C4 Issue 2: Fall 2011 Read online



  C4: The Chamber Four Lit Mag

  Issue 2: Fall 2011

  Editors

  Sean Clark

  Eric Markowsky

  Marcos Velasquez

  Nico Vreeland

  Published by Chamber Four LLC

  Cambridge, MA

  2011

  Published by Chamber Four LLC, 2011

  Direct inquiries to:

  [email protected]

  C4: The Chamber Four Lit Mag, Issue 2, Fall 2011. “Truly Madly, Deeply Madly,” Copyright © 2011 by Hairee Lee. “Stranger,” Copyright © 2011 by David S. Atkinson. “In Hope We Find This Nation,” Copyright © 2011 by Chris Linforth. “School Bus,” Copyright © 2011 by David Williamson. “Fakie and Switch,” Copyright © 2011 by Tracy Hayes Odena. “Amanda’s Garden,” Copyright © 2011 by Eliza Horn. “Headache,” Copyright © 2011 by Tunji Ajibade. “Tok,” Copyright © 2011 by Joshua Willey. “Your Siren’s Running on Empty,” Copyright © 2011 by Abigail Grindle. “Landscape with Young Gourmand,” Copyright © 2011 by Ben Miller. “Troades,” Copyright © 2011 by Jason Newport. “Whatever Normal Means Now,” Copyright © 2011 by Joyce Tomlinson. “Scowler,” Copyright © 2011 by Ron Spalletta. “This Is What Faith Looks Like,” Copyright © 2011 by Derold Sligh. “What Remains,” Copyright © 2011 by Ed Tato. “Outer Casings,” Copyright © 2011 by Daniel Aristi. “Golem,” Copyright © 2011 by Heather Elliott. “Tetherball,” and “Note to Anne,” Copyright © 2011 by Kate Ruebenson. “What Insomnia Teaches Us,” Copyright © 2011 by Neil Carpathios. “Now I Can Tell You,” “Not Thinking About My Mother,” and “Driving to Arizona,” Copyright © 2011 by Samantha Ten Eyck. “The Accoutrements,” Copyright © 2011 by Robert Spiegel.

  Cover Art by Nicholas Naughton.

  All rights reserved by individual copyright holders. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted without prior written permission of the copyright owner. Chamber Four LLC is not authorized to grant permission for further uses of copyrighted selections without permission of their owners. Permission must be obtained from the individual copyright owners as identified herein.

  Published in the United States of America.

  ChamberFour.com

  ISBN 978-0-9829327-3-5

  Visit mag.chamberfour.com to see the visual art component of this issue, and to keep up with future issues of C4.

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  Table of Contents

  Fiction

  Truly Madly, Deeply Madly By Hairee Lee

  Stranger By David S. Atkinson

  In Hope We Find This Nation By Christopher Linforth

  School Bus By David Williamson

  Fakie and Switch By Tracy Hayes Odena

  Amanda’s Garden By Eliza Horn

  Headache By Tunji Ajibade

  Tok By Joshua Willey

  Your Siren’s Running on Empty By Abigail Grindle

  Nonfiction

  Landscape with Young Gourmand By Ben Miller

  Troades By Jason Newport

  Whatever Normal Means Now By Joyce Tomlinson

  Poetry

  Scowler By Ron Spalletta

  This Is What Faith Looks Like By Derold Sligh

  What Remains By Ed Tato

  Outer Casings By Daniel Aristi

  Golem By Heather Elliott

  Two Poems By Kate Ruebenson

  What Insomnia Teaches Us By Neil Carpathios

  Three Poems By Samantha Ten Eyck

  The Accoutrements By Robert Spiegel

  About the authors

  About the publisher

  Truly Madly, Deeply Madly

  By Hairee Lee

  Sylvia receives a last minute email from Babs saying she can’t attend the classical music concert with her tomorrow. Would Sylvia like to pick up the tickets at, say, six so that she can attend the concert with someone else?

