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sparkle + blink 70© 2015 Quiet Lightning

artwork © Michelle Brandemuehlmichellebrandemuehl.tumblr.com

“On Hans Fallach’s Girl with Tarpan” by E.C. Messer previously appeared in Caketrain

book design by j. brandon loberg

set in Absara

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CONTENTScurated by

Heather Bourbeau, Matt Leibel & Evan Karp

featured artist Michelle Brandemuehl

LARA COLEY St Denis 1

ANDREW O. DUGAS Crossfire 3

LENORE WEISS Self-Evidence 7

LAURA E. RUBERTO Cursing Lessons 11

ANDREA ALEXANDER Portraits of the Bible Belt 13

KATIE JENKINS-MOSES Thigh Kink 23

JAMES COTTER When Humanity Jumped the Shark 25

E.C. MESSER On Hans Fallach’s Girl with Tarpan 31

KALIA ARMBRUSTER Stay/Come 37

JOEL TOMFOHR For Anton English 39 Christmas Tree, and Lights 41 Another Late Summer Afternoon 43 The Pheasant 45

MATTHEW LEWANDOWSKI Swan Dive 49

CASEY CHILDERS It’s, Like, a Whole Regimen, Man 53

QUIET LIGHTNING IS SPONSORED BY

l a g u n i t a s . c o m

QUIET LIGHTNING

A 501(c)3, the primary objective and purpose of Quiet Lightning is to foster a community based on literary expression and to provide an arena for said expression. QL produces a monthly, submission-based reading series on the first Monday of every month, of which these books (sparkle + blink) are verbatim transcripts.

Formed as a nonprofit in July 2011, the board of QL is currently:

Evan Karp executive director

Chris Cole managing director

Josey Lee public relations

Meghan Thornton treasurer

Kristen Kramer chair

Kelsey Schimmelman secretary

Sarah Ciston director of books

Katie Wheeler-Dubin director of films

Laura Cerón Meloart director

Christine Noproducer/assistant managing director

If you live in the Bay Area and are interested in helping—on any level—please send us a line:

evan@ quiet l ightning .org

- SET 1 -

1

L A R A C O L E L

ST DENIS

For Gui

Aujourd’hui, en haute voix, j’ai lu le poème à Marie, le poème qui dit que tu pourrais mourir et je ne saurrais jamais. Après, j’ai entendu des morts, des hommes qui ont déchiré ta ville, qui sont allés après toi, qui ont tire des fusibles en metal dans des os, qui voulais renverser du sang des corps comme le tien, dans le quartier que tu surveilles, dans le quartier où j’ai dit, Mais je me sens bien ici, n’importe ce qu’ils disent. Et j’ai cherché les photos surligne pour juste un detail de toi, je me sentais ridicule en regardant les fesses des hommes bien blindé, en pensant que je pourrais t’identifier par même ça, que je te connais tellement bien, chaque centimetre de toi, le mouvement de ta marche, la ligne de tes cheveux, que je connais même comment le tissu te touche, comment tu le veux près, tu veux qu’il se sent comme la peau, tu veux qu’il te tienne entier.

Today I read the poem aloud to Marie, the one that says you could die and I wouldn’t ever know. And then I heard about the deaths, about the men who ripped open your city, who went after you, who lit metal fuses into bone, who wanted to spill blood from

2

bodies like yours, in the neighborhood you patrol, in the one that I said, But I feel safe here, no matter what they say. And I searched the photos online for a glimpse of you, feeling ridiculous for looking at the asses of heavily armored men, for thinking I could identify you by even that, that I know you that well, every inch of you, the sway of your stride, the line of your hair, that I even know the way cloth touches you, how you want it close, you want it to feel like skin, how you want it to hold you together.

3

A A D R E W O . D A A A S

CROSSFIRE

The driver-side window collapses to the seat like a shower of shattered diamonds. Mary stares at the blue-tinted treasure next to her, distracted only by the dim buzzing in her head and the sudden wet warmth creeping over her shoulder.

Flashes of lightning. Thunder shaking the whole car.

The sheet metal thunder of cheap sound effects. She and Keith had recently seen a live performance of an old radio play with a young man and woman who would shake a dangling sheet of metal to produce the sound of booming thunder. The couple, fresh-faced and deadly serious in their vintage 1930s garb, were about the same age as her own son, Martin. Whenever they reached for the dangling metal, Mary knew the thunder was coming any second.

Keith. Where was Keith? The ATM. I’ll be just a second, honey.

Lightning brightens the car like flashbulbs. The thunder comes with a rapid-fire immediacy. Less BOO-OOO-OOM, more BOOM BOOM BOOM.

4

The entire windshield crystallizes and it’s like staring into blind frost. Mary’s foot panics toward an imaginary brake pedal but of course she’s in the passenger seat, and the car is already stopped.

Indeed, the car is parked, Keith having only a moment earlier pulled into the red zone outside the Bank of America. The engine is idling, shift in Park, handbrake up. I’ll be just a second, honey.

BOOM BOOM BOOMBOOMBOOM

She wonders if Martin would like to work in the theatre, even if it means just shaking sheet metal to produce thunder. He was in the drama club in high school and seemed to have liked it.

Mary, her shoulder wet and warm, even though she is feeling quite chilly, cannot for the life of her remember the name of the play.

