The Blo t terThe Blo t terMay 2020May 2020

magazinemagazine

The South’s Unique, FREE, International Literature and Arts MagazineThe South’s Unique, FREE, International Literature and Arts Magazine

www.b lo t t e r r ag . comwww.b lo t t e r r ag . com

G. M. Somers ..............................Editor-in-ChiefMartin K. Smith..Publisher-at-Large, TreasurerMarilyn Fontenot.....Director of DevelopmentLaine Cunningham.....Publishing ConsultantBrace Boone III....................Marketing AdvisorRichard Hess........................Programs DirectorT.J. Garrett...........................Staff Photographer

Subscriptions Contact:Martin K. Smith

M_K_Smith@yahoo.com919.286.7760

Advertisers Contact: Martin K. Smith

M_K_Smith@yahoo.com919.286.7760

Submissions and Editorial Business to:Jenny Haniver

mermaid@blotterrag.com

Garrison Somers, Editor-in-Chiefchief@blotterrag.com

919.869.7110 (business hours only! you maycall for information about snail-mail submis-

sions)

Marketing & Public Relations Contact:Marilyn Fontenot

marilyng fontenot@gmail.com

COVER: “Sungarden” by Bruce Baldwin.

Unless otherwise noted, all content copyright2020 by the artist, not the magazine.

The Blot terThe Blot ter is a production of

The Blotter Magazine, Inc.,

Durham, NC.

A 501 (c)3 non-profit

ISSN 1549-0351

www.blotterrag.com

The B l o t t e r

www.blotterrag.com

“Prayer”

Difficult times. I don’t need to tell you that, but I want you to be aware that Iam aware. What is there to say that hasn’t already been said, or that troublesthat which is already disturbed? Good question….

My thoughts are divided into four unequal quadrants: What I know, what Ithink, what I believe and what I don’t know. What I know consists of thosethings I can verify as facts. What I think consists of those things I have someknowledge of, but cannot prove or verify. What I don’t know is that verylarge set of things about which I yet have shown no interest in or may yetencounter and develop that interest. It is also all things I have tried to learnbut cannot. And what I believe is that which I have only hope or faith in butcannot verify or prove. I choose to call the divisions between these thoughtsquadrants, but this may be a misnomer as there is certainly overlap, forexample, between what I know and what I don’t know and what I think andwhat I don’t know.

To give you an example of what I’ll call quadrant 1, I know that when I typethis document and use my software application’s save function, I can put anelectronic copy of it into a file on my computer’s hard drive. It is knowledgethat I have had for quite some time, and yet it is new knowledge that did notexist for anyone on earth before I was born, in fact, barely before I became anadult. Computers have not had such capabilities for very long, in the schemeof human existence.

It may be argued by some that I do not know that the computer behaves likethis, because sometimes computers make mistakes. He argument is that Ionly trust that the electrons do what I tell them to. What this is, unfortunate-ly, is a failure in the knowledge of some people. They cannot see, or dochoose to agree that particle physics does what it does. I cannot see it,either. It can also be said that I don’t know the math that makes particles dowhat they do, so I don’t actually know what I think I know.

Hmmm.

What often happens in a discussion like this is the argument, that is the dis-cussion using reason, not the idiom for fighting with words, deteriorates intosomething ad hominem, which is a point of fallacy, or something anecdotal,which may or may not be evidence, but by itself isn’t scientific. It is insuffi-cient, a term that implies and should be inferred as only my opinion, to say“let’s agree to disagree.” I am troubled that

MAGAZINE

We often use Bobco fonts, copyrightedshareware from the Church of the

Subgenius. Prabob. We also useMary Jane Antique and other free-ware fonts from Apostrophic Labs

and other fonts from other sources.

in the Great State of Georgia!

aThe Blotter Magazine, Inc. (again, a

501(c)3 non-profit) is an education con-cern. Our primary interest is the fur-

thering of creative writing and fine arts,with the magazine being a means to thatend. We publish in the first half of each

month and enjoy a free circulationthroughout the Southeast and someother places, too. Submissions are

always welcome, as are ad inquiries.

Subscriptions are offered as a premiumfor a donation of $25 or more. Send

check or money order, name andaddress to The Blotter MagazineSubscriptions, 1010 Hale Street,

Durham, NC 27705. Back issues are alsoavailable, 5 for $5. Inquire re. same by

e-mail: chief@blotterrag.com.

sCAUTION

friends to the show that never ends

I hear this so often. There must be some way to have truth and facts, withouteveryone squaring off in corners, gloves down. Let’s just say that What IKnow has the least solid foundation of the four quadrants. As it should.

To continue…

What I think is a rather large quadrant. That’s because I think a lot, aboutlots of different things. People, my friends and family. Places I’ve been andwant to go, and history and music. Poetry takes a lot of my thinking, andwordplay in general. I think, like many writers do, about my work-in-progress, what is coming together and what’s still broken, and what needs tostill be figured out. I don’t have much free time, because I’m not sure pre-cisely what that means to most people, but I try to keep a lot of balls in theair, am rarely bored, and don’t consider thinking as wasting time or “doingnothing.” What I think has been full of things like “I think she likes me” and“I think that the first Star Wars is the best,” as well as “planets are sphericalbecause gravity makes them be that way,” and “coffee is better than tea.” Asyou can see, this is largely opinion, only some of which is based on anythingremotely resembling empirical evidence. All of it is arguable, particularly thatfirst one. Sometimes, however, the Think quadrant has good information. “Ithink that it is difficult for someone to make a living as a poet” skirts that fineline between the Knowledge and the Think quadrants, with even a couple oftoes in the “I don’t know” quadrant.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time on the What I Don’t Know space. It isinfinite, of course, and ever growing. I don’t know much about astrophysics,and I don’t know anything at all about TikTok. And so on, and so on. I don’tshy away from my lack, however. I embrace it. Not in the way that sounds,however, like I’m happy in my ignorance. I embrace that there is an infinitevariety of things to contemplate and discover, and I reach out into that set tofind new interests. I hope to do this as long as I am able.

What I believe. And now, the tricky one. We are so inclined to interchangethe words “I believe” with “I think” that it becomes hazy what we really mean.Do we really believe that this Sunday we switch back to Daylight Savings? Dowe really believe that it’s going to rain this weekend, or that there’s anotherjar of mayonnaise in the pantry? We say things like this all of the time. And itturns our communications with one another just one more notch to the diffi-cult. I know what I believe. I know that what I believe cannot be proven –that it is based on the concept of faith, which is a different collection of

May 2020

page 3

continued on page 25

With one glass eye and with onewooden leg, but with a shovel in hishands, 72-year old Napoleon deMarswas an earth surgeon. But he felt coldand clammy when his long-handledshovel painstakingly pried up theburied object. It was disinterment!White of bone came at him, right fromthe grave. It was a human skull,opened at a wedge in the frontal lobe,and Napoleon knew it most likely hadbeen murder. The skull, and apparent-ly some of its bones holding on to thelast known form, lay at the end of hishalf day’s work, a trench at the Firstiron Works of America, in Saugus, amere dozen miles from Boston’sFreedom Trail. The site was being exca-vated for and from history. It wasSeptember of 1952. Excavation hadbeen under way since 1948, on a smallscale, but steadily. Not a single piece ofdiesel-driven power equipment hadbeen allowed in there as yet. It was apick and shovel site, a whiskbroomsite, toothpick and cotton swab coun-try. Now it was a graveyard. Napoleon, for all his years, for allhis toted calamities, felt nauseous. Three people of varying impor-tance were at the Iron Works site whenthe grisly discovery was made:Napoleon deMars, the seventy-two yearold, one-eyed, one-legged earth sur-geon; Dr. Roland Wells Robbins, sitearcheologist who had found the ruinsof Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond afew years earlier, now in charge ofunearthing the site of the very firstiron works which had brought toAmerica all the experience Europe wasable to muster back in the 1600’s; and

Silas Tully, police officer of the town,on the force only a matter of six yearsafter his service in the Marine Corps inthe once-noisy Pacific. On that high-blue September day,clouds lain over someplace else, thefaintest breath of salt coming off theriver, at eleven o’clock in the morning,Napoleon deMars put down his shovel.It was a half-hour to lunchtime and henever stopped work, he never cursedhis place in life, he never gave cause toany boss. Here, at the Iron Works, at$2.35 an hour and the best wage hehad ever gotten, where he oftenthought that he could shovel until hewas eighty, he put his work aside. He looked out over the First IronWorks in America, up off the banks ofthe Saugus River on the North Shoreabove Boston. The site was a conglom-eration of excavations, mounds, slagpiles, marked stone walls which hadbeen retrieved from history, a halfdozen trenches cutting across a smallpiece of Saugus crooked as lightning,ragged as crossword puzzles, and thescattered piles of artifacts yet to be cat-alogued and put away. Napoleon walked up the site withthe marked limp he had carried withhim for more than half a century. Thebroad band of a suspender hookedover one shoulder and slipped into hisbelt line where, down inside his pants,it connected to the crude wooden leghe had worn for so long. In reality, thisone was his third, and no lighter thanthe first. Around the site he looked forRollie Robbins, boss man, a little prissyNapoleon had often thought, but moreknowledgeable than any man in townon this kind of an excavation. Often

enough he’d seen the light go on inRollie’s eyes when a new discovery wasmade, when a ditch gave up clues orartifacts, when the 17th Centurystruggled up out of a pile of dirt or thebottom of a hole like a woodchuckchecking the lay of the land. Now, Napoleon had found thisnew discovery. With effort he tried toreach back into history the way Rolliedid. Long had he marveled at howmuch Rollie could pull out of a smallfind, the way a rock sat on its neighboror what it was made of or how thedemarcation in a trench of the naturalsoil line could tell time as good as acalendar. Napoleon used his head to signalRollie, as if giving signals to his dog,and nodded to his current diggingspot. Roland Wells Robbins, dark-haired, round faced, handsome in hisruddy outdoors way, just now begin-ning to widen at the belt line a bit,tipped dark-rimmed glasses off his faceand looked at Napoleon. From longstanding he admired the old man, whokept his shovel moving more industri-ously than any two of the other labor-ers. Napoleon was also a good luck tal-isman for Rollie, his charm piece. Heremembered the day he had hired theold man, who began methodicallyshoveling his way through three hun-dred years of fill. His single eye was amarvelously good organ. A cannon ballpopped off his shovel that first day; ahalf dozen clay pipe remnants (withone bowl intact) turned up an hourlater, on the second day the crustedremains of a matchlock pistol wereheld in the air just as the crew brokefor lunch. For that one moment Rolliethe archeologist had palmed devilishantiquity. “What is it, Napoleon?” Sweat wasa dark stain on Napoleon’s shirt underthe one-strap suspender. An off-yellow

