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I’ve said it before, but choosing the winner of the Writer’s Digest Poetry Awards is one of my favorite things to do each year. In 2024, there were more than 700 entries covering a range of forms, subjects, issues, and themes. In the end, I selected Judith Chibante’s “Naïve Beauty” for the First Place Prize of $1,000, publication in Writer’s Digest, and a 20–minute consultation with yours truly.

Chibante, who has been writing “since Mrs. Thompson’s English class in high school” before going on to teach for four decades herself, previously finished in the Top 10 for this competition multiple times, and her perseverance paid off this time around. For me, her poem “Naïve Beauty” was a sonic delight focused on natural beauty.

Here’s a quick Q&A:

What are you currently up to?

I have not yet published a full-length book, and would like to shape the current manuscript I’m working on in that direction. That, of course, means more prolific writing, which is a major focus right now. Why not write a poem a day? (WD features a path for this.) Or at least a week? I continue to need to challenge myself on this.

What inspired “Naïve Beauty”?

An in-depth study of Gerard Manley Hopkins gave impetus for the form, but the ideas are from my own discoveries about creating the new—what hadn’t been in the world until I brought it into Being. When I was a young girl, I made a pillow out of felt and yarn; even though I had used a pattern, I remember the euphoria to look at that pillow and realize it had never “been”
before—now it “was.” This poem expresses the power—and, I think—the magic of making a new entity: finishing the hat in Stephen Sondheim’s words.

And … that making saves us. Any one of us at any moment may need redeeming. From what? From the ordinary, from past slovenly or half-realized effort, from self-doubt. Perhaps these are the “sins” (if any) of the artist.

If you could pass on one piece of advice to other poets, what would it be?

You are as much an artist as Monet or Beethoven—their reputations were created by others embracing and lifting their art. Their own creative process is the same one you tussle with. You paint in the language of images and description and fresh observations. Put everything down on your “new canvas” (it’s only blank until you come to it)—that three-word refrain repeatedly playing in your head, the inspirational turn of phrase from Call the Midwife (e.g., “We are each other’s wealth and our greatest good fortune …”). Keep a running log on your tablet to catch yourself—and others—being brilliant; use it as a personal source to mine.

Also, seek out poems that speak to you to learn “by heart”—your heart. Mine is stirred by poems of poets as diverse as Charles Baudelaire (“Be Drunk”) and Jane Kenyon (“Happiness”). In this way, you build a body of high language that becomes a background to draw from for your own efforts. Once poems are living in your heart—those of others, as well as your own—you can access them at 3 a.m. or standing in the grocery check-out line or sitting in another waiting room. And they make for a deep and rich anteroom for meditation.

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While Lucy Day has a lot of interesting and surprising things to share about her almost 10 years of self-publishing, at the top of the list might be this: She started her writing career being traditionally published.

“I found with a traditional publisher—this was years ago—that it could take 18 months or more after a manuscript was accepted to actually see it finished, and that’s an eternity,” she says with a laugh. “I really love that with self-publishing, I create my own timetable, and I can generally publish faster than that. The first Lucy Day book was published in September of ’22, and now the fourth one [came] out [in February].”

But it’s not just how quickly she can get the works out to readers that draws her to self-publishing. She says, “It’s empowering to learn all the facets of self-publishing, all those nitty-gritty details, and that it’s possible to do all that—or a lot of it—yourself. And to do it well and publish the same caliber books that traditional presses are doing.”

Along this vein, she says that she “just never really understood that stigma of self-publishing not being as good as traditional. I think there are a ton of amazing books out there that are self-published. And I think we’re lucky that we live in a time where it’s relatively easy to self-publish.

“There are a lot of people out there with a lot of important things to say and amazing stories to tell, and they don’t have the same resources that a lot of other authors have. It’s really hard to find an agent and get in with a traditional house sometimes. Then it can take years to finally get a book in print. It’s a gift to be able to self-publish, and I think there’s a lot of amazing authors out there doing it.”

That pride in quality is what elevated her novel, One Sweet Holiday, to the top of the Writer’s Digest 12^th Annual Self-Published E-book Awards. This grand-prize win netted Day a prize package of $5,000, a paid trip to the Writer’s Digest Annual Conference, and more.

While she finds self-publishing rewarding, it comes with challenges. Day says the biggest challenge for her is marketing. “It’s a challenge to gain visibility when you self-publish. … I feel like the landscape in marketing is the thing that is always changing. And I just want to be able to engage with my readers. I find that it’s sometimes hard to do that through social media just because, especially now, it seems like there’s so much noise. It’s really hard to cut through! [laughs] But I would say that that visibility and that engagement is the most challenging thing. … Marketing can take a whole lot of time and, frankly, I’d just rather spend that time writing.”

How does she overcome these challenges? She turns to her community of writers and self-published authors. “A friend of mine and I went into this self-publishing vein together, and she and I had strengths that complimented each other. So, we had learned a lot over the years about editing, formatting—I’m a graphic designer, so the cover design, I felt confident doing myself. … I am fortunate to have a couple of close friends who also work as editors … several of us will trade services essentially. I’m lucky to have a network of people who I can trade those services with. [But] if I didn’t have friends who could help me … that would be really hard to navigate around.”

It was her community that inspired the story of One Sweet Holiday. Although this is the third book of the Jasmine Falls Love Stories series, one of Day’s friends challenged her to write a holiday romance—something she’d never tackled before. She took up the challenge and decided to add in other romance genre elements she loves: someone new comes to a small town to give people a fresh perspective; opposites attract; a female entrepreneur who is finding her path. And she says, “My late mother loved Christmas, everything about it. The more I worked on that story, it just became kind of a love letter to her too.”

We also discussed how community can give writers confidence—and that confidence can be the make-or-break-it of a writer’s career.

“I have this friend and writing coach, Camille Pagán, who’s been a huge influence on me in terms of mindset. And this is something that we talk about together a lot because, you know, now I feel like I can either tell myself that writing’s hard and I can toil, or I can tell myself that writing is easy and it’s going to be fun. Those thoughts directly affect how I feel and how I write. So, it’s a little bit woo, but it’s about the science of mindset. … I choose to have fun when I’m writing. Now it often comes more with ease than it used to, but there are definitely moments where I get stuck, and sometimes, I just need to take a walk, get out of the house and clear my head, let ideas percolate and come back to them later. But ultimately, I just trust the process now. I know some parts are going to be harder to write than others, but I’m confident I’ll get the story where I want it to be in the end.

