by Hank Quense
Mama cut the flour and Crisco with two silver butter knives as she explained the difference between a pie and tart. “See here, Sissy, a pie is thick and has two crusts. You put the apple slices in any which way. A tart is elegant and thin. You lay the apple slices from the crimped crust towards the center in precise patterns around and round and round in an ever-diminishing spiral.” Mama loved words strange to me like “precise,” “diminishing” and “spiral.” “But the real difference, Sissy, between pie and tart is you bake a tart crust first in a special pan. And before you bake it, you prick it all over with a fork so that it will lie flat and not bulge out of shape.”
She tucked a stray hair into the bun at the nape of her neck as she detailed these fine points of baking lore. Everywhere she touched left little fingerprints of flour. She promised I could prick the crust if I hurried back with her white enamel dishpan full of apples.
I just doted on my mama. She could do just about anything that was worth doing in my estimation. She could slip tomato skins faster than anyone I knew. Even Miz Marlow, who always took blue ribbons for her canned tomatoes, ceded the floor to Mama when it came to stripping tomatoes naked. She knew the best picnic spots. She would drive us up back roads till they petered out in the still woods. We ate cold salads and sardines on saltines while resting on cool thick green mats of moss. "See what the forest has given us for a cloth, darling?" She could read clouds. She knew how to fix any lock broken. And she would make the best birthday cake castles—great layered things all shimmery and topped with iced and decorated cardboard throne rooms. Give Mama something to nail, and she'd whip her ball peen out of her big red leather pocketbook stamped to look like alligator skin and hammer away, telling me all the while how to correctly hold a hammer for the best leverage. Mama was a born as well as a certified teacher.
So out I went, taking the back porch stairs in two’s, to the pie apple tree. I shinnied up, the little red-rimmed pan tucked under my arm. This was my special dreaming tree. I knew every branch, twig, and knot. I knew just how to swivel around the trunk and grab a second branch, while I put my knee up and over the next higher branch. I beat my own record getting up that tree.
I don't remember falling. I don't remember hitting the ground. I just remember hearing in my head the sound raw chicken meat makes when you tear it off the bone. Then Mama was slapping my face, crying, "She's dead. She's dead." Her face was so smeared with blood and flour she scared me. She looked so wild and torn up. Her apron was half off. Her tidy waved hair was flying like mad crows around her shoulders.
"I'm all right, Mama. I just got the wind knocked out of me. I skinned my knee; it stings." I sucked in my breath to ease the hot pain. I inventoried my parts. "My arm is sore, but I’m really okay, Mama." But she didn't stop crying as she stared over my head; her screams pierced my bones. I couldn’t see what she was staring at, because she had me hugged so close, my bloodied nose mashed against her breast. I couldn’t see the man who was crossing the yard. The man I would first know as my grandfather. Sometimes, on still days with no wind, and with Sarah and Jenny, my granddaughters, out of the house, I can hear her screams. My bones are like wind tunnels for her screams—making them flow faster and concentrating the sound.
I don't remember what happened next. I just know that a little while later—two hours, two days, two weeks—I was riding with Grandpa in his 1949 robin’s egg blue Plymouth. We didn't talk all the way to his farm. I sat with my tan paper suitcase upright on my lap. I grasped its brown handle fiercely. Clutching that handle and sitting straight up was all that kept me tied to this world. Else wise, I would have flown off to the stratosphere of black crows and screams to be with Mama.
It was a long, long time before I found out what made her scream like that and go off with the crows. To tell the truth, maybe I didn't really want to know. Sitting up in Grandpa's Plymouth, I buried Mama’s stream of pain deep down. My own pain of losing her and that of mine to come layered over hers. At the farm’s mailbox, we turned into the long dirt track that dipped down under cool trees in the creek bottom. Before the track fetched up at the tractor shed by the house, I was myself again. Well, that's what Grandpa said. I did have a bright outside again. And that's where I lived—on my skin.
I didn't know where Mama was. I didn't ask. No one told. In fact we didn't discuss it at all. Now, it sounds weird, unfeeling even, to leave a child alone with grief and terror, but then that’s what all the experts advised. Grandpa just didn't talk much—at least in the daytime.
When I stepped out of the car, I could smell the hot sand baking under the tin roof of the tractor shed. I squatted down with a piece of straw to stir a doodle bug hole. "Doodle bug, doodle bug, fly away home, your house is on fire, your children will burn," I chanted while I poked the straw deep into the cone to see if the doodle bug would come skittering out. None came. I sighed in satisfaction. "Your house is on fire. Your children will burn." Dusting off my knees and the scuffed toes of my brown lace-ups, I turned toward the crisp white bungalow, which perched on the crest of the rise surrounded by cotton fields. Blood-red geraniums higher than my head flanked the stone steps. Grandpa took my hand. I clasped tight with the other the handle of my little suitcase. Together we set off across the neat clipped grass.