The B l o t t e r

www.blotterrag.com

“Improper Burial at the First IronWorks of America”by Tom Sheehan

color it was, almost like an old tobaccostain, and made Rollie think of hisgrandfather for the first time in manyyears. “Where I’m digging, boss. Downwhere you sent me yesterday to trenchout. There’s a skeleton.” The old man’sone eye had remoteness in it. “It’s inthe fill. It’s in some clay. I don’t think Ihit it with my shovel, but the front ofthe skull has been crushed. I didn’t tellany of the others. It must have been anasty death.” A story wagged deepbehind his one eye, his brow leaningover it darkly. Rollie looked at his watch, smiledat Napoleon. “Thanks, Napoleon. Tellthe others they can go for lunch. I’llcheck it out myself.” Down the slopeRollie’s gait was deliberate, drawing noeyes. Down into the trench Napoleonhad cut he eased himself. Neatnesscame at him immediately; the floor ofthe trench was level, the five-foot sideswere cut down as if they had beencarved or sculpted out of the sand andgravel and blue-gray hardpan. The pilethrown out humped a long moundstretching away from the trench. Theneat trench itself was about eighteenfeet long. Beneath him he saw thebones of the skeleton Napoleon hadunearthed. The skull indeed wascrushed in at the forehead. Arm bonesand torso bones had been exposed. Aquick little chill spun on Rollie’s skinand danced off someplace. Neverbefore in any of his digs had he seenthis. There’d been pots and pans androcks and stones and clay pipes andglass bottles of every sort and pieces ofwood with enough left of their grainthat stories could still be extractedfrom them. But never the hard remainsof a human being; just the subtleremains, the storied remains, never theboned and final remains. The other workers thought it odd

that Rollie and Napoleon during lunchhad quickly set up a canvas tent overthe trench. They hadn’t seen a tent on-site in almost a year. It was, obviously,now out of bounds for them. The third party on the scene, adaily visitor to the site, was OfficerSilas Tully of the Saugus PoliceDepartment. For a couple of years hehad watched as Rollie Robbins piecedtogether so much of the original sitefrom piles of rock and slag heaps andbaskets full of artifacts, and now won-dered what a tent signified. Curious,he made his way down to the tent,stepping over trenches with his longlegs, jumping over small piles of slagor rocks, avoiding larger holes andpits. Rollie and he had become, if notfriends, at least daily conversationalistson the topic of excavation. Each lovedthe way details and mysteries workedon them and each found in the other asense of mirror. The particulars of eachcalling worked resolutely. Si Tully slipped aside the canvasdoor flap of the tent and steppedinside. Rollie looked up at him fromthe bottom of the trench, a nonplusedlook on his face as if a policeman wasabsolutely the last person he wantedon site. With some effort Rollieclimbed the ladder out of the trench.Touching the blue sleeve of Silas’ shirt,a pained look, as if he had been sur-prised at the cookie jar or caught peek-ing in the girl’s bathroom, flooded hisface. In the hanging light of a Colemanlamp buzzing its ignition as noisy asbees his face reddened deeply. “Si, we just can’t let too manypeople in on this until we found outwhat it’s all about!” His eyes affectedbeseeching. “They’ll trample the hellout of the place. It’d take us months torecover. We can’t let strangers in here.” “Find out what’s what all about?”Silas said, and then, swiftly directed,he looked along the length of Rollie’s

arm pointing at the skull in the bottomof the trench, its forehead obviouslycrushed at a point of history. Six years on the force and thiswas Si Tully’s first skull and, moreover,his first skeleton. Bodies he’d seen,that’s for sure, in the islands on theturnpike at crash scenes, laid out onthe median strips more times than hecared to remember. This, though, wasa new mystery to him; an unknown, avictim how long in the historic graveno one knew or might never know.Something told him that Rollie hadmade assessments, that one or moreleads had already surfaced, that thisgruesome crime would be solved. Itwas second nature to the archeologist.This could be most interesting, abizarre and intriguing find at thearcheological site, more than historyunfurling itself. Si spoke again. “It’s my town,Rollie, and it’s murder clear as a bell,and I’ve got to report it. You knowthat. No matter how old it is.” The for-mer Marine, the military man, early inthis new episode, could see lines beingcrossed, basic command structurebeing aborted.Rollie had seen the quizzical light inSilas’ eyes before. Again he touchedhim on the arm. This time it was as ifhe were drawing the young policemaninto a strictest confidence; the secretof King Tut’s tomb, a hidden roombeneath the Sphinx, a new RosettaStone unearthed in old Yankee Saugus.Consciously he decided not to tell Silasof the other waiting discovery; therewere stars to be earned! Treach hadpaved the way. Rollie stood beside the trenchlooking down at the skeleton, downwhere history was always telling himstories. A storyteller might have beenreciting the sad and gruesome tale tohim, a tale of love turned sour, of mad-ness, a tale of clandestine deeds per-

page 5

May 2020

formed or perpetrated under cover ofdarkness. In the air he could feelhatred, and despair. A man, hethought, a seaman perhaps, had comehome from the high angry seas only tofind more trouble at the hearth. Hismind kept telling him it had a will ofits own, despite the training, the yearsof experience. Mystery, he knew, didit. But, he thought with some eager-ness, he lived on mysteries. Robby still held Silas by the arm,working on the mystery, the love ofdetails in the policeman which madehis own life go ‘round. “I’m going toget Professor Hartley out here fromHarvard. Loves this place he does andhe’ll love this challenge. I can see himmarshaling the forces at Harvard, get-ting his cronies in the labs to do us afew favors. His forensic friends willhave a small busman’s holiday on this,their own little murder to play with.They’ll love it, the boys of the oldschool, in a deep, dark secret, rollingup their pant legs and getting downand dirty. They’ll give us the answer toevery question we can come up with,you and I. Then, with it all laid out,you can go to the chief or the State orwhoever else and lay a clean solvedcase right on the blotter.” There wasaffirmation in his eyes, in his voice. He squeezed Silas’ arm. Theywere standing there on the edge of his-tory. It could have been The Valley ofKings under their feet, or Chitzen-itsaor a Ming Dynasty tomb somewhere inChina. Again he squeezed Silas’ arm,brothers of the mystery. Early Sunday morning two stationwagons rolled into the parking area ofthe Iron Works. Rollie and Silas metProfessor D’Jana K. Hartley, tall, effec-tively studious-looking in his tweedleathered elbows, but not in a boringway, and his cohorts from the ivy halls;two more archeologists, a forensicexpert and his young sidekick with

blond hair and extremely bright eyes, aprofessor of Humanities who lookedto be the most intelligent of all, a manwho carried from the trunk of one cara canvas bag of assorted gear, and ayoung good looking woman wearingdenim, boots and a yellow blouse fit-ting her so well that most otherswould not believe she was fromHarvard. None of the site diggers,that’s for sure, noting how compellingyellow was. Napoleon deMars watched themapproach. Leaning on his shovel nearthe tent, he was still on the clock, stillat $2.35 an hour, and no one, not onesoul, had entered the tent since he’dreceived his orders from Rollie.Perhaps the victim was as old as hewas, perhaps a person he had knownin his youth. His mind went skippingback through the years for a notedloss. Nothing came to mind. Napoleonwatched the Harvards at work andadmired the deftness of their handswith the small trowels and brushesthey employed, yet was certain the softleather boots they wore must have costa week’s pay. He tried to hear thewhispers and small asides that con-nected them, made them such out-landers down in the hole he had cutinto the earth. Professor D’Jana Hartley’s peoplewere crack specialists. Quietly theywent their turn back into the minorhistory of the skeleton in the trench ofthe Iron Works. Small talk amongstthem, as much whisper as anythingcould be, as if covering a trail of aknown confidant, had scanned a seriesof possibilities: an indentured servant,probably a Scot, a slag toter or bogdigger or barrow pusher, who had fall-en astray, perhaps with another slave’swoman or the Iron Master’s wife, andthey tittered at a remark about a newax of Cane manufactured on the veryspot and which had done the improba-

ble deed; a late visitor to the site,pocketbook or pouch laden withcrown coin or Spanish gold pieces,fallen under the swing of a metal bar,come slowly as an ingot of first life outof the very furnace whose ruins lay attheir backs, in the hands of anotherindentured servant waiting to buy hisway out of contract. Now and then a giggle caughtitself on the tall air. Napoleon, intentlywatching every move, hearing everysound, thought of his grandchildren atthe cookie jar and smiled at the like-ness of things. He’d work till ninety ifthey let him, and if the other legwould hold its own, here in this affablecradle of history. On the way homehe’d buy a box of cookies for the cook-ie jar; it was a fair swap. The dig, though, was a Chinesecheckerboard of ups and downs, holesand trenches and piles and mounds ofearth, almost a battle zone of sorts.The slag pile looked like it might haveoozed out of the place where Rolliehad said the furnace originally was. Itwas twenty feet high or thereaboutsand ran towards the river for ninety ormore feet. When the sun caught a slickside of slag, like a shiny piece of coalwith an enamel surface, one wouldthink of a semaphore signal leapingfrom darkness. The land sloped awayfrom the Iron Master’s House on thehigh point to where the salt waterreached at high tide, a good two milesand a half up the Saugus River fromthe Atlantic Ocean, itself a trove of his-tory. Legend had it that a pirate cap-tain, Treach or Langton perhaps, hadbrought his ship a good way up theriver and then landed a long boat fur-ther up, a boat which had carriedmuch of his plunder to be buried inDungeon Rock, now a huge hole 135feet down in solid rock and bare milesaway in the Lynn Woods Reservation. The young policeman, at the