“It took me a long time to get to that place. I’m not saying it happened overnight. [laughs] But once that confidence started to grow, it’s like, ‘OK, I know how to tell a good story. I can trust myself to shape this the way it needs to be.’”

Part of that confidence is in knowing where your strengths do not lie. Being able to discern this can set a writer up for success. Day says, “I’m always happy to hire people who do the things that are outside of my wheelhouse because I have learned the hard way that it can be not the best use of my time to try to learn too many things or to do things that are really just not in my expertise. [laughs] Book tours, for example. I always hire somebody to handle tours for me because that’s not something that I’m very good at, frankly. And that’s just how I approach it. If I come upon a task I need done that I know I’m not going to do it well enough that I’m happy with it, I’d rather hire somebody who is really good at it and hire the most professional people I can to help.”

When asked what advice she has for other writers, her answer is simple but profound: “Trust your gut, and choose a path that aligns with your goals and your intentions. Don’t be afraid to take the leaps that will allow you to grow. Just show up for yourself every day and have your own back—to me, that has been a game changer.”

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Elocution Lesson

by Mary-Jane Holmes

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The Souls

by E.M. Schorb

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Details and Aftershocks

by Gretchen Ayoub

“The casket you ordered—we had to change it. We needed to special order a new one, since we measured your son—he’s 6’8”. He won’t fit into our regular size.” The funeral director gives me this newest information as gently as he can, speaking softly and slowly. He stops and waits, trained to anticipate any number of reactions. Each time we go over an expense, another item on the list, he does the same thing. Stop, wait, listen. I silently nod agreement. Yes, to the hearse costs. Yes, to the church fees. Yes, to the embalming and body preparation costs. Yes, to the cemetery burial costs. Yes, to the extra-long casket; yes, the color is fine…

The three-part legal-size pre-printed form lists items and services for wakes, funerals, and burials. I approved a similar list fourteen years ago in this same room when I came to bury my husband. He did not need a bigger casket. Right now my vision blurs in and out and I try to focus on what I am about to sign. There are “special” charges that were not on my husband’s bill. Keeping my son’s body at Bay Area Funeral Services. Transport to San Francisco Airport. Flight charges. Transport from Boston’s Logan Airport to the funeral home. These are the costs of flying my boy’s body home. Who are these people who attended to him after the time of death was called, drove his body to the San Francisco airport, loaded him on a plane like cargo freight? Mark, the consummate world traveler, 55 countries and counting, some of which I had to locate on a map, has made his final trip, 3000 miles to Boston.

The funeral director asks if I am ready. I nod again and start to stand up. It is like pushing through cement. He holds the chair with one hand and my elbow with the other, anticipating that I might keel over. He gestures toward the door and leads me to a viewing room, where Mark’s prepared body lies, having arrived two days earlier. “Before you go in, I just want to let you know that we did the best we could. It took a week to bring him home…. that is a long time….”

Eight days earlier, I am driving Mark and his fiancée to the airport after spending a wonderful Fourth of July week together. He has on his favorite T-shirt. It is bright green with a picture of The Grinch across the entire front. He loves Dr. Seuss, and I had given him this shirt years ago. I have countless pictures of him wearing it—on Christmas morning, at his college graduation party, in the various countries he visited. That day at the airport, he embraces me in a final bear hug, this giant of a son with his 5’3” mom. “Love you, call you later!” He and his fiancée walk into the lobby, her taking three steps to his one, as his size 17 1/2 feet swiftly carry him to the door. He holds it open for her. I can still feel that hug.

His fiancée asks that he be buried in his wedding suit, beautifully tailored, charcoal gray in color, that she and her family had custom-made in China, where her parents were born. I agree. When I step into the viewing room, however, I still envision him wearing that Grinch shirt and that mile-wide loving smile. I walk over to the newly delivered extra-long casket. This body with its flesh tone makeup, face frozen in pain, wearing a suit with his hands folded in front of him? This cannot be my thirty-three-year-old son whose infectious enthusiasm, laugh, and kindness permeated every room he entered. Who at any age was still the biggest kid in the room. Whose little nieces and nephews hung on their giant oak tree of an uncle; he was their favorite. Whose photos from all over the world are not stiff and formal, but delightful—a lemur on his head in Madagascar, swaying on the hanging bridges of Costa Rica with his mom, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, exploring ice caves, and hanging out on the edges of waterfalls worldwide. He should be resting peacefully in a Dr. Seuss shirt and a pair of oversized shorts, sporting his big sneakers that he wore when he completed a marathon. To no one, I cry out “What happened? He doesn’t look like Mark at all!” Without turning around, I know that the funeral director is standing a respectful distance back with his hands clasped in front of him, once again prepared. I don’t move but stare. Perhaps if I look long enough, I will once again see my Mark.

Sudden. Cardiac. Arrest. The week before, vacationing with the family, planning the final details of his upcoming wedding in three months. A typical flight back to San Francisco. Waking up the next day with his fiancée. It’s her birthday. They plan a special birthday dinner for that night. “I don’t feel too well.” Head to the hospital. Dead. Hysterical phone call from his fiancée. More phone calls. Frozen in a charcoal gray suit lying in an extra-long casket.

I review these hard facts as I stand over him. None of this aligns with any of Mark’s being. Perhaps the spirit of this Madagascar roamer has gone off to another remote place and left this XL body here, so that we may bury him according to his beloved Syrian Orthodox tradition. I thank the kind funeral director, take the yellow copy of the bill, and go home.

Over the next weeks, I often hear “You’re so strong.” I greet the mourners at the wake, comforting young men and women who are so grief-stricken they are unable to speak. They try to tell me what a great friend he was while breaking down in tears. We hug. I thank them for being here. I turn to the next person in line, a middle school teacher, a former employer from his high school job, work colleagues who have flown in from California, an old friend of mine who I have not seen in fifteen years, his friends from many states and countries. I stand stick straight at the front of the church on the day of the funeral and read his eulogy, written on the plane from Boston to San Francisco that first night when my sister Judy and I flew out to be with his fiancée.