Keith would know. Mary thinks, I’ll call and ask him. She glances around for her purse, where her cell phone is tucked away, sees the red leather on the floor, between her feet, diamonds everywhere.

She reaches for it but her arm doesn’t move. Mary looks down the length of her arm, all the long way to her hand, which is curled into an unresponsive claw. A solid line of blood runs down her wrist, the side of her hand, and finally her pinky, drip-drip-dripping into

Andrew O. dugAs 5

the dark recess of the cup holder.

What was the name of that damned play?

Red and blue lights. Sirens. More booming thunder.

Outside the shattered driver-side window, a man appears, his head covered with a ski mask. No, one of those Mexican wrestling masks. Red, green, and white. He does not look at Mary. She wonders if he knows that she is even there.

A sudden knot of lightningthunderlightningthunder. The man buckles, thrusting one elbow through the window to keep from falling. His hands appear and he claws the mask off his head. His hair is long and blond and plastered wet against his forehead.

He is so young, younger even than her Martin.

Blood seeps from his neck. His hands swipe at the wound, as if to pull out some offending arrow or knife or spearhead. But there is only his blood.

His gesticulations grow more frantic, and then he sees Mary. His eyes lock on her, like she has the answer. Like she can save him. Like she can encourage him to try out for that play, apply to this college, make pretend thunder in the blue recesses of the theatre.

His hand reaches toward her, but she cannot reach back.

6

Her arm is dead, reduced to an exit ramp for her own blood. She shrugs, embarrassed. She wants to help. More than anything she wants to help.

The young man’s gaze, dull and slow but nonetheless focused, takes in her arm and her blood. She shrugs again. His face tightens and he shakes his head. One sudden effort and he jerks the door open. He falls to his knees but still tries to press forward into the Subaru.

He reaches across the spill of diamonds in the driver’s seat and takes Mary’s hand in his, as if she could pull him to safety.

Mary tries to grip back. She tells herself that it’s enough that they are together. She takes comfort in the pressure of their fingers wrapping around each other. She relaxes back into the seat leather, appreciating fully for the first time how luxurious it is. Keith had insisted on the leather, damn the expense.

“You were right, honey,” she says aloud. “It was worth it.”

Mary closes her eyes and waits for the thunder.

Any second now, she thinks. Any second.

7

L E A O R E W E I S S

SELF-EVIDENCE

1

Underneath a drone of airplanes, I hear the chant of clouds,

drift across the top of apartment buildingssinging songs to glass rooftops and satellite dishes

and crowsgathered on telephone wires close to where people drink lattes with low-fat milk,

foamingmustaches evaporate.

Long before cataracts drifted above my head—I was a girl handing out leaflets—fingers greasy black from mimeo machines behemoths in every storefront where the changelingsof my generation spent summers collecting petitions against the War in Vietnam,marching down Fifth Avenue in a cavalcade of banners,the Civil Rights Movement, assassinations imprintedon our brains, memorized the combination.

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Interviewed paraplegic Vietnam veterans in VA hospitals

who helped each other to commit suicide, read Walt Whitman, celebrationsof good and plenty gone to lumber, building ships, railroads, and cities.

I wanted a job to pay the red robin of my worth,a woman who took a turn handing out leafletsand baptized hurricanes with the names of men.

2

Later, I had a front row seat at the computer revolution.

The first time I looked into a flickering CRT screen and talked

to a stranger, the futureand its green letters danced around my event horizon.

Real time meant wall clock time, tick tock right now time,

But there were other times, a virtual time that lived inside

an application, also borrowed time, stealing an integerfrom one column to pay for the next, the way life and

deathare two sides of the same copper penny,shopping carts rolling down the street empty.

LenOre weiss 9

Some traded picket signs to learn Assemblypredating C++ or Ruby, Moore’s Law doubling every eighteen months, a computer language of x’s and o’s that allowed an operating system to know itself,

a president electedbecause he knew how to work a TV audience, another built his base with social media, people hailed each other in a cloud of dust.

3

Now AT&T offers the cocaine of four additional lines.We hold our cell phones to take selfies,

post the address of a new restaurant,an electrified didgeridoo in the subway,at a fundraiser reading poetry,the rescue puppy who needs adoption,new sketch of a jazz musician,baby’s first birthday party,graduations, baseball games, tomatoes in our gardens,standing in front of a sign, a car, a house,persimmons in a bowl with purple orchids,marches on the streets of Hong Kong,demonstrations on the streets of Ferguson,people fleeing homes in Gaza,

and we want everyone to like us for who we are

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and we want everyone to like us for who we are

as a murder of crows gather on telephone wires,as clouds keep changinguntil the whole sky becomes one cloud,and I hear a voice chanting and I strain to hear the

words.

11

L A A R A E . R A B E R T O

CURSING LESSONS

Christmas eve, the kids no longer at the table, my seventy-year old mother tells us that when she was a girl she used to stand in a corner of a room and curse under her breath—vai a morire ammazzato, li mortacci tua, mignotta. A string of glorious obscenities in her native Roman dialect roll off her tongue like sweet notes of a lullaby.

She wanted to hear the sound of those forbidden words, feel them, she admits: “I liked how they moved around in my mouth. Saying them out loud made them real, even if no one heard me and I never got caught.”

It’s touching to hear her tell this innocent story, so different from her typical, much-repeated, girlhood memories of American GIs giving her chocolate.

And then she adds, with a knowing gaze, “beh, si, bad things they feel so good.”