Author Bio:
Virginia Cornue is the author and co-author of seven fiction and non-fiction books. Her most recent fiction is book three in the Sandra Troux Mystery series, Secrets at Abbott House (2015) co-authored with Linda Lombri under the pen name Crystal Sharpe. Secrets commences and ends in Montclair, NJ. In 2015, she also co-edited with William R. Trotter So Much Blood The Civil War Letters of CSA Private William Wallace Beard 1861-1865, a non-fiction book. She is the former executive director of the National Organization for Women, NYC and the NYC Women’s Funding Coalition, as well as Newark Emergency Services for Families. Her 1990s doctoral research investigated social change and gender redefinitions in post-Mao China. Dr. Cornue teaches cultural anthropology and sociology at Bloomfield College, Bloomfield, NJ. She lives in Montclair with her daughter Mei who is an honors student at Brandeis University.
War and Piece
By Renae Madden
Detective Jake DeLaney had seen lots of things in his time. From the deserts of Afghanistan to the Meadowlands of North Jersey, he had witnessed a wide range of human cruelty and kindness. But he had not been prepared for this.
“All right, why don't you tell me what happened? From the beginning.”
“She kicked us off our table. Got here first, I admit, and used it to store their board games. Then nobody actually sat at the table. They all sat on the couches and armchairs. When we got here at our usual time, she--” And this time the young woman pointed to an older, smaller woman.
“Do you know her name?”
“Don't want to.”
“Fair enough.” He took some notes. “Keep going.”
“When she declared everything was set, I told her it wasn't. Have you ever tried to type on a coffee table lower than your knees? It's a beautiful piece, great for setting down your coffee and chatting while you lounge, but writing? I can't even use a pen and paper on that thing! God, my wrists ..."
“Miss, if you could stay on topic?”
“Right. I told her it wasn't working. The rest of my writing group seemed to agree with me, so we all just started moving their games to the coffee table where they so graciously said we could sit--”
“On topic. Please.”
“Right. It was that guy with The Settlers of Catan who threw the first punch.” She jerked her chin towards the more than 6-foot-tall, 200-pounds-plus man the EMTs were tending to on the floor. “Guess he felt we were threatening his resources. After that it was self-defense.”
“Right.” Detective Delaney looked the young woman up and down, noticing the blood on her temple, and that one of her cheeks was beginning to swell.
“I suppose you gave what you got?”
“Eh, I work at a municipal
archive. Nobody but the files will notice this.” She motioned to her cheek, perhaps oblivious to the blood.
“And your--” He motioned to the blood at her temple. She tentatively reached to touch her face. When she looked at her hand, her eyebrows shot up, but she shrugged. “Huh, must have been that guy with the Star Munchkin Expansion Pack. Thought I dodged that. Oh, well. Guy's got a good arm.”
“Uh-huh.” He took more notes and glanced at the woman before taking even more. She was standing up straight and tall, apparently unconcerned with the carnage around her. When he first entered the room he had noticed a pack of cards with blood on one of the corners. So, that was probably her blood. “I can't help but notice, miss, you know the games.”
“Of course I do, Detective. I am a nerd.”
It was time for his eyebrows to shoot up now. “You are?”
“Yes. When I game, I game.” She looked down at her laptop, sitting peacefully closed on the table in dispute. “And when I write, I write.”
A River of Pain
By Brian Montalbano
(An excerpt from Into the Lion’s Mouth)
Prologue
Leonius opened his eyes. He saw only darkness. He jerked his head left, then right. The darkness surrounded him. He looked ahead once more, desperately seeking any form or shade. Leonius growled when his eyes could not discern anything.
Suddenly, Leonius felt the cool touch of a gentle current sweep across his fingertips. Each finger fluttered at the caress of the water, finally confirming his physical presence. His eyes now adjusting, he looked down to see the insignia of the lion on the chest of his armor. Below that, his legs were standing in a calmly flowing river, which tried to urge him further down its shore.
“What you doing in the water, soldier?” a voice asked.
“I am a prefect,” Leonius said without searching from where the voice came.
“You think that makes a difference? Prefect, centurion, legionnaire—all just armor and flesh. Rank means nothing down here.”
“Where am I?” Leonius searched his surroundings once more. A man drew near atop a crude vessel—a small boat guided by a single oar.
“You’re where every man comes, yet where every man hopes not to be.” The man chuckled.
Leonius looked ahead once more.
“No sense looking that way,” the man began. “Now’s the time for thinking back—about how and why you got here.”
“Betrayal.”
“That sounds like the beginning of a tantalizing tale. Who was it? Wife? Scorned lover? A child after his inheritance?”
“No,” Leonius’s voice trailed off. “I…I’m not sure I even know anymore.”
“Well there’s not much time to become any more sure. You either know or you don’t at this point.”
“Who are you?” Leonius asked.
“Charon’s the name. I’ll be your ferryman across the River of Pain this evening…This evening. Ha. That always gets me. Down here, it’s always evening.”