Greeting people, eulogizing, and standing motionless at the gravesite as the muffled tears of those in attendance float around me in the hot July afternoon—that is my body in the sleeveless black dress. But my being is somewhere above, in the high ceilings of the church, in the blue sky above the casket at the cemetery service, outside of the funeral home walls. The shock space. I box up the anguish and put it on some invisible shelf with “do not open until___” scrawled in black marker on the outside.

As the wake begins, I tenderly tuck his gold christening cross and chain into his stiff hands. The funeral director asks me if I want it back when the services are done. “No.” “Are you sure…” as if to clarify that once the casket is closed and in the ground, there is no more asking. Maybe that gold cross will make him seem more like Mark and less like the man in the suit.

The rest of the world keeps moving. I try to organize boxes of his memories in the attic but end up sitting on the creaky, splintered wood floor, realizing that I have been crying for a while, but not making any noise. This is not the mom in the black dress, but the mom who loses track of time next to childhood letters from camp, handmade Mother’s Day and birthday cards with giant hearts, stick figures, and xxx’s and ooo’s and scrapbooks filled with newspaper clippings. There are Tupperware bins of holiday decorations including his personalized Christmas stocking knit by my godmother when he was born. It will stay folded in the plastic box.

I open my eyes in the middle of the night, not sure if I was ever really asleep. On my daily walks, sunglasses are essential even when it is dark. Daylight hurts. I sit with my strong morning coffee on the back porch in all weather, staring and thinking. I get up because I must; the constant weight pressing on my chest and legs will otherwise immobilize me. Very few ask anymore, “How are you doing?” and I don’t volunteer. Because if I do, everything may shatter all at once, splintering into thousands of tiny shards. I read articles where experts discuss complicated or prolonged grief disorder, as if grief is a pathology that needs to be cured. All grief is complicated and lasting. It is circular and messy, defying parameters. There is no order.

Four years later, there are still times where I cannot attend a party, a holiday event, or a family gathering. It is too suffocating. Some wonder what happened to that early strong woman; she is no longer easy to find. They are curious as to why I cannot muster the will to be present and to find joy, why it is so hard to be with those fully living. And I do not expect that they would understand why. The old adages resurface: time to move on, time to heal, time to do “what he’d want you to do.” Sometimes, I watch others who have suffered unexpected loss and their eyes have that look; the one caught between trying to be present, but realizing that they are in a moment that will never be for the one who has died.

Sudden death produces shock, which provides a temporary coating, allowing for compartmentalization and dissociation to take over. That coating can peel off, then regenerate. There is a frozen river that I see when I am walking in the woods in the winter months. The top seems impenetrable, yet the water still flows fast underneath, churning below the surface, as if ready to break through at any moment. How long that ice will stay firm is unpredictable. It could be all winter or it could crack due to a couple of unexpectedly warm days. Freeze, thaw, refreeze. That is the longer, quieter sequence of sudden loss.

It has not even begun.

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Batgirl’s Last Ride

by Nancie Erhard

It looks like a solid brick wall but wait—are those cracks? A secret exit reveals itself, swinging down like a drawbridge. Out zooms a masked girl riding a motorcycle, her cape billowing away from her shoulders like wings. It’s Batgirl!

I narrated the scene and sang the theme song music to myself, Nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah, as I hit the pedals and scooted out of the carport. There was no secret exit because there was no real wall, and it was a girl’s blue Schwinn bike instead of a motorcycle, so I had to make my own Vroom, Vrooms. With a glance to be sure that no cars were coming, I barrelled full speed down the short driveway into the street. I had to get away from the house as fast as I could so no one could guess my secret identity. Especially not Jan. I pedaled in the opposite direction from her house.

I had cobbled together Batgirl’s disguise: a leotard on which I’d stuck the bat symbol cut out of yellow contact paper, plus tights, a scalloped cape from an old skirt, a headband to which I attached little bat ears, and a dime-store mask. Halloween was over, but I wore this getup outside anyway. Jan would have looked at me from bat ears to sneakers, sniffed, and said something like, “Well, look at you! But aren’t you a little old to play dress up?” The girls who buzzed around her like flies around spoiled fruit would snicker behind their hands. I wouldn’t be a teenager for a few months yet, but I guess my Batgirl disguise would seem childish to someone who already wore a bra and makeup, shaved her legs, and taped up her school uniform hem well above her knees. It would be childish, that is, if I were playing dress-up.

Was Yvonne Craig playing dress-up in her role as Barbara Gordon/Batgirl? Or Nichelle Nichols as Lieutenant Uhura, the only female with a speaking role on the crew of the starship Enterprise? I wasn’t playing dress up, I was rehearsing, no—doing improv. It was too bad that I didn’t have anyone to do improv with anymore, the way I did in the drama class I went to on Saturdays last year. But why should I let that stop me? I could at least imagine I was part of a Dynamic Trio.

Batgirl didn’t wait for an invitation. She dared to insert herself and prove her worth, even rescuing a captive Batman and Robin, more than once. Batgirl didn’t need superpowers, just her brain, an impressive kick, and some clever technology, like a compact with a laser beam, to cause some “delightful, dynamic, destruction!” for the bad guys. Sure, the live-action TV version of the comic books (with its ridiculous villains and WHAMs and POWs in the fight scenes) was silly, but I loved its wordplay.

Jan would not be impressed. Before she arrived, with the exception of Geri’s cousin, the girls in my class had known each other since kindergarten. We weren’t saints; there were squabbles and hurt feelings. But nothing cruel. I was the first to sit next to Jan and talk to her, to make a new girl feel welcome, but she soon pronounced me “too dorky.” And her comments about others had me noticing things I never gave a thought before like how greasy Geri’s hair was— “Gross. Hasn’t she heard of shampoo?”—or that Annie wore orthopedic shoes. We went from all being “us” to “us” and “them,” “in” or “out,” in a matter of weeks.

The mission I had invented for Batgirl was rescuing my older brother. He’s listed as Missing in Action, the narrator intoned, this time with Walter Cronkite’s voice in my head. He could be wounded, a P.O.W.—or worse. The voice changed to Batman’s narrator. What’s this? Batgirl is going behind enemy lines? Holy Hanoi, what are you thinking, Batgirl?