13

A A D R E A A L E A A A D E R

PORTRAITS OF THEBIBLE BELT

Portrait I: of my grandmother

Over the breakfast table,forks scraping on coronet plateswith dainty blue trim,she was “grimmaw” to me,as in, “grimmaw thanks for making me oats,”

or “grimmaw, where is the sugar?”but roosting amongflocks of mockingbirdsI sacrificed her name to the guillotine with a flap of

my tongueGrandma, my grandmother,the “d” an axe,the memory of “d” burned into the fractals of my iris

so tonight I could only speak to herwith my head bowed.Best the mockingbirds don’t knowthe way grimmaw’s head bows,back hunched over the butter churn until her speech

turns to whey,whiskey floating through the roomas though her son thinks his moustache will filter

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out the smell.grimmaw used to tell meif I sprinkled salt on a bird’s wingit wouldn’t be able to flyand I could catch one.I didn’t believe her, but chased crows through the

flowerbeds with a salt shakerso I could believe her when she promised me next

summer the bluejays would sing.

AndreA ALexAnder 15

Portrait II: of my uncle, at his funeral

They lined his casket with purple silkand rimmed his neck with the samesilk striped tie you wear to church on Sundays to

hide the buttons on your shirtso the preacher can hide from your bare chest.

I say, Larry’s fingernails are too clean.

In death they made him lie,the same as when he threw newspaper over the

empty glass bottles in the trash can before grandma came calling.

In death they made him lie stillwith lips shut over his tar-stained teethand hands unrounded,ironed to his abdomen lest his callusespull threads on his purple satin pillow.

In his death they lied to themselves to grow a womb to hold their sadness and hide it under the dirt.

I say,they should bury him on Saturday night by the

bonfire while I skirt between their cursesand crawl up to the roof, unsupervised,to hide from the cigarette smoke rolling off their lipsand pretend someone in an airplane will see me

waving.

16

But since grimmaw only recognizes him on Sundays, they buried him in a suit

on a Sunday morning bathing in purple,singingLord, make me an instrument of thy peaceto Larry our king, our savior.

AndreA ALexAnder 17

Portrait III: of the family heirloom I keep in my pantry

Flour on the table edgestreaks white across her navy apron, egg splattered

against sunset air.It smells like baconand sizzles like needles falling on the wooden floor

every afternoon by the window,thumbing color swatches and old buttons.I ate her grits and chocolate cakeswith the guilt of the floors she sweptand the sons and daughters who never called,my arms pulley-rigged, spooning dirt into a mound

that grows behind our backs;shields us from the summer sun.Grass roots itself,sticks in my bare feet as I turn aroundto plow up the hillstraight into the heat of the oven’s mouth, hugging

her mother’s mother’s cast-iron skillet, seasoning from years I never saw

flaking onto my grown palms,molecules of lard or collards or venison.Below, her navy apron is still prickled with grease,

and I’m licking icing off my fingers in the morning.

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Portrait IV: of my father

My father would furrow his brow,forehead wrinkled up like cotton rows,a series of rises and creases bunching up at the horizontapering off at the line where his hair used to be.

“Stop callin’ it a trailer. It’s a mobile home,”he said.What he meant was:

“I didn’t fail.”

This isn’t Georgia, wherethe girls are sweet peaches sugary-sap-dribbling-

down-your-chin sticky in the heatBelles with petticoatsand lustful accents.

This is Bama, wherebits of pine cone stickin the bottoms of naked feet pattering, pantingthrough the forest;twigs sprout at jutted anglesfrom little banshee headswhose cheeks never scrub clean.

When the tornadoes came in summer,we’d all sit around the tvstruggling to remember which was ‘warning’ and

which was ‘watch’,rain on the tin roof

AndreA ALexAnder 19

like pebbles in my stomach,bolts of light slashing the sky openlike my brushthrown in angerwhen it shattered the mirror,thunder sending shivers all over the earthlike the cabinet trembled when my brother’s head

crashed into itafter he was thrown.

“Dad I didn’t mean to drop the eggs,”he saidtoo late.

Last winter, I went back,mascara coating my lasheshair neatly brushedconfused for a Yankee.

My father lookedcrookwaysdownat my baby sister,kissing her foreheadso softly,the slitted eyes I remembertoo tired to be angry.

“She is my second chance,”he said.He never could say:

“I’m sorry.”

20

Portrait V: of a blueberry donut I ate at age 22

I unzipped my white skirtin a Chevron station bathroomnext to the Holiday Inn,let it fall past my anklesto pool around the black stalksthrusting my heels away from the tile floor.

Four inches to make sure I wasalmost as tall as the men,but small enough to lettheir sunshine faces beam down onmy flowered collar bone,their sunbeam hands to entice me open.

The man tonight liked mini skirts.He liked young girls,so I wore light pink lipstick.

If I saw that man again now,after changing back intoblue jeans and tennis shoes,my lips would be four inches lower.I would know that he felt my heartbeatcloser to his stomach.I would know that the memoryof kissing his jawlinewithout having to pull his head downby his necktiebelonged to a girl with longer legs.

AndreA ALexAnder 21

Last week I had cried alone in the kitchenover my last ten dollars, and the failed blueberry pancakesthat hugged my spatula like a spool of tangled yarn.

The Chevron station had blueberry cake donutsso I asked the clerk if she could make changefor a hundred dollar bill.

