newspaper deadline February 29, 1896. Klojer Stephen, Schultor* of the Gro Romo Rahmo. TRANSLATOR'S NOTE ultor i d here. From In the Realms of the Unreal by John G Oakes, copyright © 1993- Reprinted by permission ofHachette Books, an imprint ofHachette Book Group, Inc. 52 PRISM 61.2 Terese Brasen THE THING THAT'S WRONG WITH ME Once upon a time, in the land of Hans Christian Andersen, Ingrid began a new day She was an ordinary-looking Danish girl with a slightly crooked front tooth, the consequence of having a very small mouth. Although no one spoke of it, they all knew the defect resulted from inbreeding. The farmers who had lived for hundreds of years in remote parts of the country often had no choice but to marry their cousins. Ingrid was born about 200 kilometres from Horsens in a long medieval farmhouse—the plaster white like icing sugar, the roof blood-red. Trees fenced in the fields, standing tight against each other, their branches intertwined to guard the land from the fierce, unpredictable winds that rip and yell. "Watch the way they bend," Ingrid's mother would say about the crooked trunks. "This place will deform you too." This part of Denmark—Jutland—is named after the Jutes, the Vikings who invaded Britain in the late fourth century Long ago, Ingrid's ancestors traded in their hammers for crucifixes, although many inhabitants still hold onto their pagan beliefs. Ingrid's mother still cursed the Viking 53 goddess Freyja. "Oh for seven black male cats with night eyes," she would say, calling to the goddess who flew across the sky with her felines. Her mother was a shaman of sorts, the kitchen counter an altar, where wild fermenting yeast (always alive) bubbled in a ceramic bowl. Every day, she kneaded sourdough into hearty loaves that cooled on the wide window sills, the fragrance wafting over the fields where wild rye had always grown. Viking warriors worshipped the grain. Mould grows on the stalks. Taste it, and you will become a fearless berserker. Ingrid was born in 1917, so her trips to the Jutland Asylum, also known as the Curative Institution for the Insane, would have taken place in the 1920s. Her family took the buggy into town and then the train to visit Ingrid's two cousins. Both had thick black brows, square jaws and black hair pulled up and piled on top. "Why bother?" Ingrid would ask. "Because we're family," her mother would answer, showing her Christian side. "And the sick aren't particular. They're happy with any company" Often they sat outside in the fresh air away from the smell, which reminded Ingrid of rotten potato water. The stone terrace was uneven. The spindly metal chairs with heart-shaped backs were unsturdy. Ingrid and her sisters would leave their too-sweet apple juice on the tilting table, while their mother's coffee threatened to spill. The afternoons often ended with a scene, with one of the women slapping someone or going into hysteria. Before the Jutland Asylum opened in 1852, madmen went to the old monastery at Our Lady's Church. Some survived in wooden boxes about one-and-a-half square metres, each with a bed and toilet and a small hole to let in light and some fresh air. In a report from 1792, a warden described a raving madman who had broken the box five times. The monastery then made him a special cage with brick walls four feet thick. Change started in England. A British psychiatrist, J.C. Pritchard, wrote a book in 1835- In 1842, a Danish doctor, Harald Selmer, translated it. A few years later, he published a paper: "General principles of the organisation of the psychiatric system." The paper led to the opening of the Jutland Asylum in 1852, with Selmer (the founder of modern Danish psychiatry) as head psychiatrist. The key word was "curative." Dr. Selmer thought madness was fix- able. Although he believed in healing, the hospital had a large ward for incurables, Ingrid's two cousins among the in-patients. In 1878, after twenty-five years with the asylum, Selmer wrote a report where he stated that nearly half of all mental illnesses are psychological. 54 PRISM 61.2 Concerns and fears and continuous nagging can trigger mental illness and lead to abnormal brain processes. He listed the causes of mental illnesses, among them: Neglected, deprived childhood Foolishness, spoiled in upbringing Spiritual overexertion, reading for an exam, devouring a novel, studies at folk high schools Religious awakening A broken heart, jealousy Extramarital child birth Loss of children and other close relatives Marital and domestic sorrows Loss of money, bankruptcy, or other financial misfortune Loss of employment, economic decline Idleness, unsettledness, and aimless life On that morning in 1946 in Horsens, the window to Ingrid's room was open about an inch. The morning breeze carried the scent of the fjord. The sea air invited her to join the lively noise already beginning on the streets. But Ingrid felt a lingering gloom. She knew she had dreamed vividly Although the details were already gone, the feeling suggested her mind had travelled somewhere dark. Ingrid's troubles began in 1930, when she was thirteen. "Come now, Ingrid, your porridge is getting cold," she remembered her sisters calling. She was dressed, her bed made, and she was lying on the covers, unable to move. Her sister Rita came into the bedroom and, seeing her motionless, touched her forehead. "Come here, all of you. She's on fire," she yelled. In northern Jutland, meningitis was the scourge they lived with. It came when it pleased. It took whomever it wanted. They fought back, but it won. They hid from it, but it found them. For Ingrid, the sickness lasted weeks. In the beginning, there was vomiting, pail by the bed. She threw up during her sleep, all over the starched and ironed pillowcases. Vomit soaked the black cushion, with its red needlepoint flowers and green stems. Her tiny frame trembled. She could not win the battle. Burning followed by trembling cold. She was the source of constant deliberations—new sheets, hot com- 55 presses, thin soups that her body expelled. In her feverish thoughts, she was a lonely finch flying through fog-filled clouds—wet and hot, dark and light, with sunny reprieves and no certainty ahead. Then one day, she smelled chicken, and it didn't sicken her. Soon, her mother was serving fried drumsticks in bed. Clean was everywhere again. Pillows pumped up so she could sit. A board rested on the wooden sides of her bed. Gravy soaked into potatoes. Crisp chicken skin. Alleluia. There were tears in her mother's eyes as Ingrid asked for more. But for Ingrid, there was no sound. Mother spoke. She spoke. But no sound. The scourge had left. But it had taken Ingrid's hearing. Her mother did not treat this second stage with hot compresses, nor did she drip boiling water into Ingrid's ears. None of those remedies could help Ingrid now. Day after day, her sisters read to her. Rita took a chair from the kitchen, rested her grey knitted slippers onto the crossbar, and leaned towards the little book. Eventually Ingrid's hearing returned, but the brightness inside her did not. She became listless. Her birthday came and went. A slow sad feeling made it difficult to get out of bed. Food tasted like paper. Clouds darkened her space. At school, she laid her head on her desk. At home, she refused to leave her bed. She wanted to stay inside the wooden box with its many pillows, where she had languished for so many weeks. She called the feeling, "The thing that's wrong with me." Crying came suddenly Clatter from the yard blew in through the open window. Hens plucked. The sounds told sad stories. All was gloom and sorrow, feelings she was too small to have but still could not dismiss. The doctors and teachers said the devil was in her mind and books were arousing dark thoughts. Lock the texts and Satan away. Ingrid would no longer go to school. Instead, she would work in the manor house down the road. She already knew how to break a chicken's neck, milk a cow, plant crops in straight rows, and delouse hair. Now she would learn how to fold a tablecloth properly How to set a table for a three-course dinner. How to wipe chandeliers and polish silver. Wax and buff floors. Make white laundry gleam. At night, when all the guests were gone, she would work in the downstairs kitchen, scrubbing away the chicken skin and fat that burned into the old porous cauldrons, crying as steel wool scratched at blackened surfaces. Think of Ingrid bicycling from the manor house, the battery lamp throwing yellow light over the gravel road and fields, as she pushed the 56 PRISM 61.2 pedals and steered toward home. Think of her reaching the white stone house and then the barn, where everything eventful took place. Animals were born there. People died. Watch her lean the cycle against the wall, next to the bench where her sisters sat holding hands. Suddenly, Eve stood up and began dancing as if she were in the National Ballet, although her arms were crooked, her turns lopsided, and everything seemed off balance. That night, Ingrid learned that her father had been found hanging from the barn rafters. The next day, tortes cooled on the windowsill. Wood glowed inside the stove. Steam rose from the kettle spout. Ingrid's mother poured hot water over ground beans. Fresh coffee dripped into the blue pot on the stove. The aroma was stifling. A long straw stretcher covered the kitchen table, where sometimes they rolled out and cut Christmas cookies. Father was lying there. Naked. Grandmother was washing him, assured (it seemed) that this was only flesh. His spirit had departed, and this was no different than cleaning a chicken. Soon the undertaker would be here with his loud horses. The coffee dripped into the pot, while his blood dripped, too, into a pail. Grandmother was careful not to disturb the needle and hose. In the afternoon, the spatula sliced into the soft cake. The implement with its carved ivory handle was reserved for special circumstances. Filling oozed onto the plates, as Ingrid's mother ladled up each serving. Slices toppled onto their sides. Cream filling smudged against the china. A layer of raspberry, a layer of white. Ingrid