My brother wasn’t missing in action. He hadn’t even been drafted. But it could happen soon. He had made it into junior college, and under the old rules, he would have had a deferment. But they changed to a lottery system. They said it would be fairer, and for people born in his year, the lottery would happen next summer. Even though I’d conjured this rescue scenario for Batgirl, I couldn’t picture him—his gymnast’s build, high cheekbones, sharp jawline, and warm amber eyes—shorn of his thick, collar-length brown hair and dressed in a uniform.

I didn’t have to imagine hostile forces in the neighborhood. For as long as I could remember, the favorite game among the boys had been War. Girls were banned from the game except as targets, so it was never clear to me which side was which, how the players could tell who won, or even knew when the game was over. It didn’t seem to end. Batgirl knows where nests of snipers might be lurking, so she has to choose her route carefully. My eyes darted to the known bivouacs of garbage cans and hedges; I was ready to divert or abort at any sign of an ambush. I flew down one hill and made it up the next where I turned into a cul-de-sac, the street where my current crush lived, just in case I could glimpse him.

“Finding” my brother wounded but alive, I imagined Batgirl freeing him. I could almost feel him holding onto me as he rode on the back of Batgirl’s motorcycle while, evading ambush again, she brought him home.

Over the winter, my brother moved in with some friends, but he still came home regularly. He was a math whiz and good at sports, both things that were not my strengths. But he struggled more than I did with writing, and sometimes he asked me to look over his papers before he handed them in, to check his spelling and grammar. He was cool enough to ask for help from a little sister. Most guys would be too stuck up.

College seemed so much more interesting than seventh grade. Except Miss Slama’s class. Four days a week we studied history—this year it was the American Revolution—but on Fridays, we put the desks in a circle and discussed current events. We studied popular song lyrics alongside Time and Newsweek, and we were supposed to watch the evening news. I did that already. I would sit on the floor in front of the TV. Along with my heated-up frozen pizza, fish sticks, or Swanson TV dinners, I ingested images of a river on fire in Cleveland, the atrocities at My Lai, napalm explosions, police attacking protesters.

That winter I turned thirteen, and by the spring the war had breached a border. Soldiers shot college students like my brother, at a protest in Kent, Ohio. Four died. A girl knelt on the pavement beside one of them with her arms outstretched, pleading. She was just a year older than me. She looked a bit like me, too.

My brother had marked my becoming a teenager by taking me to the concert of my choice as a birthday gift. From the concerts available, I chose to see Neil Diamond. To my surprise my brother enjoyed the show. We didn’t always agree on things.

In fact, we argued a lot. By this time our arguments had evolved into something more than sibling fights over who would get the last piece of chocolate cake. When Miss Slama had us hold a mock debate over the American Revolution, as if we were alive at the time, I realized that’s what my brother and I were doing. We were debating. It could be about almost anything, from what he wrote in his college papers to whether or not Bob Dylan was a genius. He said, “Listen to Beethoven’s Fifth. That’s genius.” I had to admit he was right about Beethoven, but that didn’t make me wrong about Dylan. My brother would never let me get away with arguing for or against something based on emotion. I had to have solid reasons. He was all for logic, like Mr. Spock. (I watched Star Trek because he liked Star Trek.) Unlike anyone else in the family, it mattered to him what I thought. Deep discussions didn’t happen with my parents or sisters, ever.

One topic we never touched, though, was the war.

I wanted to ask him about it, to know where he stood, to discover what I thought as we slammed questions around. Is there a time for war? Or was it, as the song said, good for “absolutely nothing?” Surely some things were worth fighting for—human rights, freedom, defending the innocent and weak. But was that what we were doing? Were we fighting for something worth sending my brother? I knew I couldn’t raise such questions without getting swamped by feelings. I couldn’t put out of my head the images of dead women and children and old people in trenches, of thatched huts set ablaze with flamethrowers, jungles turned black with poison. Our soldiers did this, not an enemy. I couldn’t even whisper it: What if we were the bad guys?

We inched closer to Lottery Day. One night, I heard my brother’s Volkswagen put-put into the driveway, so I started down the hall to see him. I heard him say hi to Dad, who must have been sitting at the kitchen table with his beer and cigarettes, rather than in his recliner, waiting.

Dad didn’t say hi. Without any preamble, he said, “Son, if you’re called and you don’t go, don’t come back. You don’t have a home here.”

I froze and retreated.

My brother had always looked up to Dad. As the only two males in the household, they shared something my sisters and I weren’t part of. I thought they were a team. I imagine my brother did, too, until that moment.

The lottery took place on a Wednesday. My brother wasn’t home; I didn’t know where he was. I was relieved I could watch it on TV—ABC carried it nation-wide, live—without him in the room. Men in suits rotated and rotated two big drums, like bingo. One drum had capsules with the dates of the year, the other the numbers 1-365. They drew a capsule from each drum, and young men with that birthdate would have the corresponding number assigned; the lowest numbers would be the first to be drafted. The news said that “youths” with numbers below 124 were sure to be called up, but also that the White House estimated the cut-off number could go as high as 245. When they drew my brother’s birthday, I hid my face in my hands and peeked through my fingers.

251. My brother was safe.

But it was only a matter of luck. Other families weren’t so lucky.

I never rode out as Batgirl again; the leotard and tights got too small. Besides, both Batman and Star Trek had been cancelled. I didn’t care. They felt repetitive. Here’s another brawl with clownish villains and their thugs; there’s one more battle with the Romulans. I longed for a different kind of story, but I couldn’t have said what that was.

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Her Teeth Marks Bones

by K.B. Winecap

Snow isn’t white. Peony knows this. Snow has aquamarine and amethyst shadows, and when the sun shines through gray clouds the snow glitters. At night when the silver moon kisses the mulberry wine sky, the snow shimmers like diamonds twisted into galaxies. And in snow, blood melts crimson like rose petals, caving inwards to the frozen ground.

Snowflakes now gently tumble from a curtain of thick clouds, quiet and calming as they land on snow banks, grouped together until they become like mountains, growing around Peony as she stands in the forest. Lodge pines and Douglas firs are packed, weighted down by winter and the black-capped chickadees desperately digging for bugs inside bark frozen with golden sap.