When she smiled I wondered if she knew,if she’d been there before,if she would have done the same.

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K A T I E J E A K I A S - M O S E S

THIGH KINK

I got a thing for thighs.I wanna cross my legs.That’s it, I’ve got a thigh kink. I see those spindly legs crossing.Even the meaty ones too.All these feminine legs crossing, sometimes even legs

attached to dicks.They crossing too.Damn, those crossing legs be the image of a woman.All proper and shit. Perfect for women in skirts. In dresses. In culture.Any proper lady got to cross her legs.My legs must be broken. Or maybe I am.My legs don’t cross. My thighs too think. Gotta

physically pull up one leg onto andover the other. Then like held by a rubber band the leg will eventually shoot back down. My legs must be broken.

Thick fatty thighs just don’t leave enough space for crossing. Instead my legs spread open.

It’s some improper shit.Sometimes I cross my ankles. But eventually that

hurts and gets old too. I yearn to cross my legs.I gotta thigh kink.

25

J A M E S C O T T E R

WHEN HUMANITYJUMPED THE SHARK

It was the year the Patriots went 19-0 that things started going poorly for humanity.

this aspect of the story was not reported on.

for years before this the unimaginable had become imaginable so many times,

that it meant less and less to imagine anything.

the export of the American lifestyle was rapid, and everyone in China started driving cars.

the exact breaking point could not be pinpointed.

if you asked some family, it would be the day their son or daughter stopped keeping up with the burden of each day,

lost their job, and succumbed to this or that.

the way a suspension bridge, if neglected, will pull at all points, until some weakest point unravels its cable braid,

starting a seaward cascade.

26

nobody knew, watching the presentation of the Lombardi trophy,

that all humans before and after, had aspired to this point, and would use it as reference.

that all tales of myths of glory, all pomp of Rome and madcap Mongol sieges, were approximations of this.

that from this time on, when the present was compared with the past, there would be no forgiving vagaries of a blurred historical record,

to help us discount what we had once been.

this time, a perfection we could not live up to ever again was captured in high definition.

sometime before, a guy named Gene Sprague jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, after walking back and forth for 90 minutes,

with his hair whipping about and his life’s agitations playing repeatedly on his face and in his nervous and surprisingly ungrand gestures.

and he stood, on a rail, facing away from the water, and tipped away from foot-traffic,

with Christ-like arms and two or three unscored gymnastic tumbles, into

an ocean

JAmes COtter 27

that is no great fan of the Patriots, even though they were the greatest of all time.

and this leap was captured as part of a feature film. the clip then was posted, once or twice, or so, on YouTube and people put the music they felt fit to it.

this is an obscure reference, the analogy to past works being the historical or minor figure for whom a scholar would require a footnote to explain or even justify.

now of course, the only universal of this age, being the lack of all universality and so the equivocation of everything, this reference isn’t the type a scholar could explain or

justify.

now there are resources to research that make their funneling of the characters of a poem or a reference unnecessary.

only the Patriots, whom everybody knows, and FreekboyG, whom nobody knows, remain in the common voice.

and after the Patriots, there was no point in

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singularities, and no story could have a happy ending.

humanity held on for a while, fidgeted, looked upon Tom Brady’s god-like face, and surrendered, in careless spirals and collapsing bridges.

- SET 2 -

31

E . C . M E S S E R

ON HANS FALLACH’SGIRL WITH TARPAN

The painter Hans Fallach, whose work is largely un-remarkable but who has risen to prominence in the Western art world for his unnerving 1912 composi-tion Girl with Tarpan, is remembered this month with a special exhibition in Munich, the artist’s hometown. On the occasion of its near-centennial, I have taken the opportunity to revisit this improbable masterwork, which I first saw on tour many years ago in a cramped secondary gallery of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and have followed with great interest ever since.

The painting was composed quite purposefully in the Impressionist mode, a style from which, throughout his entire career, Fallach never deviated. Briefly sum-marized, it depicts an early 20th century European zoological garden, presumably in spring. In the fore-ground we are given a partial view of a large-animal enclosure in which a single, petite quadruped resem-bling a tarpan—the Asiatic horse whose 1909 extinc-tion was challenged by the zookeepers of Munich, though long after Hans Fallach’s time—stands in quiet obedience. At the heart of the painting, trapped on the opposite side of the enclosure, stands

32

a girl in a lemon-yellow pinafore gazing intently and almost entirely at the tarpan—though also, very slightly, at the viewer. She cannot be more than eleven or twelve years old, and she regards the tarpan with such esteem and longing that we are led to believe she wants nothing more in all the world than to lay a small, unassuming hand upon its sloping mane. Other details of the scene are cursory at best (a pathway, a building or two in the background, some kind of sky); it is the congress between girl and tarpan alone which generates the painting’s curious, unlikely power.