  Sylvia and Babs met in a continuing studies class at a local college—Contemporary Music Appreciation—and discovered their mutual love for the London Symphony Orchestra. Every few weeks or so they ride the tube together from the Finchley Road Station to the Barbican to watch Prokofiev, Purcell, Elgar, Beethoven, Monteverdi, Rachmaninov, Gershwin, whatever happens to be on the program at the time. For a couple of hours at a concert, the uniform silence of a large group of people paying attention, paying to pay attention, to a single point of interest, makes Sylvia feel as if they each belong to one another, or more accurately, to her.

  At Babs’s home on Queen’s Grove in St John’s Wood, a very lovely part of London, Richard answers the door. Sylvia wonders if he’s been standing behind it, waiting. He looks flushed and his eyes dart about. Babs is running late, he says.

  From a distance, Babs and Richard, both in their early forties, make a handsome couple: she a petit waif with a hazelnut face and a conservative bob of fine beige hair, he a perennially khaki-and-button-down-shirt clad man with a decent build and tall frame. Closer, Babs looks birdlike with a frenetic way of speaking that makes her sound like her vocal chords are always straining at the upper end of her treble range. Because she gesticulates when she speaks, one cannot help but notice the knobby joints between the arthritic arrangement of her fingers. It reminds Sylvia of chicken feet, the old maid in the gingerbread house, decline.

  Curious still, Babs and Richard are not a couple. The brother and sister live together, cook meals for each other, work at the same university library, launder each other’s clothes, open each other’s mail (bills mostly), and share a joint account. Sylvia is fairly certain they are virgins.

  Sylvia takes off her glove to check the time, but realizes that she forgot to put on her watch. Impatience makes her nearly sigh aloud.

  It’s Thursday. Sylvia is scheduled to rendezvous with Sean—Irish, handsome, law enforcement officer Sean—at eight o’clock at her apartment. She has bought him a box of chocolates shaped like miniature knobs from a sex shop in Soho. It is uncharacteristic of Sylvia to do anything extra for her lovers, particularly in this weather, but Sean cancelled the week before. He did not even pretend at an excuse. What bothered Sylvia more was not that he didn’t explain—in fact, had he done so, she would have likely become impatient and wondered at his motives when they shared a tacit agreement to owe each other nothing beyond her bedroom—but that she had suffered anxiety. She would never admit his cancellation as a slight against her ego. So she feels the weight of the candy in her purse with ill-defined resentment.

  Richard asks if she’d like to wait inside. Sylvia would rather not, but the meteorologists seem to have gotten it right for once—it is actually snowing in London and in increasing volume.

  Richard stoops in that way some tall people, usually women, do, curling in his shoulders as if apologizing for his bones. Sylvia thinks he could have been attractive with his dark hair and bright blue eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses. Unfortunately, his queer and sad unawareness of his assets, his painful shyness that overstrains the muscles around his eyes and cheeks, gives him a look of a man in agony, nullifying any quality of magnetism afforded him by the happy and neglected accident of his genes.

  Their semi-detached two-story house is on a fairly posh, quiet street lined with centuries old trees and pruned bushes. When Sylvia steps inside, Richard waves to the sofa. She perches on one end, leaving her coat on.

  The living room is tastefully decorated with one long wall of built-in mahogany shelves filled with books. The floor space in front of the shelves is taken up
by more books. Neat piles of journals keep them company. Three knee-high stacks of the Guardian and Observer Magazine are nearest to where Sylvia sits. The date on one of them is over three years old. They do, however, appear to have been read. An enormous grandfather clock stands in one corner of the room—it says five to six—behind the aubergine colored velveteen sofa. Beside the curtain-drawn bay windows, on the other side of the room, is an upright piano. The keyboard is exposed. On the coffee table are more magazines and an open book, faced down, Madame Bovary, and a mismatched collection of coasters strewn willy-nilly. Oddly—odd because neither of the residents smoke or drink—an ashtray made of unpolished quartz rests on the table, filled with wine corks.