www.blotterrag.com

The B l o t t e r

same time, was not standing still. Aminor conviction had told him that theskeleton was not too old; at least, notof Colonial age. This conviction heaccepted as coming from intelligenceand a feel for things that he had culti-vated while on the job and while inthe military. Immediately he had goneto a retired postman, a neighbor of hisfor years, who was a veritable historianof the town, gossip or rumor or fact.Silas had found out that the stagecoachroad from Boston to Newburyporthad, at one time, run right past thebackside of the Iron Works. That, too,was on what was now Central Street.That Central Street, still clear in Silas’mind, had once swept right on by thefront of the Iron Works. Somewhere intown, a long time ago, but not as longas some might think it, a person haddisappeared, or had been murdered,or had been buried in the lap of histo-ry. Silas Tully made his mind up thathe was going to solve this case, that hewould find out whose bones had beenburied at the Iron Works. The weekly Saugus Advertiserand the Lynn Daily Evening Itemseemed to be his best choices and hebegan a one-man search for a personwho had suddenly gone unaccountedfor. Through reams and reams of oldcopies he labored. To old timereporters and editors he talked and inturn haunted the cracker barrels andbarroom back rooms and sundry otherlocations they had directed him to.These were places where historywalked, where history talked, wherethe tongues of history carried on thelegends and the lineage that mightnever make its way into print. Over-the-fence stuff. Dark alley stuff. Storieshe never heard before surfaced, debrisriding up on the tide, swollen drainsdumping pieces of the town into theriver, silt of lives streaming away. Oldcopies of Saugus Gazette and Saugus

Herald and Lynn Transcript, Lynnbeing the next being town over, to theeast, brought nothing to light. Noheadlines, no want ads for a lost per-son, no missing person with no singleaccounting. No melodramas in thelocal library of a missing girl or boy ora triangle affair gone haywire. But he was resolute. It was Ars Veritas that broughtthings into focus after Rollie’s discov-ery of the coin. An informal, unsigned, handwrit-ten report came to Rollie Robbins amere three days after the Harvardentourage had first hit the Iron Works.Line by line, item by item, he consid-ered the information set forth: The subject is male, thirty-oneyears of age, dead of a savage blow tothe frontal lobe of the skull. Deathwas immediate. It is estimated that hehas been covered (Rollie almost gig-gled at the word) since mid year of1905. His watch stopped at 2:17 of aday, in the AM we would assume, andwas German, a Gersplank, very limit-ed in production and rarely seen thisside of the Atlantic. He carried asmall sum of coin. One leg, the right,was 3/4 inch shorter than the other.He had been an accident victim priorto his demise, his hip and thigh boneboth having been fractured, the rightside, and most likely about two yearsprior to his end. He was perhaps inmilitary uniform at the time of hisdeath, as determined by tunic buttonsfound at the site, an officer of a cap-tain’s rank, United States Cavalry,22nd Regiment Massachusetts. No mil-itary identification was found on-site,which we find questionable and suspi-cious in nature, inasmuch as hispouch was neither emptied norremoved. Two bones in right indexand right middle finger were brokenwhich we assume to have happened ator close to the scene of discovery, at

time of death, meaning struggle. Alength of chain had been dropped orhad fallen onto the body and wasfound, remains of it, rusted solid ontop of the spinal column. No otherobjects or material were found inproximity of the remains except for asmall figure of jade of unknown ori-gin discovered a mere two feet fromthe left hand, the figure tendingtowards Chinese but not yet con-firmed, but probably pre-Ming. In summation we offer thefollowing: Victim was a 31 year oldprofessional military man with healedbone fractures of hip and leg and wasprobably in uniform at death butmust have been on a limited dutyroster; did struggle at time of death asevidenced by broken fingers but wasmortally wounded and diedimmediately from severe trauma toforehead. May have had Chinese orFar East connection, if indeed the jadepiece found nearby does not prove tobe Incan or pre-Incan. Our camp isexactly halved on this last point. The lack of any evidence offabric, other than his pouch, gatherssuspicion the more we have thinkabout it, especially concerning tunicbuttons and no tunic residue of note.It is possible that his uniform wasbiodegradable and has passed on, butwe doubt that. Therefore we think hemay have been nude (stripped underduress) and pushed bodily into a hole.If he was nude, the evidence of tunicbuttons indicates they may have beenplaced there to mislead anysubsequent authority inquest, and wemust ask why. Certainly, the personwho committed this deed did notexpect it to be discovered in theforeseeable future, but was coveringtracks for any discovery some yearsdown the road. It therefore causes usto think he was known to the victim,was himself in the military, tried to

May 2020

page 7

put sand in the gears (so to speak)(Rollie giggled), or, as D’Jana Hartleysaid on last resort, it was a militaryman who killed a civilian and triedto thwart any future identification bythrowing in the tunic buttons, like theproverbial hand of gravel as in dustunto dust, probably off his own shirt,a kindly killer who took the shirt offhis own back. We have a world wide networkworking on the jade figure and feelthat it was indeed a portion of lootfrom some local robbery. We shallkeep you advised as to all incominginformation or any changes in ourcollective thinking. In close proximityto the remains was found a 1903 onecent piece, but we do not know if thiscoin was interred with the remains orhad later fallen into the hole duringexcavation. Archeologist Rollie Robbins, gig-gling at much of the report, finding thehumor effective, the conclusions aspalpable as his own, and, for the mostpart, felt the mystery deepen. Saugus patrolman, and armchair detec-tive when he had to be or needed tobe, Silas Tully, at receiving the reportand the information on the 1903 cent,found his new starting point and wentright to it. For no reason apparent tohimself, he gave a grace year to thepassage of time, skipped 1904 andwent right to 1905. 1905, it appeared,after much scrutinizing of papers andbooks and magazines and other infor-mation almanacs, was the year of theRussias, or, as he quipped to himself,the year the Russias didn’t do too well.The Japanese whipped their butt allover hell in their war; they lost200,000 in the Mukden battle alone,had their naval fleet destroyed in theStrait of Tsushima, lost Sakhalin Islandoutright, got badly overrun inManchuria, and a number of other

places. Crewmen of the great battle-ship Potemkin mutinied and eventuallyturned the ship over to Rumanianauthorities. The Russian Grand Duke,Sergei Aleksandrovich, the uncle ofCzar Nicholas II, was assassinated by abomb thrown into his lap by a revolu-tionary. The Russian pot certainly wasstirring and much of the world was inturmoil, and, of course, he realized,being on this side of the informationtrail one could see to where a lot of allthis was leading. A few other events attracted hiseye, disparate events, no obvious tiesbetween them, but events that rode ontop of tidal debris, like cheese boxesor pieces of flotsam, bobbing to benoticed: the Cullinan Diamond, all3,106 carats of it, was discovered inTransvaal and insurance underwrittenby a U.S. company; the body ofAmerican Naval hero John Paul Joneswas found in a cemetery in Paris andwas moved to the United States, per-haps in a cask of rum for a preserva-tion attempt; the Russian-Japanese Warwas ended by a pact signed practicallyin Saugus’ own back yard, atPortsmouth, New Hampshire, after akey role was played by the old stick-swinger himself, President TeddyRoosevelt, and closer to home, just afew miles away, the palatial home ofW. Putnam Wesley, on the Saugus-Wakefield line in what had become theBreakheart Reservation, was robbed inthe dead of night by an unknown malewho threatened three servants withbodily harm or death if they tried toescape from a pantry they had beenlocked into, chopping off a butler’s fin-ger with an old sword to prove hisvow. Silas Tully went to sleep thatnight after chewing all these thingsover in his mind, locked in on all theinternational stuff, he knew he was out

of his element. But down deep some-thing fervent told him he was goingalong for the whole ride. All the way.And a bare thread of light, the thinnestlisle possible, gossamer at best,seemed to be pulling at these disparateevents. Upon W. Putnam Wesley hesettled for his first stepping-stonetowards a solution. Filthy rich to saythe least, much of it come by way ofhis grandfather from the Californiagold fields and parlayed by his father,Wesley had various shades of darknesssitting around him. He had journeyedfar and wide, especially in Europe andthe Far East, often with a largeentourage. His interest included, aftermoney, artifacts of historical intrigue(such as dueling swords or dueling pis-tols from famous encounters), objectsd’art tending to explicit sex of anyselection, gems so special that theremight not have been a match withanother, all things Chinese that mightbe described by one or more of theaforementioned. He had had fourwives, three of which died in the midstof a long trip or voyage. Silas foundone report of his fourth wife havingtaken a shot at him, in jest as theydeclared. Silas figured the threat ofthat single shot to have saved her life. Wesley was called Puttee from hisearliest days, both from his middlename and from his adventurous youth-ful habit, when playing soldier games,of wearing strips of cloth which circledhis legs from ankle to knee, much inthe manner of real soldiers. His namehe wore well. The sixth sense was working over-time for Silas a few days later when hesat with Rollie under a tarp at the IronWorks site. They discussed their pointsof view and all the data of the ArsVeritas report. “It’s a crime of passion,” Rolliefinally affirmed, his voice steady, con-

www.blotterrag.com

The B l o t t e r

vincing in its stoic way, his dark seri-ous eyes looking out over the site andseeing, oblivious to Silas Tully, whatthe site would eventually look like. Hisbaby, Rollie’s baby, put to bed. “A marriage is involved,” he con-tinued, “a triangle affair. I think wemust look to the Hawkridges.Powerful, money by the handfuls, own-ers of the site for a long time, theirpapers still scattered throughout theIron Master’s house like they’ve justgone away for the weekend and will beback on Monday to square thingsaway.” He seemed to mull over his ownwords before he added, “Perhaps theHawkridges were so powerful that theabsence of one of the family could eas-ily be explained.” “You’ve found something?” Silas

said, turning to face Rollie as they saton a fence rail. The light in Rollie’seyes was amber, obvious. Silas, fromday one of their acquaintance, knewthat Rollie’s bent was to the romantic,to the clandestine, Rollie’s eye havingthat other light in them. “Yes,” Rollie said. “One of theHawkridges, Carlton TheophusHawkridge. About thirty years of agethat I know of. Went off on a tripsomewhere around 1905, perhaps a bitlater, and was never heard from again.” “How do you know that?” “From a few letters I found in a

box in the upper rooms. Went off sup-posedly very quickly on a trip for hishealth. Not the most likable fellow, notfrom what I gather, but family.” “Do you think the family did himin?” Si’s eyes were deep with question,his scowl like punctuation. “I really don’t know that, but wescrambled at the beginning of all thisto go a lot further back than wethought we could. “What have youcome up with?” As though he expected no reply,