From a technical standpoint, the painting’s efficacy is difficult to explain. Fallach’s slavish devotion to the Impression as late as 1912 is initially suspect, on top of which the painting’s adherence to its chosen style is incomplete. Rather than capturing the light and image of a passing moment, Fallach’s girl and tarpan sink forever into the canvas in an eternity of girls and tarpans. Meanwhile, the extraneous background details of the painting detach themselves and float away, leaving the two figures on a nearly-empty plane. In addition to these shortcomings, there is the rest of Fallach’s oeuvre to consider; how could the author of such petty canvases as Königinstraße Window-Box and Early Afternoon in the Blue Doorway have executed the astounding Girl with Tarpan? Failing any explanation of natural talent, aesthetic sensitivity, or artistic de-velopment, the secret of the painting’s success in the wake of so many failures may perhaps be found in the artist’s biography.

e.C. messer 33

Hans Fallach was born in 1880 near St.-Jakobs-Platz in Munich, a German Jew with an inexplicably Gælic surname. Little is known of his origins except that his father was a cloth merchant and also, perhaps, a tailor. Of his mother, Fallach mentions in passing (in an ardent letter to German poet Stefan George that never reached its intended recipient) her shockingly red hair. No additional details survive.

Fallach did not appear before the gods of history in earnest until 1900, his twentieth year, when he began to show his work in the cafés and minor salons of Munich.

By that time it seems that he had broken entirely with his natural family—whether for personal or profes-sional reasons, fear of anti-Semitic censure or simple indifference, we do not know.

Hans Fallach became an Impressionist painter at a time when Impressionism was out of fashion every-where—even Americans were, by that time, beginning to look at hard angles with something other than derision. The Gallic discipline arrived late in Germany, if it can be said to have arrived at all, eclipsed as it was by Post-Impressionism and later, the Expres-sionist works of Der Blaue Reiter. Somehow Fallach managed to exist entirely outside these advances; the elegant simplicity of Max Liebermann was perhaps his sole contemporary influence. Through his early twenties he continued to paint in blissful ignorance

34

of modernity. Meanwhile, both the conservative and the elderly grew fond of his work, steeped as it was in orthodoxy and sentimental calm. By 1904 Fallach had earned enough money to quit his day job at one of the cafés which grudgingly hung his paintings, and to wed.

In 1905 he married Gerta Grün, the Gentile daughter of a Münicher house-painting contractor and retailer. (Despite the claims of more fanciful historians, it is im-possible to determine if this same man later hired onto his crew a young Viennese transplant with artistic pre-tensions named Adolf Hitler.) From his father-in-law Hans Fallach obtained for his work not the paint itself, but the supplies with which he mixed his own oils.

Following the birth of their only child, a dour and troubled boy christened Nils after neither his Jewish nor his Lutheran forbearers, Hans and Gerta grew apart—he retreating into painting, she to the succor of a child with the unsettling habit of smothering sparrows and other small birds in turpentine-soaked pillowcases. In the wake of his son’s increasing violence, Fallach began to concentrate greater and more protracted intensity on landscapes and fauna; his human figures, already dim and out-of-focus, now disappeared entirely.

In 1912, Nils Fallach strangled and butchered a large albino peacock that had managed—who knows how?—to escape from a wealthy neighbor’s aviary. The results of the boy’s efforts were arranged carefully

e.C. messer 35

on his parents’ bed, awaiting eventual discovery by his horrified mother and permanently staining the Bavarian lace duvet (a wedding present from Herr Grün). It was perhaps this act of barbarism on the part of his son, the last he would ever witness, which inspired the series of events resulting in Hans Fallach’s only masterpiece.

That night, Nils was spirited away by agents in the employ of Gerta’s father. He told his daughter and son-in-law that the child had been sent to a country hospital that specialized in such situations. The next day, the grieving mother took to her bed and Fallach to the streets of Munich. In the evening he returned to his studio only, and through the tradesman’s entrance. He never again set foot in the house. Two weeks later, Girl with Tarpan sat finished on an easel by the door, but Hans Fallach was gone.

Following the turmoil of two World Wars, the painting was unearthed as a symbol of German cultural endurance and for years made a grand tour of Europe and the Americas. Finally, judged too old-fashioned for the Pinakothek der Moderne, the painting was installed in the Neue Pinakothek, where it may now be viewed alongside a smattering of the artist’s minor works; generously donated by prominent local citizens. Critics with more speculative minds than mine have suggested that the Girl of the painting’s title was sacrificed to both Fallach’s domestic despair and his artistic ambitions—that this great work came

36

at the price of a human soul. More difficult to dismiss than this absurdity is the appearance of the tarpan, impossible between its 1909 extinction and attempts at its regeneration in the Fascist 1930s. One can easily imagine that Fallach saw such a beast prior to 1909, perhaps on a youthful outing, which he recreated in 1912 from memory and extant zoological sketches. What one cannot imagine is that the scene between girl and tarpan is anything other than a moment from real life. Of the fourteen days spent in the studio, the actual process behind Girl with Tarpan, and the eventual whereabouts of its composer, we know nothing. However, we do know that two weeks prior to Hans Fallach’s disappearance and the painting’s discovery, a twelve-year-old girl was reported missing from Tierpark Hellabrunn—the Munich zoo.

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K A L I A A R M B R A S T E R

STAY/COME

When you said goodbye,your voice was as softand as thin as a goldfish tail.We thought I should leave the stationbefore the train came,and my feet took me outside.I walked with an ache,something like a pin in my hip,sand gathering in my throat,an empty seat.I couldn’t see you in the trainand summer ended.Time went back to movingthe way it’s supposed to.Nothing was slow,my blood was blood, fluid and quick.I couldn’t see you in the train,the space between us was heavy, was solid.You sat still with salt from my eyes on your neck,and I rocked and rockedlike a peach in boiling water.