  Sylvia makes no effort to relieve the silence though she knows that Richard does not know how. Irritation makes her ungenerous. She watches him squirm, standing in the middle of the living room, unable to speak, unable to sit, unable to decide. Watching him struggle, she finds herself enjoying it and takes off her coat and stores her gloves in the pockets. Richard’s infatuation with her is a foregone conclusion and having her alone with him in the same room seems too much for the virgin to bear. Yet he is unable to leave the room or dissolve into the carpet. The awareness soothes Sylvia’s bruised ego like a balm. Several more moments pass in delicious, awkward silence.

  “Would you like some wine?” he says abruptly.

  She looks at him, tilting her head. “Wine?”

  “White,” he says.

  Through the closed kitchen door on her left, she hears him struggling to remove the cork and wash and dry the glasses. She pulls out a Benson & Hedges from her purse and lights it. Several noisy minutes later he walks into the room with an overfilled glass of white wine.

  “Aren’t you going to join me?” she says, deliberately trailing her gaze from the glass at level with his groin up to his face. He looks away, too late to hide his flush, pretending to be occupied with pulling down the sleeves of his jumper.

  “I don’t like to lose control.”

  “I guess I’ll lose control alone then. Chin, chin.”

  She takes a sip and another longer sip.

  And then pulls a long drag from her cigarette.

  Richard stares at her openly now. The blue of his eyes practically glitter behind his glasses. She looks away, disconcerted by their brightness, and stares instead at the long cylinder of ash forming between her fingers. Again, she looks down at her wrist.

  “Bugger.”

  “Do you mind? The language,” says Richard with a hard edge to his voice.

  She stares at him.

  “How’s the wine?” he asks, after clearing his throat.

  She shrugs and says fine.

  “I think it’s the same kind that you brought to Hyde Park,” he says reminding her of an outdoor concert that she and Babs had attended, Richard joining them unexpectedly.

  “Oh? I don’t remember.”

  Sylvia leans over to tap her cigarette into the ashtray full of wine corks. Almost lunging, Richard scoops out the corks just before the ash falls into the tray. He kneels on the rug and sets down his treasure carefully on the corner of the coffee table farthest from Sylvia.

  “You don’t mind me smoking, do you?”

  She looks at him lazily through the smoke.

  “It was a Riesling,” he says fingering one of the corks. “The other white wine.”

  If she didn’t know better, Sylvia would have thought he was being funny. She turns to look at the Grandfather clock behind her. Five to six.

  “It’s only five to six, by the way,” he says. “What’s your hurry?”

  And though Richard has nothing to do with the memory, Sylvia recalls her mother, on the rare occasion she had time for her daughter, teaching her to read a clock made of a paper plate and take-out chopsticks, one snapped in half for the short hand. She was six. Long hand at twelve, short hand at one, then two, then three. One o’clock, two o’clock, three. “See?” her mother said, looking at the digital clock on the stove, and then saying, “Where the hell is he?” The lesson, forgotten. Five to six: long hand at eleven, short hand at six.

  “It was either that or the vintage I saw you drinking with your date on Monday,” he says and holds up another cork from the pile.

  She doesn’t understand immediately.

  “I saw you at Grafton Pub. Monday? Supper?” he says.

  “I didn’t see you.”

  The hard edge in Richard’s voice returns. “No. You don’t.”

  Sylvia stares at the corks now and she tries to count them.

  “He’s just a bloke,” she says deliberately, lightly. “A mate from uni.” The muscles between her shoulder blades pull together.

  “A mate.” Richard spits out the words. “Is that how you kiss mates?”

  A forgotten memory: Richard walking by happenstance while she waited at the bus stop as usual for Babs. Oh, hullo! What are you doing here! Oh! A concert! Here!—taking out a chocolate bar from his trouser pocket and thrusting it at her so that Sylvia grabbed it to keep it from hitting her chest—I was walking home from work! And bought it at the store! Looking at his shortening form as he walked away, she noticed the absence of a work bag or briefcase. Then she forgot about him.

  “Well? Is it? Like... like some slapper.” Then he slaps his thigh hard and says, “Sorry. It’s just you know what they say. Keep your enemies closer. Not so much your mates. People could get the wrong idea.”