Rollie looked away from Silas, seeingthe sun catch on the water of the river,an angular slicing of light in the lateafternoon, sometimes gold, sometimesblue, that leaped across the river andonto Vinegar Hill where he just knewTreach’s treasure was buried. The holebeing dug he could picture, the chestbeing lowered, the rocks being piledup. He could see the descent of thecrew back down to the longboat, couldsee their soft and easy float down theriver to the ship shifting slightly atanchor. He knew where his next jobwas coming from. And if the skeletonin the trench was one, or could safelyassume to be so, Carlton TheophusHawkridge knew the move to the nextdig would be a cinch. So muchdepended on the young policeman sit-ting beside him. Spoon feeding himwould be a challenge. Subtle as asnake it would need to be. Silas Tully gave nothing away.Not even the fact that he knew he wasnot a rank amateur, that knots in spiteof all apparent were being slowly tied,that the gossamer thread would cometo rope. If Roland Robbins had hisblind romance, he had his own. “I just keep poking along, Rollie,trying to tie things together. It’s all sofar away, as if never touching us withreality.” “If it’s Hawkridge, Si, I can see aspread in the Boston papers for you.Perhaps a magazine article. You couldturn this old Yankee town right up onits ear! They’ll be beating a path toyour door. You couldn’t beat them off.”His smile was broader than a shovelblade. And the shovel blade was slicingdeep into a pile of manure. “The Japanese tried that, Rollie. Itdidn’t work for them either.” Therewas a declaration he hoped Rolliewould understand. Edging off thefence rail, he waved slightly, almosthalf-heartedly. “I’ll keep you posted,

Rollie. You do the same.” There wasanother one. As Si walked off, Rollie looked outover the site, saw a glancing shaft oflight leap off the river and leap up tothe crest of Vinegar Hill. Treach justknew he was coming after him! Bet onit! The gossamer thickened indeedlater that week for Silas Tully. An arti-cle in an old issue of a discontinuedBoston paper, about Old Ironsides andthe Charlestown Navy Yard, tiedtogether John Paul Jones and W.Putnam “Puttee” Wesley. It was a sin-gle line implying that the containerbringing home the body of the herowas used to illegally convey somepriceless artifacts. And Puttee Wesleywas accompanying the body home, aservice he so graciously volunteered toperform, inasmuch as he was in Parisand on his way home. PresidentRoosevelt accepted the offer. The thinline of gossamer, with a little morebody to it, seemed to fall like a shadowof netting on the piece of jade that hadlain so long in the earth beside anoth-er body. Silas had come to abrupt atten-tion, as if the old Commander-in-Chiefhimself had walked in on him. Life wasfull of little pieces of goodness. Findthem, that’s all you had to do. Theywere at your feet, in your back pocket,around the corner. Puttee Wesley, he decided fromall that he ingested of him, was notafraid of playing either the pirate orthe brigand or the smuggler to get anyof the items his heart desired. If moneywouldn’t buy them, he’d get them oneway or another. In 1919 he had diedsuddenly, unprotected by his moneyor his treasures, from a bout withinfluenza. The family then, as manyfamilies do under pressure, had scat-tered, their fortunes wasted, and littleevidence of Puttee Wesley’s existence

page 9

May 2020

hung on. Breakheart had becomepond and forest and a scattering oftrails, the huge mansion gone toground, a bare bit of stone foundationthrusting out of brush. But to Silasthere came echoes repeating them-selves like gunshots down betweencanyon walls, the continuing onslaughtof the same notion...all these things,Jones and Puttee and the jade pieceand the skeleton, were caught up inthe same web, the same gossamerspinning out of his mind, spinning outof the twist of all the years. Rollie Robbins had tried to plumbSilas’ mind a number of times, tried tosteer him to the Hawkridges, but fellshort with each attempt. The stubborn-ness of the young policeman, though acraggy veteran, bothered him morethan he let on. Treach had waited this long, buthe might not wait forever. Even indeath the pirate might be a most ram-bunctious ghost. It took a strange turn of eventsto swing matters in the correct direc-tion, the kind of luck that Silas Tullyknew would come of endless scratch-ing, endless probing, endless digging,his own l’affair archeology. If hisFrench were much better he’d be ableto spell it right. It was a naval clerk at thePentagon who remembered SilasTully’s numerous inquiries about theJohn Paul Jones transfer, who had seenSilas’ letter concerning the suspicionssurrounding the hero’s remains beingbrought home, who a long time earlierin his current assignment had begunreading old documents in the Navyarchives. Seaman First Class Peter J. Leonewrote the following to Officer SilasTully of the Saugus Police Department: This is not an official documentand is only sent to you on a personal

basis because of the interest you haveexcited in me about the Admiral JohnPaul Jones situation. I have comeacross a number of old documentsand communiqués concerning theAdmiral’s coming home to where heshould have been. If there is anythingelse I might furnish, I will try, but Ithink you will be interested in whathas caught my eye in the files. Thepresident at the time, Theo. Roosevelt,was advised of certain shady dealsthat might be attached to the move-ment of the Admiral’s remains. Theinformation came in a letter to himfrom a Bruce Jacob Bellbend, a cap-tain in British intelligence, who hadaccidentally come on the informationwhile on a separate assignment. It didmention illegal movement of preciousartifacts that had been taken fromunknown sources. The presidentassigned a personal representative,Captain Arthur G. Savage, U.S. Navy,to proceed to Paris and accompanythe remains home and to investigateand report to him any and all find-ings he might come across. None of thecaptain’s reports are in file, but I didfind the following information abouthim: he was from Grand Hawk,Minnesota, was a graduate of theNaval Academy, was captain of theU.S.S. Standish at one time, did suffera serious accident aboard ship thatrequired medical leave (hip and leginjury in a fall, right side), had a deepscar on his left cheek of unknowncause, was a gutsy and devoted leaderof men, and loved nothing better thanhis country. He was reported as beingmissing in July of 1905 and nothingmore is known of him, as though hehad gone off the face of the Earth. Silas Tully brought his case torest, though it lay at his feet for a fewdays, being stepped on, turned over,and cemented back into place. He

could see Puttee Wesley or one of hishenchmen knock the captain on thehead, take him under cover ofdarkness to where Central Street wasbeing filled in, dropping him in thehole, throwing on top of his bare bodythe buttons of some army tunic tothrow leads elsewhere in case the bodymight be discovered. The jade piece,still unidentified, was sacrificed to helpthe scattering of leads. The remnantsof chain continued to be nothing morethan a corrosive coil in his mind. Theprecious artifacts put away for the timebeing. Silas Tully told it all to his wifePhyllis and none of it to RollieRobbins. Napoleon deMars, with the helpof two grandchildren and two sons-in-law, held sway over the tent foranother week until the remains of theunknown body, as it was officiallytreated, were laid quietly to furtherrest in a shaded area of RiversideCemetery, just outside of SaugusCenter, alongside the railroad tracksno longer in use. One evening thereafter, RollieRobbins, maverick archeologist, ram-rod of stones and bones, continued towatch the late afternoon sun glance offthe river with surprising richness.Flares of light flew like spears; shysparks reigned as though diamondshad been loosed from chest or pouch.Gallant red wing blackbirds from bothsides of the river flew across andthrough shafts of late light like arrowsonto their targets. Dusk, as part ofshadow, settled itself softly, a dust,atop the colonial town. Vinegar Hilland Round Hill and Hemlock Hill andIndian Slide and dark passages ofBreakheart Reservation shifted into theshadows that history continually lendsto its constituents. Treach had such anight, he was sure. And he was out

www.blotterrag.com

The B l o t t e r

there, his subtle remains, waiting forhim in those shadows. And one night a few weeks later,when all was quiet, the sky a darkcanopy, Silas Tully, a policemanalways, a Marine forever, a patriot feel-ing the pains of wounds he had longforgotten, his eyes raw with sadness,thinking of the admiral and the captainand the president and the seaman atthe Pentagon, knowing the town heloved would cement the ultimateresolve, affixed above that single graveat the Veteran’s Section of RiversideCemetery a wooden sign he hadcarved one long night filled with thedeepest of thoughts. It read: ARTHURG. SAVAGE, CAPTAIN U.S. NAVY, WHODIED IN THE SERVICE OF HIS COUN-TRY. There would be no fanfare, noclarions or trumpets or drums. Nogunfire. The captain would sift into thepast, along with all the other veteransfrom all the other wars, all the warriorsthe town had ceded to history. He’dhave a flag atop his grave on MemorialDay, put there by the American Legion.The breeze and the sunlight wouldcatch at it, flapping it about. Childrenwould wave back. A few seniors, offer-ing up their own kinds of parades,would offer serious nods. The windwould come back again and again, arapture of touch, a salute of sorts.Nights would accept the continualsilence abounding in Riverside. Silas Tully thought he could giveCaptain Arthur Savage nothing moreprecious than that. When he told his wife, she lovedhim all over again. v

