James Valvis is the author of How To Say Goodbye (Aortic Books, 2011). His poems or stories have appeared in journals such as Anderbo, Arts & Letters, Barrow Street, Hanging Loose, LA Review, Nimrod, Rattle, River Styx, Vestal Review, and many others. His poetry has been featured in Verse Daily and the Best American Poetry website. His fiction was chosen for the 2013 Sundress Best of the Net. A former US Army soldier, he lives near Seattle.

      Walter stopped screaming once he realized the tigers were incapable of causing him bodily harm. One giant male had leapt toward him, its five-foot long arms extended and jaws wide open, with the full intention of ripping Walter’s skinny throat clean out of his skinny body. But before the tiger could reach him, the heavenly mist collected into a magnificent twister, swarmed the tiger, and stopped it mid-air. The confused beast continued to circle Walter, frustrated.
      Walter sat down in the middle of the room and began to cry. He felt himself crying, felt the tears rising in his eyes and his nose welling with snot globules, and yet, as he began to make crying noises, he found that the tears never actually came, because of the absence of his earthly, corporeal form. This only made him metaphysically cry harder.
      It is impossible to say how long these Walter and tiger souls were in the room. Time had ceased entirely in this miraculous and incomprehensible place, so Walter and the tigers could have been trapped there for ten minutes, or three centuries. But in any case, at some point the cloudy mist cleared completely, and all was subsumed in utter darkness. And then a rumbling sound was heard in both human and tiger ears, the latter’s which were perked up in curiosity, and an enormous door rolled open to reveal a disorienting yet perceivable and nonetheless beautiful whiteness. One by one, the tigers trotted happily through the door and into the white light, their tails wagging to and fro as they followed one another through. Walter remained behind, staring stupidly. The apparent bliss that accompanied whatever was behind the door did not beckon him like it did the tigers. This made his soul very depressed and lonely feeling.
      He felt a tap on the back of his shoulder. When he turned around, he saw himself.
      “Hello, Walter Rice,” said the duplicate Walter Rice.
      For the briefest of moments, Walter experienced the strange sensation of seeing the image of oneself unprecedented. The experience was similar to turning around, let’s say in a convenience store or gas station, and being struck by a video image of yourself on a security screen. At first, you are struck with recognition, as if you have seen this person before, and then, most spectacularly, a feeling of non-recognition, as if the physical features do not come together quite accurately. Lastly, you are struck with the stark realization that it is in fact you you are looking at. And all this occurs within the span of three seconds.
      Because Walter was in a state of divine consciousness, this experience lasted much longer, and he was filled with happiness and comfort at being confronted with his bodily self, even if it only was an imitation. Which it was, of course, as duplicate Walter informed him, explaining how Duplicate Walter was an angel of God who assumed the figure of the departed soul, so as not to frighten him. He then explained that some great cosmic error had been made.
      “A great cosmic error has been made,” said Angel Walter. “Sometimes this happens when the cosmos must deal with a large amount of deaths in one instant.”
      “I remember the bridge,” said Walter, scratching his head.
      “Yes, precisely, the bridge. Thirty dear souls.” The angel lowered his head in grief. He wiped an artificial tear from under his eyeglasses. “Thirty-one souls if we count you.”
      “Doesn’t really seem like that many people…”
      The angel held up his chin defensively. “You clearly know nothing of the departure process! Perhaps one day you will be offered a job as Angel assistant in heaven-placement, and you will see for yourself how difficult the job can be.”
      “Speaking of heaven placement,” Walter gestured to the last remaining three tigers, each sniffing each other’s behinds as they lined up in front of the door.
      “Ah yes. Well, as you have gathered, we are in the waiting room of Tiger Heaven.”
      “Tiger Heaven,” Walter repeated.
      “And there is one tiger lost among the humans in Human Heaven who accidentally took your place.”
      Walter perked up. “Then send me over there!”
      “I’m afraid it is not that easy.”
      Walter stared at his duplicate.
      “Souls can not be transferred from one heaven to another,” explained the Angel. “Only from earth to heaven.”
      “Sounds like a pretty serious flaw in your system.”
      Angel Walter stiffened. “If you continue in this insolent manner we will be forced to leave you here in this room, which will continue to fill up with tigers for all eternity.”
      “Ok, sorry. I apologize. So what’s the plan?”
      “The only possible solution is for us to go back in time to the moment of your death, return everyone to the bridge, all the tigers to the Siberian wilderness, and replay the deaths over again.”
      Walter could barely contain his enthusiasm. “Sounds great to me! Let’s do it now. I’m ready. Let’s go.”
      “Well hold on, I’m afraid—”
      Walter sighed. “Let me guess. You are afraid it’s not that easy.”
      “Correct. You first need to prove you are a desirable.”
      “A what?”
      “A desirable. Right now you are in purgatory, if you wish to call it that, and the council members have every intention of leaving you here because you were not exactly the most, well…hm, how should I put this?”
      “A good-doer?”
      “More like, not their favorite of people.”
      “Their favorite? What’s wrong with me? Why am I not their favorite?”
      “You led an unsophisticated, unsuccessfully crude life. You also committed some pretty serious offenses.”
      Walter was stunned. “Like what?”
      “You sold drugs.”
      “That was ages ago. What else?”
      “You wished for an unborn baby to be born deformed and retarded. That is one of the top three gravest offenses a human can commit.”
      Walter fumed. “That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life!”
      “It is the law. Simple as that.”
      “If you had any idea what that woman put me through in the last three years—”
      “Principally when the baby is yours.”
      ”What?”
      “The baby is yours.”
      Walter was speechless. His soul felt very weak and toppled all of a sudden. He tried to bite his thumbnail but his lack of a real thumb and real teeth left him defeated. “How…how could you possibly know that?” he finally asked.
      “Are you seriously asking me that?”
      “Well I didn’t know that!” Walter’s soul began pacing back and forth, thinking. He reflected how throughout his life, he had always been a big, fat quitter. Whenever any ordeal or obstacle became too hard, he had given up. When his fiancé told him she was leaving him for her boss, he didn’t put up much of a fight, despite his sense of betrayal and urge to keep her with him. Quitting, he reflected, had always been fine by him. Quitting was the one thing he was good at. In fact, if he had quit by not returning to Mindy’s house when it was too late for reconciliation anyway, he wouldn’t have died and wouldn’t be in this Tiger Heaven mess in the first place. He had always thought death would be the easiest part of life. He had accepted his death almost immediately, and now even death made no sense. All of it was hard. Not fair, he thought.
      He felt the angel’s divine hand on his shoulder. He ceased his manic strides.
      “Look,” Angel Walter said sympathetically, looking into his eyes. “I think we can fix this. We are going to meet with the council. Tell them that you wish to repent for what you said about the baby. Tell them that as a future father, you wish to be placed in Human Heaven in hopes that one day you will be reunited with your unborn child. Also apologize for selling psychedelics to that poor kid who jumped off his apartment balcony. Now come, let us converse in a more comfortable environment.”
      The angel led Walter toward another large door. It was fifty feet tall, black and gold, and had miraculously appeared across the room.
      “Oh,” said Walter, “but I was so comfortable in this room, nearly mauled to death and eaten.”
      The Angel snapped its head back. “It is in your best interest to refrain from indulging in your inane and petulant attitude. There are worse fates than Tiger Heaven.”