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J O E L T O M F O H R

FOR ANTON ENGLISH

Lying about, you see him. It is you. It is some afternoon or another. It doesn’t matter. Maybe it is the late August afternoon of going to Wakanda Park on Lake Menomin. Ah Ojibwe county. Your mother has wet hair. Her skin smells of sun block, some strange coconut, and pine needles. There are snacks; cold chicken from yesterday, yes. Potato chips, salty, yes. Pop, fizzy and cold too and sugary, yes. How content you are. You go down to the sandy shore. Other people stand in the water—young fathers with pale skin, the beginnings of the bellies of adulthood and, yes, of old age. Young country mothers with pale skin, too, yes. The stretch marks that come from giving birth. They are halves of people in the water. You are between older brother (please don’t drown me) and younger (I will not drown you). Turn around. Quiet Mother looks back at you. One. Two. Three. All three of you are one. Does she smile when she waves? Yes she does. You swear you can hear the click of the many rings on the long, slender fingers of her strong and delicate hands. She sweeps salty potato chip crumbs from the picnic table, yes. They land next to drying and dried out pine needles. You smell the pine needles from here at the shore. You swear it. At the shore, your feet

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disappear into the water. Now shins, now knees, and now shorts. The next part is the worst. It is cold, yes, and it is wet. Now he becomes half a person like the others in the water.

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CHRISTMAS TREE, AND LIGHTS

The green-black Christmas tree at night in the living room sat silent when the boy returned home with his dad.

“Wait here at the door,” his dad said, and he disappeared behind the tree. Now the green-black tree glowed warmly with its varicolored lights. “Why couldn’t you stay out at Jim’s?”

“It smelled funny,” the boy admitted. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“Shall I lay the sleeping bags out under the tree?”

His dad had a strange way of talking. Everything out at Jim’s house seemed rough and hard, unrecognizable.

“Yes,” the boy said.

The boy went up the stairs to the bedroom that he shared with his younger brother.

“David,” he whispered. “David.” He touched David’s shoulder gently. “Come to sleep under the tree with me and Dad.”

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Now the boy, David, and their dad lay beneath the glowing tree and outside a light dusting of white snow began to fall. The snow fell without a sound until all three, father and two sons, slept. And while they slept still it fell through the cold and dark winter night. This would be the last holiday season for his dad in the house.

JOeL tOmfOhr 43

ANOTHER LATE SUMMER AFTERNOON

At the edge of the family, there he stood. It was another late summer afternoon—they all seemed like late summer afternoons. They were gathered around the lawn chairs in a circle in the shade of the wide trunk, of the big leaves of the catalpa tree: mother, father, two older brothers and younger. The younger—he was the youngest of them all—was held between his mother’s strong legs. At the edge of the circle they had made, there he stood. There was the boy, at the edge of his family. He wore blue shorts. He wore no shirt. His small tummy and chest were brown from the sun, his face pink. From the edge of his family he saw his father, slender father. Here was the story that his slender father told while they were gathered in the circle beneath the shade of the catalpa tree as the sun slowly made its way across the now late afternoon sky.

He began: “When I was a boy, not much older than you, Joel, I was sick.”

All of the brothers looked to their mother, and she nodded yes, it was true. “Your father almost died,” she said.

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“I almost died,” he said. “But I went to the doctor, and I stayed in bed all winter while all the other boys and girls my age played in the snow.”

He and his brothers were silent. At the edge of his family the boy stood, held by his love for them, held by their love for him. The family dog that had been sleeping in the warm sun, the black cocker spaniel came to sit beside the boy. He ran his small fingers through the dog’s thick, black fur. The dog loved it when the boy did this.

“But in spring,” his dad said. “In spring I became better, and I was saved by love. My parents and my brother and sisters took care of me. They loved me.”

The boy looked to his mother as she held his youngest brother between her strong legs, and he caught her, unaware of herself, looking away lost, it seemed, in a thought that was not now, that was not here.

At the edge of his family on this late summer afternoon—they all felt like late summer afternoons back then—there he stood held by the love and the mystery of his family.

JOeL tOmfOhr 45

THE PHEASANT

“Did you see it?”

“I saw it.”

“Did you see it?”

“I saw it.”

They walked along the fence of the property of a farmer his dad knew. Father and three sons—the oldest was twelve, the next was ten, and the boy was five. He held his father’s big hand and it was warm. The air was crisp. The trees had lost most of their leaves by now. Those that clung to the withered branches were brown and brittle. The sky was clear and blue. His father had spotted a pheasant, the bright red tail of it.

“Where is it?” the boy asked.

“Shh,” the oldest brother said.

“I see it,” said the brother that was ten.

The boy’s father scooped him up in his arms so that

46

he could look from above. “Do you see it now?” he whispered with warm breath in his ear.

The boy looked. The grass around the lone leafless tree, its branches and trunk withered and strong at once. Gnarled. And then from the brown brittle, deep green almost not green so deep alighted the pheasant, the bright red tail of it like a fresh red wound.

“I see it,” the boy said.

“In the thicket.” His father smiled at the boy in his arms.

“Do people hunt those?”

“They do. The meat tastes good.”

“I would not eat them.”

“Quiet,” said the older brothers. “You’ll scare him away.”

From the thicket , the snapping of the twigs, the dry cold near winter landscape gave them up and the pheasant stood still.

“Where’d it go?”

And then thump, thump it rose from the thicket in a blur.