thought of her father, wandering the yard with his pitchfork, screaming and hollering. She remembered him going to the city and coming home drunk. Ingrid's mother would wait in the dark kitchen for him to stumble across the threshold, her cane ready to beat him, while he cried like a broken child. Now that he was gone, there would be no more drunken scenes, no more unmanly cries, no more doubt about who does all the work. Today, they would take a small pause and taste this moment. Sun highlighted the heat rising from cups. Smoky waves like crocheted lace obscured faces, Grandmother with her brown, fringed kerchief tied loosely under her chin, her mother without her apron. They would not come apart. There would be no tears. Grandmother dropped three sugar cubes into her coffee; after all, it was her son who had hanged himself. Ingrid watched her stir the sweetness and cream. She was like the sugar cubes dissolving into tiny grains 57 and disappearing. She didn't want to exist either, not like this anyway, on stiff back chairs around the table in the living room, solid and untouched. Ingrid heard voices calling her. She was falling away from here and everyone. Soon there were screams and fighting, and she was on her bed, and they were holding her down, "Ingrid, Ingrid." After her father's death and her subsequent hysteria, Ingrid did not return to the house down the road to scour pots. Instead, she experienced the first of many unlikely events, which objectively could be called rescues. She had never been far from her town or village. All she knew was this place by the North Sea, where winds washed up angry waves and farmers fought to survive, their countenances hardened by isolation and ignorance. Her mother sent for the pastor, who proposed that Ingrid come and live with him. Despite its Viking history, Denmark was a sanctified Lutheran country where all clergy studied at university In the pastor's delightful home with its extensive libraries, Ingrid read book after book, which calmed her mind. She was quite gifted and over time became governess and teacher to the pastor's children. Through her readings, she learned that here is only one aspect of the universe. We can (if we let ourselves) slip into different spaces. Our minds can walk into heaven. And those journeys are as real as this place. Ingrid stayed with the pastor for several years. Eventually, she left to join the Danish Deaconess Foundation School of Nursing, where young women could get a basic education and also learn about hygiene and caring for the sick and needy The nurses were ordained sisters, the school a Lutheran convent. Ingrid travelled across Jutland by train all the way to Copenhagen, where she came to serve god and learn about bacteria, sores, and infections. She bandaged wounds, gave birth to children, taught mothers to breastfeed, consoled the dying, and poked needles into veins. On that morning in Horsens in 1946, Ingrid was no longer a member of the Danish Deaconess Foundation School of Nursing. She had left. Now, she was simply a former nurse with a list of addresses. In the early fifteen-hundreds, King Christian III made it law that all Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians were to clean their houses on Saturdays. It was the beginning of the Reformation, and domestic cleanliness was one way to prepare for Sunday, a day dedicated to prayer and worship. Remarkably, most Danes still obeyed. On Saturdays across the land, they washed their floors and walls, scoured their kitchens, and boiled their 58 PRISM 61.2 cottons. But here in Jutland, there was untold filth—so much filth that the government had hired women, like Ingrid, to go door to door and teach homemakers how to remove it. Ingrid sat up, turned sideways, and placed her feet on the strip of woven carpet that ran parallel to the bed. First, she washed her face, taking a clean cloth from the pile, wetting it with warm water and rubbing it on the bar of soap. She washed under her eyes, in her ears, around her cheeks, and under her arms until she felt a freshness. She cleaned between her legs and down her thighs, rinsing the cloth clean and repeating. She removed her nightgown, reached her arms through bra straps, pulled on fresh underwear, attached her garter belt, unfolded one silk stocking, and then slid it up her legs to hook it on the button and secure it in place. She was about to don a silk slip followed by a sky-blue suit with covered buttons. The jacket bottom flared slightly and the skirt tapered in below her knees. First, she placed her scarf. The border was the same shade as the suit. The rest had swirls of pink and white. She slipped on the jacket. On her head, she set a navy hat made of woven material because it was summer. Over her arm, she hung her handbag. It zipped open and closed and carried her government identification, a hairbrush, handkerchief, and change purse, with enough coin for bus fare and lunch. As a treat, she would allow herself a coffee and cheese sandwich at an inn. Ingrid did not wear high heel pumps, like so many other women. Instead, she had one-inch heels, perfect for marching. The lace-ups gave her feet and ankles support. Her job was to walk across the town, neighbourhood after neighbourhood, knock on doors, show her identification as though she were a police officer, and then inspect the homes. She never cleaned in her good clothing. She made appointments and returned in a plain dress pulling a cart loaded with ammonia and rags. Each day, she mapped her own route. Some women blocked the entranceways, sometimes with children on their hips and lice crawling in their hair. But others wanted to learn. She taught poor young mothers how to change bed sheets and kill the black bugs that crawled on the cotton. The creatures could be so tight on each other, it could be difficult to see that the cloth had once been white. She taught grandmothers how to expunge insects from floorboards, how to turn old clothing into rags, how to mix ammonia and washing soda, and how to rinse kitchen rags with cold water. Bacteria grow in heat. You can smell it. 59 On that morning in 1946, Torben stood on the deck of the ferry, which was moving quickly, stirring up waves that spat their cool foam at his face. Last night, he had had vivid dreams replete with the topsy-turvy nonsense that makes sense only when you're asleep. In his dream, bicycle wheels had turned without advancing. His suits were nowhere to be found. He pulled slacks and jackets from piles, but retrieved only misfits and old discarded outfits. Even his sweater was missing, replaced by a knit from his childhood. He tried to pull his arms through, but the garment was meant for a ten-year-old. When he reached for his hat, he grabbed a ball, which of course wouldn't stay on his head. Standing on the ferry deck, he imagined sailing all the way across the Atlantic. This wasn't meaningless daydreaming. More like a rehearsal. He theorized that there were two types of people—leavers and stayers. While some need to venture, others prefer to stay attached to the land. Torben was a leaver. His future would take place on new soil in a new country unafraid of innovation. His family's furniture factory designed and sold Scandinavian modern furniture. Lathes turned wood. Automatic drills fastened screws. Electric staples snapped on upholstery, making beautiful and practical goods of the highest quality But he wanted to work with plastic and aluminium. Invented in Denmark inl825 by Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted, aluminium still had not achieved its full glory The ferry reached the shoreline. He retrieved his bicycle and then began peddling to Horsens to the KFUK (Danish for YWCA). His father was opening a facility in Horsens, and Torben would ensure things were running smoothly It was the last assignment, he hoped, before leaving for Canada. He passed yellow mustard fields. Tufts of clouds moved teasingly across the blue. The scene had a fairy-tale quality He expected to encounter Hans Christian Anderson's Clumsy Hans riding a billy goat on his way to court a princess. Dead crows lay in the ditches, one after the other, as though someone was making a sport of killing. The peasants who lived on this peninsula had fertile minds and told any number of stories about crows, none of them logical or rational. He reflected on the newest thinking by Carl Jung, who claimed the black bird belonged to our collective unconscious. Crows had flocked to Viking battle fields and therefore may be part of 60 PRISM 61.2 the Scandinavian imagination. We associate these winged animals with the journey from earth to Valhalla, the dwelling of the gods. Ingrid locked the door to her room at the KFUK The building was old and had settled. The entrance was three short steps. The narrow stairs sat at a slight angle. Getting down required care. When she stepped onto the cobblestone, she saw several fat black crows circling. The pastor had shown her that fervent prayer accompanied by religious text could soothe her thoughts and feelings. Holding the small cross she wore around her neck helped her let go of sadness. She would lie on her bed and try to see the bright lights shining from heaven and hear the angels sing their hymns. She had entered the Danish Deaconess Foundation School of Nursing believing she would have time to shut her eyes and pray every day But none of that came true. They were working sisters who served god and his citizens ten hours a day They were so busy with acts of servitude that no one had time to read scriptures, let alone pray Some nights she could barely stand. Barely make it to her bed to collapse. Now, on the front steps of the KFUK, she was reliving last night's dream, where a dead crow had landed on her path. Blood darkened its black wings. Its stiff spidery feet seemed to claw the air. She could almost smell its rotting flesh. She recalled the image that vividly The stench went right through to her gut and made her insides turn and wretch. Now, she wondered if the crows were actually there, circling, or was she just witnessing something sinister? She turned and stepped back into