      After entering through the black and gold door, the two Walters emerged in a beautiful garden with an enormous concrete swimming pool at the center. On both sides were fruit trees, and every branch was filled with perfectly ripe apples, peaches, and mangoes. Under every tree were wine-racks, well stocked and perched on top lush, billowy grass. The temperature, if detectable for humans, was something akin to seventy two degrees. The warmth of the sun felt spectacular on Walter’s heaven-skin, but when he looked up he found that there was no sun at all, only a clear, robin’s egg blue sky. Lounging by the sides of the pool, eating fruit and drinking wine, were about two dozen angels.
      Walter nearly screamed. The angels were hideous. They were of an abominable height at six foot seven inches. Their giant, awkward wings were repulsively birdlike; dirty and frayed, they fluttered involuntarily and smelled like stale water. The angels’ skin was the color of whipped eggs, and their eyes were notably too far apart. They had no pupils or noses. Their eyes were gray-colored and milky. And even worse, they were all completely naked.
      “Everyone!” announced Angel Walter. “Everyone!”
      The angels stopped chatting and turned to the Walters. They each held chalices in their impossibly large hands. Angel Walter cleared his throat. “This is Walter. He is the one placed in Tiger Heaven.”
      The angels looked at one another, seemingly perplexed. Their silence was deafening, and yet, a strange peace encircled them in their contemplation and stillness. Walter felt deep in his soul that the angels would take pity on him, and surely send him home. He began to relax. Finally, the silence was broken, and they all burst into laughter.
      “This is Walter?” cried one from under a tree, munching on a peach.
      “Look at you Heriminus!” cried another, gesturing to Angel Walter. “You look absolutely ridiculous.”
      “Walter is probably the worst name ever conceived, too, by the way.”
      “It is! It’s true. The records show it. Walters are never employed on earth, and they almost always die of obesity.”
      “Is this the guy who once sold acid, and put acid on breath mints, but he was also a compulsive mint-chewer, so he accidentally ate all the mints while driving cross-state, and had to pull over and call an ambulance?”
      They all roared with laughter. “It is that guy!” cried one.
      “Ha! Who does that?”
      “And he’s the one who couldn’t die correctly. Big surprise!”
      Their laughter and berating continued in this way for quite some time. Walter was forced to hear verbatim the pithy details of his life. For instance, how in 1993 he had failed 4th grade math and how, a year later, his parents divorced due to the financial strain of raising young Walter; how in the fall of 1998, he had been overjoyed in making the junior high football team, but how he had quit on October 15 because the team ridiculed him for being short and ugly; how, on February 3, 2000 Walter accidentally ran over his father’s beloved cat, Carlyle, a week before his father committed suicide; how a month later the most beautiful girl he had ever met, a blond painter named Daisy, had made fun of him when he was unable to make love her; how in 2004 the kid who jumped off the balcony sued Walter’s family for damages; how Walter lived with his grandmother for three years without being able to repay her before her death; how in the summer of 2007 her estate was sold and Walter disinherited; how in early 2008, his fiancé Mindy had sexual relations with her boss for three consecutive months before moving out of Walter’s apartment, and how incredibly funny it was that Mindy’s new husband would raise Walter’s baby as his own, for the next eighteen years to be precise, until the child would graduate from high school before attending Harvard Law School, being elected state senator in the year 2031, instigating one act that would single-handedly save the entire North Atlantic fish population, and another that would quash the death penalty in the United States forever. Also how Mindy’s lecherous husband would provide the child with a better life than Walter ever could. Mindy’s husband was going straight to hell by the way, chimed the angels, due to an offense back in 2002 of kicking a dog, which made the entire situation even more hilarious for them.
      Walter heard all of this for what seemed like eternity that in a most peculiar manner, his pathetic life flashed before his eyes as if it was a slideshow, and he was soon overcome with anguish. Had he been a bodily person he would have surely burst into tears. But instead, as the berating continued, Walter’s distress began to boil, until his soul could no longer take it, and he screamed out.
      “What the hell is wrong with you people?” he bellowed. “I am a person! I have feelings. And I definitely accomplished more in my life than…than sitting around getting drunk all day!”
      The laughter stopped abruptly. The angels’ wings fluttered outwards, stiffened. Their eyes turned black.
      “Did he just call us ‘people’?”
      “Did he just utter the ‘H’ word?”
      “I’ll kick his bony ass straight to the underworld, if he likes that word so much!”
      “Let’s turn him into a plankton!”
      “Yeah! A plankton!” They roared in agreement.
      “Silence! Everyone! Silence! Be quiet!” said Angel Walter. The angels hushed.
      “It is not your position to cast judgment on his past. That has already been done, if you recall. This man is heaven-bound but stuck in purgatory. It is now your position, in light of the cosmic mistake, to hear his repentance.”
      “But, Heriminus, he just called us people,” whined one angel by the pool. It tipped back its chalice and finished the wine. It then picked up another bottle, pulled out the cork with its mouth, and poured more.
      “Oh, top me off too, Brutalius,” said the angel to its right, offering its chalice.
      “Me too, me too!” said another eagerly.
      “This is third B.C Greek pinot, you realize,” Brutalius explained happily.
      Walter sat down on the grass and put his head in his hands. He felt the heavens could not care less about him. He was hopeless, he had completely given up. The angels were right; he had failed at life and was now failing in the afterworld. Better for them to send him back with the tigers.
      He looked up. The angels had resumed their revelry and drinking and were back in good spirits. Angel Walter was consoling Brutalius and the peach-eating angel about the H-word. “This human is prone to mistakes,” argued Angel Walter. He began explaining his Walter ensemble. One angel did not understand the purpose of shirt collars.
      Walter watched them curiously. And then he had a funny thought; the tiger, whose place he had taken, trying to argue its way into Tiger Heaven with a group of tiger angels, delving in whatever pleasures make tigers the happiest.
      “Oh, don’t think that,” said one angel by the pool.
      Walter jerked his heaven-head in its direction. This angel had its gargantuan feet in the water and was peeling a mango with nail-less fingers. It bit off half the mango, which was ostensibly pit-less. “Animals don’t have councils. They go straight to heaven.”
      “So Carlyle the cat…”
      “In Cat Heaven,” it slurred grotesquely, masticating the slimy fruit. “With your father, in fact. Humans and pets share a Heaven, If the owner is a desirable, that is.”
      And just like that, Walter had an idea. It was an ill-conceived one, yes, but an idea worth trying anyway. If not for the sake of himself, then certainly for the sake of his unborn, successful future-Senator-child, who deserved a father not bound for hell, but a father who was a desirable.
      Walter stood and waved his arms in attention. “Everyone! Everyone, please! I have something to say!”
      The angels turned to him one by one.
      “Look, I am sorry for saying the H-word. I am sorry for calling you ‘people’, you are very, very obviously not people. I apologize for wishing my baby was born deformed, and I apologize for selling drugs. I apologize for everything I have ever done that offended you um…majestic and heavenly beings. You don’t have to send me to Human Heaven. That would be far too generous of you. But think of that poor tiger trapped in purgatory. That poor animal is completely innocent. It deserves to be in a Heaven with its own kind. Please reverse our deaths so that it may go to its rightful Heaven. That is all.”
      The angels took a moment, looked at one another.
      “I do like tigers,” one said.
      “They are quite awe-some.”
      “Weren’t they created on the third day?”
      “No, no it was the fourth.”
      “Are you sure?”
      “You’re thinking of the lion.”
      ”Oh.”
      Brutalius stood and silenced the angels with his hand. They all looked up at him. Slightly slurring and teetering on his feet, but with an official voice that boomed throughout the heavens, he announced:
      “Due to an agreed upon consensus that we all think tigers are awe-some and sweet, we have agreed to send them back! Both deaths will be replayed. Let the turning back of time on earth begin. It is done!”
      “Amen!” said the angels in unison, toasting their chalices.
      And so the angels sent Walter and the tiger back to earth on December 3, 2010. But because they were so drunk, they got it wrong all over again.