Her breath fogs heavily in front of her. When she was a child she had called it “dragon’s breath.” She huffs it out repeatedly, watching the moisture rise up and vanish in the air as she pulls her jacket closer to her body. To her left, a gray-brown doe walks cautiously down the snowy terrain with her twin fawns who were born in early summer. They are small, but thick in their winter coats. She hopes the doe is able to find them food so they survive. She occasionally leaves out bread and apples, but not often. It’s illegal to feed the wildlife, to encourage them to adjust to human care, but she only does this from time to time when the deer have to resort to eating bark off the tree to keep from starving.

Peony notices something is different with the snow far to the left of her cabin. in the clearing outside of the trees. The snow has been trampled, dead wheatgrass underneath kicked up to the sky, exposed and naked. Ravens and crows dance back and forth from the ground to the tree branches above. The branches are covered in lichens and snow, draping heavily down to the earth like curtains. She sees the prints in the snow before the bright red blood, like crimson rose petals. The crime scene belongs to a mountain lion, who chased the buck into the grove of trees before killing, eating its fill, and then vanishing silently away, bloody paw prints the only voice to speak in the silence of the mountains.

The deer has been gutted—intestines gone, mouth horrifically gaped open, tongue dangling out, soft brown eyes glossed over like glass marbles in death.

Peony turns away and scans for the cougar. She can’t imagine it would travel far from a fresh kill. The safest thing for her would be to return to her tiny cabin.

“Yes, it would be wise if you left now.”

Whipping around, Peony looks for the voice. It’s just her this far up the mountain neighbor-wise, so a voice speaking out of the ether? Terrifying.

“No, no, not a person. Me. Down here. Dead deer?”

“Oh, God.”

“There. Less scary, right?”

“A talking corpse is less scary?” Peony looks down, making a face.

“Don’t look at me that way. It’s rude.”

“I apologize, truly, but, uh, it’s not the greatest sight.”

“You need to leave carefully. The mountain lion is stalking you and you’re too close to me. The ravens and crows are trying to warn you, too.”

Peony carefully makes her way back to the cabin, walking backwards, nearly falling over the entire time until she feels the reassuring thump of wood paneling behind her, a hard jab of the old brass doorknob into her back. She finally vanishes inside.

It’s nearly three days before Peony returns back outside. She has watched the cougar stalking back and forth around its kill, feasting on the deer with the aid of carrions. Once, a red fox appears when the wild cat was gone to take its fair winter share before vanishing forever, smart enough to know to never return.

The cougar has long since prowled away, the corpse picked clean, now barely a skeleton. The head remains, but most of the bones have been destroyed for their marrow. The bones are scattered; they’ve stained the snow around them red and pink. Ravens push the bones about like they’re playing with new toys.

Bundled up in several layers of jackets and scarves, Peony steps out, painful gasps escaping her lips as icy air plunges into her lungs. It feels like piercing ice crystals are growing and blooming inside her body. Her nose instantly reddens and runs. She wiggles her fingers inside her warm gloves and she crunches her boots through the snow and towards the buck. Standing nearby are the doe and twin fawns, sniffing at the bones, the mother flicking up her white tail, quickly moving on when the twins bolt forward and crash through stiff snow, desperately escaping the horrifying human.

“Those are my offspring,” The Skeleton chuckles once the twins have cleared Peony’s land and found a place to watch from the middle of dried snowberry bushes. “My last two I will ever sire.”

“They are pretty. Jitterish.”

“As they should be,” he says. “How am I looking?”

“Utterly destroyed. Bones picked clean.”

“That’s how I feel.”

“Do you hurt?”

“Not now. When I was dying? Absolutely. She was a young cougar, inexperienced.”

“You suffered. I’m so sorry.”

“I finally left the corporeal world when I bled out but she was using her canines on my hide. That was excruciating.”

“So, what…are you a vengeful deer ghost now?”

The Skeleton makes a sound somewhere between a deer snort and a dry laugh.

“Hardly. What could a ghost deer do to a cougar that a live deer couldn’t?”

Peony sucks her lips against her teeth, wishing for more chapstick. The air hits her gums like sharp, tiny pine needles.

“You have my antlers.”

“Oh?” Peony startles, glancing towards her cabin. The pair she found that December is now inside in mid-January. She has the antlers sitting on the dusty glass top table on her deck. They’re circled around a mason jar filled with dried lichen and one giant pinecone. The pinecone keeps a bouquet of dead, dried aspen daisies tied with wheatgrass twine in place. “Oh! I do remember that. You were very handsome.”

“Thank you. You should go back inside. You seem very cold.”

“I feel like I’m going to freeze like an icicle.”

“Come back and visit me.”

“I will.”

A blizzard whips through that night and the next day the crime scene has been buried and erased as if it never happened.

Peony stands at the same spot where she chatted with the Skeleton the day before. A raven sits at the top of the tallest pine tree. She clacks her beak and makes a raspy call before flapping her wings and flying away. A solitary black feather flutters down with the slow snowflakes. Reaching out with her gloves, Peony grabs the feather out of the air.

“Are you okay under all the snow?”

“Yes, I can see and hear you just fine. What a lovely feather. Are you going to put it in your mason jar?”

“You know what a mason jar is?”

“We pay attention to human business.”

“I believe that.”

“You do not feel insulted by my insinuating that some of your species lacks the intelligence or spiritual understanding to connect to nature, to my kind?” The Skeleton asks, his tone filled with malice and a bitterness Peony could taste on her own tongue.

“Not at all, a great number of humans do not connect to nature. However, there is a great amount who do and understand far better than I.”

“I suppose I can be satisfied with that answer, but you’ll feel my bitterness for an eternity.”

“So you are a vengeful ghost.”

“Perhaps so.”