the KFUK to take some coffee and breakfast before starting her day. For Torben, the highway turned to cobblestone. Open fields gave way to stone buildings that leaned toward the roadway and against each other like old sisters who had witnessed hundreds of years of traffic. Citizens were just beginning to sip their coffee and taste their warm buttery buns. Children were starting to jump hopscotch and take their dolls for a stroll. Shopkeepers were unfurling their awnings and pulling their flower stands outside. Sausage vendors wheeled out their carts. Ice cream stands unlocked their windows. Torben reached the KFUK, where he hoped to find some breakfast. Then, in the cafeteria, he saw a young woman, sitting by herself. He said good morning, and she blushed, which wasn't unusual. He often had that effect on women. When he asked her to join him, she said, "That I would love," wondering if she sounded too eager or whether it was appropriate to dine publicly 61 with a man she didn't know. Ingrid had never been on a date. She was an entirely single woman who had never even been kissed. Nor had she seen a lot of kissing. She knew nothing about closeness, which might explain why she had such a strong and immediate reaction to this gentleman. Ingrid and Torben began dining together in the KFUK cafeteria, eating open-faced shrimp and mayonnaise sandwiches with knives and forks. He came to dote on this tiny sweet woman with a crooked front tooth and round cheeks like freshly baked buns. Over the weeks, as he came to know her soft, muddled thoughts, the sensation intensified, until he speculated that he may have fallen in love. A mutual dissatisfaction with the state of this Lutheran country helped them rapidly forge a powerful bond and fashion a wish list for the future. And so my parents—Ingrid and Torben—two young people, perfectly unmatched, agreed to join in holy matrimony and then, when the time was right, sail across the Atlantic to America, leaving claustrophobic and rainy Denmark behind. Abandoning her home, the pastor, the nunnery, and then Horsens to come all the way to Calgary, Canada, did not cure my mother's sadness or stop the crows from circling in her dreams. In the basement laundry room, the wringer washer rocked the clothing clean, while my mother spoke about her childhood, reliving everything, while I listened, almost unaware there was anything wrong with her. In the early years, she was good at kitchen things, at least, shaping bread dough into buns, circling it between her palms to make perfectly round shapes, rolling hamburger into meatballs, stewing oranges and apricots into marmalade, pouring sugar into the pot as the mixture bubbled. Then she began spending most days in bed—sleeping and disappearing into her fears. When my father was late from work, she would stand by the kitchen door, watching for his car. In winter, frost coated the rectangular glass. Her warm breath melted a patch of ice on the window pane, so she could see the parking lot. Meanwhile, vivid pictures in her uncontrollable mind foretold absolute tragedy His car skidding over the icy road into the ditch, the windshield shattering, cutting into his face. The police finding him in the morning when daylight returned. Eventually, only electroshock therapy and then pills could soften the hallucinations and give her a peaceful sleep. In 2005, the World Journal ojBiological Psychiatry published an article 62 PRISM 61.2 by Andre L. Abrahao, Roberto Focaccia, and Wagner F Gattaz. The authors show that childhood meningitis increases the risk for adult schizophrenia, particularly when there is hearing loss. But nobody knew that then, nor could anyone explain Ingrid's mind. Face Me by Joey Mok 63 Charlie Petch IN SICKNESS AND IN DEATH She tells me of the ghost at the foot of my bed staring and I ask if she wants to see a photo of my late husband I do my best again to get rid of him but he still runs his fingers through my hair I am so used to my ghosts to the peacefulness my husband never had in life and his anger still keeps the basement cold the transmasc break up involves the returning of the bag of dicks and I'm not surprised when she shows up with it she says I still speak like we're married I don't tell her that sometimes he grips my head so hard I think I might join him once again I am alone with ghosts with dicks I had to purchase and phantoms where my breasts used to be I am the sum of my parts I am a body of work I tell the room most would see empty I guess you got what you wished for 64 PRISM 61.2 Nadia Froe.se FALL COMES AFTER A LONG TIME OF NOTHING I've stopped measuring things in actions. I no longer run, go, stop, eat, build, etc. In my sleep I drank a lightning bolt and now I can't stop. Can't run or go etc. What's another way to say I'm waiting? Not sitting here on my hands or any of the usual things. I mean something like, on the street as the sky dims. A water bottle almost empty, the sound of it in my bag. It's been a long day In my dream I swallowed a lightning bolt and sat up in bed like actuality and thought, nothing ever has to happen to me again. When I whisper to you nights later about my scary dream you say yeah yeah like of course that would be the nightmare. I think about what you think you know about me. I want to say actually that wasn't even the scary part. In the evening by the yellow light I want to be outside to taste the bluster, even if it's only on the evening street. You almost enter the room, look at me from the doorway and say winter drives us emotionally into our deaths. It's not even winter I say not responding to what you said just avoiding our deaths. 65 I take your hand. Hasn't it been a long time? The sun feels so far away I've stopped waving you say I haven't thought about the sun in a long time. Outside the shadows are spinning round and round. There's a bit of water left in my backpack, in the doorframe. You tell me my eyes are full. Of what? Of water? Winter drives us emotionally into our deaths. Our depths, you say. I think about what I think I know about you. I want to say we are opposites but I've decided to stop measuring things. Mostly in actions but also in depths. Instead I close my eyes and imagine the moment, sudden sitting up in bed, electricity later and what will be later, in my mind forever on the darkening street, walking home. 66 PRISM 61.2 Aefa Mulholland AN UNOBTRUSIVE BIRD February, The European Robin (Erithacus rubecula) My mum missed feeding the birds, so we gathered them to her, every way we could. Text messages announcing curlew, ibis, oystercatcher sightings in Donegal, Johannesburg, London. Books about jackdaw hospitals. Stuffed toy red-winged blackbirds that whistled when squeezed. Recordings of nightingales singing along with cellists in Berlin. Calls to her bedside with phones held skywards as swifts shrieked overhead. I was home with her, so I relayed the messages, delivered the books, pressed play on recordings and videos. Each day, I found myself showered in birdseed, stale buns, last week's berries as I tried to humph them onto the garage roof, so she could see the flocks feeding when she was well enough to sit by the upper window. 67 From the bed my dad and I made her in the dining room—once she couldn't get upstairs anymore, she watched the woodpigeon nest, worrying about the proximity of the squirrel until the chick was fledged. One early morning, when she was too sore to sleep, the robin she'd fed since he was hatched sang to her from the sill. March, The Grey Heron (Ardea cinereal) I'd risked a rare outing. I was aiming for the main road, but instead slipped through the back gates of the Botanic Gardens, into the green. I ducked down the path to the river. The Kelvin. My favourite river, the one beside whose banks I was born. From Kirklee, the Kelvin flows in a wide, sullen churn through the Botanies. It pours past the hems of North Kelvinside and races and swirls under Kelvinbridge. It slows and gleams through Kelvingrove Park, past the Gothic Revival towers of the University of Glasgow, the art deco Bandstand, the proud red sandstone and spires of the Art Galleries. By the stage the Kelvin reaches Partick Bridge, the river is bright, splashy, joyful—you can almost hear it chatter its excitement about joining the River Clyde, waiting around the next bend. In this, its last rush, as it passes what was once the maternity hospital, the Kelvin is shallow—it sparkles, reflects the light, as if it has left all its depths and darks and weights behind. As I walked through the greenery, I imagined my mum tucking me into a blanket, emerging into the light to take me home—the heart-lifting rush of the Kelvin's rapids one of the first sounds to reach my tiny ears. I started along the river walkway, but only got as far as the weir. It's wide and mysterious here, forbidding, the water dark, swirling with unknown depths, glinting as it streams over the reeded hummock of the weir. Midstream—a grey heron stood motionless, poised, ready to plunge at the slightest flicker. Twenty feet away, I had the same frozen posture. Holding my breath, bargaining—with the heron? with nature? with God?—if the heron didn't move, my mum would come through, if the heron stayed stock still, she'd—. The heron's head thrust down into the stream and back out, a wriggle of silver in his beak. My phone rang. I hurtled home to another urgent, terrified bundling of my mum's fragile frame into another ambulance, another ward, another unknown. 