      This is the story of how Walter saved the entire Siberian tiger population from extinction.
      Walter came to in a small cage in a remote area of Northwest Russia. He looked up and saw three Russian men staring down at him, their eyes wide and mouths agape in complete shock. The Russian men took the skinny man out of the cage, brought him to their tent, put warm blankets on him, and gave him a hefty dose of pepper-infused vodka. Outside the tent, several tigers growled and paced in similar cages. The poachers then took Walter to town where he used the phone at a gas station to contact the U.S embassy. A representative was flown in that very day, and they took Walter to Moscow where, by then, news had traveled of the strange American suffering from amnesia, who could not remember how he turned up in a poacher’s camp. The attention to Walter was so great that the poachers were not able to continue their mission of securing two hundred furs that week, the nice men who saved Walter were arrested, and the entire operation shut down.
      Walter was welcomed back to Pennsylvania as a sort of celebrity, and the media attention on him was almost as ubiquitous as the thirty people who perished on the bridge that same week. Perhaps the tragedy was so disturbing that people opted to focus on an amnesiac’s story rather than the fact that meaningless deaths can occur any day, at any time. Meaningless deaths are, in fact, as easy to explain as an American man magically appearing inside a tiger cage in Siberia.
      Walter never saw Mindy again, despite her many attempts to contact him during the media coverage. When he finally did take her call, she told him that he was the father of her baby, and that she wanted to reconcile, and start a family together. He hung up on her. Forever after that, Walter prided himself for having the gall to escape the confines of his aimless attraction to her. He eventually met a nice woman. She worked as a veterinary assistant in east Pittsburgh, and they were married and had two children.
      There was one other news-bit that did not garner as much attention as Walter’s story or that of the collapsed bridge. But it was intriguing, nonetheless, and even made the national news, although it was quickly forgotten afterwards. When authorities recovered the bodies from the river, they found an empty 1999 Toyota Corolla with a drowned tiger inside. The female tiger was rather shabby and missing an eye. Authorities eventually concluded that someone must have brought an illicit pet tiger with them into the car. These things sometimes happen in American cities. After the accident, the driver must have swum out, and the body never found. It was the only logical explanation.

Originally from El Paso, Texas, Patricia Marquez lives in Brooklyn, New York where she works as an English instructor. She holds a Masters degree in English Literature from Brooklyn College, a BA in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College, and studied literature and philosophy at King’s College London. She has completed several screenplays, and is currently working on a science fiction novel.

A cute little bladder infection. Ectoplasm.

Burnished magnesium. Elongated fatwas.

A book of screams in a little red room.

Trigonometry for mummies. Hoe-downs.

A knife balanced on a knife-blade.

Walls of ghost-breaths. Mystic sensibilities.

Pillow-books and phatic salutations.

Swordplay behind the School of Dance.

The desert of the real. Light’s threshold.

The first and last of polyester newspapers.

An entire set of ant-dreams in polished amber.

The sudden realization of a universal truth.

A kiss on fire. The meaning of cancer.

Shadow-shadows, once cloistered in attics.

A series of teeth crying out for a head.

Miserable buttons. The breasts of Atlantis.

A rebel yell with toothache. Indelible bunnies.

The diaphanous domain of melancholia.

Spare savant-whistles. Pennies that sweat.

Throttled soldiers’ breaths. Bone booties.

Birthmarks, and a comic’s monologue.

Trophies for bowling. Torn spectrographs.

Thirteen bullets and world’s smallest glum.

The skull-music of handgun logic.

Thermodynamic miracles. Stygian gloom.

Aural karma. A warm impermanence.

Chaotic streetwear. Vials of oxen-blood.

Trade winds captured in a blue bottle.

One monosyllable, in Santa Claus mode.

A recipe for tears. Electromagnetic slippers.

Shot glasses in love with toxic empathy.

Dinosaurian scarf and mittens. Wing-nuts.

Brutal thunderclouds. Seasick serpents.

Essence of Runnymede. Broken cattle.

User-friendly totalitarian regimes. Pixels.

The dim recall of every passing breath.

Some old skin sloughed from this very hand.

The darkeyed junco and varied thrush.

A burning shortlist, as if a stone candle.

Originally from Niagara Falls Ontario, Pushcart-nominee Bruce McRae is a musician who has spent much of his life in London and British Columbia. He has been published in hundreds of periodicals and anthologies. His first book, The So-Called Sonnets is available from the Silenced Press website or via Amazon books. To hear his music and view more poems visit his website: http://www.bpmcrae.com.

She asked if I believed in ghosts.
I responded: “Some,” my voice
a raspy set of scissors: “What are you?”

“What are you good at?”

I am—despite being on the side
of angels—not one of them.

I dress like a grocery store manager,
like an abandoned refrigerator
and we will carry on this feud
forever, she in her evening

dress, “Just look at it,” she says.
The floatable dusk marking the half hour,
and here was one empty room, there, the other—
that was the extent of our transgressions.

It was the history of light.

But, there are tides in the body. And once
you stumble, love transforms
into movable furniture or plastered over
grimaces, gazing out of a passing train’s
window, at the loose atmosphere

behind the pane of glass.

And she had felt glad
she’d done it: swallowed, down,
then thrown the last inches
away, then wiped her fingers, her
thick fingers, then finally said:

“I don’t pity myself.”

Born and raised in Miami, FL, Michael J Pagán spent four years (1999-2003) in the United States Navy before (hastily) running back to college during the spring of 2004. He currently resides in Deerfield Beach, FL with his wife and daughter where he continues to work on his poetry, short fiction, and his first stage play. He is a contributor to his alma mater’s blog, The MFA at FAU, as well as his own, The Elevator Room Company.

daubed with pheromones. Even the nose hairs flinch
in excitement. But a sweet joy comes when I eat an avocado

alone in the kitchen, and the breeze blows past me through the open
window, a sheet passing softly across an arm. We’re all being

reupholstered. You with me. Me with this sheen
of hot sweat. I’m munching on the fruits of your labor, the neurons

in my head. The lakes are full now, robust. The trees fill in
like hair. Your intentions are wide like arms, or roots, or

bad ideas. I hold the corona of the sun in my mouth. As I write this,
May arrives. And yes, come to think of it, everything is wide:

the silence that hangs around the lone metal chime.