  She puts down her glass and looks again at her bare wrist.

  Another memory: seeing Richard at the local Sainsbury’s, local for Sylvia. She spotted him in the cereal aisle with a box of Wheetabix in his hand and kept going, not wanting to endure an awkward conversation, which was inevitable with Richard. She saw in her peripheral vision his head turn.

  “What time is it?” She stands and her body tips, but she catches herself on the arm of the sofa. “Bugger.”

  “I said you shouldn’t swear.”

  Piss off, says Sylvia, but only in her mind because her tongue is a slab of lead.

  “You should sit down.”

  And she sits down as she’s told, but against her will. Her lips stitch together and the wine glass, which she looks at fixedly, is filled with the weight of all the wine in the kingdom. It’s a wonder she did not drop it before. It could flood the entire neighborhood. There are little atoms of white settling in gravity-defying slowness to the bottom of the glass, each particle, paradoxically, weighing whole worlds.

  She does not see Richard bending down to take the still lit cigarette from her fingers and put it out in the ash tray. But she can hear him talking some distance away.

  “Your body starts to make promises, Sylvia. However much you try to keep the heart and body divided, the interface is porous. Eventually, if you repeat the act of making love often enough, whether you think of it as love making or not, nature trumps will. The heart, even yours, begins to sway to the rhythms of the body. Its longings and its satisfactions, its hopes. I couldn’t let you go on making those promises to them.”

  The last words were but the faintest echoes from miles away.

  “Don’t you see? The act becomes you.”

  * * *

  When she regains consciousness, Sylvia is on the sofa. Her arms are extended to either side of her over the top of the back cushions. A complex system of tension cords pin her wrists to the sofa and connect her wrists to her ankles. When she tries to pull down her arms, her feet get tugged under her, and when she tries to rise, the chords stick hard into her wrists. The only light is from the table lamp to her left that casts deep shadows into all corners of the room.

  “You’re awake,” says a voice from one of these corners.

  The sound of music, one note then another, issues from the piano.

  “Richard?” C-major arpeggio. “What the hell is going on?” Her head throbs.

  Crashing G-minor chord. “Really, Sylvia, it makes me uncomfortable when you swear.”

 
She says, staring in the direction of the piano, “Try tension chords.” Her tone is cool and condescending. “Get these things off me, Richard.”

  He moves out of the shadows to stand six feet from her; Richard seems to wilt a little under her iron gaze.

  “I just want to talk to you,” he says, brows knitted.

  “Get these things off me, Richard.”

  “You walked in here.” It almost sounds as if he’s pleading.

  “Kidnapping to talk?” she says incredulously.

  “I never forced you to come inside, I didn’t force you to come.”

  Richard stands sideways to her to keep from having to make eye contact.

  “I didn’t force you to come?”—enunciating every word—“I wanted to talk to you? And so that must mean I wanted you to drug me? And tie me up?” Sylvia’s tone nears hysteria.

  Richard pulls on his index finger as if to pull it off his hand.

  Lowering the volume of her voice she says, “Untie me, Richard.”

  He whispers, begging, “I can’t. I love you.”

  As a girl, Sylvia watched her mother bring home men who would come out of her bedroom early in the morning before her mother could notice them leave. Sylvia waited in the living room. She wanted to watch them tip toe, let them know that someone witnessed their exit. Some didn’t even pretend to be friendly and left without a word. When her mother awoke, she would cry over the stove as she fried Sylvia’s eggs. Why couldn’t she ever keep one with her? her mother had often cried.

  “Untie me, Richard.” And then, “Untie me, Richard. Untie me. Richard, untie me! Right now! Untie me, right now! Untie me, Richard!” She yells, “I have someone expecting me, Richard, and when I don’t show up he’s going to know something’s wrong and then he’ll come looking for me!”

  Up until that point Richard has been pacing in random lines around the room, from one corner to the sofa to the curtains to the other wall to the shelf and back again, but at Sylvia’s last remark, he stops, looking at her askance.