It’s too cold to go outside for the next two days. Peony can feel the ice in her veins and spends a good chunk of the first day resting in a hot bath. That night the Skeleton calls to her to come to the window where chartreuse green and violet-magenta lights dance in the sky. Aurora borealis keeps both of them entertained until dawn presents herself. Peony sleeps far into the next afternoon, missing a full day of housework. Stoat siblings in their winter coats chase each other over the frozen blue-tinted snow. Several birds that brave the cold weather sit in trees searching for hidden bugs and seeds. The winter day is filled with the trills of snow buntings, house sparrows, and dark-eyed Juncos. Peony dreams of flying with feathered wings like a snowy owl, eyes wide and yellow-gold. She soars high over frigid clouds, unaware that outside her very window a dark brown and blond wolverine stalks through the snow with a purpose, panting heavily, wet nose twitching, searching for the faint remains of bone marrow in the Skeleton.

The Skeleton doesn’t even cry out for help as razor-sharp claws rake back the snow, massive canines clamping down and biting through the bones he has left. He’s lost all physical urges, panic and pain just fading, survival instincts that used to keep him alive. His ghost watches as the wolverine devours, her teeth marking his bones, shattering and swallowing, giving the wolverine a chance to live a little longer.

He is ethereal, floating above the massacre. She moves on to his skull, her hot breath enveloping it, vicious canines crackling and crunching. He looks away and sees all the others like him. Centuries, millennia of fellow animals of all kinds, their ghosts walking, flying, swimming. He walks, or kind of floats, through the wooden cabin. There lays Peony, curled up in layers of covers. He smells the room. It’s like a potpourri of cleaning chemicals, sweat, sweet-scented candles, and the oyster mushroom growing kit on her window sill. He bites down on the fabric of some of the blankets, pulling them over her exposed shoulder. She makes a face before settling back into a deep slumber. He knows she will wake up near nightfall and to search for his skeleton but it won’t be there – their way of communication all gone. He isn’t sure how their souls connected over his dead body. He’s a bit grateful, however, as he watches her stir and awaken a few hours before sunset, that they have their moment here. She hurries outside in a mix of her pajamas and winter clothing. He watches as she stands over his grave, her face crestfallen. She studies at the tracks and the rest of her surroundings She has to know a wolverine caused this mess.

He can’t tell her it’s been gone for half a day now, but he’s watching her. As she returns to the safety of her cabin he sees her see it – a single vertebra. She stares at it before scooping it up with a gloved hand, and taking it towards her cabin. He wrinkles his nose. He doesn’t want his last bone inside a human home.

She freezes and looks in his direction and for a moment he thinks Peony can see him. She turns away from him and places his lumbar with his antlers and disappears inside. 

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For Better or For Louse

by Emily Hampson

Before we were married, I promised my then-future husband that I would stand by him in sickness, health, and hair loss.

“You can count on me,” I told him earnestly while we fed each other bites of Chunky Monkey ice cream from a shared spoon in bed. We were adorable once upon a time. “Except for two scenarios. If at any point our house becomes infested with bed bugs OR our kids catch lice, all bets are off. I cannot guarantee that I’ll stay. I may even flee the state.” I stared at him without apology.

“Oh, come on.” He waved me off while licking the spoon.

I gripped his arm for emphasis, halting the dairy consumption. “No, really. I’m not kidding.”

In my defense, insects, in a general sense, are not the issue—as long as they’re hunkered down in their natural habitats, buzzing over daffodils and dog shit with bafflingly similar preferences. In fact, it is with great humility that I relinquish the great outdoors to the beasties. Let them infest every last fecund forest and backyard suburban picnic, dodging house sparrows and hand slaps. Let them flock to the floodlights at the ballfield like addicts to a vice. Let them propagate in puddles and feast on decay. What I can’t handle—with any paltry speck of decorum—are bugs in my living space, confined, cornered, or contained within my toddler-hand-smeared walls. When they cross the threshold into my red-brick Georgian and venture upstairs, adhere themselves to my Posturepedic mattress or limp hair follicles, then I get crazed.

The February night I found several translucent blood-sucking pediculosis capitis crawling along my three-year-old’s scalp during bath time, my husband was at work. Conveniently. The same place he was the night our fire alarm started chirping at two a.m. AND the morning I broke my foot in the foyer AND the afternoon a trio of hornets took up residence in our master bath. I don’t blame him for the timing. At least not entirely, but I must point out that tackling emergencies in tandem is supposed to be one of the main benefits of modern coupling. That and filing a joint return.

And yet, there I was, utterly alone, kneeling on the tile floor, shampoo suds seeping down my wrists. For a brief moment after I discovered the lice, I froze. I stared at those vile creatures and contemplated abandoning my girls in four-inches of lukewarm bath water, hightailing it out the door, and sprinting until I reached Indiana. When they got cold enough, they’d eventually towel off and slip on their pjs, right? My six-year-old would figure it out. She knew the drill—how to set the toothbrush timer, sing “My Favorite Things”, and illuminate the 57 nightlights that make our house shine like a beacon in the night.

But then I beheld their naked little bodies, pink and puckered from a warm soak. My preschooler announced with glee that she’d written the number “3” with a bath crayon on the side of the tub—blissful ignorance oozed from her toothy smile, naïve to the gruesome ectoparasites sucking the blood out of her head at that very moment. Ancient maternal instinct won out and I dialed Hair Butterflies.

Don’t be fooled. This establishment is not extracting monarchs out of manes. The name of the only lice-removal salon in a twenty-mile radius is quite an affront, given its unabashed attempt to evoke serenity, but what I find more egregious is that they call themselves a salon. Nevertheless, they offer a 24-hour answering service.

The store owner peppered me with questions, predominately about price. “Did I understand that the after-hours rate in the salon was three times the standard amount?”

“Yes, fine,” I spat out. Did he not understand that I was willing to drain my checking account in order to eradicate these invaders? As with any hostage situation, I was primed to pay.

An hour later, my daughters and I were doused in peppermint oil, combed out strand by strand, and probed for nits. My six-year-old was deemed clear and soon after, I was declared “unscathed”, although I would spend the next 72 hours clawing at my scalp with the dedication a hyena devotes to a carcass. My leprous 3-year-old sat in the salon chair, happy as a rat at the county fair, clutching her iPad in one hand and a lollipop in the other, oblivious to why her head was covered in a goop and tied down in a shower cap. When we returned home after 10 pm, I sanitized the bedsheets in scalding water, vacuumed the carpets, and banished an army of stuffed animals and dolls to the freezer. Three days later, I would discover there is nothing creepier than a pair of frost-bitten plastic eyeballs peeking out through a Ziploc bag beside a Home Run Inn Pizza.