“Play some really old music,” Kitcalled over to me as I sat on thecouch. Mom chuckled from herfavorite chair across from Kit at thekitchen table, her eyes fixed on thescreen of her Chromebook as it sat onthe glass tabletop. Her laugh alwaysstole my attention, though a strangerwouldn’t think anything of it. It mademe wonder if she laughed at thecomputer screen, a jest from Kit, or avoice beside her ear that was inaudibleto me. Mom nodded at Kit’s request.Opened a tab for Youtube on mytablet and played the 1890s version ofDaisy Bell, then the Haydn Quartetsongs from the 1900s. Doing so, I feltuncomfortable, as if I should playsomething else, something Mom andKit wouldn’t relish hearing. Maybe Iwas being irresponsible by lettingthem get nostalgic. But how stupid tocreate an issue over something as sillyas an old song. And what else wasthere to do when the roads ofWilmington were covered with ice andsnow? On a normal day I would staybusy — on my laptop at a coffee housedowntown, or at my university inmidtown, or taking a long walk afterwork to keep from going home —wondering, will I make enough for therent? when will Mom support herselfon her own? Or at least make anattempt? It’s been three years sinceDad died, and here I am at the age oftwenty-four, cooped up in a twobedroom apartment with my motherand sister. When the unlikely snow storm hitNorth Carolina in 2017, I took solace

in the knowledge that my freedomwould return when the snow and icecleared; but for now I had to staypatiently nestled on the suede couch,with my cinnamon candle lit on thecoffee table, watching flurries behindthe window as the wind swept againstthem, impeding their descent andwhisking them here and there. I glanced down at the smallbookshelf just under the window.How old are those glow in the darkBuddhas sitting on the shelf? Ithought. They were surely as old asthat chunk of amethyst Momunwrapped in her bedroom when Iwas ten. The figurines were stillpristine, aside from the Seraphimangel, whose cracked-off headbalanced awkwardly on the upwardlycurved hem of her pink dress. Icouldn’t get away from those littlereminders of my childhood. I hadn’tnoticed these anachronisms in so long Placidly I listened while DaisyBell bellowed strenuously through theapartment, the lyrics barelyintelligible. Then came Billy Murray’sShine on Harvest Moon, followed bymore of our favorite artists: RuthEtting, Benny Goodman, EllaFitzgerald. The second snow day wasthe same — store closures and thethree of us cloistered in the apartmentlike that dusty cluster of buddhas. Despite the small comfort of theold music, and the scenic winter Ihadn’t witnessed in years, a disquietpersisted, with a voice inside me thatsaid, Don’t get too comfortable withthis. Don’t let it be the way it used tobe. Maybe it did feel better to be awayfrom judgmental eyes of coworkers

May 2020

page 11

“The Turn In The Weather”by Jillian Dhyana Oliver

and students who no doubtwondered, why is she so strange, soavoidant? But it would only get worseif I stopped facing them. I turned around and lookedtoward the kitchen table. Kit sat infront of a bowl of cereal as she tiedher long, black hair in a ponytail. Momtapped and slid her index finger alongthe touchpad of her Chromebook.There was another Seraphim angel,handless, and propped next to Mom’sboxes of Kashi cereal. She concealed itthere so it wouldn’t be seen by all thevisitors she wouldn’t have. She was wrapped in theoversized blue robe Dad had given heraround thirteen years ago — longbefore we moved to this apartment,long before Dad died of lung cancer.Steven, Kit’s and my long absentbrother, was even living with us backthen, before his schizophrenia becametoo much, and our parents sent himaway to Port South Assisted Living. She had kept the robe wellpreserved even though she hadn’tpreserved herself quite as well.Looking at her, I wished I could haveseen the mother I knew when I wasten; the one who had all her teeth(now two incisors and three molarswere missing), a complexion thatwasn’t yet sallow from her cigarettes. But it was still so comfortable,quaint, and familiar just to sit in theliving room in our small apartment.Don’t get too comfortable I gentlyreminded myself. But part of memissed our old, secluded life inPennsylvania and the 19th centuryhome we lived in on Scotrun Avenue. It was a quiet street, separatedfrom the main road only by a stretchof sparse trees that flanked a canal. Ona mountainous incline behind ourhouse stood a dense forest and anincongruous trailer perched above all

the old, two story homes. From one of the windows in myroom I could see the highway throughthe arms of a red oak in front of thehouse. Cars and trucks zipped byabove the canal and vanished behindwhite oaks and pines. I watchedintently and longed to know wherethey were headed. The Scotrun diner came to life inthe early morning — an event I’d wakefor at 5am, just to watch the lightssnap on like opening eyes and all thecars roll in. From my window I saw aneighboring house that stood within ascattering of trees about two hundredfeet away. I watched its six darkwindows and pale siding during theearly AM hours. The fake candles thatshone through the curtained windowshelped me conjure up fanciful images:the shadow of Nosferatu cast acrossthe lawn, and mysterious, ghostlyimpressions of horses hooves andcarriage wheels on the snow covereddriveway. Mom once said she wanted us tolive in our own little world, and wecertainly did. There would be noschool, few outside influences. AtScotrun all we had was five cats, oldfilms and music, and immersion inMom’s peculiar beliefs.*** One afternoon, Kit and I dancedin the kitchen while our silverboombox, smeared with some dark,sticky substance and two or threecigarette burns, played Boogie WoogieBugle Boy. The song, our favorite ofthe Andrew Sisters, prompted Kit tograb my wrists in her fingers and wespun in unison, arms locked. Weclumsily tried to move with the paceof the song across the alabaster tiles. Ilooked down at our arms and noticedfor the first time in a while that Kit’sskin was a shade paler than my own. A

shock of dismay. I had imagined I wasas light as the starlets of the ‘30s:Myrna Loy, Jean Harlow, GingerRogers. I had watched Rita Hayworth’sporcelain face in Gilda, and since Iwanted to be Rita that week, I neededto believe I could erase thecomplexion my Italian mother passeddown to me. I didn’t realize then thatRita had been made over to lookwhiter than she really was, and thather black hair and darker, olive skinhad been bleached. All I knew was myfrustration with not knowing where I’dfit in one of those black and whitefilms. Could I be Dolores Del Rio? Ididn’t care for her much, and I wastired of being Pier Angeli for monthsat a time. I hoped Kit wouldn’t notice whatI had noticed, but in the absence ofother influences, those old movies hadtaught us both to be attentive to eventhe subtlest contrasts between people.“Look at how dark your skin is next tomine!” she bragged. We were distracted by a familiarsound above our heads: bedspringsstressing repeatedly with the vigor ofan intruder testing a locked door.Chortles seeped through the brassvent cover in the ceiling. Placed like a cork in a bottle ofwine, the antique vent cover could beconveniently removed from below orabove with just a push or pull. Andthere were many other parts of thehouse that hadn’t been updated indecades: cast iron doorknobs,yellowed light switches, faded floralwallpaper, and two attic panels thatreleased flakes of wood when wepulled their strings. Floors groanedlike an achy old man just from thestress of a cat’s paws scamperingacross the red and blue carpets. Thesesounds never failed to frighten mewhen I was in bed and the sounds of

The B l o t t e r

www.blotterrag.com

Mom’s bedroom activities were just aspermeable through the vents andcheap drywall. “She’s at it again,” I said with aGinger Rogers-style sarcasm and aneye roll, just to let Kit know that I waswise to the things grownups did whenthey were alone. Kit followed suit,making an effort to change the wide-eyed innocence that initially appearedon her face. “She’s probably wearingthat slutty black nightgown,” shereplied. “Bet it’s rolled up to herneck!” To distract ourselves from thecommotion, we loudly played our“Swing Is Alive” CD. We’d hearGambler’s Blues follow Boogie WoogieBugle Boy. This was the song thatalways made us laugh. Following TheAndrew Sisters’ peppy beat, StanKenton’s bluesy tune was a drag; somuch so it even warrantedpantomimes from Kit. As old as thejoke was, we needed the humor inthat moment. We forced our laughter, anxiousto get caught up in the hilarity of theskit Kit was about to perform. She lether arms fall limp at her sides,swinging lazily as she tramped thefloor hard with bent knees in tunewith the song’s opening. I laughedeven harder when she’d muss up thetight black curls around her chin anduntuck her floral blue sweater fromher brown pleated skirt. I wondered ifshe noticed how fake my laugh was. One day, when the distractionsno longer worked on Mom’s laughter,Kit marched over to the dusty cornerby the cellar door, grabbed the broom,and pounded the vent. The laughterturned to small whispers. The bedsprings were still. I imagined hersitting on top of her comforter, tellingher invisible lover that the childrenwere listening. Soon she was as silent

as the icicles I watched drip frombehind the thick glass of the twinwindows. I widened the little holes in ouryellow, vinyl tablecloth while I waitedfor the sound of the rattling brass tostop. Kit threw the broom back in thecorner, scattering clumps of dust. Shelet a “Jesus Christ” slip from hermouth. “I’m sick of this crap!” sheadded as she stormed toward a box ofLittle Debbie Moonpies on the table.She slapped one on a saucer she gotfrom the drainer and put it in themicrowave until the chocolate was halfstuck to the china. “I just wish she’d stop acting soloose.” I said. Before placing a spoonful ofmelted moonpie in her mouth Kit halfwhispered in a sardonic tone, “I guesswe shouldn’t say anything too loud.She always says they hear us.”*** On our fifth month in the house,near the end of winter, I heard Kituttering something unintelligible as Isat in my bedroom, as if she’d justexperienced a shock — though therewas some delight. She barreled up thesteps and stopped at my room.“There’s a noose in the basement!”she said to me with hazel eyes thatwere as wide as walnuts, and hernormally pink cheekbones nearlyblended with the snow gatheredoutside my window. A smile wastrying to twitch across her face amidstthe horror. With a groan I abandonedmy 1947 issue of Time and followedher down the steps. On the way, Iwalked over shedded cat claws andnoticed all the clumps of black cat furthat had accumulated on each stepover the months we had lived there.As we made our way through the redcarpeted room outside of the kitchen,Kit recounted the tale of how she

found her noose. It seemed she wasstanding at the kitchen sink washingdishes when she had felt as ifsomeone wanted her to turn around.When she turned, her eyes fell on thecellar door. “I felt freaked out that the cellardoor was open, so I went to close it. Ilooked inside first, though. There wasnothing odd.” She said. She had looked down at the four-panel door that lay horizontally on themildewed wood and opened to thecellar steps. Kit closed the cellar doorand went back to the dishes. Soon thestrange feeling had nagged her againwhile she set plates and mugs in thedrainer. When she opened the cellardoor the second time, she decided toswitch on the light, and as she did herfinger slipped through a loop in thelight’s string. “I could have sworn that stringwas straight. It was straight wasn’t it?”She asked. “Yeah, definitely,” I said. To demonstrate, she grasped thecellar’s cast iron knob, moving slowly,dramatically, as if she were openingBluebeard’s forbidden chamber. Whenshe turned the light on, the flimsynoose swayed stiffly next to the dustcovered bulb. Initially I had imagineda thick rope dangling directly abovethe cellar steps after having appearedfrom nowhere. I even added somedust or maybe blood, nearly black anddried up. But there was only a flimsyrope, not much wider than dentalfloss. It had been tied with a tinyrunning knot above it. We stood gawking at the ominousnoose and I asked Kit if Steven couldhave gotten to the cellar without hernoticing. We agreed that he would becapable of doing this since it perfectlysuited his humor and hispreoccupation with strange things like

