Delmarva Review, Volume 7

The

Delmarva

Review

VOLUME 7

Editorial Board

Wilson Wyatt, Jr., Executive Editor

Anne Colwell, Poetry Editor

Harold O. Wilson, Co-Fiction Editor

Amy Abrams, Co-Fiction Editor

George Merrill, Co-Nonfiction Editor

Cheryl Somers Aubin, Co-Nonfiction Editor

Cheril Thomas, Submissions

Bill Gourgey, Publishing

Gerald F. Sweeney, Editorial Advisor

Melanie Rigney, Editorial Advisor

Design and Layout Editor, Laura Ambler

Copyediting, Jeanne Pinault

Proofreading, Charlene Marcum

Cover photograph: Roger Camp, Dolls, Provincetown, MA

The Delmarva Review is published annually in print and digital editions by the Eastern Shore Writers Association, a nonprofit organization supporting writers and the literary arts across the Delmarva Peninsula (including portions of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia). Additional support is provided by private contributions and sales. The content of each issue is determined solely by the editorial board.

The Review welcomes new prose and poetry submissions from all writers, regardless of residence. Editors consider only those manuscripts submitted electronically during specific submission periods. The dates and guidelines are posted on the website: www.delmarvareview.com.

General correspondence can be sent to:

The Delmarva Review

P.O. Box 544, St. Michaels, MD 21663

Or e-mail: editor@delmarvareview.com

Copyright 2014 by the Eastern Shore Writers Association

www.easternshorewriters.org

Library of Congress Control Number: 2008215789

Paperback: ISBN-13: 978-0-9883456-1-4

Electronic: ISBN-13: 978-0-9883456-2-1

Preface

Welcome to the seventh edition of The Delmarva Review, a literary journal dedicated to the discovery of compelling new prose and poetry. We are pleased to present a sampling of voices and writing styles of 40 contributors from 14 states, the District of Columbia, and one foreign country. Over a thousand authors submitted their work for consideration in 2014. As editors, we are grateful for the opportunity to read their poems, short fiction, and essays. The published pieces represent a fraction of the good writing we received.

The cover features doll artifacts that conjure images from times past. They tease our imaginations with the potential for discovery. Like the promise of literature, these crafted ceramic parts have survived generations and traveled far. The dolls were once whole, their parts attached, like a writer’s characters. Their purpose was to inspire or entertain an audience.

The pieces, some 100 to 200 years old, were gathered at low tide from under time-weathered piers in Provincetown harbor, off Cape Cod. Fine art photographer Roger Camp arranged them to create the cover photograph, giving them renewed visibility.

The Delmarva Review strives to fulfill two purposes: to discover and publish new literary work and to inspire other writers, by example, to pursue excellence in literary writing. We publish print and electronic editions and, through digital technology, provide for wide distribution, far beyond an author’s regional borders. Our writers will reach new, discerning readers.

Readers, many of whom are writers themselves, will find diversity among the pieces selected for this edition. The writing that follows will give readers a sense of the writer’s voice and command of craft. It is likely that something here will engage and inspire you.

The publisher, the Eastern Shore Writers Association, and the talented volunteers on the Review’s Editorial Board, join me in welcoming you to these pages of literary discovery.

Wilson Wyatt Jr.

Executive Editor

Contents

Preface

Contents

FICTION

August Evans

The Mythology of the Wife

Cathy Herbert

The Estate Sale

Denise Emanuel Clemen

Bread

Valeri Miner

Something in the Way She Knows

Ellen Prentiss Campbell

Entangled Objects

Brandon Getz

Robot on a Park Bench

Robert I. Mann

The Player

Sarah Barnett

Dining in Rome

Christina McDaniel

Tomorrow We'll Be Salt

Ree Davis

A Limitless Sky

NONFICTION

Linda Morefield

The Graveyard of Books

Robert Vivian

Ink of River

Ramona DeFelice Long

Hurricanes and Fairy Tales

Faith Lord

I Hate Rain

Emily Rich

Retrieving My Belongings

Timothy Kenny

Four x One: Managua, Detroit, Connecticut, Kabul

Jackie Mercurio

My Rock

Randon Billings Noble

Widow Fantasies

Mary Lide

A Wake

POETRY

Charlie Clark

Devil in Museum

Devil in Summer

Devil Worship

Devil on an Elevator

Deviled Eggs

Devil's Periphery

Adam McGee

Prayer for a Blizzard

My Father as the Dormition of the Virgin Mary

For the readers of graves

I visit the Boston University Medical School

The Mispillion River rests in Milford, Delaware

The floor gives way as my father preaches on the Destruction of the Temple

Meg Hunter

Visiting the World War II Memorial,

Cherry Blossoms 2009

Where I Have Come to Forget You

Look Close Enough

Fish Tank

Flea-Bitten Grey:

Learn Burn

Helen Wickes

Marriage in the Atomic Age

Notes on the Solar Storm

The Year's Missing Second

Ordinary Cosmology

Hell to Heaven Any Given Day

Wendy Elizabeth Ingersoll

Cold

Bringing Beauty

Carolyn Martin

One Month Since

Le Hinton

(Magpies) in Another Country

Jeff Rath

Mantis

Karina Borowicz

She Waits

Marvin Shackleford

After the Bank

Glen Armstrong

The Bedside Book of Thrift Store Finds

John Palen

Morning Paper

Jennifer Davis

He's (Pretty) Bright

John McCarthy

Pickup Truck (#13)

Pickup Truck (#16)

Pickup Truck (#11)

Darren Demaree

Emily as it Matters

If This is a Forest or a Ship

Emily as the First Question is a Blood Question

Emily as Otherwise, the Bustle

Manda Frederick

Postcard from I-90

Kinetic in the Dark

Barbara Ryder-Levinson

Seasons of Grief

After Reading Jamaica Kincaid

BOOK REVIEWS

Bleeding Edge,

by Thomas Pynchon

Wilmot Here, Collect for Stella,

by Christian Anton Gerard

Avoiding Armageddon: America, India,

and Pakistan to the Brink and Back

by Bruce Riedel

Contributors

Orders

August Evans

THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE WIFE

On a dark Saturday morning, in a house in the woods of the lower Midwest, the wife made poached eggs and wheat toast for breakfast. Though the husband came and sat across from her at their square table, all he wanted was black tea.

Here, far from the city where they met, the wife and husband live in a house set amongst beds of apples. Shoulders of hills track through deep pine; steep firs drip their hair upon ravines.

On a morning in late October, through the window to the side of their breakfast table, mist shrouded the husband and wife’s garden.

Moving here after the husband lost his job as a city salesman, he and the wife decided to paint their living room a deep, dark green. The shade they purchased looked different on the wall than it had on the swatch. More like a turquoise. And so clashing with the red of their couch.

The dark Saturday was the husband’s leaving day. A week-long visit to his sister’s in Chicago.

Smelling of pine, he hefted a duffel bag over his shoulder.

Just to your sister’s? asked the wife.

The husband kissed the wife, and she thought of their bed, still damp.

"You are every other woman," he spoke, hand on knob, parting words.

One night in winter, in a leather chair, on break in the shop where the wife then worked, before she was a wife, her eyes leapt up from the book she was reading, and there he was, directly in her line of sight. The husband. At a circular table with two other men. Such shops don’t exist anymore, not after the city ordinance outlawing the sale of tobacco alongside beverages. He dragged his chair through blue smoke, behind him along the wood floor. Some people turned and stared. The wife watched his approaching thighs: thin, yet consequential. She couldn’t stop thinking about a sentence in the book. What did you say? she asked, after discovering he was standing over her, talking to her. What is that you’re reading? the husband repeated. The wife stuck her finger in her page and held the cover out to him; he began to laugh. What’s so funny? she asked. In his hand was the very same book. The wife and husband sat across from each other in their chairs and talked for the rest of the wife’s break. When the wife excused herself, her face was flushed in the bathroom mirror. She returned, intent on telling the husband she had to get back to work; but he already had put on his coat. I traded our books while you were away, he said, as she wrote down her number for him. And this made the not-yet wife laugh.

The wife did not know, tying her apron behind the bar, after the husband had put on his wool hat and said goodbye to his friends and strode out into the pitch-cold night, looking back at her as he opened the door, what she would do when he called. The fact that they had been reading the same book at the moment they met could be interpreted as a divine boon; equally, the subject matter of the book could color their situation. Although the wife had just begun the book, she knew it concerned itself entirely with marriage. Adultery. A husband who leaves his wife for a younger woman.

The day after the blue room, the husband phoned the wife in the early afternoon. The first thing she said was she hadn’t read any more of his copy of the book. He said he hadn’t opened her copy, either.

I was only a few pages in, the wife said.

I hadn’t even started it, the husband said.

Your copy’s a library book.

Don’t worry about it.

They set a date for four days, agreeing to, before then, both finish the book.

Across from him at a circular table in a Mexican restaurant in Lincoln Square, the wife watched the husband. It was a night of fat snow, and crystals of it had begun to dry in his dark hair, his dense eyelashes.

So, the book, the wife began. What did you think of the subject matter?

The husband said, What do you want me to say about a book about one-sided cheating? Hardly an easy read. The kind of love they had—too much. Unsustainable.

Uncontainable, nodded the wife.

The stuff of tragedy, said the husband, forking some guacamole.

The wife sighed. Ridiculous, for any people in their right minds to put themselves through such a thing.