“Wow,” the boy said, following its arc into the clear

JOeL tOmfOhr 47

crisp blue sky. The sun was so bright that the boy lost the bird in the lances of light, and it was gone to him. The moment had ended. His father set the boy down and took the boy’s hand in his warm hand. The two older brothers ran ahead, and they all moved forward together through the crisp morning air of their late fall walk.

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M A T T H E W L E W A A D O W S K ISWAN DIVE

Today I watched a pigeon commit suicide. I mean, he really stayed up there contemplating for like, ten or fifteen minutes. I was waiting in line for a sandwich so I didn’t have much else to do but stand and watch. The thing about eliminating your own map via tall city building if you’re a pigeon is that the rescue team doesn’t have to shout with one of those bull horns from the ground level to try to talk some sense into you. They can literally fly right next to you and have a chat about whatever they chat about. Usually things like, “you don’t have to do this,” “what would your mother say?” or, “think about your little sister,” etc, I think. You could even have some friends fly up there and bring you a few beers, watch the baseball game together through some guy’s window, who is probably also drinking a few beers. All of this made this choice of the pigeon’s, I mean standing on the ledge and going for the ultimate plummet, seem pretty awkward. He could have just flown in front of a train, stayed in the middle of the street when a car tried to pass, or even kept his place on the sidewalk while hundreds of tourists herded through town without even looking where they were going. The spectacle, though. It’s all about the show, the statement, the message to

50

your fellow community. I still don’t know why he chose the old fashion face first dive.

The thing was strange to watch, notwithstanding the awkward fact that this pigeon had made up his mind that it was over. I mean, you see a pigeon fall, and it’s like, he could just save himself at any moment by flying away. So I was standing there like expecting a spectacular recovery, one all his friends would be proud of. But, nothing. Just: thump. The bird must have really been fed up, to go out like that and all.

But the way that it looked, that was the most intriguing part, falling with like a blatant disregard for the law of conservation of angular momentum. The bird stood up there, perched right, kind of walking back and forth, bobbing his head in and out, looking at something on the roof, looking up, looking back down, sort of sizing up his options I guess. So then the moment came. He’s all in. No escape.

Actually here’s another fascinating thing. For a bird, the ledge does not equal the point of no return, does it? He’s got like a few more seconds where he’s got to be committed to the fall, so he doesn’t abort the mission and all. But he’s decided to take the first step now, at the ledge. He’s facing forward, away from the building, looking out over the other buildings and toward the rest of the city, head held high, proud. His feet are wrapped around the railing as he pivots forward. It starts slowly. At first it’s not clear, maybe he’s just

mAtthew LewAndOwski 51

a little inebriated and losing his balance. But then he speeds up, pivoting downward, head now racing toward the horizontal position. This circumstance, the force of gravity on the center of mass of the bird combined with the fact that his feet are attached to the railing, sets up what is called in the profession of physics, and, like, many other mechanical trades, a lever arm. This generates an initial amount of angular momentum so that as the bird decides to let go, he may not have a lot of self confidence, but what he’s got is a lot of angular momentum.

At this point, it’s hard to say what’s going through the poor little guy’s cranial nervous system. He’s probably actually pretty nervous. As he pivots down, when he reaches approximately a horizontal position, his wings puff up and you could almost think he was about to abort. But it’s just a brief little puff as the air rushes up between his wings and his body. He must be pretty relaxed, actually, because this puff seems to catch him off guard. But then he quickly pulls his wings in, bodyward.

And then all the angular momentum just seems to, like, vanish. He is pivoting downward, gravity generating the A.M. and then he decides to let go. Then the puff thing happens. Now the sucker’s really falling, not attached to anything. Hundreds of years of physical intuition would tell you that this bird should keep rotating, head over heels if you will, while he falls, so the good old angular momentum vector L doesn’t

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change because now that he’s let go the lever arm is gone. Rotational and translational motion decoupling is what we should have here.

But what really happened was when his head finally reached the maximum downward position, all rotational motion stopped and this poor guy was swan diving like a bullet directly for the pavement, which I guess he didn’t really see, given the position of his eyes and all. He was more like looking up and down the street to see if anything interesting was going on. Come on, he must have known he was the only show on this block on this AM.

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C A S E L C H I L D E R S

IT’S, LIKE,A WHOLE REGIMEN, MAN

So Ricky’s sprinting back and forth between a dumpster and a pile of discarded Eddie Money cassettes in the alley behind the 7-Eleven.

Coach doesn’t see much point in it, and he says as much, but Ricky figures he oughtta at least try to get something out of these sessions to justify the money his mom is spending.

It’s not much—

“just a little beer money,” is how Coach put it with a wink, which had been way cheaper than the other running coaches she’d called

—but in the six weeks since they’d begun training together Ricky’s form has gone completely to shit and he’s lost more than a minute off his mile.

It’s probably the smoking.

Coach insists on it.

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“Man’s gotta smoke,” he says. “Life don’t do a man any favors. No point in doing any favors for life.”

The drinking’s not helping much either.

The fact that Ricky’s fifteen and bound for state championships doesn’t matter a whole lot. The only thing he’s gotten better at in the last six weeks is hiding a hangover and staring into the middle distance after making some obtuse philosophical comment on the absurdity of human existence.

So he runs sprints between sips of Coach’s special blend of schnapps and Steel Reserve while Coach drills him on the hierarchy of oppressive institutions that secretly run the world from behind the scenes.