That incident alone went above and beyond my Chunky Monkey marriage vows. I’d assumed I had paid my dues. That is until two months later, I woke up already scratching. As I rolled up my pajama pants, my breathing sputtered into something resembling birthing-class Lamaze. Bitemarks. Tracking down my entire leg. Could it be? NO. Not a chance. I had just returned from Europe, but I’d been careful. Neurotic even. Inspecting every hotel mattress pad, scouring luggage racks, and quarantining my suitcase in the basement to unpack.

With a primal scream worthy of a low-budget horror film, I tore off the bedding, hurling the mattress from the box spring like an adrenaline-seized parent lifting up the back of a Subaru. I carted in extra lamps and instructed my girls to stand on chairs and aim their flashlights. Nothing. Not one blood smear, molted exoskeleton, or scrap of bug-sized fecal matter to be found.

I texted my husband at work, convinced that I must’ve contracted the bites abroad, sighing with relief that our house was still a safe haven. But then, those seductive little dots appeared on my phone only to vanish. And reappear. Again. And again.

His reply finally illuminated my screen: I hate to tell you this. I was going to wait until I got home, but I have them too.

I tried to unsee the words. To flip my phone over and revert back to flirting with those traitorous dots, but there was no denying what this meant. The invaders were in our abode.

I threw jackets on the kids and we fled the contaminated epicenter for the sanctity of Target. When my husband returned home, the two of us attacked the master bedroom, vacuuming nightstands and ceiling fans and closet corners. An hour later, sweating and spent, we collapsed onto the bare mattress without a single insect in sight. At long last, my husband shot up like a resurrected corpse and exclaimed, “It must be the couch!”

We violated that sofa, probing through its thick microfiber folds with such intensity that it bordered on grotesque. Finally, we assessed our haul: two mismatched baby socks, one filthy penny, six popcorn kernels, half of a rock-hard granola bar, a purple beaded necklace, and several plastic Shopkins, likely suffering from dust-induced asthma.

“We need to call in the dogs,” I declared. “I read online you can hire these specially trained beagles and they sniff out the bed bugs.”

“That’s ridiculous,” my husband said, eyes already rolling. “How many hundreds of dollars do they want for that racket?”

“$350, but I’d pay twice that. I refuse to be that family: the outcasts, the pariahs, branded with a scarlet ‘A’. Our friends will never want to visit. Our children will be ostracized. Not to mention, I have no idea how I’m going to sleep tonight, exposed like that goat in Jurassic Park—the one with the rope draped around its neck in the T. Rex enclosure, bleating before the predator rips into its succulent calf.”

My husband furrowed his brow. “Are we talking about you or the goat?”

“We’re one and the same!” I bellowed. “I warned you about this before we were married.”

“I thought you were being hyperbolic.”

And then I exhibited one of my finer moments of adulthood and shouted back, “Do you even know me at all?!”

In the end, we got the beagle and an exterminator because you don’t skimp on ransom payments. Neither found any evidence of bed bugs, but the pest guy discovered several spider egg sacs attached to the underbelly of our ancient couch. After vomiting in my mouth, I wrote the check and exiled the sofa. Within a day, the adulterated albatross was tossed, and to my husband’s delight, we spent Master’s Tournament weekend shopping for replacement furniture.

All in all, our marriage has withstood and prevailed. We have a new sofa that doesn’t eat people, and I didn’t leave. I stayed. I haven’t spoon-fed him ice cream since we said “I do”, but I didn’t move to Indiana. And to me, that’s pretty darn romantic. 

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Never Read Alone

by Kathleen Jacobs

WARNING!

Books can be dangerous.

But don’t worry, I’m here to help.
No! No! Don’t turn the page!
I need to tell you about …

PAPERCUTS.

Ouch! Are you okay?
Thank goodness! Listen, I’m responsible for your safety and…
HALT! What do you think you’re doing?
No reading alone. I haven’t told you about…

GERMS.

Eww! Yuck! Gross!
You don’t know where this book has been. Go wash your hands.
I’ll wait. Hey, stop that! There might be a…

DIFFICULT WORD.

See? I told you. You’re NOT ready to read alone!
Oh, you sounded it out. Um… well, good work.
So next, I want to warn you about… Wait a second; I see what you’re doing. Ugh! Don’t skip ahead. I need to tell you about…

VOCABULARY.

Look! You’re surrounded by words you don’t understand.
What? You used context clues to figure out what they mean?
Well, just because you’re a genius doesn’t mean you should turn the page because you might come across a…

SAD PART.

Sniff, sniff, snuffle.
Don’t worry, teardrops won’t hurt me.
There, there. It’s going to be all right.
Hold up! I thought you learned your lesson. Don’t skip ahead, or you might gain …

KNOWLEDGE.

I’m warning you! Knowledge is a dangerous thing because it will lead to big…

IDEAS.

Now you’ve done it.
I’m putting my foot down. I FORBID you to read alone, or you might consider someone else’s…

PERSPECTIVE!

I hope you’re happy.
Never mind… I give up!
Just be forewarned if you put all these ingredients together, it will lead to…

THINKING FOR YOURSELF!

Oh, what have I’ve done?
You’re not ready for this.
I’ve failed you.
Wait! What did you say?
If you turn the page, you might make the world a…

BETTER PLACE.

But that’s a HUGE responsibility.
Oh, I see.
If you turn pages and read on your own, you’ll be ready!
Good point.
Well, come to think of it, I can’t think of anyone better suited for the job. So, can you do me a favor and turn the page? I can’t wait to see…

WHAT YOU’LL DO NEXT!

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White Rose Dumplings

by Genevieve Flintham

Their fingers are wet. They scoop globs of gungy crustacean between pink-stained digits and drop them into pre-flattened white cases. They move so quickly that I can barely see the flick of their wrist as they close the case, their worn fingerprints pressing frills along the edge.

Like tiny, ivory pastries.

Above them, Jesus watches. He is in the midst of crucifixion, and yet his lips are serene, his hair is scooped behind his head. The pain is all in his eyes, which are red-raw.

The oldest of the ladies purses her lips. She looks away from Jesus’s eyes, down at the steady whittling of her fingers. Scoop, drop, press, frill.

