Table of Contents:

Home
Acknowledgements
Bill Roorbach Dedication
Submission Info

Archive:

Volume 1 Spring 2002

Volume 2 Spring 2003

Volume 2 Spring 2004

Volume 2 Spring 2005

Volume 5
Spring 2006:

Contest Winners

Editor's Prize

Tumbling Dice
- Steven Shattuck-

Honorable Mentions


My Peripeteia
- Tara Sumrall-

A Charming Red Stiletto Is Dangling From A Cloud
- Allison Davis-

Jenni Downing
University of Idaho

Europa at the Cusp
                            
          Stonehenge is a lot smaller than the panoramic photos would have you believe.  Those postcard photos angling in for impressive close-ups of the infamous megaliths when twilight clings to every blade of grass and stone crevice, lavish even the lowly raven perched atop the infamous sarsen stone.  Theories of origin abound and you can do what you like with them because no one really knows if the druids sacrificed enemy blood over the altar stone.  Or whether the rock formation is an overgrown celestial statement that would take you by the hand every June and December 22nd, flip you around, line you right up with the sun and show you a solstice.     
          Juli Runkle and I stand in Salisbury on real English grass that looks nothing like postcard grass.  It lies very flat and is slow to raise itself; a carpet beneath the feet of 800 other visitors, Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.  Tourist traffic is like London traffic: various widths and heights traipse and re-traipse the roundabout marked by fraying rope and dusty red arrows spray painted on the shriveled grass.  Today is another day splashed in too many shades of gray and exactly half the world is threatening rain, but there is no golden twilight backlighting Stonehenge or any of the profound silences one would expect.  The silver-blue clouds centralize with some effort, clinging to the bald heads of the old stones like harbingers on the horizon.  The wind sweeps across the ground and the bustling crowd, pushing them in circles, encouraging the masses toward the next checkmark on their to-do lists.  I sit on a low cement bench and stare at Juli, staring at Stonehenge.  The other tourists stare at Juli, staring at Stonehenge too.  Maybe they are impressed that she seems nearly as tall and thin as those stones do, from the distance the ropes impose.  Maybe they see wispy black hair trailing on the current and spider-long arms wrapped around her torso, and they have assumed she’ll tip.  They’ll be disappointed--Juli leans like the stones lean, and both of them blend into the gray.   
          A broken megalith has been moved to the last stretch of the red-rope roundabout for visitors to touch.  The stone is pale-gray beneath my hands and on it is a vibrant blood-red ladybug with five spots misconstrued on her shell; she is crawling her way across Stonehenge.  It is like all the force of summer bottled up against the rain that’s sliding from the sky now, down the stone face and into my skin.  The little beetle spreads her wings and alights against the sky.  The red on gray is like catastrophe and I have to smile because an insect just brought Stonehenge down around my feet.                 
          It’s week two in London and victory is measured now in the amount of times we get lost in the bus system and still manage to find our way back to the hostel.  Today, I’m laughing and the laughter falls like lead into the air, the breath and the laps of people leaned against windowpanes and leather seatbacks.  It’s the same bus we’ve ridden a hundred times, but there’s a different number, different driver.  And for all her long-leggedness, Juli cannot catch this escaping Red Double Decker Bus.  I finally lend a hand and she climbs aboard, the panic settles back into the shadows.  I feel the eyes on my neck, attracted to the oddity of laughter amidst the monotony of public transport.  They are gazing at us now--weighing in a new standard for silly Americans girls to live up to, and it doesn’t matter because there’s breath to be caught.  I settle back into faded leather and run my fingers along chipped red paint.
           “You could’ve let me know the bus was leaving,” she says. 
          “Maybe you should pay more attention to watching buses than you do looking at architecture,” I grin, and duck a swipe.
           The oppressive smell of too many bodies on a small deck is stealing my air and reminding me why we don’t take the bus in London at 5pm.  People are bustling again and the palpable, shivery force I’ve come to equate with London is back, jittering along the platform and through nerves.  It has limned rush-hour and made it heavy and impatient.  It is the same nervous energy that seems to sweep every individual up into its clutches, and put more expediency in their step.  We’re caught up in the heady glow and running our way to the next agenda. 