It was an easy enough mistake to make. His parents’ optimism and thriftiness combined with Coach’s misleading flyer that read, “You can never run fast enough. Call Coach.”

Plus the tabs across the bottom of the flyer with the telephone number had made it seem pretty legit.

That he wasn’t so much a running coach as a guy named Coach who posted flyers all over town with vague, nihilistic aphorisms and the 7-Eleven payphone number was an easy detail to miss.

He’d coached life choices, swimming, archery,

CAsey ChiLders 55

business management, sales, crossfit, jazz vocals, bouldering, retirement planning, crew, grant writing, and artistic gymnastics as a result of similar misun-derstandings throughout the years.

Nobody ever got what they’d come for, but nobody ever cared too much after a week or two in Coach’s company.

They’d wander town at dusk under his direction with smokes dangling loosely from the corners of their mouths while he illustrated the pointlessness of it all, throwing rocks through the windows of check cashing places and nursing homes; setting mailbox fires; and opening fraudulent shell corporations in the names of distant relatives.

Eventually each of his clients was so broken down that they’d stop coming to Coach altogether and fade into the background where they were quickly forgotten.

But Ricky was special.

His passion for track and field coupled with his natural capacity for apologetics insulated him from Coach’s more caustic traits. He just kept turning up.

And he just kept trying to improve despite Coach’s consistent encouragement to the contrary.

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“Keep on running,” Coach says. “Never seen a horse that could win against the ground forever.”

Ricky considers that thought as he tags the dumpster and makes a quick pivot. He feels his legs soften, the malt liquor digging its syrupy claws into his muscles.

“There’s only two kinds of men,” Coach says. “Dead ones and ones that don’t know they’re dead.”

It’s a grim perspective.

Ricky prefers to fantasize about smashing Cruiser Hawkins at state. Cruiser Hawkins with his perfectly feathered hair and sick abs. Cruiser Hawkins with his #squad of sick-ab’d, feather-haired bros. Cruiser Hawkins with his big brother’s international orange Jeep Wrangler and “Oh hey Ricky what sort of whip does your brother drive? Oh sorry, bruh. Forgot your brother was dead.” Cruiser Hawkins with his four-minute-seven-second mile and hey-Ricky-smell-my-finger grin.

If he beats Cruiser he’ll lead the field, take home state—maybe even a school record.

But Coach is quick to dissuade. “Don’t buy that shit,” he says. “You’re just a sack of teeth and wet meat with strong legs. Old Man Time’ll come around soon enough to collect whatever makes you worth a nickle.”

CAsey ChiLders 57

Laid out on his mattress with his rumpled sport coat and two dollar slacks, with his coffee-stained button down, blown-out loafers and promotional neon wayfarers, Coach looks like a caricature of a famous writer or forgettable college professor.

Ricky runs harder to shake off the idea of some sadistic personification of Time coming to take away his speed and good looks and twists his ankle in the process.

He muscles through the pain with a visible wince.

“You ever seen a gun?” Coach says, digging through the folds of his valise as Ricky rediscovers his stride.

“A gun is a perfect machine with a single purpose, but whether or not it serves that purpose—”

He produces an overripe banana to illustrate his point.

“—it’s still a fucking gun.”

Ricky pauses to reflect on that, lighting a fresh smoke and taking a long sip from his booze-filled Slurpee cup. “So you’re saying I’m a good runner even if I don’t win?”

Coach nearly chokes on a mouthful of partly-chewed banana laughing at that. “Jesus, kid. No. What even is a good runner? I’m saying get a gun.”

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Ricky eyeballs his sneakers, unsure of how best to respond. “But why?” he says, hoping it effectively articulates how little he understands why.

Coach shrugs. “There’s tall people and there’s tall people, man. What do you want me to say?”

A long silence passes over the 7-Eleven alley and neither of the two is in any particular hurry to see it go. Ricky smokes diligently and considers Coach’s in-struction. Coach deftly shotguns a tallboy of Modelo.

“Hey Coach,” Ricky says. “How come you’re like this?”

And the question’s not mean. It’s earnestly curious if anything, like how Ricky might ask his mom why his dad gets quiet whenever Ricky walks in the room, like even if his mom and dad were cutting up before he came in and his dad was laughing or something, how the room gets so quiet that it’s almost like the air is made out of glass so thin that the slightest sound would shatter it all and kill everyone in there with the shards.

He asks it like that, and that’s maybe even how Coach takes it.

“Aw shit,” Coach says. “You know how it is, kid. You try and you try until, you know, you tried. The rest is just days and nights. Toss me those smokes.”

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He doesn’t know what Coach means, but he laughs a dumb laugh and nods his head knowingly before tossing the smokes just the same. What he does know is Cruiser Hawkins isn’t going to beat himself at state. What he does know is he’s not coming any closer to a four minute mile so long as he’s standing still.

“Alright,” Ricky says, flicking his cigarette butt over the alley’s wooden fence and crouching into a starting stance. The pain in his ankle seems miles away, dulled as it is by alcohol, and the only thing Ricky feels with any intensity is the approach of victory, earned by dint of his implacable spirit. “Time me on this next lap, Coach. This is gonna be my best one yet.”

But Coach does no such thing, having passed out in the fading evening sunlight, and little of what comes after is of any particular consequence.

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