And even after their divorce, explained the husband, their bond continued to torment them.

Like an incurable sickness, nodded the wife.

The subject of some of our greatest art, the husband replied.

After death, then they’ll be free, the wife agreed.

The husband asked the wife if she would like to get out of there. The lights had dimmed and he had long since paid their check. The wife ran her finger around the lip of her margarita glass, licking clean her salty nail.

In their long coats, the husband and wife crunched over a dense layer of snow. The husband took the wife’s gloved hand in his gloved hand, and said he wanted to emphasize they not let the contents of the book affect their actual lives. Placing stock in such a thing was akin to voodoo, or astrology. What mattered, the husband believed, was that he and the wife had been reading the same book at all. And even that was just coincidence. Besides, once I got into it, the book didn’t really do it for me, the husband continued. I had a hard time understanding why the wife was so drawn to him in the first place.

They met when the wife was young, the wife replied. That might have had something to do with it. Him being her first.

It’s important for people to grow out of those sorts of things, the husband said, stopping the wife before a wrought-iron fence, pulling her near.

Their love was mythological, with no place in the real world, said the wife, as the husband removed his glove, began stroking her face. I think of Andromeda, walking along the shore at dawn, discovering a chest. When she looks inside, she cries out. Perseus, from his ship, abandons his voyages, goes to her.

But that’s not what happens in the book, the husband said, pulling back the wife’s scarf, lowering his lips to her neck. It’s a distorted version of the myth.

Exactly, sighed the wife, into the husband’s ear.

The wife’s orgasm: a blue room so endless she finally had to push the husband from it.

The husband whispered in the wife’s ear, Let’s never be like the book, where they stood in embrace before a crowd, their wedding kiss.

Fifteen years went by. The husband and wife lived in the city, continuing to read the same books. As it turned out, the husband was a book vendor, so he always had access to rare, new titles, which he brought home to the wife, who continued her work at the tobacco shop. By the time the husband was laid off from his job, he had already started toying with the thought of moving to the country, somewhere South, closer to the land that had borne him. It was time for him to start using his hands, he told the wife. To remember how much he had in common with the animals.

And so they moved, further South, to this cabin, the husband opening a welding shop in the town proper, where he soldered traps for country folks to lure prey. Here, the wife and husband have woods and a lawn and a fireplace. A neighbor,

Louise:

Tall. Skin the shade of dark tea. A circular, white knit hat. Coal hair to her waist. Heavy breasts, taut with youth. Lined eyes, very strong whites. Thin, bracelet-saddled wrists. Age: twenty-three. Sometimes she sits outside sipping wine with the husband and wife after they’ve supped together, her hair breathy and wild.

Louise’s herbalism is in high demand, and people wait in long lines for it at her back door. She prepares tinctures and balms for anxiety, insomnia, an overactive mind, menstrual pain, chicken pox. Her remedies work very well.

One other thing:

Louise is not a wife.

Louise’s cabin, chimney smoke. Rounded, tidy stacks of wood. A long porch, several blankets and cloths on lines. Garden plots in better shape than those of the husband and wife.

Within: Louise’s tinctures, balms, stacked from counter to ceiling all throughout the kitchen and the hallways and the bathrooms. Rooms entirely devoted to herbs. The wife does odd jobs for her several days a week. Sometimes she feels strange about this, her employer being fifteen years her junior, but the wife quickly abandons these thoughts when they get going. After all, the work she does for Louise is only a hobby, a means of stringing together the empty time when the husband is away at work. Besides, she is getting to be friends with Louise. On dusk at most days, they sit in Louise’s living room, talking, drinking potent tea.

Louise’s living room contains a large collection of animal skins.

The wife does not say she houses dark, daily suspicions that the husband is unfaithful. That once she found in unpacking her husband’s suitcase a pair of women’s sturdy black underwear (when she brought it up to the husband, he scoffed, said they were hers, stuck in his laundry, he had accidentally packed them). In fact, in her talks with Louise, the wife is not in the habit of bringing up the husband at all. Not once does she discuss the book. The wife thinks: Louise hears enough of others’ ailments.

Rotate Louise’s living room: a wrought iron trap has appeared above her fireplace. The wife should ask her someday, who managed to solder such a weighty thing to brick.

The wife asked the husband, who finally called the next day, how his sister was.

The beat was too long for the wife to believe he was anywhere near her.

If she mimics the words a wife should say, does the wife become one?

Mostly, the wife derives her suspicions from smells, postures, a deep sense of the husband’s hair having been stroked by someone else. Paranoia, he calls it, severe, when the wife brings it up with him. Obsession—you should do something with your unhealthy obsession.

Last summer in the city, the wife watched men running through the park without their shirts, and tried filling their bodies with her desire.

But she could only observe them in the milky way you would children playing on a set