May 2020

page 13

death metal and fallen angels. Thelatter of which spoke to him, or so heclaimed. We reasoned that taunting Kit inthis way would be nothing to a guywho fantasized about rape and cold-blooded murder. But Kit alsosuggested an alternative: ghosts. “I justdon’t understand how Steven couldput all those tiny knots in there,” shesaid. “It looks difficult to do. And hehas big fingers, too.” To settle thematter, we decided to go to Mom,since she would certainly have aclearer idea of what was going on,considering her connections to thespirit world. Mom’s bedroom door was at thetop landing, but set back enough sothat it looked like it was peering overthe stairs. We journeyed back up thestairs and opened her door. She lay inbed with a piece of printing paper onher lap—her handmade ouija board—with the alphabet, numbers, and ‘yes’and ‘no’ penned with blue ink. Besideher outstretched legs, just withinreach of her pale hand, was a quartzpendulum. And, of course, there wasthe display, the shrine of framed GeneKelly photos lining the top of thedresser that stood beside her bed. Infront of the photos sat even morependulums made from amethyst,crystal, and obsidian, plus spheres ofthe same materials that sat securely intheir gilt stands. Mom appeared secure as well.She wore her pastel pink slip, and herexpression was so serene. It was thelook of a woman who wasmomentarily relieved of all life’s stress,a result of constantly hearing voicesfrom the spirit world, consistinglargely of her favorite dead celebrities. “You won’t believe what I foundin the cellar!” Kit said so jubilantly shejumped a little. She told Mom thenoose story. Mom came downstairs

with us and examined the noose forherself. She concurred with Kit’sopinion—the culprit was what Momcalled a “negative entity.” Of courseMom’s word would be taken seriouslyby both of us. After all, Kit and I didhave some experiences of our ownthat we couldn’t explain. We would sitin the attic waiting for spirits, jolting atcreaks that seemed to come fromnowhere and human voices thatpercolated through the vents on eitherside of the attic. Sure, the voices couldhave come from people outside, asDad once suggested, but it didn’t feelthat way to us. Despite my initialdoubts about the noose, I supposed,with some hesitation, that Mom hadto be right.*** Following the discovery of thenoose, I dreamed something that Ibelieved explained our hauntings.There was a little girl in Kit’s roomdressed like a porcelain doll who fellof her own will out the window. ThenI was thrust down the carpetedhallway to the edge of the stairs to seea woman hanging from the attic, herlegs dangling over the stairs. “I know what happened toeveryone who lived here!” I exclaimedto Mom in the morning when I was onone of my regular visits. She laughedat the gothic drama my brain conjuredup. “That’s a little over the top,” shesaid incredulously. But certainly there was a negativeentity somewhere in that old house,and it had chilled Kit’s calves onenight when she was trying to enjoy anAstaire-Rogers film and a hotdogdinner. Mom responded to it thenwith a stalk of burning sage and a longrant at the frigid ghost. “Don’t youdare hurt my daughters!” she hadshouted at the top of her lungs. Butclearly the entity couldn’t stay away forlong. In response to the noose, Mom

armed herself with more sage andbathed every corner of the house. More than a week after thesaging, I lay awake in bed thinkingabout that negative entity until myback formed small beads of sweat thatdampened my flannel nightgown. Thedampness of the nightgown turnedcold quickly. I forced my eyes shutand thought about the dream I’d had,the negative entity—whatever it was—that wandered around the house tyingstrings into nooses and making noisein the attic. My mind, while halfasleep, started to chisel a dark,shadowy man walking out on the lawnin a steady pursuit of me. Steven’s bedsprings screechedand he whispered and whispered. Hisvoices always acted up in the middleof the night, whereas Mom’s weremore active in the day. I hoped theagitation in his whispers wouldn’tescalate, as they so often did, toshouts or bangs or crashes. The thought of moving, gettingout of bed and crossing the hall to mysister’s room seemed impossible. Itwas so dark, the hall was so narrow,though only a few feet across, and therailing around the stairs would beright next to my feet. My toes tingledjust thinking about some invisible armreaching through the rails andgrabbing hold. But my anxiety, like a flimsystring, broke after being wrung tootightly and I finally found the will todash across the hall to get to Kit’sroom. Her room was much narrowerthan mine and resembled a largecloset more than it did a bedroom,and this somehow made it safer. Igripped her plaid nightgown andshook her arm. “Kit, I feel like there’ssomeone in the house,” I whisperedemphatically. She started, thenreluctantly got out of bed and webraved the hallway to get to the light

The B l o t t e r

www.blotterrag.com

and we went to Mom’s room. She,too, was hesitant to get out of bedwhen I told her about my impression.I didn’t hear footsteps anywhere in oraround the house, after all; nor did Ihear the doors being tried out front orto the side of the house in thesunroom. Mom walked down the steps andreached around for the hall light justbehind one of the pillars. She glancedat the living room to her left, then thered room around the other side, thenshe walked heavy footed back upstairs.“There’s nothing,” she said groggily.Steven poked his head out of hisroom, which was set to the top rightof the stairs, like a small companion toMom’s room. “What’s going on?” heasked. His black, graphic tee shirt hadholes in places and he wore his usualpair of white briefs, which were nowbeginning to part from the waistband.“Nothing’s going on, honey,” she said. When Mom and Steven wentback to bed, I stayed in Kit’s room,looking out the window overlookingthe two acre yard, covered in snow. Ireturned to my room before the suncame up and opened the window,feeling healed in the winter air,watching cars move in and the warmlights go on at the diner. A cool bathto temper a fever.*** Mom needed our help stayingawake one night. Kit and I had beenwatching Top Hat. The film came nearits end with the “Piccolino” dancenumber, which we weren’t interestedin because Astaire and Rogers weremarried by this point in the film andhis pursuit of her had thus ended. Thethrilling chase and all the romancewas over. So we went to the kitchenand poured ourselves some Cran-Grape juice in wine glasses and begansipping delicately. We heard “Girls!” plaintively

shouted from upstairs. It had the toneof a five year old’s importunities toher parents. We went upstairs and Kitopened the door and we wandered in. Mom sat on the edge of the bedwith the sheets in disarray, as if theywere involved in some struggle. Ididn’t bother imagining what hadhappened. I decided I’d set up ablockade in my head to conceal thethoughts I shouldn’t have. But I nevercould block out the noxious smell thatalways hit us the moment we openedher door. It reminded me of our cat’slitter box, or maybe peed sheets thathadn’t been washed for weeks, ormaybe just stale incense. I didn’t liketo let on that I picked up on the odor.I believed I wasn’t supposed to know. Mom swung her pendulum overher paper ouija board, looking downon it lovingly like it was her ownuniverse. “What’s going on?” Kit asked.Mom was silent as the pendulumswung vigorously. Kit asked again. “Don’t be afraid,” Mom reportedcarefully, as if she were receivingmorse code and translating it for us bitby bit. “I’m going to take your motheraway for a while. . .but she’ll be back.”Mom shook her head. “I’m done withthis,” she said as she let the pendulumfall from her hand. That night she saidshe was “sick of being told what todo.” “I’m an adult!” She said. “Youhave no right to make me doanything!” She was angry, tired ofbeing harassed, yet Kit and I could seea smirk struggling betray her fierydemeanor. We passed a knowing lookto each other. Mom decided to enlist our helpin fighting the domineering force.They had a tendency to pull her byforce to her bed when she didn’tcomply, but this time Kit’s and mymuscles would help fight them. Momwas already sitting up so all we had todo was hold her arms on either side,

but the entities were strong andpulled her with a sudden push downon the bed. We tried to hold her armsfirmly, but she jerked to and fro andpulled towards the bed. At one pointher body snapped away from us like acatapult and she began runningaround the room squealing somethingin protest. We followed her trail,grabbing at her arms, tugging heraway from the bed as she leaned inthat direction, seemingly without hercontrol. As she giggled, I was uncertain ifshe was still under the influence of thespirits or if she even wanted our helpstill. Finally, her energy spent, shecrashed on the bed with a long sigh.“You can go now.” She said. In thehall, my face felt hot and my limbswere tried as if I had just gone joggingunder a summer sun. I didn’t realizehow much strength it would take tofend off something that was invisible. Iquickly lost the adrenaline as a suddensadness swelled in me. I couldn’tunderstand what it was about. Kit’sface looked the way I felt. She went tothe bathroom next to Mom’s roomand looked into the oval mirror, herbrows knitted with sadness andirritation. Then tears and sobs burstfree. “What is it?” I asked. “I’m just so tired of it.” She said,lifting her head enough for me to seetenuous avenues in her face powder. As she continued crying, I had afeeling that she was truly sick of thenights when Mom got out of hand, orSteven twitched and mumbled atdemons. Maybe she knew there wereproblems with Mom’s belief in hervoices, the spirit realms, and the sage,and ouija boards. Maybe she wasstarting to suspect that something elsewas going on that couldn’t beexplained by ghosts. And maybe myresentment towards Mom was not

May 2020

page 15

simply jealousy like she believed. If Kitagreed, we could tell Dad what wasgoing on. Even though he tried tomake us watch modern films, what ifwe could still trust him somehow? Kit’s tears soon dried and ivorypowder paved the avenues. We settledback on the sofa, staring blankly at thescreen. I glanced at her from time totime. Her stoic expression neverchanged. In the days that followed, we atebreakfast, went sledding, concoctedgames, and watched movies, withoutever mentioning what had gone onwith Mom. The noose wasn’tmentioned much either until one earlyafternoon. *** The snow was melting away andthe sun appeared around the house inpatches through the curtains. We hadwatched A League of their Own, theonly “modern” movie we were willingto watch, and it inspired us to dressup in our skirts and tee shirts and playbaseball. I was getting dressed for abaseball game and Kit, meanwhile,went to the cereal cabinet, a white,six-foot-long structure with twindoors—old like most everything elsein the house. On the middle shelf ajewel sat behind one of the cerealboxes. As with the noose, Mom wasimmediately consulted. I could hear from my room aconversation taking place behindMom’s closed door. There were nerveslike spores breezing in my stomach asI wondered what Kit was saying, whatMom was saying, but I didn’t want toget close enough to hear. When Kitemerged, she walked down the hall toher room. From my room, I watched her siton her bed, first looking at the jewelin her palm and then searching one ofher plastic bins for something. “What’swrong?” I asked as I cautiously walked

through the opening of the door. “It’sa little jewel I found in the cabinet.”She said tenderly. “I’m certain itwasn’t there before. It just appearedfor me to find.” I sank beside herlooking at the little square shimmeringpink and sometimes blue and red. Kitlet me hold it while she continuedsearching the bin. I ran my indexfinger along the soft velvet svelte onthe back end and I clicked myfingernail on the iridescent plastic. From out of the bin Kit pulled aring box that was similar to the sveltein color and texture. “Mom thinks thespirit gave it to me as an apology forthe noose.” She said. The box wasempty and she took the jewel andslipped it into the slot that once held aring she got on her birthday.