Kristen Steenbeeke is an alumna of the University of Washington creative writing program, where she was runner-up for the Charlotte Paul Reese prize for fiction. Her work is forthcoming in Mare Nostrum. She currently works at the Richard Hugo House, a literary arts center in Seattle, and has a cat named David whose name is an amalgamation of all great writers named David.

      We head northwest on the freeway. “Why the zoo, Mars?” Why hadn’t I put my foot down?
      “I know one of your Siberian tigers,” Mars says. “Valentina. She was a baby four years ago at the Denver zoo during those awful merger negotiations with NBC. Remember how nuts they made me?”
      I do. I had to fly to Denver and take her home to Vancouver. “You know this tiger?”
      “She’ll remember me. You’ll see. We made a connection.”
      “What kind of connection?”
      “A sort of . . . mutual recognition.”
      “Of what exactly?”
      She shakes her head and closes her fingers around the grab handle above her door. “Never mind, Ron.”
      Already I’ve disappointed her. My wife, Deborah, believes this is inevitable, since Mars lives in a world she has made up, with rules only she understands. Rich in fantasy, Deborah says, trying not to sound envious, Mars has become fantasy rich. But I disagree. I believe my sister is firmly established in this world, the same one where I have a city job in Berkeley, an oak tree whose roots are invading my sewer pipes, and a soccer league’s books to keep current. Mars counts on this world, the one we all share, to set her apart. Even wild animals, it seems, single her out.
      “Deborah sends her best,” I say, although Deborah didn’t, doesn’t, never has. If Mars misses her connection to Atlanta, if she has to stay with us tonight, Deborah won’t like it. Neither will the boys, despite their aunt’s SciFi Channel credentials. The last time she visited, they ganged up and beat her at Clue. She was furious.
      “How’s Wendell?”
      “Why didn’t you ask him?” Mars says, choleric now. “Didn’t he call with my flight number?”
      We talk about you, I want to say, not each other, but she wouldn’t like that. It would make her feel trapped, as nearly every situation does sooner or later, this time in the almond-shaped section where the Venn diagrams of Wendell’s life and mine intersect.
      “Wendell said the SciFi Channel is keeping NBC afloat, and you’re keeping SciFi afloat. The wedding’s still on for June. He’s happy about that. I found out that much.” Wendell did say some of these things.
      The diamonds on her engagement ring blink at me. The big ruby in the center swallows light. Wendell is a producer, known for bringing in programs under budget. When it comes to Mars, however, he spares no expense.
      “I’ll have to take a week off for the wedding,” Mars says warily. “Three weeks is all I can give you and Mom now. My boss says even that may ‘strain our relationship.’” Finger quoting.
      “Isn’t Wendell your boss?”
      Mars groans. “No. I’ve explained this. By the time Wendell starts working on something, I’m more or less finished.”
      That’s right. Mars “creates” new shows. “Three weeks will help,” I say, “although I was hoping for four.” Mom can’t possibly last four.
      I glance at the mole on Mars’s left cheek, remembering how as a toddler I reached out to touch it. Mars let me, as long as I was gentle. White hairs spring from it now. Untrimmed, they curve along her jaw line.
      “Do you think it’s possible,” Deborah asked this morning, “that she doesn’t see that hair?”
      I study the mole itself to see if it’s getting darker, until an erratic wind careening off the bay makes it hard to keep my Volvo in the middle lane.
      Mars switches on the radio, listens for a few seconds. “Who’s that?”
      ”Terry Gross?”
      “I know that much. I’ve been on Terry Gross. Who’s she interviewing?”
      “Marianne Faithfull,” I say.
      ”Who?”
      “Singer? One-time girlfriend of Mick Jagger? Drug addict, homeless person, comeback artist?” I listened to the Faithfull interview when it was first broadcast last night, but I knew the outlines of her story already.
      Mars shakes her head. “Never heard of her.”
      “The sixties?”
      “I was reading,” Mars says. “To you.”
      More than forty years ago, admitted to Mars’s bedroom, her inner sanctum, I lay on my belly on the empty twin bed, my arms dangling over the foot, my sneakers off so they wouldn’t sully the quilted, pink satin bedspread Mom laid in place like an imperial flag. Mars leaned back against her matching pink headboard and, through many seasons and configurations of braces, read aloud the Oz books, Ivanhoe, Dracula, Frankenstein. My favorites were the Edgar Rice Burroughs’ eleven Mars books, in which Civil War hero John Carter, caught up in the Indian Wars of the 1870s and dying in an Arizona cave, wills himself to the Red Planet, abandoning his earthly frame. Mars read them the summer I was nine and she was twelve. The plots on Barsoom—what Burroughs’ Martians call Mars—are wildly repetitive, but I tuned in for the battles: green Martians whacking giant white apes, bodiless Martians plotting against headless.
      We’d start late in the afternoon, break for dinner, and keep going until bedtime. Our mother, a widow since I was a baby, living in a house her rich parents provided, was happy enough for Mars to entertain me. She believed in independence—elective for herself, just good sense for others—and tailored clothing.
      When Mars stopped reading for a moment, all those years ago, to take a sip of water or change position, she sometimes forgot what she was doing. She’d stare out her bedroom window for minutes at a time, wishing, I was sure, that she could step free of her body and sail away, diaphanous as her curtains, like John Carter.
      Marianne Faithfull introduces her recording of “Pirate Jenny,” from The Threepenny Opera. In a gravelly voice, she pronounces threepenny as thruppny. Jenny washes glasses in a bar, while her comrades’ ship, “the black freighter, with a skull on its masthead,” enters the harbor, prepared to attack.
      “I like this song,” Mars says, taking a pistachio from the bag I keep in a cup holder, prying apart the shell and tossing it, not in the bowl I keep under the radio, but onto the floor.
      When the song is over, I feel as if a course correction is vital. Pirates are not the figures I need Mars to identify with now. “Mom just wants to close the distance a little,” I say. “Not eliminate it. She knows it’s too late for that.”
      Mars shrugs.
      “How long has it been since you’ve seen her?” I ask. “Mom won’t tell me.”
      ”Fifteen years.”
      Most of what I remember from my early teens, besides John Carter and his faithful beast, Woola, is my mother and sister screaming at each other. When I was with Mom in September, her thinking was getting fuzzy, but many of her memories remained vivid.
      “Your sister would never do a lick of housework,” she said, fingering the lace on her bed jacket, “She wouldn’t go to mass after she was eight. In high school, when the other girls got themselves all tarted up, she wouldn’t even wear lipstick.”
      Except that Halloween when she showed up at school dressed as a prostitute, in borrowed fishnet stockings, a see-through blouse, white lipstick and blue eye shadow, her mole, hairless then, playing the role of sexy beauty mark. We’re all female impersonators, she told her first-period teacher. It was the early seventies, and Mars was on the cutting edge. Her teacher, a tidy Mormon mother who taught a half-day of typing and bookkeeping, was not. She and the principal gave Mom a lecture on morals.
      In midday light Mars’s mole is dark pink, a more benign color than the grays of her hair, slackening skin, and naked lips. Deborah says that the mole’s white crop of hair is an emblem of Mars’s disregard for others, but I think it serves another purpose. It’s a badge of resistance, a Barsoomian talisman, Captain Hook’s hook.