          The bus spits us out on Edgware Road and huffs off, leaves the road swimming in a dirty-grey cough.  I’m craning my neck toward Westminster Abbey, looking for signs of a top, and slip into St. Margaret’s Church of God to escape the panorama of noise and motion because none of it stops for throngs of people or straggling nineteen-year old tourists.  The war of a thousand feet slapping pavement versus the grumble of engines leaves no room for thought and there’s no breath, just dirt that crawls inside the lungs and tries to pry them inside out.  I accept a Bible and clumsily cross myself.  I’ve guessed backward.  Juli cringes but my sincerity is the winning ticket to the Father’s kindly smile, his papery, wrinkled blessing, and a pew situated beneath foggy glass windows.  The people are moving constantly, imperceptibly- kneeling, praying, pressing forward with bowed heads and litanies.  I’m no longer on the street but the reeling sensation is still there and I clasp the gnarled oak bench and ground myself in whorls and lathe-strokes that are much older than I am.  The children in the choir are singing and their God is accented by voices that float to the walls where the stained glass is trying to twinkle at me.  There are sections of musty-bottle blue sky, green grass, and yellow hair that is dry and rattled like corn husks.  The edge of brittle gray thorns dig into the Lord’s immaculate face, and four drops of startling red blood slide down the pane.  Christ is crying, and his tears are bleeding.  Somehow this goes unnoticed because the children are singing and Christ is still being crucified to the sound of a cabbie screaming on the street. 
          It is our last week in Europe, and our exhaustion testifies to our accomplishments.   There are miles of Welsh country where farm roads yawn across wheat-fields, and these miles on miles have taken their toll from us.  Mary and Michael are old and gray like the ramshackle hostel in which we meet them and his bristly pencil mustache endears him to me as much as my American impropriety does me to him.  On July 7, 2005, Michael Jackson, who owned the name first on account that he’s “sixty-bloody-seven years old” and not getting any younger, offers us a lift to the train station if we’re willing to wait a few hours.  Of course we are.  It isn’t until we’re halfway to King’s Cross, London that I glance out the train window at a station signboard that reads “Avoid London.”  Then the conductor is speaking and his words have the hushed tone of a final diagnosis: people have died and explosives were involved.  What exactly happened?  No one knows.  The man next to me is slack-jawed, oblivious to his Stella Artois emptying itself in a bubbly mess on the aisle.  By noon, the passengers are dispossessed onto the cusp of Wales and all trains have stopped moving.  Everything, has stopped moving. 
          The last-resort hotel room is immaculate, spacious, and everything it should be for $200 per night.  A portrait of a London black cab stares at me from the bedside and I turn to the television instead.    The twisted wreckage of a double-decker bus crawls across the screen and I’d love to look away but can’t.  The bus has been destroyed by a bomb.  The roof and top deck have been entirely dismantled, and the back of the bus is like black ashes and streaking burns- a cigarette butt, hastily extinguished.  Jagged metal spires that were window panes, grip-railings, and luggage racks, stretch out gnarly arms that are holding the debris of suitcases, newspapers, and clothing.  Gray buildings and faces watch the smoke cloud from the metal heap of the deepest red and it looks like something that might hurt but you want to touch it anyway--it’s like a red rose at a funeral.  The bus is familiar and I remember the smooth cool of that red structure, imagine Juli and I may have been passengers on Stagecoach London’s bus number 30 two days before it became scrap metal.  “Michael Jackson saved our lives,” I say and the words crack without humor.  But there are other incidents and when the figures are all reigned in, 52 civilians are dead, and 700 more are injured.  It is the single deadliest bombing in London since the Second World War, and it has been orchestrated by four men who will never have a chance to be hated to their face.  Three London Underground trains have also been bombed and over the course of several hours we glue ourselves to the newscast, and it glues us to desolation.  Part of me remembers a September day very much like this one.  An American tragedy from which I was separated by half a continent and empathies lost on youth.  Work crews are towing away the pieces of the double-decker now, and I want to curl my fingers toward the television and say “come back.”  I’m not finished sifting through the pieces and I’m already three years late.
          If you asked them, most Londoners wouldn’t remember the last time the   Underground was closed.  Days pass and double-decker buses aren’t taking corners over- sharp and trilling their horns across the city.  The world has stopped spinning and all existence lives in levels of silent disbelief and vertigo.  Across London, the million footsteps that trudge each day have turned to pacing, and the city traffic seems to have self-eliminated.  The sunset will be a violent shade of red as it sets over cityscape and park vista tonight.  And in two days, bodies and vehicles will crowd the streets again as the nightlife recovers.  The London Underground will take residents to work and tourists to St. Paul’s Cathedral.  Little red buses will crawl through the gray geometric nothingness like a beetle on the back of Stonehenge.  
          But for a moment, there is infinity.  A city is brought to its knees and there is the resounding lull of the reality’s stage shattered, the fragments lie at the bended knees of its actors.  For a moment, the daily grind is broken.  The driving pursuit of duty creaks to a halt, and society takes three steps back to remember itself.  And when London settles back into its own skin, it does so with a new awareness that rises from the ashes and breaks through the surface of monotony, takes its first tentative steps beyond the barrier.  It’s a brave new world, and a strange one, because some things hadn’t changed.  And many things did.