68 PRISM 61.2 I called the family In they swooped—from Germany, England, Ireland, and South Africa. My mum perked slightly, briefly, reminded of childhood birdwatching adventures back home in Tipperary But this time she was too weary to rise. She faded, lost half her body weight. Sometimes I snatched fragments of sleep with an expectant heap of clothes waiting at the foot of the bed. Sometimes I didn't undress. I filled the smallest cocotte dish with her favourite pie. I arranged and re-arranged minute morsels of eggs on toast, crusts carefully cut. I wrestled with an uncooperative chicken and far too small a pot to concoct broth from the mottled recipe in her battered school cookbook. I re-enacted my battle with the chicken at her bedside. ".. .but the wretched thing just bobbed back up to the surface, all its stupid legs pointing accusingly at me!" She smiled the tiniest smile, tired even by that. The soup congealed quietly on her tray. April, The Eurasian Woodcock (Scolopax rusticola) She'd been sinking for five weeks when I found it. A glimpse of russet orange and grey as I pelted to the hospital in inappropriate shoes. Half hidden under piles of wet April leaves that huddled near the university, there was a bedraggled feather, barred with tan and black, grey-tipped. I washed and blow-dried it, tucked it in a pocket, snuck it into the hospital. My mum's eyes fixed on the feather. She held out a hand. "Help me sit," she whispered. I hoisted her upright, hindered by her turning the feather over and over. "A kestrel? A sparrow hawk?" It was a feather my mum didn't know. She insisted I take a photo and email it to the British Trust for Ornithology right away They sent it on to experts at Stirling University's Biological and Environmental Science Department. A prompt but unexpected reply came back—it was the tail feather of a woodcock. "The mystery is," said the email, "What was a woodcock doing in Glasgow's West End?" "Give me the laptop," my mum said. 69 I changed her compression stockings as she researched. "A fairly large wader," she reported, ignoring me manhandling her withered legs. "Favoured by game shooters, with a long, sturdy, black beak and dark black and tan plumage, ideal for camouflage." Maybe not so ideal. The B.T.O. reckoned our bird was mid-migration. Flying by night, they usually move back to breeding grounds in Scottish forest, woodlands and plantings in March, but this year everything had run late because of prolonged cold. This bird could have been predated by a peregrine or sparrow hawk mid-flight, the B.T.O. suggested, or simply come down for a rest during daylight, snuggling up in leaf litter at ground level. "Is that what happened to it?" my mum wondered, some days later, "Stopping for a rest on the way home, only to be snuffed out by a cat or a fox?" But with just one feather, no surrounding scene of carnage, she imagined the woodcock escaped any such encounter—rising in a flutter of fright, leaving behind just one feather and an air of outrage. "I can't remember where safe is," said my mum's friend Sister Julia, having failed to find a poem she had put in a safe place. "That's the problem," my mum said. "None of us can." May, The Herring Gull (Larus argentatus) Two weeks after I found the woodcock's feather, my mum left the hospital, in a hospital bed, in an ambulance taking her for two weeks' respite care at Saint Margaret of Scotland Hospice. She'd build up a bit more strength, then she'd be coming home. As the ambulance trundled along Great Western Road, my mum took in May's dazzle of pink and white cherry blossoms and the skirmish of herring gulls above. She watched them wheel, clutching my hand, the feather packed with her most precious belongings. At St. Margaret's, she settled in, the feather on her nightstand. Steroids kickstarted her appetite. Warned they can make people hyper, my mum remarked, "Well, anything has to be an improvement on being low-per." She put on weight, had her hair done, and was trundled along to Mass every morning. 70 PRISM 61.2 June, The Common Swift (Apodidae) Two weeks became three. My mum roosted happily, giving my dad time to organise a hospital bed for the house, giving me time to practice giving morphine shots. She entertained visitors with tales of hospice goings-on, of the indomitable head nun, the thoughtful tea lady, the priests who came to call. Once my sister shunted my mum's bed outside so they could watch the first swifts, returned from Africa, circling high above. A stained glass artist by trade, my mum started painting again, taking requests as to which birds. Swallows over Tipperary barley fields, an owl for the thoughtful nurse, those first swifts, a nuthatch that caught her fancy, and, of course, a woodcock's feather. At the end of her fourth week at the hospice, she fell asleep holding the feather, and it must have been swept away with the bedclothes for the wash. I searched in books, under furniture, in bags, between pillows, blankets, sheets, tearing through every card, letter and chart, on my hands and knees, crawling under the bed, hands scraping behind bedside cupboards, below the mattress, my mum watching my every move, but the woodcock's feather was gone. She sunk fast. A few days after the feather was lost, I called the family home for the last time. July, Woodcock's Feather (Pluma scolopax rusticola) In a note I found afterwards, she'd written, "Usually people take white feathers to be signs, reminders of passing angels. I got a dark one instead— a symbol of an unobtrusive bird going about its business, unexpectedly knocked off its perch by disaster." That photo of her hands holding a then-unidentified feather is one of the last I have of my mum. Then, it was a picture of my desperate hope that something, anything, might make my dying mother feel better. Now, it's a picture of her unquenchable sense of wonder and joy, of the moment she found something to live for again. Even as I took the picture, my mum's hands couldn't stop exploring the quill, the barbs, the barbules, as if they might reveal the story—did 71 an unassuming bird end its flight under a scatter of windblown leaves on a grassy northern bank? Or did it merely touch down, leaving a beautiful reminder, before soaring away to whatever lies beyond? Swan Battle by Errol Cratt 72 PRISM 61.2 Catriona Wright ONE POLKA A dream remains a dream. Heather and David come over from next door and ask me to a dance down the shore. I have just moved into my uncle's cottage and know nothing of dances and in fact, so far, I know no one in the neighbourhood except Heather, who I met in university many years ago. At forty years old, I am too old for a dance, but then I reason that Heather must be about my age, and her brother David perhaps a little older. So I set out the coffee things and say; "Yes, but only, David, if they play a polka, will you dance it with me?" I do not say the other things connected with dancing. Mainly that I'm a good dancer and my husband, long divorced, was a wizard dancer, about the only thing he was good at. That first year, when I started to feel safe, I taught myself the polka from watching Polka Time on TV, but after that, I always wanted to polka with someone, anyone, but it never happened. Weddings passed, my daughter's wedding last year, the niece in Toronto, the band played, but I was never asked to dance, polka or no. David smiles. "Love to," he said. "And I'm not on call this weekend." Why is it we are drawn to doctors, I think, as I watch them walk 73 away Perhaps because they seem so kind and one believes they are kind at home too, patient and generous with their time. "Don't be silly," I say out loud, and then wince at the very words, the exact words my mother used when, a couple of teenage times, I called out to her, "You don't love me." "Don't be silly," she said. Both times. To be ignored, to be unloved, to marry foolishly, it all fits together, so that out of the blue one is invited to a dance, and one's heart jumps with joy, even at such a banal thing as a polka. It's quite possible I've forgotten the steps. We only exist in the context of our own time, after all. And mine is good now, deep-breath good, hyperventilating good, my lovely cottage with its painted walls, oriental rugs, screened porch with daybed, and the sound of the ocean, the rain, the people walking by on the path down by the shore, a sturdy door, a car, a good job, money in the bank, and plenty of time to work, study, read, cook, walk, and live unafraid, secure, the basis of all happiness. A polka? Not silly at all. Just a diamond chip in the golden ring of the present. The band is hot: first rock, then waltz and then, what? Could it be a schottische after all these years? I sit at a side table with the rum and coke that David bought me when we first arrived, and I watch the dancers. Heather introduces me to a man called Blair and then they swirl away David is standing talking by the bar and then he disappears. After an hour, I'm tired of watching everyone dance. The polka at last. Many people sit down around me so that only a few remain on the floor. After the last stamp and yell, I gather up coat, boots, and hat, and, lifting my long skirt over the snow ruts outside, I walk home, lights shining far out to sea, an icy drizzle of rain catching me on the neck, the wind pushing between the houses of the little village, pushing me home. Self-talk is the key to happiness. Very useful. The next day I drive into the city, to the art gallery where I work as a bookkeeper. They're putting up pictures, Desmond directing, and I remember how, when I first started working here, eight years ago, I had a crush on Desmond, and later I had a crush on the carpenter who renovated the cafeteria. Then I said to myself, "Don't be silly," and, to change direction, I bought a white leather couch for the old apartment on Main Street. But, not long ago, there was the old uncle in the Home, the only nearby relative, to whom I brought grapes and soft candies and listened to the stories of his brother, my father, who was a government health 74 PRISM 61.2 inspector, and my mother, so short, "as short as Queen Victoria," that she had special low kitchen cabinets made so she could cook. I watched Uncle die after the stroke. He breathed without moving for two weeks. His eyelids were half shut, but only the whites showed. I sat by his head and babbled: the weather, the ships in the harbour, the latest art show, the carpenter who was renovating the cafeteria in stone trim and a great beam of black ash, all to reflect the landscape of Newfoundland outside. In my little office, I feel safe. I have my cover story to explain why I was here on a Sunday, just checking a few things, entering the latest invoices, managing the latest outvoices, the forever voice that has only