      I park south of the zoo, along the Great Highway, the city’s western rim, the only barrier between it and the Pacific breakers. It’s a clear day—no fog—but the wind is more single-minded here than erratic, intent on blowing whatever isn’t tied down out to sea. Before I can pull out the extra jacket I keep in the trunk, Mars has run into the street, dodging her way across four lanes of traffic. “Could you wait?” I shout, but she doesn’t stop until she reaches the zoo entrance. I walk to the crosswalk and press the button to cue the signal.
      “They feed the cats at 2:00,” she says when I reach her.
      I help her into my old parka. “It’s almost 3:00, Mars.”
      I buy our tickets and hand her one. She puts on my jacket, her hands disappearing into the sleeves, and hustles past the gift shop, decorated inside and out with greenery, the carousel, the big café, and the monkeys—to the Lion House, an old white stucco building hunkered down under mossy roof tiles, art deco fillips adorning the entrance. Its red doors, surrounded by Christmas lights, are shut tight.
      Mars sinks onto a bench.
      “Didn’t you hear me say it’s 3:00?”
      “Yes,” she barks. “I heard you.”
      When my boys were younger, they also clamored to see the big-cat feeding in the Lion House. They were quiet kids, Lego boys more than light-sword boys, but the tossing of dead rabbits and horsemeat into serial cages filled with roaring animals the size of cars electrified them. I led them in reluctantly, staying as far away from the animals as I could, hugging the opposite wall, keeping Sam in one of the double strollers the zoo rented out while I lifted Ethan onto my shoulders—until Sam started shouting that he couldn’t see. Then I lowered Ethan into the stroller and lifted Sam up.
      I don’t remember that Tony, the male Siberian tiger who’s lived at our zoo for years, roared at feeding time, but the male lions’ roars, as loud as the Blue Angels flying overhead but right there in the room with us, rattled me in such a deep place that I asked myself what I was doing there, with my children. My wife, on the other hand, covered her ears and laughed, insanely secure in our little family’s berth at the top of the food chain. Once the boys grew past stroller size, I let her take them to the zoo.
      “Closing time is 5:00,” I say, “which is about when we have to head back to the airport anyway. Let’s find your tiger.”
      “In the Lion House,” Mars says to no one in particular, “you could get really close to all the big cats.” She stands up and starts walking.
      We wander past the pint-sized Magellanic penguins crowded together on a concrete island and two river otters confined to a pool only ten feet square. Mars averts her eyes and heads in the wrong direction.
      “The big cats are that way,” I say, pointing to our right.
      “I’m a little nervous,” she says, keeping left. From the minute she deplaned, Mars has seemed more agitated than usual and—this is new, I think—magnetized as well, as if she were being dragged toward some things and away from others. Valentina seems to be both attracting and repelling her.
      We stand on a covered bridge with windows set in the sides and look hard at a half-acre of eucalyptus, trying to spot a koala. After a minute I give up, step away, and watch a slick, three-minute video about the animals. When it’s over, I take Mars’s arm. “They get the koalas down from of the trees at night by poking them with sticks.”
      “Lucky bears,” she says.
      “They aren’t bears, they’re—”
      “I know, Ron.”
      “Then why did you call them bears?”
      “It’s shorthand. Did you want me to say lucky marsupials? You’re talking like some encyclopedic eight-year-old.”
      If Mars weren’t standing right next to me, I’d swear that only my mother could have said that last sentence in just that way, with that particular note of disdain.
      “Mom is thrilled about Wendell,” I say. “She’ll see that ring and die happy.”
      “Maybe I don’t want her to die happy.” Mars points at a clump of trees. “There’s one.” A flat nose, big ears and eyes peek around a trunk.
      “He looks like Wendell,” I say, smiling, wishing that I could say something nastier, that I didn’t want so desperately not to return to Atlanta.
      “Funny. Have you told Mom that Wendell drinks too much, and that he has three illegitimate kids?”
      “I figure you’ll tell her that if you want her to know.”
      “Look,” Mars says. “You want me to be okay with death duty. Well, I’m not. Mom will dredge up some nasty argument from the Dark Ages, what she said and what I said.”
      “Actually, she’s been on good behavior.“
      “With you, maybe,” says Mars. “With me, she’ll be meaner than snakes.”
      “You’ll never be alone with her,” I point out.
      “And who’s paying for that round-the-clock nursing?” She doesn’t give me a chance to answer. “I am.”
      “The last day or two, she’ll go into a coma. That’s what the oncologist told me.”
      “So I’m sitting there for three weeks hoping for a coma?” Mars walks out from under the bridge’s roof. A gust of wind hits her in the face, and she grabs her cap to keep it from blowing off.
      “Wendell didn’t offer to go with you?” I ask.
      “He says you don’t walk in during the last act.”
      “Deborah says that if you’ve sat through the first four and can guess the end, you get to skip it.” When Mars says nothing, I force myself to say, “I could go myself, I guess.” In fact, Deborah has said feel free, but she isn’t serious. Mom’s illness has been hard on our marriage. Even so, that’s not what’s keeping me at home. I just don’t think I can walk through my mother’s front door again.
      “It’s my turn,” Mars says, “if that’s the way this works.”
      “It’s not so much that it’s your turn,” I say, although it is. “But Mom’s asking for you, and if you’re going now, you might as well stay for the end.”