The nerves in me were nowdampened by the realization that I waspowerless. Ideas root themselves sofirmly that I would only hurt myself if Itried to pluck them out in one pull. Icould only hope to slowly untanglemyself from their grip. On Kit’s bed, I sat and noddedcomplacently as I half listened to herecho Mom’s narrative of capriciousspirits. I thought ahead to baseball, toDad coming home off the road, to thenext movie. I looked down at theopen ring box and stroked the plasticwith care, as if it were somethingspecial. v

www.blotterrag.com

The B l o t t e r

The Dream Journalreal dreams, real weird

Please send excerpts from your own dream journals. If noth-ing else, we’d love to read them. We won’t publish your

whole name.

It’s not a good time to keep a dream journal. It’s not like many ofus are sleeping well, having happy thoughts and wondering if theycan remember what they dreamed to write down and keep for somesort of posterity, or as character developement for some story ornovel coming down the road. I snapped awake last night becausethe person to whom I was talking suddenly had no eyes worth men-tioning and reached out for mine, and I just wasn’t feeling that gen-erous. I have dreamed, recently, that the grass out back was goodenough for a meal, and I snatched fistfuls of it, put what can onlygenerously be called lawn-clippings in a cereal bowl and went bare-foot back into the house. Springtime is best, someone in my kitchensaid to me. By summer it will be too full of silica. I don’t know ifthat’s true or not, and I dont want to know, I replied. Cows havetwo stomachs. Yes, the person said. And a horse walks on its toe.It lost all of the rest vestigially. I don’t know if that’s a word, I said,trying to prepare my lawn for consumption, searching in the cabinetfor something. What, I don’t know.

Madeleine D - cyberspace

He said: ‘Never tell any bossyou’re desperate to work. Becausethey will believe you’re so wretchedyou’re going to snatch some doughdirectly out of their pockets. Play itcool, be smart, pretend you’re inter-ested but if they don’t have anythingfor you, that’s ok, cause you still gottime. You want to work, that’s right,but you’re not here to beg for somework. Above all, don’t let them smellthe slave that hides in every one of uswhen we’re down in the bottoms.That’s plain philosophy, kid.’ We were on the road. I had hitch-hiked that afternoon from the caravanpark where I slept, and from all thedrivers the only one who stopped wasa philosopher. – Sir, it’s been weeks I’m lookingfor one, and I’ve already been in everyfarm in the area and... – Are you still looking for one?he interrupted me. – Yeah, sure, I answered tooquickly, with as much conviction in myvoice as I could afford then. But, Ithought, could it not wait my after-noon booze first? That was the reasonI had hitchiked. To go to the shoppingcentre and get some cheap pack ofbeers. – Well, I’ll drive you RIGHT NOWto some friend of mine. The onlyquestion is: ARE YOU MOTIVATEDSON? – Oh sure! THANK YOU SIR! Next time, I should learn to keepmy mouth shut... He pulled over on the road andturned back. I could hear my crossbeing nailed somewhere close. “Here it is, son. I reckon she’s

somewhere back there. Come withme.” We arrived at a farm I had alreadybeen to, but I said nothing. I thought,they would probably recognize meand with a little luck I could go grabsome booze and lay back. A wrinkled over-tanned orangesmall lady walked towards us. I didn’tknow her but I had a bad feelinginside. – How’s it going mate? sheasked. – Fine thank you. Yourself? Iasked. But she didn’t bother to answer,‘cause he took her a little bit furtherand started talking with her about myhuge motivation, or something closeto it I suppose. Next thing I heardwas: “No worries mate I’LL TAKE CAREOF HIM.” – Well goodbye, mate! said thephilosopher, with a firm handshake. – Goodbye! and thank you VERYMUCH!’ I replied. So here I was: left on my own,with what looked like a supervisor tome. I craved to start running away, butinstead I asked her as leisurely as Icould: ‘What kind of fruits you grow inhere, ma’am?’ ‘No fruits mate. We grow carrotsmate. That’s all there is in here: CAR-ROTS.’ Well, I had been a dishwasher, inthe heat and hell of the doomedkitchens of this little earth. A factotum,paid to clean up the dust in warehous-es. A farmhand, employed to benddown low and die in the sun whilepicking up tomatoes, zucchinis,aubergines, grapes, pumpkins, chili

peppers and what else? I had workedmy way into greenhouses so close tohell, the Devil himself shared my mad-laughter in the hot summer after-noons... So now what, carrots? Itcould not be worse. Then, she explained the job tome: to each backpacker, a line. Intoeach line, carrots were supposed togrow. To grow well, each backpackerhad to look and LOOK WELL, for anyweed and take it out. In other words:the weed: bad. Carrots: Good. Easydoes it.

It was my first day, very first hourand I went fast into my line. Money,money, money. I looked up and sawall the other backpackers way behindme. I was proud of myself. All the hardjobs had finally paid. These guys knewnothing of the pain in the sun. Herecame the real man. Show them theway, Spartacus! ‘Hey mate! how’s it going foryou?’ It was the over-tanned orangesupervisor who woke me up from mydreams. ‘Great mate, really great. I think I

like this job.’ ‘Good to hear mate, but comewith me, I want to show you some-thing.’ ‘No worries, mate!’ I followed her whistling one myfavourite tune. My shadow was danc-ing on the ground and I had a bigsmile on. Show me something? The john?The beers in the fridge? The way out? ‘See these things mate?’ ‘No, not really.’ ‘These things here mate.’ ‘What things?’ ‘THESE things!’ She pointedsome strange little things, barely visi-ble. I had to drop on my knees andlook well. But even from that distance,I could not see what she saw.

May 2020

page 17

“Rabbit Town”by Horia Pop

‘Uh? ‘HERE. And… HERE… And…HERE. HERE. HERE. And…’ ‘Wait, do you mean THESEthings?’ ‘YEP, MATE.’ ‘You mean I have to take THEMout too?’ ‘THAT’S RIGHT MATE!’ ‘Oh’ ‘Go back mate and start it allover. And this time LOOK WELL. Yougot to clear EVERY WEED ON YOURLINE.’ I walked back slowly. Very slowly.Meanwhile once or twice, I accidental-ly caught some of my new colleagues’smiling faces. It looked like they couldnot hide their happiness to see meback among them. With my knees deep into theground, and my pride a little bit deep-er, I started all over. Five minutes later, I had a shad-ow over me. I felt her presence. I wasbending over a tiny bitty little greenishthing that was to become some sort ofweed. I held it on the edge of my littlefinger and examined it. It was barely agrain of dust. Perhaps the cousin of anatom. Some ersatz of weed at its best.Could that baby weed be dangerousfor the carrots? I had to lift that weightfrom my shoulders. ‘Is that BAD weed ma’am?’ Iasked. ‘YEAH MATE, THAT’S BAD FORTHE CARROT. NOW YOU DIG IT!’ ‘Ah.’ ‘AND LEAVE NOTHING BEHINDMATE!’ It lasted three weeks. And then Ifelt it was time for me to move ononce again. So I paid my debts to thecaravan park, packed up my thingsand I went back to the first big city onthe map. Wanna know how? By train.I’ve never hitch-hiked again. vwww.blotterrag.com

The B l o t t e r

“Paperclip”What if clouds were afraid of heightsand no longer participated in precipitation

What if the heart were not a beat but a songlike a Siren calling you inward

What if when drowning in the sea we awakento peacefulness never known before

What if when speaking words appear in the airso we can edit them before they are heard

What if along with seeing colors we could alsofeel and hear them too

What if our bodies were shaped like paperclipsso we could attach ourselves to so much more

What if light is generated by darknessand we’ve been wrong about seeking the light

Two by DAH

page 19

May 2020

“fragmented no. 32”today is the hour / today,/ now on the verge of rising,of awakening

when i step / into the breezewith the sky sealed blue / anda light humming

of early bees / the lighter hummingof earlier birds / and this is easyto imagine:

the body, as a cover, as cloth / as a basin or a river / these chains of emotions

attached, like zippers / and pulling like trains / the shapeless effectof moonlight,

a flickering ghost / a shaky hand / and one’s last breath, as a spellcasting death.

i sit up in bed / as if a child askingfor water, the extent of this dream above me / light years away.

in this space of near darknessstreetlamps are faraway planets, as if light years away:

in this dream, i’ve cut my fingera glass cut, a papercut, a knife cut … ?

www.blotterrag.com

The B l o t t e r

‘Kiss Ass:’(The Story of A & B)

A is always busy, Always so, so busy,And B wears a mask of wood.B doesn’t know to kiss ass is to be a performance While A gets her philosophy hand-me-down.A has too many cogs inside herLike a Rube-Goldberg toaster,And B uses Miracle Grow on her memory.But B’s tiny branches must scratch A’s neckEven if she can’t fall far from the ‘me.’