one sentence. Then, after an hour or so, I wave to the men in the big room, and go home. ••v Hungry Pierrot by Joey Mok 75 Jo Gatford YOU WATER THE GARDEN IN THE EVENING WHEN THE HEAT OF THE DAY HAS PASSED You water the garden in the evening when the heat of the day has passed you fill three cans from the rain barrel and the water comes out golden you worry about the asbestos guttering about pouring poisoned water on the vegetables and then eating them There are brambles growing through the fence you imagine pulling them out with your bare hands wiping bloody palms across your thighs even the leaves are serrated barbed wire biology so desperate to live you will leave them this year let them bring forth berries Pumpkin vines have taken over the bed like the starfish child who appears two hours before dawn sweaty head and cold feet a conduit stretched diagonal between you in the space of two days the leaves have grown larger than your face the fruit heavy as a skull The teens next door are making a ruckus the kind of i -tha re land ot noise that would irritate your husband to the point of rage if he were here but he's not and they're just kids so you win the imaginary argument and your imaginary husband sulks for the rest of the evening 76 PRISM 61.2 There is a toad living under the shed he / she / they watch you fill the watering can for the third time hi there buddy, you say they do not reply you tell them you used to steal bucketfuls of spawn from your neighbours' ponds parent a hundred newts through summer let them sunbathe on your bare legs stroke their orange striped bellies and chase off the goldfish until they were grown you never had your own pond your husband always hated aquatic things you found a frog in the bushes last year rushed to show the boys but they ran away shrieking it's things like this that make you wonder if they really are your children The sun drops behind the hill line and the air drops a notch cooler the rain barrel is still half full the toad is still watching you hi there buddy you say and you take up the shovel and you start digging 77 (Don't) Take Me to Church by Joey Mok 78 PRISM 61.2 Carolyn Chung HELLO, HOW CAN I HELP YOU? The plan seemed to be working. Robert had found a new job, one that didn't require him to be on his feet all day, coming home with his head on a string, stunned with exhaustion. Soon, I would be able to quit my job at the call centre. We would move somewhere nice. Or, at the very least, an apartment that wasn't slowly keeling over, with its cracked plaster walls and damp, sagging corners, its convulsive undergrowth of cockroaches. The future I had secretly envisioned since I was a child—of a loving, attentive family—had plenty of time to intercept me. At one point, before I realized that the plan was not, in fact, working, I could happily imagine looking at my future children, seeing myself in their inquisitive, slightly nervous faces, and feeling no fear. None of the monotonous dread or sharp, urgent pangs that needled me throughout the day, forcing me into a chorus of shallow breaths. When I'd finally let Robert in on my secret—this was years into uneventful dating, when things were starting to look serious—he'd seemed uncon- 79 vinced, even suspicious. "You!" he'd said. "A mother!" My coworkers who had children liked me—at least, I think they liked me, perhaps they were only courteous, or bored—because I always asked after their children, my eyes springing back and forth between their faces and the faces of their children, which they revealed to me in the form of pictures they'd taken. I tried to work backwards from each child's face, deducing which features had collided with other features, reorganizing their weight, creating an entirely new face. The sight of other people's children always compelled me to imagine my own with renewed attentiveness, although, strangely, I sometimes found it impossible—when I wasn't looking directly at him—to remember what Robert looked like. No matter how hard I tried to pull his individual features into focus, all I could conjure was a mask, a rocklike configuration based on the expression he wore at home as of late, of impassive diplomacy, as though we were less than roommates, but mere strangers passing through the same living room. My mother never liked Robert. I'm not sure he knew this. "A man whose teeth don't show when he speaks is a liar," she'd warned me in Vietnamese. She was prone to such phrases, including, "The fuller the earlobes, the more generous the man." All this she'd repeated upon meeting Robert, his frugal earlobes, for the first time. We were in the apartment where she lived alone, an apartment so compact that it often felt uncomfortable to stand in. The longer my mother looked at Robert—who stood with his shoulders hunched, not understanding a word—the more perplexed she seemed to grow, slipping me looks that said, "Are you seeing what I'm seeing?" At some point, he took off his baseball cap, which was a mistake. At the sight of his forehead, my mother squinted as though attempting to solve a riddle. Baffled, she gestured toward her own forehead. "Why does he need the extra room?" Because of this, perhaps, some part of me had been suspicious. The night before, I had paced the length of our bedroom, chin tucked, fielding the gnawing urge to snoop through Robert's phone as soon as I'd registered the peaceful thrum of the shower. Tonight, having replayed this morning's conversation in my head throughout the day, feeling increasingly unspooled, as though realizing I had spent my life running in larger and larger circles, I seized the device from where it sat on his nightstand the moment he disappeared into the bathroom. I scrolled past an array of minor obligations: messages from friends, reminders to drink water or install the latest software update. I spent some time scanning his emails, 80 PRISM 61.2 then began opening and closing apps indiscriminately, unable to find what I was searching for. That is, evidence of a new job. Robert wasn't incompetent. He understood cybersecurity (although his new job had nothing to do with cybersecurity, neither did his old one). He once explained to me how something called a Raspberry Pi worked, its seemingly infinite applications despite the fact that it could fit in the palm of your hand. His explanation was detailed, and I was bored. Sometimes, hearing his voice at parties—although the types of parties we went to were no longer parties, really, weren't even on the verge of becoming parties, held in a friend's shadowy low-ceilinged basement, the silence in the room somehow louder than the music—I would peer into the faces of the women who were listening to Robert, who liked him, and I would feel very alone. I would also feel, with rare and terrible certainty, that I had no control over my life. I could see in their faces a glimpse of what Robert had been like in high school: tall, unbothered, calmly sociable. And yet, I knew that this version of Robert had terminated in a dead end. This was something out of his control. Until recently, it was something we'd had in common. This morning, as Robert was getting ready to leave, I'd asked, "Why are you bringing your laptop? Isn't that risky? You could be hacked... privacy-wise. You could lose it all." He grunted, slicing open an envelope. "I'm not working with any confidential information. Anyway, it's a small company I barely have a desk. Bring your own device is an unspoken rule." "But what do you do!" "I'm a descriptive copywriter." He was rooting around in my handbag for the car keys. "I write descriptions. Do you expect a different answer every time you ask?" "I don't understand why they would hire you. Why would they hire you? "They made a serious error in judgment." "If it's a marketing agency, why don't they have a website? How do they find their clients? They're not even listed." I had no idea what it meant for an agency to be listed, if it meant anything at all, but it sounded legit. "Shouldn't you be—I don't know—happier? I get to sit down." In truth, I had imagined his next job would involve equal parts sitting and standing, such as occupying a kiosk or a hotel help desk, or even doing unreliable repair work—but a copywriter? "You didn't even tell me you had an interview! I would've wished you luck." When he didn't respond to this, I said, "I just hope it's not some sort of scam." To this, he responded, "Agh!" He'd slid open a drawer, its sides studded with six or seven German cockroaches, antennae twitching in the sudden light. He slammed it shut. "I have to go." That night, balanced on the edge of our bed, Robert's phone in hand, I couldn't find anything even remotely related to a new job. Instead, I found dozens upon dozens of images of a naked blond woman. As I scrolled past the peachy expanse, I felt surprised by my own emotions—not so much by the shock and dismay, but by the ensuing relief, astonishment, and curiosity I let go of the phone and lay down on my side of the bed. I imagined what their children would look like. I imagined Robert imagining his children with this woman who was not me, his expression unrecognizably happy Were they both descriptive copywriters? I closed my eyes, trying to summon intense negative feelings into my body When that didn't work—I felt mild indignation and jealousy—I sat up. I plugged the charger back into the phone, back into the wall, and set the phone down on Robert's nightstand. Everyone on the floor had a code name. Loomis had pinned a list of them to the bulletin board out front, explaining why my coworker Zinaida answered the phone as Emily For ten hours at a time, I answered as Susan. Fifteen minutes before my shift was set to begin, I set my handbag down at my cubicle. Sitting down at my desk, it always seemed to me that I'd arrived in the real world, with its walls, screens, and dividers, a world rinsed in a colourless light. It was somehow implicit that this was not just acceptable, but all I had to aspire to. I could see Zinaida approaching. She had become a familiar sight: an old lady shrouded in wool and, if it was raining, encased in a plastic raincoat, moving noiselessly through the cramped grey maze of dividers. She trotted sullenly into the cubicle beside mine. For some reason, I was the only one on the floor who called her by her real name, Zinaida, instead of Emily I only found out her name wasn't Emily because I'd asked her if the little girl in the photograph taped to the plastic trim of her cubicle was her granddaughter. The girl had a remarkable face, honed by sucked-in cheeks and commanded by a nose that curved downwards like a mediaeval blade. Her expression was impressively scornful. 