      The big cats spend their days in open grottos that arc around the back of the Lion House and connect to it via rear doors. “Naturally” landscaped, the grottos are protected from visitors, and visitors are protected from the animals, by a wide, deep moat, usually dry, a few feet of boxwood at ground level, and a cyclone fence. The distance from the bottom of the moat to the top is about twice my height. The cyclone fence in front of the boxwood is six feet tall. Beyond that is a waist-high railing, where signs about the cats’ origins and habits are hung.
      I have to jog to keep up with Mars, who dashes past the Sumatran tigers and their new cubs to the grotto of the Siberian male tiger, Tony. Only his tail is visible, shooting around a boulder like a flame—orange and ivory and smoky black.
      “They don’t live together, the two Siberians?”
      “Sometimes they do. But they have their own space, too.”
      Wendell has also provided separate space for Mars. Before she moved in with him, he built a small house on the back of his weekend property in Victoria—a place for her to work and sleep alone if she wanted to. I’d never seen her as relaxed as she was the weekend Deborah and I flew up to celebrate the engagement.
      “I think my sister really loves you,” I said to Wendell.
      “Well sure,” he said, “and I love her”—as if this required no special talent, no extraordinary tolerance.
      On the flight home, Deborah said, “We should kiss the ground he walks on.”
      “Haven’t they had babies, Tony and your Valentina?” I ask Mars. “Isn’t there a mandate for zoos to reproduce species going extinct?”
      “Tony’s had a vasectomy. He’s 15, getting up there. I guess that’s the reason.”
      There will be no babies for Mars, either, getting married for the first time at 56. But as far as I know, she’s never wanted any.
      “It’s just after 4:00, Mars.”
      “Valentina’s right around the corner.”
      Now Mars walks at a slow, ritualistic pace past the wall that separates the two Siberian tigers. I try to picture her as a bride in white lace, a long train splayed out behind her, Miss Havisham without, God help us, the jilting. But surely she won’t choose a conventional wedding. It would be too much like debuting in Atlanta, a fate she fought tooth and claw to escape when she was 18.
      She stops short and whispers, “Awesome.” She sounds like ten-year-old Sam, for whom everything now is awesomundo.
      Then I see Valentina, lying on her side in the center of the grotto. She’s impressive all right, six or seven feet long not counting her tail and maybe five feet tall. Her head, surrounded by a short ruff, is big as a tire, and her feet are sphinxlike, the size of serious dictionaries. Tony may be larger, but, as I remember from visits when the boys were young, the expression on his face suggests a certain . . . philosophy. He appears to consider his situation. He’s stupefyingly other, as Valentina is, but he’s self-regulating. Valentina strikes me as pure, uncontainable energy.
      “Val-en-teen-a,” Mars shouts over the wind as if summoning a house cat.
      The tiger raises her head and gazes directly at my sister.
      Mars looks up at me and shouts in my face, “There! Do you see? She knows me!”
      Nonsense. A low growl joins the rush of wind through the bare mulberries and dense pines in the big square opposite us. The growl ends in a snarl. “She doesn’t like shouting,” I say.
      Mars inches forward, holding on to the waist-high railing on our side of the cyclone fence. “You’re right. She expects to be respected.”
      I’ve heard those words before. I believe I said them—during the Battle of the Debut, when Mom and Mars fought like harpies over whether Mars would attend “poise school,” get plucked and polished, don a ball gown and descend a curved staircase accompanied by our cousin Charles. She expects to be respected, I said fruitlessly to both of them. I was fourteen. Mars, enveloped in her struggle with Mom, had stopped reading to me. Mom had stopped seeing me.
      My sister did not debut. I still don’t entirely understand how two women could be driven so far apart by arguments over parties and make-up and dresses that they haven’t seen each other for 15 years.
      Three teenaged boys stand directly in front of Valentina. One reads the sign that describes her species. “The Siberian, or Amur tiger, is the largest living member of the . . . Fell-i-day family—”
      “Fee-li-dee,” says Mars.
      She still has the voice of a girl. The boys turn toward her with interest. Whatever they see floods their faces with contempt.
      “That ‘grotto,’” Mars says, pointing to the grass and bark expanse in front of us, backed by a hill of concrete poured to look like rock, “is still a cage. Valentina is still a prisoner.”
      If the boys hear, they ignore her. The reader continues: “This species may become extinct. Fewer than 500 Amur tigers live in the wild, in small groups in eastern Russia and northern China. Humans are their only enemies, but they rarely eat human flesh.”
      The two boys not reading are brothers for sure, maybe even twins, slight bodies in enormous sweatshirts, almost identical stubbly faces. They bend over to pick up pinecones.
      Mars doesn’t notice this. She’s staring catatonically at Valentina, who is still and silent, studying the young men in motion.
      When the first pinecone hits the asphalt floor of the grotto, Mars staggers sideways, as if it has hit her. She backs up against me and turns away from the tiger, the bill of her cap rubbing against my neck. In spite of the driving wind, she has taken off my jacket and draped it across her arm. Wrapping my arms around her, I feel again how thin she is. Her jeans would fit twelve-year-old Ethan.
      “Hey tiger!” shouts the boy who’s been reading. He’s waving his arms over his head, to appear bigger, or feel bigger. “Get up, why don’t you? Get off that lazy ass and do something. You freeloader. You welfare case.”
      The twins bounce on the balls of their feet, and then widen their search, picking up sticks and more pinecones, hurling them into the wind. Most of these objects don’t make it across the moat. Valentina hasn’t moved an inch.
      “Cut it out!” I shout at the boys. I look around for a zoo guard, but, near closing time on Christmas Day, I see no one but the boys and us.
      “Leave her alone, assholes,” Mars yells. My body muffles her voice, and I hope the boys don’t hear her, but they do. Their eyes widen in rage.
      “Shut up, lady,” says one brother. “Shut the fuck up.”
      Mars’s body stiffens. Valentina, on her feet now, paces a narrow field, taking three or four steps and turning around, snarling rather quietly—talking to herself, or so I imagine.
      All three boys shout at once. “I thought you were a hunter.” “Show us what you got, Mama. Hunt us.” “Or are you just a big, dumb bitch?” One of them throws a stick, a hefty one, and it connects, thumping Valentina’s hip. She faces front, shows her incisors, and jumps down into the dry moat.
      Now the boys toss more wood, and a rock or two, underhanded, straight up over the fence like kids making free throws. Valentina stands on her hind legs, her front paws stretching up the asphalt wall, and roars, silencing the boys for a moment.
      “Jesus,” one of the brothers says at last. He steps back and trips, falling on his ass.
      “She can’t get out,” says the reader. “She can’t do anything.” But he looks pale, shaken.
      I want to run.
      Mars peels my fingers off her shoulder and takes a step away. “Go find Security.”
      Thank God. “You come with me.”
      “I don’t want to leave Valentina alone with them.”
      “Mars, that tiger doesn’t know you from Adam. Come on.”
      ”No!”
      Valentina jumps from the moat floor, missing the top of the asphalt wall by about two feet, and skids down on her claws until she gives up, pulls away, and falls to the bottom.
      One of the boys says what I’m thinking: “They know how high to build these walls, right?”
      I pull my cellphone out of my jacket pocket and dial 911. “I’m at the zoo. One of the tigers—I think it might escape.”
      “If this is some kind of prank,” says a female voice, “you should know that you can be arrested for wasting responder time.”
      My children are safe at home, but my sister’s right here, and something fights my flight response, a hysterical urge to protect. I start yelling into the phone. “Listen. I’m not in the habit of—“ I point the phone toward Valentina, her roars coming one after another now, penetrating and paralyzing.
      “Okay. The police are on their way,” says the voice. “They’ll contact zoo security. Get the hell out of there. But don’t hang up.”
      I hang up by mistake, grab Mars’s arm and yank her in my direction.
      She turns and slaps my face, almost knocking me over. “Jesus, Mars,” I say when I’ve stumbled to standing again.
      One of the brothers holds a rock against his chest as big as his head. He squats and heaves it skyward. I hold my breath as its sails up, over the cyclone fence, and all the way down into the moat. Mars screams, “Watch out!” distracting Valentina. The rock grazes her head.
      She seems stunned at first, but after a few seconds leans back on her haunches and jumps again, higher than before but still not to the top of the wall. This time her claws get some traction on the asphalt, enough so that she can scramble up into the boxwood. Now she’s eye to eye with the teenagers, separated from them by only a few feet of foliage and the six-foot cyclone fence. She stumbles around in the bushes, finds some footing, and in a second she’s over the fence.
      Of the three running boys, she chooses the reader, the one with the loudest mouth, not the one who threw the big rock. She runs to his left to flank him, then turns and runs directly toward him, downs him with her front paws, and rips open his throat.
      I’ll tell the police later that the wind must have stopped for a moment because I heard a…bubbling sound.
      The other boys don’t stay to watch their friend die. They race across the square toward a café, lit up inside by a big Christmas tree. Valentina lifts her bloody mouth and looks back at Mars and me, and at a zoo employee in a black jacket that is suddenly standing beside us.
      “Holy Mary, Mother of God” the man says, “pray for us sinners—“
      The remaining words fly from my mouth. “Now and at the hour of our death.”
      “Mars, do you want to die here?” I say. “Because I don’t.” I’ll leave her if I have to.
      “No,” says Mars, tears streaming down her face. “Not us. She’ll go after the other two.”
      “Go! Run!” says the man to my sister and me. I shove Mars a few feet back around the corner, in front of the fence surrounding Tony’s grotto. I glimpse him out of the corner of my eye, jumping down into the moat. Right below us now, he begins roaring as well, crazy with fear or bloodlust or love. I lose control of my bladder.
      Cold and wet, I start shaking. I watch as the boys reach the café and pound on the glass wall, but the scene is a little removed now, as if I’m watching a video, a very scary one, but a video nonetheless. Valentina covers the distance between her first kill and what will surely be her second in a few leaps. She brings one of the brothers down, opens her great jaws and closes them around the boy’s head.
      I hear the zoo man scream into his cell phone, “She’s killing another one!” and spot three other men wearing black staff jackets on the periphery of the square, two behind the cars of the steam train holding walkie talkies near their faces, the third behind a fence in the capybara’s enclosure, pointing a gun at Valentina.
      Mars runs forward and shouts, “Don’t kill her!”
      The man shoots. I can’t see whether he hits the tiger or not.
      “It’s a tranquillizer gun,” says the man next to me. “But the police are almost here and they’ll kill her.” To Mars he yells, “Step back!”
      I’m looking around for the third boy, hoping he’s abandoned his doomed brother and run for his life, but I spot him on the far side of the café squatting behind a garbage can.
      Tony is trying to get out of his grotto, jumping as far up the moat wall as he can. Neither as young nor as strong as Valentina, he can’t make it, and part of me regrets this.
      Police cars pull up behind us, their sirens silent. Men spring past, keeping their distance from the tiger, all but one, who advances to the mulberry tree in the center of the square and raises his rifle. Valentina senses his presence, lifts her head, and looks right at him. He takes aim. She doesn’t move. Maybe the zoo shooter was able to hit her, and the tranquillizer is working.
      “No!” Mars screams, then suddenly collects herself. She says the next words loudly and slowly, as if her mind has cleared: “Don’t kill her. They attacked her. She’s a wild animal. What do you expect?”
      I step toward Mars and try one last time to pull her back. She jerks free and runs toward the policeman aiming the gun, screaming, “Stop!”
      The cool look on that policeman’s face—he’s been trained to recognize threats to public safety. He’s been prepared to deal with them.
      “Officer!” he calls to his colleagues, but he doesn’t lower his rifle, doesn’t remove his eye from the scope.
      Two bullets are fired at the same time. One hits the tiger in the neck, where her ruff is thickest. The other hits Mars in the leg.
      I watch my sister fall forward onto the concrete. Her glasses skitter across the pavement, broken in half.