There are eight of them. They make White Rose Dumplings, a speciality in Vietnam’s port town of Hoi An. Traditionally, they are filled with pulverised prawns, but a recent surge in vegetarianism has one lady scooping purple aubergine into little damp cases. Her arms are stained past the wrist; the heady colour of bruising climbs over the back of her hands.

They work ten hours a day, six days a week. I know this because the owner, a woman with dark circles and fine white hair, boasted of it earlier. She had the air of a prostitute’s madam. She looked as if she conducted autopsies on the side.

“They work very hard,” she stated, her missing teeth creating a whistle to this understatement.

I ordered six dumplings. I had no idea whether this was the going amount, or whether I was creating more work for the tired women, who muttered to each other when the madam wasn’t looking.

The toilet of the restaurant was the stuff of horror films. The restaurant opened 30 years ago; I suspected the basin hadn’t been cleaned since the inauguration. The towel, hanging limp and once-white from a rusty nail, had developed a stain in an almost-perfect outline of Africa.

I imagined complaining. I imagined complaining about the state of the toilet to the madam, who might drag one of these women, who were lagging towards the end of their ten-hour shift, to the bathroom. The bleach might ease some of the crustacean blood from her skin. I felt sick at my own imagination, as if these were intrusive thoughts and not the product of privileged Western hygiene.

A few of the women stirred; they were looking up at Jesus again. Jesus didn’t look back. It didn’t deter them.

Vietnamese Catholics have had a hard time, to use the understatement of the whistling teeth.

In August 1798, more than 10,000 Catholics were massacred in Hue, caught in the egoic imaginings of a Toy Son Emperor. More recently, after overthrowing French rule, Catholicism was often seen as the antithesis to the communist ambitions of the North of Vietnam. While the South encouraged Catholicism to some extent, it came at the price of Buddhism, with the demolishment of sacred Buddhist temples and pagodas under the hands of Catholic paramilitaries.

While Catholics fled from the North to the South of the country, the communist rubric grew in factions, stabilising the identity of a country that has withheld countless periods of turbulence.

To counter the persecution of well-known religions, which often carry stereotypes of their own and can be misconstrued by governments as battle-worn tools, the majority of the Vietnamese public took to adopting agnosticism or folk beliefs. Adopting the folk religions of their ancestors enabled the sense of community and hope to manifest, without the risk of direct persecution, owing to the ‘vague label’ on the packet.

I had enjoyed Tet in the town previously. Tet is a public holiday, the aim of which is to celebrate the many folk tales that provide comfort and joy to the masses. It is a holiday complete with singing, dancing, and giant, caterpillar-like dragons. The children know the stories; the elders let the haunting cries of the opera attempt to fictionalise them. In the absence of political stability, the country built solidarity and community on the back of another metaphysical entity: belief.

Belief has held the country together, through French rule, through a long and bloody war that still stains much of Vietnam today. When the physical reality is too harsh to see, we find that one most important feeling – hope – in that that can’t be seen or proven.

As they glance up at the picture of Christ, his bloodshot eyes glaring at his nailed left hand, I wonder whether they feel power coursing through them, or if they feel similarly persecuted.

Because this is 2023. Thousands of years ago, our homo sapiens ancestors lived lives of hardship and hunger. Foraging and killing, fighting and whittling, battling for a position in the middle of the food chain. But now, we’re at the top. Now, we have created a society that shouldn’t allow elderly women to work sixty physical hours a week; we have created borders that are as metaphysical as the community of belief, and yet we stand by them because it suits us.

In the West, religion is a declining practise, and yet, if we take the common elements from religion – a community of individuals who bond over common, non-proven beliefs – then we arrive fairly swiftly at the law. A set of guidelines that we all believe in, that we all implement, and, by all intents and purposes, worship, to some extent.

As the lined lady with the pink hands and the stooped shoulders, wearing a tabard that is striped through with thin red thread, considers her saviour, so I consider employment laws. Tribunals. Unions.

They should not have to work sixty hours a week, because the law should forbid it.

I explore my own religion, the guidelines of regulations and constitutions, and come up short. Instead, I turn my mind to other levels of folklore that are widely known in my country. My mind stops at Robin Hood; the tale of the man who steals from the rich to feed the poor. We all know of this tale, and yet our knowledge of it does not cement a community as strongly as that of the folklore genus.

My brain struggles to grasp the comforts of belief because I think that I do not need to. I imagine that we have solved it – that our Western world knows of things that these women in archaic Hoi An cannot know – and conveniently ignore the truth; that we are not looking at a picture on the wall; that we are wealthy and drowning.

A well-dressed man stumbles into the restaurant. It is raining outside and he carries the smell of the alleyway and floating lanterns. He leans on the French architecture while the Chinese lanterns above our heads sway. He shoots the madam a look that I imagine he thinks is charming.

“So sorry to bother you,” he says, rubbing his wet hair with one hand. The ladies pause in their dumpling spinning; they all watch with vague interest in their dark eyes. “It’s just that we’ve been waiting twenty minutes for our dumplings, and the kids are hungry. Do you think you could speed things up?”

He doesn’t see me. He doesn’t see the women, who don’t understand English but understand the madam’s eyes; they quicken, as if an invisible button has been pressed. Their arms are all sinew and bloodspots; their wrinkled fingers catch smells that I will be washing from my clothes as soon as I’m home. He doesn’t see the picture of Jesus on the wall, the picture that stands above the mashed prawn innards, the cleaved hunks of hewn aubergine, the fine red thread that severs necks from bodies.

I don’t look at Jesus either. I don’t look at the madam, who is apologising, even though she hasn’t sat down in seven hours and is the age of my grandmother. I don’t look at the neat set of dumplings that sit, waiting to be steamed, or the stream of angry customers who look at their Rolex’s and tap their leather brogues on the floor, no doubt thinking of our Western religion – law – and how it might apply if expected timings aren’t met, or the standard of the goods isn’t up to scratch.

I look at the women. Their arms delve and process, spin and recycle, press and purse. Their eyes are dark but powerful, crackling in this ruined den, spinning magic from tragedy, putting their faith in the picture on the wall; showing us all how faith is maintained, how hope manifests. 

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