82 PRISM 61.2 "That is me," she said. "She looks just like you," I said, not understanding. Perhaps it was her accent, or the outlandishness of someone putting up a single photograph of themselves as a child at their desk. "No. You don't listen. That is me." She turned so that her nose pointed at me, and I finally understood. "Oh," I said. I told her my name. At that moment, Loomis had appeared to remind Zinaida—though he addressed her as Emily, which I still thought was her name—to arrive no later than fifteen minutes before the start of her shift, so that she would be prepared to take her first call the moment her shift began. Zinaida nodded dismissively not bothering to look at Loomis, who had just returned from a month-long vacation and was dressed, oddly, in what seemed to be an ill-fitting grey wedding tuxedo. Loomis said something about Zinaida's average pickup time, which was one tick below Standard and three ticks below Excellent, with Excellent being the actual standard. "Something to think about, Emily" He was leaving when, noticing something small and shiny on the carpet, he bent to pick it up while kissing his teeth and groaning and accidentally revealing the crack between his upper buttocks, which were badly sunburnt. I glanced at Zinaida, who glanced at me. Later, she told me her real name. We became friends. Twice now, she'd given me a handful of Russian sweets, wrappers printed with Cyrillic and smiling babies. Once, when a call had left me with tears in my eyes, she'd reached over and patted my hand before blowing her nose into the crook of her elbow. A month ago, because I was bored, I had shown her a picture on my phone of Robert, over which her eyes had darted randomly while squinting, never settling, as though there was no subject in the photo, validating some small but growing feeling I had towards him. Last week, while cutting across the parking lot ahead of my shift, I'd noticed Zinaida asleep across the backseats of her 1998 Toyota Corolla, still in the baby blue uniform of another job, her face blank and vulnerable and astonishingly younger in sleep, far from that of a grandmother. Later that day, when I watched her walk toward our cubicles, I noticed for the first time that her walk was punctuated, her face going rigid every so often as though stifling a jolt of pain. I felt ashamed for not having noticed sooner. The morning after I'd snooped through Robert's phone, Zinaida could sense that something was wrong. 83 "What is it, little fish? You have not found anything?" By anything, she meant any other job. "I have, actually Found something." I told her I had been hired as a descriptive copywriter. "Good," said Zinaida. "Go away and never return." Perhaps it was something in her voice, the tenderness I knew was behind her words, or perhaps it was the chocolate candies she then handed me, the ones with squirrels on their wrappers: I felt seized with courage. I decided to quit. I had begun, without my awareness, to cry Before she could say anything, our first calls came in. As a rule, most of the callers I spoke to were disappointed. Or mad. Over time, what they were mad at seemed less and less clear—less like the expected issues and concerns in my script than an endless, involuntary response to a general malfunctioning of sorts. Or they were senile, seniors who somehow phoned in accidentally In fact, the happiest caller I ever spoke to was an old man who spent twenty minutes telling me the directions to his house, where he was supposedly waiting with his young daughter. He explained how to cook her favourite meal (macaroni with meat sauce) and play her favourite board game (chess). He kept mixing up the pieces and their moves ("Now the pawn is the most powerful piece, you will remember, because there are thousands of them"), when Loomis, who had been listening in remotely from his office, instructed me to end the call immediately It was a feature of the routing system—he could take over a call if he had to, usually if we'd escalated the case, but he preferred to listen in (this made him omnipresent, his presence inferred on every call, even though that was impossible), piping up out of the blue to give instructions, which he could do without the customer hearing. Anyway, I couldn't do it. "Just hang up," said Loomis impatiently I began apologizing to the man, only he interrupted with his own apology I could tell he was fighting his embarrassment. "I would prefer it if you came sooner rather than later. I don't know where I am, but I'm alone and it'd be nice to see a friendly face," he said. Then he promptly hung up. Today, my first caller was one whose voice I quickly recognized. I had spoken with this woman many times, each resolution turning out to be as short-lived as the last. As soon as I introduced myself, she said, "I know who you are. I asked them for you." "How can I help you, ma'am?" 84 PRISM 61.2 There was a pause. "Can you guess why I'm calling?" "What seems to be the issue?" Another pause. "What do you think the issue is?" I wondered how long we could go on like this, with her reversing every question I asked. "I'll give you some time to think about what the issue is," she said finally. I waited in silence. I imagined she was the same woman who, when I had worked as a cashier in high school, had thrown the change I'd just given her onto the counter. "Count it," she'd said. "If you count too fast, I'll make you start over." I thought about what Zinaida had said. Never return. Recently, I'd given up entirely on one job platform and was now solely focusing my efforts on another. I spent my free time sending indiscriminate requests to connect, neurotically editing my profile, and stalking the profiles of people whose competence darkened my phone screen with self-congratulatory text. My anxiety seemed to correspond directly with the amount of time I did all these things, and yet I couldn't stop. At some point in my life, something had gone wrong, and although I'd always known that things would work out, that, contrary to my suspicions, I did have control over my life, that my choices—some lack of attention, at some point—had led me here, I was beginning to question how I knew this. Everything works out in the end. Who had told me this, and why had I believed them? "Did you figure it out?" the woman asked cheerfully. "Sorry," I replied. "What seems to be the issue?" "Fine. You're right. There is no new job," said Robert. "There is no new job," I repeated. This was after I'd flung some books and an ashtray across the room. I wasn't immune to intense negative feelings after all. "But there is something." I stared at him, his stem-like body capped with a flop of brown hair. Who are you and what are you doing in my living room? I wanted to ask. I tried searching Robert's face for an answer, but I was having trouble keeping him in my mind even as I was looking at him. I glanced at the broken ashtray on the floor. I'd bought the ashtray on a whim, even though it was shockingly expensive, because it was beautiful. It was white and shaped like an open 85 palm. It was only when I'd brought it home and set it down on the coffee table, taking a step back to admire it, that I was overcome by the grim and demoralizing realization that what made the ashtray beautiful was not the ashtray itself, but something to do with the rest of the display back at the store, the floating shelves, spills of ivy, and exposed brick, the implication of leisure. Our living room had no such implication. It had an obvious place to sit, but that was about it. The sight of the ceramic hand cleaved in two was a source of relief Almost. The truth, Robert was saying, was that he was impersonating a woman—the woman I had seen on his phone—and selling nude images of her to strangers on the internet. "You wouldn't believe the things they say These men, I mean." "What? You're selling what?" "They're lonely, is what it is. I can't help but feel for them." He explained everything he was doing in great detail, how he'd bought and downloaded the images himself from some subterranean internet forum, how he met his prospects on dating apps he'd hidden on his phone, the tactics he employed to avoid getting banned from certain apps. He mentioned the photos I'd seen, using the word indiscretion, although why had I invaded his privacy? I listened without interrupting, and this seemed to stir something in him. He spoke faster, his expression searching mine. "Do you know how much I'm making?" he said. He took out his phone, tapped it twice, and held it up. I took a step closer. I felt him watching me. Suddenly, I understood that there was nothing in life that was not a scam. I stepped back. From where I stood, Robert seemed to occupy an absence, like he was a placeholder for somebody special, somebody important in the larger scheme of my life. I had the sudden desire to be in among a crowd, to move off as if I were with anyone else but him. "I almost quit today," I said. At this, he withdrew, as though reminded that people always wanted to use each other for something. "It's not a real job. It's just something to pass the time." "Who is she? The woman." Something in his face changed. He smiled tiredly, though it was a good-natured smile. He was being patient. "I don't know her," he said. "I'm sorry I didn't tell you sooner. You must've thought—well, you thought something else." I tried to fit all of this into a recognizable pattern of behaviour. Some- 86 PRISM 61.2 thing I'd heard him say once came to mind, some comment he'd thrown out about how his life would've been easier had he been born a