      The next day I sit in front of the Crab Pot again, waiting for Wendell’s plane to arrive. He’s usually in a rush, but today I see him walking slowly and deliberately, as if hurrying won’t help. In his cashmere coat, with the collar turned up, his peculiarities—gut, goatee, and big ears—are less conspicuous than they might be. This disturbs me. I need Wendell to be Wendell today, to take responsibility for Mars.
      He’s carrying her duffle bag, lumpy and half-empty. He’s probably forgotten half of what she needs. He shakes my hand. “When’s your flight to Atlanta?” he asks.
      “In an hour and a half.”
      We decide to try the bar at the Crab Pot. Wendell orders himself a whiskey and a plate of skewered shrimp, me a beer.
      “I knew she was…tired,” he says. “We’re going to premarital counseling—did she tell you that?”
      “Mars read to me once upon a time, but we’ve never talked much.” I picture her staring out her bedroom window, trying to will herself free of Mom’s house, Mom, and probably me. I hope there’s a window in her room in the hospital’s psych ward, where she’s about to be transferred.
      He reaches inside his shirt and scratches his chest. “A couple of weeks ago, the priest took me aside. He must have seen trouble coming. He suggested we table the wedding plans until Mars has some time to grieve for your mother, or work through her anger, or whatever she’s going to do. So I mentioned to Mars that maybe we ought to wait, and she said—“
      “Absolutely not.”
      “You got it in one.”
      “Do you think Mars is going to be all right, Wendell?”
      “Sure she is,” he says, then looks shamefaced, as if he’s delivered a line from a script. “I have to believe she is. I’ll find a private hospital. I’ll get her what she needs.”
      “What does all right look like for Mars?”
      “Working. She’s works harder than anyone I’ve ever known. Going out to dinner, even when she doesn’t eat much. In Victoria, she walks on the beach. Sundays, she tries to sleep in, take it easy.” He picks up a shrimp with his fingers, pops it in his mouth, and wipes the buttery sauce from his goatee with a napkin.
      “You must have a lot of household help.”
      “We have help, yes.”
      Hating myself for keeping score, I think of all the chores Deborah and I have left to do on Sundays—shopping, cleaning, homework with the boys. We can’t afford to take it easy.
      The bartender turns up the volume on the TV over the bar. A plane has crashed somewhere. Wendell motions to him to turn it back down. “For Mars,” he says, “any death watch would have been a stretch, but this particular one—”
      “Would have been impossible. Is that what you’re saying?”
      “Maybe.”
      “Because what she did at the zoo—if you’d been there—if you’d seen how weirdly calm she became before she ran toward that policeman . . . maybe it was crazy calm. Or maybe she has reserves of strength that we don’t know about, that she doesn’t know about. She might have done fine with Mom.”
      Wendell says nothing.
      “Did Mars really intend to go to Atlanta?” I ask. “She wasn’t carrying a bag when she arrived. Did she check one?”
      “I don’t know. She got herself to the airport yesterday morning. She said she was going.”
      “Because if she didn’t mean to go,” I say, “why fly this far?”
      Wendell appears to consider this. Then he shrugs.
      I picture Mars running toward the policeman with the gun, her ponytail flying in the wind like some bespectacled comic book hero’s. She might have come, I guess, to tell me in person that she couldn’t go to Atlanta, couldn’t help Mom die, that she could do almost anything else, but not that.
      I check my watch. It’s time to board. Mom awaits.

Jo Ann Heydron lives in Bellingham, Washington. Her work has appeared in Puerto del Sol, Trachodon, The Nebraska Review, So to Speak, and elsewhere. In 2009 she received an MFA in fiction from Pacific University. This year she’s enjoying a yearlong workshop taught by Kim Stafford through Fishtrap. She has taught at community colleges in Washington and California. Photo by Warren Miller 2012.

She sits in a fauteuil of light wood
Backed in mauve, with embroidered
Flowers. Behind her, a side table on
Which rests a large canvas of green
And brown foliage, a cotton napkin,
A table knife with an ivory handle,
A formal glass of a clear blue. Fruit
Seem to balance on the edge of the
Napkin : a russet apple, a guava, an
Innocuous and overripe avocado. It is
As if each object had been stationed in
A condition of absolute independence,
No relation seeming to subsist between
One facet and another. Our lady wears
A long skirt and a flamboyantly violet
Jacket pulled in softly at the waist by
A ceinture buckled in silver. A bloom
Of white extends across her awkward
Chest, and her hand lies passively at
Her side, three of its fingers joined by
A kind of preoccupied tension. The
Same shows in her homely visage,
Where overlarge ears ride alongside a
Face constructed as if to give the sense
Of a constant slight irritation. Madame
Wears her lips as if longing to be rid
Of them. If there is a soul of maladroit,
It lives in the frail casing of her skull.