“Pink Flamingos” (In the Lawn)

Using the zoom like a drunk man,the cameraman cock-pecks at the worldthat he is never in --but like him, fields sit around the characters in it: divine and as regal as a planetary body.It's all a head-spin of glamorous proportions(but do remember the chicken is a very stupid animal).Meanwhile, Kibosh sausages hang off a dirty word --“it’s garbage,” sells the film(and one might debate, at the end of the day, that it’s a complex form of sorrow),in which a century is displaced, in a very Freudian sense.These fat delinquents,licking upholstered couches thick,whisper to a camera too thin to capture the whole image, blinking its c*** eyes of unspoken gender.

Two by Michael T. Smith

page 21

May 2020

“Makerspace”by Amanda Yanovitch

The new Jefferson University makerspace is pretty impressive. I went in last week thinking I would just build apopsicle-stick bridge or make some kind of project with whatever odds and ends they had. I’ve always been into artsand crafts. Instead, I ended up meeting a bunch of people and got completely new hair. Some people were doing crazyshit with the 4D printer—new arms, new eyes, new whatever.

I need to think more about who I want to be, I guess. My elementary school PATHS testing showed that I was atheatre kid instead of a STEM kid. My folks are both engineers, and I had always loved to build things. They panickedwhen the notice came:

Dear PARENTS OF FRANKIE SCANTLING,Please review the enclosed results of your child’s PATHS testing. Our district has used this method of placing childreninto appropriate educational pathways for the last five years with great success. Research has shown that children thrivein structured learning environments free from distractions. Placing them into career tracks by age eleven has beenshown to improve testing performance in middle school and is one way in which our district has successfully developeda workforce that…

Dad wasn’t going to have it. He went in to meet with Principal Ziege, and they went over each section on the test. “Thanks for coming in, Mr. Scantling. I think—yes, please have a seat—I know this is very hard. It can be a quite a

shock. I’ll just tell you this—defined pathways are vital to the well-being of children. We cannot choose their tracks. It’sour job to support them once they are placed in a track, but it’s highly detrimental to interfere with the placement.”

My dad asked Mr. Ziege to show him the first question: DRAW A PICTURE IN THE BOX.

Dad swallowed. “What did Frankie draw?”Mr. Ziege flipped to the answer sheet.

Dad stared. Mr. Ziege moved on to question two:WHICH ONE DO YOU LIKE?A. ScienceB. TechnologyC. EngineeringD. Math

Ziege put a finger to his temple. “Frankie didn’t pick anything for that one.”“Well—could she have just, you know, skipped it? She’s nine years old! Maybe she got distracted?”

“Mr. Scantling, these kids all know how important PATHS testing is. We spend the entire second grade yearpreparing them for this.”

“But there are no theatre people in our family! My wife and I are both engineers!”“Frankie is her own person. If PATHS says she’s a theatre kid, we all need to support that result. I’ve

seen parents try to force kids down a track that the test didn’t choose. It never ends well.”Dad fell back in his chair. “Frankie’s always loved to build. She’s always been an engineer. We got her

the STEM infant pack with the BuildIT Pacifier. She memorized the entire Baby Archimedes video seriesbefore she could walk! She did science-based Pre-K and finished the Junior National Engineering ReadinessDegree before she even started at this school! I mean… I can’t—”

When he got home, he and my mom went upstairs and didn’t come back down for hours. Mom eventu-ally came down and hugged me and asked if wanted dinner, but it was different. She never looked at me thesame way again.

I decided that my first choice for college was the Sullivan Institute’s School for Theatre Arts. That’swhere all the theatre kids went. It was a state school, and their theatre tech department was ranked third inthe country.

Of course, it closed. All the schools that didn’t produce enough STEM majors got shut down. The onlyother school I could get into was Jefferson University. I came here for set design, but they axed the dramadepartment in my first semester and turned the theatre into a planetarium. The green room is where kids goto barf if the motion of the universe makes them sick.

The theatre professor is still my advisor. When Jefferson closed the drama department, the administra-tors called her into a meeting to fire her. They apologized, but it wasn’t their fault, they said. Times werechanging. They had no control over things, they said. No funding.

She stood up and placed her hands on the table. “This is the excellent foppery of the world,” she said,“that when we are sick in fortune—often the surfeits of our own behaviour—we make guilty of our disastersthe sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves,thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedi-ence of planetary influence, and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on.”

It was Shakespeare, which she knew would confuse them, and it worked—the administrators noddedto each other, baffled. Then she sighed and told them that she had a minor in planetary science and wasready to roll out the new curriculum that very semester. They were pretty shocked, but also relieved sinceshe was the only person on campus who knew how to work the lights and sound in the planetarium.

She smiles every time she tells us that story. She doesn’t actually have a minor in planetary science.She’s just a really good actress.

All of the students know this, but nobody is complaining. The fact that ASTR 101 is actually an improvclass means that all the astronomy students are developing amazing interview skills. According to theStudent-Customer Satisfaction report published by Jefferson last week, astronomy students now have thelowest rates of suicide on campus. The administration credited the new planetarium for increased studentsuccess.

Sometimes I sneak into the workshop behind the old stage. I flick on the fluorescent lights, let the talldoors close behind me, and breathe in the sawdust. It’s a makerspace cemetery. I think of the kids in thenew makerspace. What are they printing today? v

The B l o t t e r

www.blotterrag.com

“A Secret Society Forms”In lieu of secret handshake,a salute was created.

To make the salute, you made a downward circular motionwith your right hand,starting quickly but then wound slowly downto total stillness.

We referred to it as the whirlpool.

Whenever we came acrosseach other in public,we saluted.People looked at uslike we were weirdbut that didn’t matter.

It was a signal of recognition.We were all part of something.

All that something needed nowwas something to do.

“The Change In Life”I surprise myselfwith how much easier it has been to fall in withthe unified actionsof others rather than going it alone.

It is gratifyingto be part ofthe relief, the satisfaction,of belongingto the crowd.

And it makes less and less senseto try to free myself from the conviviality,the impetus,of this common identity.

Solitude had hadits lonely day.It’s time to embracethe group dictate.

I intend to give up writing poetry,join a gun club.

May 2020

page 23

Two by John Grey

“The Body In The Lake”by John Grey

A body’s floating in the lake,held up from below,illuminated from above.Fat sun, high mountains,and human detritus.Throw in a darting fishand a leaping frog.

A body merely rocks in place.It doesn’t bask on a rock like the turtles. Or overhang as does the willow bough.The egret is on the slow, deliberate, march.But the carcass does nothing for its keep. There’s less to itthan a dragonfly snaring mosquitoes in the marsh grass.

Soon, a rescue team will arrive,fetch the corpse out of the water.The wildlife will keep their distance.But nowhere near the distancethe body keeps.

www.blotterrag.com

The B l o t t e r

page 25

May 2020

knowledge and thinking on my part (hence some more overlaps in my quadrants.) But I try to never confuse it withthings that I think can be proven (yes, there is more mayo), and I am not troubled by the idea that details underlyingbeliefs are sometimes questioned by those who need more evidence, or proof. Or pose questions to me about whatcan or cannot be done.

That’s a good start, I think. I don’t know. I know I’ll come back to this. I believe it has potential for being useful. LikeI believe that things will get better. I think it will take time. I know that we’ve been through difficult times before, andcome through them. I don’t know how it will look at the end.

And I hope you are OK.

Garry - chief@blotterrag.com

continued from page 3

ContributorsTom Sheehan, in his 93rd year, (31st Infantry, Korea 1950-52; Boston College 1952-56) has published 48 books,has multiple works in many sites and magazines Rosebud, The Linnet’s Wings, Copperfield Review, LiterallyStories, Indiana Voices Journal, Frontier Tales, Faith-Hope and Fiction, Green Silk Journal, Rope & Wire Magazine,etc. He has 16 Pushcart nominations, 6 Best of the Net nominations (one winner). He was 2016 Writer-in-Residence at Danse Macabre in Las Vegas. Latest books released are The Grand Royal Stand-off and OtherStories and Small Victories for the Soul VII and Poems and Reflections for Proper Bostonians. In submission cycleare Beneath My Feet This Rare Earth often Slips into the Far Side of Another’s Telescope and Saugus, My HomeTown.Jillian Oliver is a freelance writer and student from Wilmington, NC. She wrote and edited for publications such asMovie Babble Reviews and Season Magazine and her fiction has appeared recently in Gargoyle Magazine and TheQuail Bell Magazine.Horia Pop lives in Salon-de-Provencec, France and currently works as a night audit and writes poems, plays andshort-stories. When he saves enough money, he’ll quit his job to travel again. His has set his mind on Kamtchatkaand Antarctica, but hush, his mother still doesn’t know it DAH is a multiple Pushcart Prize and Best Of The Net nominee, and the lead editor for the poetry critique group,The Lounge. The author of nine books of poetry, DAH lives in Berkeley, CA, and has been teaching yoga to childrenin public and private schools since 2005. He is working on his tenth poetry book, which is due for release inSeptember, 2020 from Clare Songbirds Press. To find out more, visit: www.dahlusion.wordpress.comMichael T. Smith is an Assistant Professor of English who teaches both writing and film courses. He has publishedover 150 pieces (poetry and prose) in over 80 different journals. He loves to travel.Amanda Yanovitch earned a BA and an MA in English from the University of Virginia and worked in publishing untilshe could no longer resist the urge to take up dry-erase markers and share the good news about composition andliterature with students at John Tyler Community College. She lives near Richmond, VA and spends her days fight-ing to keep STEM from taking away all of the nice things.John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in Hawaii Pacific Review, Dalhousie Review andQwerty with work upcoming in Blueline, Willard and Maple and Clade Song.Bruce Baldwin is an artist living in Cary, NC, working in watercolor, ink, color pencils and markers. His paintingsand drawing have been on display in various locations with upcoming shows in Cary. Fixated on the world aroundhim, his works are mostly of nature. Buildings, street scenes and life in general as seen through the eyes of NorthCarolians are captured in the mediums Bruce employs. He’ll have 30 paintings/drawings at The Bond ParkCommunity Center, 150 Metro Park Dr, in Cary starting Wed, July 1, ending Mon, Aug 31 with the reception July 31from 6 until 8PM.