woman. This was back when he was still at Amazon, and I remembered his after- work posture as he said this, shoulders slumped, as though he were made of concrete. It had never occurred to me to imagine how Robert felt about his life. "I am alarmed," I said. I announced this slowly, like I was backing away from a skunk on the sidewalk. "I am creeped out and disappointed." "Aren't you always?" He was irritated now. "You're always disappointed." "Yes?" I said. Didn't we live in a world where perpetual disappointment, if not depression, was the proportionate reaction? Dont we— Robert interrupted. "I didn't have to keep this a secret." "What?" "Do you have any idea what I have to deal with?" he said. He began to describe me. I understood that what was being said had been left unsaid for a long time. Somehow, yet again, the conversation had reversed itself. At the same time, I became aware that I was exhausted, and that I had been exhausted for a long time. This startled me—the idea that I could be anything, such as exhausted and unhappy, and never get the opportunity to know it. At some point, I looked up and saw that Robert had walked away. "Where are you going?" I asked. "Where have you been going?" He unlocked the front door before turning to look at me. "Don't quit your job," he said, and left. When I was seven, my mother bought a computer. We lived in a one- bedroom apartment with neighbours from all over the world. Across from us was a Mexican man whose girlfriend called the cops almost every week. I'd stand on a footstool, peering through the peephole: the cops would bang on their door, the man would emerge, embarrassed, appeasing, and apologizing, and the cops, with no obvious objective, would eventually leave. To the right of us was the stairwell, and to the left was a quiet Korean woman whom I hardly ever saw, but who smoked on the balcony every night for hours. My mother complained about it constantly, although I think what really bothered her was my father's smoking. At his worst, he smoked a pack a day Down the hall from us lived twin brothers from the Philippines who worked the night shift at a chicken 87 processing plant. I remember running into them once, having followed my father into the hallway while he was taking out the trash. My father stood before the grimy garbage chute in plastic sandals, his gnarled toes like ginger root under the low-wattage bulbs. He talked with the twins about life at the chicken processing plant, which was terrible. My father's accent gave him trouble, and he was normally silent, so difficult was it for him to speak through it, much less make himself heard. One of the twins bent over and lifted me up from under my armpits. Something from inside the pocket of my nightgown fell, a stick of gum or a marble, and I let it fall. When he put me down, I ran back inside. I wanted to look at the computer. The thing was enormous, bulky and white, seeming to glow even when it wasn't on, even when my mother had turned the lights off in the living room, like the skull of a dinosaur I'd seen suspended at a museum. I climbed up onto the desk chair and pressed my forehead against the cool, dark glass. Looking back, I don't know why we wasted money on a computer. My parents both worked in factories, and neither of them ever developed anything close to computer literacy Many years later, when I thought to ask my mother about it, she explained that the computer had come to us through a family friend, that it was somewhat less expensive than I'd thought, and that she'd enrolled in a typing course, although it had amounted to nothing. None of us, in any case, had any meaningful understanding of what my mother had bought. So when she powered it up, beaming a pathway between the three of us—my father and I stood behind her—and the rest of the world, we had no idea what to expect. It wasn't long until we scrolled past a flashing banner with a colourful wheel on it with the words You can be a lucky winner today above it. I remember waving my hands and pointing. I remember sensing my mother's uncertainty, and, more importantly, my father's attention, his curiosity that would soon become impatience. What I wanted more than anything was to align myself with him. So I begged her to click the wheel, which indicated that we could be the lucky winners of a television, an iPod Touch, or a pair of heavy-looking headphones. In between the prizes were badly cropped images of thumbs pointing down, signalling the possibility that we might not win. Perhaps it was this detail that finally convinced her, or it was my father's silent encouragement, or it was my mother's own belief in good fortune. The wheel spun for what seemed like an entire minute. When it finally landed, the word Congratulations PRISM 61.2 danced across the screen. My father's face broke into a grin, as did my own. I'm not sure if whatever we did next destroyed the computer, or if it was simply the first step toward its destruction, but soon enough we could no longer access web pages without it freezing or shutting down. Eventually, it would never power up again, would do nothing but get in the way of someone passing behind the couch, its white plastic shell slowly but surely yellowing. The next time my mother would buy a computer would be at the start of ninth grade, a little Dell netbook with a short battery life and a grainy camera, but that was all mine to explore, my mother showing no interest outside of its discounted price and my father having long moved out. On the day Zinaida died, I went to visit my mother. Before I left, I lay in bed for a while. It was early on a Sunday, the sun having just risen, and I could feel Robert's body next to mine, its sleepy warmth. Lying there, amidst the stillness of the room, I found myself paralyzed from head to toe. In the corner of the room, a phone—my desk phone—was ringing diabolically I was awake in a dream, which, when the dream is a nightmare, always translates into being stuck. I tried to scream, getting as far as shaping the air in my throat. Very slowly, my body returned itself to me. At the same time as I regained consciousness, everything I'd kept a lid on thus far—all the rage and exhaustion—rose up like bile, only without a foreseeable point of exit, overshadowing any sense of relief. When I finally staggered out of bed, I was exhausted. In the living room, stranded within a smoking band of early morning light, were the two halves of the broken ashtray I left without waking Robert. On the drive to my mother's apartment, I felt queasy and out of breath. The streets were cool, hushed, and I rolled down the window to let the breeze in. I thought about the woman Robert was impersonating. I felt ashamed, but mostly I felt responsible for whatever I was supposed to do next. The night before, I'd read an academic article by an associate professor at Cambridge about the phenomenon of "eWhoring." The article had referred to Robert as an offender. I imagined giving an interview about him. "He was half the rent," I'd say "We were strangers, really" My mother was already awake when I arrived. I went to join her on the balcony, which I remembered as neglected and vacant but was now crowded with clear plastic storage bins full of soil and seedlings she'd 89 bought from a tent outside the local supermarket. Paint peeled off the ceiling in glinting scales. My mother was in the middle of something. When I slid open the screen door, she looked at me blankly With a trowel, she turned over the soil in a tub of chilli plants. "Do you see them too?" she asked in Vietnamese. I stepped closer. I hadn't noticed at first, but the soil was obviously infested. I made a disgusted sound. "Yes," she agreed. "They're symphylans." "Can't you get rid of them?" She made a gesture I recognized from childhood, one that meant something was a fact of life, and facts couldn't be changed. She asked me how work was going. I told her everything was fine. "It's only temporary," I reminded both of us. "Are they training you?" She was always asking me this. Training me for what? When did the training end? "Yes." "That's good. See? Not so bad after all." She patted down the soil before setting the trowel aside. We went inside, where my mother seemed to have taken everything she owned out of its container. The room was filled with various objects hoping to be reorganized into a set of storage bins similar to the ones on the balcony I spotted my high school diploma on a chair, nearly hidden beneath a pile of Vietnamese DVDs, Paris by Night episodes one through infinity All I could see was the Minister of Education's signature on the bottom right-hand corner, its spiralling script full of hope. From the kitchen, my mother asked, "Did you know this woman?" "Who?" I called. I was picking through a cardboard box of comic books and palm-sized figurines. As a preteen, superheroes were all I cared about. Unlike the kids in my class, I'd shown no preference for one superhero over another; I rifled through lesser-known characters whose colourful costumes I no longer recognized. "I don't know how to pronounce her name," my mother called back. With wet hands, she handed me her phone before going back into the kitchen. As I read the article she'd pulled up, I understood that Zinaida was dead. The circumstances of her death—in her car, in a motel parking lot, due to carbon monoxide poisoning from an overturned gas can— didn't register until I recalled her habit of sleeping in her car before shifts. According to the article, she'd worked two jobs, one full-time and 90 PRISM 61.2 the other part-time, a room attendant at a motel. The article alternated between framing her death as a tragic accident versus the result of "an employee lying to their employer regarding prior commitments." She had been forty-six years old. I took a seat. I said something to my mother, something that would prevent any further questions. To distract myself, I tried to remember what I'd liked about superheroes. I had seen all the movies, memorizing each sequence of choreographed combat, gasping at special effects, reciting clever lines at every opportunity I remembered feeling