And yet she is tender : there is a certain
Florid beauty to her. Love overcomes,
Wherever there is a body to command.

Owen Lucas is a British poet living in Norwalk, Connecticut. He grew up in rural Cambridgeshire, and began writing as a student at the University of London. His work has featured in Petrichor Machine, The MacGuffin, Psychic Meatloaf, Lines & Stars, Clinic, You Stumble Into a Room Full of Poets, and Third Wednesday, with poems soon to appear in The James Dickey Review, Electric Windmill Press, Clarion, 94 Creations, and Vector Press. His first chapbook, containing twenty-five poems inspired by the paintings of Daumier, Serusier, Gauguin and others, will be published in 2013 by Mountain Tales Press. Photo: Kathleen Telesco 2011

Olga Vilkotskaya is a graduate of the University of Washington, where she published in Bricolage, the on-campus literary arts journal. She’s the recipient of the Arthur Oberg Prize for Poetry and the Innis Arden Friends of the Arts Scholarship. She lives and works in Seattle.

10.
July, 2012. If we look to the west shortly after sundown, we can see Mars from our front porch, a faint red glow in the twilight. The astronomy website earthsky.org tells us that “Because Earth in its orbit is traveling away from slower-moving Mars and Saturn, these planets will fade in brightness and will sink lower in the evening sky. Even so, these planets will still shine as brightly as first-magnitude stars…” Mars will disappear from view in about a month—right about the time that I have to leave you.

9.
Barsoom–Abbot and Costello went there; Ice Cube fought ghosts there; it’s where Dr. Manhattan exiled himself; Yvonne Craig was one of its needed women; its natives grafted Sarah Jessica Parker’s head onto her Chihuahua’s body; Santa Claus conquered its inhabitants.

8.
I wasn’t much of a David Bowie fan, before I met you. Like everyone else, I knew he was a rock and roll legend, and I appreciated the fact that he produced Lou Reed’s best albums. But I didn’t really appreciate him until that first time we danced together, at that club’s “Retro 80s Night.” The song was “Modern Love.” We were only friends at the time, just getting to know each other, but you said, “It’s Bowie—I have to dance.” So we put our drinks down and went to the dance floor. That was when things began for us, a decade ago.

7.
In October of 2010, The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a story about two researchers—Dirk Schulze-Makuch of Arizona State University and Paul Davies of Washington State University—who proposed sending two humans to Mars on a one-way trip. These hypothetical explorers would go to the red planet and begin construction of a habitat that would, one day, house 150 people, decades after the explorers’ own deaths. At the time, we were frustrated at our jobs and with small-minded, small-town living. “So let’s go to Mars,” I suggested, joking, but also secretly longing to get away from work, away from people, away from the stress of writing and teaching and worrying about tenure and the mortgage and student loans and getting old and realizing I hadn’t done anything significant. “They probably wouldn’t let us take the cats,” you replied, knowing that would cause me to lose interest. You’re sensible like that.

6.
Bowie was The Man Who Fell to Earth.

5.
You will be living in Murfreesboro, North Carolina next year. I’ll be living in Canton, New York. The distance between these places is roughly 700 miles.

4.
We were married on Bowie’s 58th birthday. We didn’t know it was his birthday when we sent out the “Save the Date” cards, but once we found out, it seemed appropriate, and suggested some type of order or plan to the universe, a glam rock god’s Divine Providence.

3.
Depending on where each planet is in its orbit, the distance from the earth to Mars can be anywhere from 34.6 million miles to 249.4 million miles.

2.
The physical distance between us for the coming academic year seems overwhelming, but it’s really a matter of perspective.

1.
We had not planned on a long-distance relationship at this point in our careers or marriage, but come August, this is where we will be. We both decided, months ago, that this was the right thing to do, but it’s getting harder to fathom this time we will spend apart, as my departure date nears. It’s not that I’m concerned about our marriage—I know we’ll be fine. But I also know that these next few months will be lonely without you. Like sitting in a tin can, far above the moon.

Blastoff.
“Tell my wife I love her very much”—a love that’s deeper than the trenches at Noctis Labyrintus, more vast than Olympus Mons.
            -William Bradley

Devil’s Racetrack

I have tried to love
country life, small town life.

We drive the back roads,
byways a bit less than scenic
seeking the interesting and the odd.

Wandering the roads I ask you,
at every intersection,
left, right or straight ahead.

Armed only with our county maps
and our sense of adventure
we seek our fate

but we find instead
piety planted in the cotton fields
no room on the pews for us.

I have lived among
the ruritan saints,
and my sin is not fitting in.

Once again we find
the intersection.
We’re carrying a bit more now.
Let’s try a different direction this time –

The one that takes us all the way
to the interstate.
            -Emily Isaacson

William Bradley and Emily Isaacson just celebrated their 8th wedding anniversary, but they’re currently living apart because of their jobs—he is in Canton, New York, where he teaches at St. Lawrence University, while she lives and works in Murfreesboro, North Carolina, where she teaches English and critical thinking. The pieces printed here come from a book project about their relationship that they are co-authoring titled The Heretic in Exile.

William’s work has appeared in a variety of magazines and journals including The Missouri Review, Brevity, The Bellevue Literary Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The Normal School. Emily’s work has appeared in The Sixteenth Century Journal, Discoveries, University of Venus, and the Mid-America Poetry Review.

On afterlife, as long as we’re pretending, I’ll say hell I believe in.
Late at night when I think about what I’m doing with my self
and my bacterial word infection and I have friends with jobs
at some big company – which I would like to take the time now to say
I’m smart enough and could do that too and better, probably –
all I feel in the dark is a chattering of grins and teeth, and I try to laugh
back at them, like a homeless insolvent would laugh at me.

Isn’t poetry just like peeing on everything so our smell hangs around later,
acrid and deeply felt? Right here I’d rather scupper the thoughts and turn over,
saying fuck the poem, there never was a poem here, just some lost sounds
that jump you like the fall before stage one sleep. I’ve felt bad about pretending
not to have my sanity, like that one time I dressed as a punk for Halloween
and a wall-leaner yelled that’s just my life, man as I passed him on the street.

Let me keep bringing my best until all that’s left behind is the worst,
just the fats and sugars to distill into this verse. I will praise platitudes.
Life is sweet. It oscillates from young light to opaque weight and in the mix,
we are still gifted burning glances and kitchen mornings and deep sleep.
More or less, there is a fear of death, which begets a fear of being forgotten,
which is why we do anything, unless it’s for sex. I wish someone would believe me
when I say I don’t do anything for sex – just for credibility.

Leena Joshi completed the University of Washington’s undergraduate Creative Writing program, where she was a recipient of the Joan Grayston Prize in poetry. Her work has been featured before in the Red Cedar Review. An Oregon native currently living in Seattle, Washington, she likes the rain but for all she knows, it could be because it’s all she knows.