aggrieved when I realized my birth hadn't revealed any unique powers. Now, standing in my mother's disordered living room in the heat of the day, I couldn't understand what all the excitement had been about. What exactly about the world we lived in was worth defending? The action figures in the box began to feel like objects retrieved from someone else's memory. That night, in bed, I asked Robert if he was ever a fan of superheroes. "I don't think so, no." "You didn't have a favourite superhero?" "The stories all seem so formulaic. It's supposed to be empowering, right? Only I don't understand how anyone without superpowers could feel empowered when you could be killed—horrifically killed, vaporized or something—for being in the way That's all you can ever be, in a world like that. In the way" I hadn't thought of that. It was unlike him to say things like this, and I knew he was trying to apologize. We grew silent. The lights were off, and the moon had given everything in the room a soft silhouette. We were lying next to one another, but we weren't touching. Why not? I felt as though I were here, in bed, with anybody Somehow, I was certain that Robert was still awake, that he had been struck by the same thought, at the same time: Why not? He shifted his weight, repositioning his arms. When his body resolved itself, I thought he was closer to me than before. I thought we might hold hands and exchange something, some wobbling tenderness. Suddenly, I saw things as they really were. He was no stranger. It was no coincidence that we were lying next to one another. I could recall what he looked like with clarity and ease, the wine-dark birthmark at the base of his chin, the green eyes, his expression faintly doubtful, ready to give itself over to a vacant smile. He had come into focus, and what I saw embarrassed me. In the end, neither of us spoke or moved. A familiar dread settled between us. We lay there helplessly awake, trapped within our own lives. 91 CONTRIBUTORS Joan M. Baril is a successful short story writer living in Thunder Bay who has published eighty-eight fiction and nonfiction pieces, mainly in Canadian literary magazines. She has also been published in several anthologies and has won several awards for her work. William Bonfiglio is a PhD candidate at the University of New Brunswick. His poetry has been awarded a Pearl Hogrefe Grant in Creative Writing Recognition Award, the Julia Fonville Smithson Memorial Prize, and has appeared in American Journal of Poetry, New Letters, PRISM international, and elsewhere. Terese Brasen has an MFA in creative writing and is the author of the novel, KAMA, published by Outpost 19 in San Francisco. THE THING THAT'S WRONG WITH ME is from a creative nonfiction collection, which she is currently completing. Several of the stories have been published and shortlisted for prizes. Michelle Brown's first full-length collection of poetry, Safe Words, was shortlisted for the 2018 ReLit award. A finalist for The Malahat Review's Open Season award, CV2's Young Buck prize and the CBC poetry prize, her work has also appeared in The Walrus, THIS Magazine, Arc Poetry Magazine, Grain, PRISM international and The Puritan. Her second book is forthcoming with Palimpsest Press this spring. Carolyn Chung's work has appeared in This Magazine, Riddle Fence, Broken Pencil, The Puritan, and FreeFall Magazine, among others. She was one of three short fiction finalists for the 2021 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. She lives in Toronto. Errol Cratt lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. They were born in St. Catharines, Ontario to parents of Ukrainian and Scottish descent. Errol's current focus is on gender mythologies, creatures that shapeshift and metamorphose. They explore this subject matter with tattoos, ceramics, mold making, and multi-media paintings. Find them on instagram @awfultoad. Katherine DeCoste is a writer with a day job, currently living and working on the unceded, unsurrendered land of the lakwarjan peoples in so-called "Victoria, BC." Their work has appeared in Contemporary Verse 2, Plenitude Magazine, Grain Magazine, and elsewhere. Nadia Froese is a poetry and fiction writer from the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations (Vancouver). Her 92 PRISM 61.2 writing has previously appeared in Phoebe, Bat City Review and The Temz Review. Her debut chapbook of poetry, Something Spectacular, was published by 845 Press in 2021. Jo Gatford writes flash disguised as poetry, poetry disguised as flash, and mostly can't tell the difference. Her work can be found in The Forge, trampset, Pithead Chapel, SmokeLong Quarterly and elsewhere. She is the co-founder of Writers' HQand occasionally tweets about weird 17th century mermaid tiles at @jmgatford. Yasmina Jaksic is a writer and PhD candidate in Toronto. She has previously won the Kenneth G. Mills Poetry Award and was shortlisted for the RBC/ PEN Canada New Voices Award. Her poetry can be found in Grain, Sine Theta, and A Velvet Giant. Jack Lancaster is an essayist and poet living in Brooklyn, NY, by way of Michigan. His work can be found at www.jack-lancaster.com, with publications at Bellevue Literary Review and others. He is an MFA student at Hunter College. Vicki McLeod is the author of four nonfiction books. Longlisted for the 2020 CBC Nonfiction prize, she won the BC-Yukon 2020 Flash Fiction prize. She was longlisted for the 2021 BC-Yukon CNF prize, and All My Love, Alex, received second prize in EVENT Magazine's 2021 CNF competition. A graduate of the 2018 SFU Writers Studio, she is a west coast wild swimmer, living on Vancouver Island. Joey Mok MS? ^ (they/them) is a trans, disabled, summertime fag who tattoos out of their home. They currently live at queer collective with their cat in East Van. Their work has been featured in LookDeeper's newest zine release "Once Upon a Hot Crip Summer." You can find their work on ins- tagram @vastkiln. Aefa Mulholland is a writer and illustrator who lives in Toronto and Glasgow. Her creative writing has been featured in publications including Cagibi, Wanderlust, Points in Case, and Slackjaw. She has worked with national broadcasters and publications from The Irish Times and The Miami Herald to The Advocate and OUT. Charlie Petch (they/he) is a disabled/queer/transmasculine multidisciplinary artist. Their debut poetry collection/Audible book, Why I Was Late (Brick Books), won the 2022 ReLit Award, and was named "Best of 2021" by The Walrus. Petch received a Lifetime Achievement Award for Spoken Word from the League of Canadian Poets, www.charliecpetch.com 93 Lizzy Ke Polishan is the author of the poetry collection A Little Book of Blooms (2020) and the recipient of the Eleanor B. North Poetry Award (2017). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in RHINO Poetry, Psaltery & Lyre, and Tipton Poetry Journal, among others. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband. Tazi Rodrigues is a writer and master's student in biology who studies movement and fresh water in both disciplines. A second-generation settler from Winnipeg, she is currently based in Kingston, Ontario. Her lighthouse-island chapbook, I Followed the Coasts, was published by JackPine Press in 2021. Alexandra Trnka is a writer and editor who was born in Newfoundland and now spends her time between Montreal and Toronto. Much of her writing, including this piece, is inspired by her family's roots in the Czech Republic and the interplay between memory and immigration. She is on the board of directors of Riddle Fence: A Journal of Arts and Culture, and her recent work has been published in the Montreal Review of Books, the journal of Newfoundland and Labrador Studies, and Senses of Cinema. Catriona Wright is the author of the poetry collection Table Manners and the short story collection Difficult People. Her new poetry collection Continuity Errors is forthcoming from Coach House Books in spring 2023. Courtney WZ is pursuing her MFA at the University of Victoria, where she writes creative nonfiction on mental health and illness. She received a BA in English and Creative Writing from Western University, where she was the university's Student Writer-in-Residence. Courtney's poetry and prose have been published in local and international literary magazines. Mormei Zanke is a writer from Calgary, Alberta. After earning her BA in English and Creative Writing from UBC, she moved to New York to pursue an MFA in Literary Reportage at NYU. Her poems have appeared in Humana Obscura, New Forum, NoD Magazine, and The Windsor Review, among others. Daniel Zomparelli is the author of the poetry collections Davie Street Translations and Rom Com, co-written with Dina Del Bucchia. His collection of short stories Everything Is Awful and You're a Terrible Person was nominated for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and won the ReLit Short Fiction Award. 94 PRISM 61.2 vallum contemporary poetry Chapbook APRIL 30, 2023 Award Winner receives $300 and publication as part of the Vallum Chapbook Series. Poetry Award JULY 15, 2023 Winner: $750 and publication Finalist: $250 and publication Details: vallummag.com/submit COLLECTED NOTES ON WRITING EVENT celebrates 50 years of publication with a Notes on Writing anthology, featuring more than 70 personal essays with insights into the joys and struggles of the writer's life and process, written by notable Canadian writers, including Jane Urquhart, David Bergen, Andre Alexis, Madeleine Thien, Eden Robinson, Jen Sookfong Lee, Zoe Whittall, Joy Kogawa, Souvankham Tham- mavongsa, Joshua Whitehead, and many others. ORDER NOW, OR RECEIVE A FREE COPY WHEN YOU SUBSCRIBE OR RENEW YOUR SUBSCRIPTION DETAILS AT EVENTMAGAZINE.CA PRISM is contemporary writing Joan M. Baril William Bonfiglio Terese Brasen Michelle Brown Carolyn Chung Katherine DeCoste Nadia Froese Jo Gatford Yasmina Jaksic Jack Lancaster Vicki McLeod Aefa Mulholland Charlie Petch Lizzy Ke Polishan Tazi Rodrigues Alexandra Trnka Catriona Wright Courtney WZ Mormei Zanke Daniel Zomparelli 7 ' 72006" 86361 2 PRISMMAGAZINE.CA $12
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