“Charon?” Leonius’s eyes widened. He looked down into the river. “Can this be so? Can my time have already passed? No. I was the most feared general in all the land. How could my thread of life have been cut so prematurely?”
“You’re gonna be one of those souls, aren’t you? Listen. The end is the wrong place to start—it’s always clouded by uncertainty. Where’d it begin, soldier? Ask yourself that.”
Leonius remained lost in thought for many moments.
“My brother,” Leonius finally stammered. “My brother did this. He’s why I’m here. It has to be him. It couldn’t have been her…”
“It sounds like you’re getting to where you need to,” Charon said, “but do ya mind coming onto the ferry as you work through this? I got plenty of souls waiting, and the numbers only keep growing.”
Leonius’s head shot up. He suddenly understood.
“Raetia. The prophetess…That’s where this all began.”
~
Chapter 1: The Lion’s Den
Leonius drove his gladius through the final invader still clinging to life on the battlefield in the Roman province of Raetia, the land just south of the Danube River.
“No filthy barbarian leaves here with his life,” he said, stepping on the man’s shoulder to withdraw his sword. While he cleaned his blade, he looked out across the bloodstained earth. Then, he roared with such a great voice as if shouting his victory to the gods on Mount Olympus.
On his journey back toward the encampment, Leonius’s soldiers saluted their prefect and offered him praise. Amid the rows upon rows of lamb-hide tents, he saw a spot of white: undoubtedly a senator’s toga.
The young general smiled to himself and quickened his steps as he entered the wooden stakes of the palisade.
“Aquilius!” Leonius shouted. He embraced his brother’s tall, slender frame with his powerful, brawny arms.
“It’s good to see you, brother,” Aquilius said. “But our greeting could have waited.” Aquilius frowned at his toga now smeared with red.
The two men walked along the main road of the camp toward its forum at the center.
“Bah, you came all the way to Raetia,” Leonius answered. “The least you can do is get some blood on you. We have one more battle ahead of us.” Leonius put his hand on Aquilius’s shoulder. “I would like nothing more than to have my brother protecting my side.”
Just then, Vespasian and Aulus, two high-ranking officers, approached. Both men possessed herculean-sized chests; however, the grey hairs that peppered Vespasian’s stubble showed his advanced age.
“I’m sure the emperor would be pleased to hear that I allowed both his sons to risk their lives on the front lines,” Vespasian said with a hint of both jest and disapproval.
“Do not fear, Vespasian,” Aquilius answered. “Those years are far behind me. Now, I look after Leonius in the Senate, to which I should return. The senators’ chests will swell with pride upon hearing of your victory and the certain end of this threat.”
“Tell ‘em of the squealers on the crucifixes too,” Aulus grunted with a chuckle.
“Crucifixes?” Aquilius asked.
“Those weaklings screamed ‘til their last breath—begged for a sword in their bellies. Ha. That oughta get a good laugh.”
“How colorful, Aulus,” Vespasian said.
“The leaders of an uprising are crucified to remind others not to stray,” Leonius said to Aquilius.
“How brutal. Is sending the barbarians to their deaths not enough?”
“No man, barbarian or Roman, should defy the emperor without facing such punishment.”
“And that desire for punishment,” Vespasian began, “is why we took the only legions stationed in Italia so far from the capital, despite my protestations.”
“Well, on this matter, my brother and I do agree, Vespasian,” Aquilius said. “My father shared your caution, but Leonius was certain this task could be done. I cited Leonius’s countless victories over four campaigns, and in the end, our emperor was convinced that we should not let the Marcomanni reach the Alps.”
“Aha,” Vespasian exclaimed. “So the Aurelius brothers joined forces to break the spirit of the mighty tree.”
“Tree? Who’s talking ‘bout trees?” Aulus interjected.
“It was a metaphor, Aulus. The tree signifies Tertius.”
“Metaphor or not,” Aquilius said, “let’s instead say my father’s spirit bent. I respect my brother’s opinions as prefect and military advisor. If he feels strongly about something, he has my support for any battle.”
“And I thought you were the sensible one,” Vespasian said.
“He may prefer the halls of the Senate to the chaos of the battlefield,” Leonius said, “but he still understands the necessity of the latter.”
Suddenly, the centurion Modius led a disheveled woman toward the men.
“This Marcomanni woman stumbled into camp,” Modius reported. “She asked specifically to speak to Leonius.
”
“Tell me, what cause have I to talk to any barbarian?” Leonius sneered. He began to walk around the woman, inspecting her. As he lifted some of her hair with the tip of his sword, clumps of dirt fell from it. “Especially one as unsightly and unkempt as this one. Do your people consider those rags appropriate clothing?”
“She claims the gods have spoken to her about the battle,” Modius said.
Leonius scowled at Modius. “Bring her to the general’s tent lest her presence unnerve the soldiers.”
They all filed north past the altar to the towering tent where Leonius and his centurions handled all military affairs. The tent could hold fifteen men across and twenty-five deep, and housed a single table covered with maps.
Once inside, Leonius returned his attention to the woman. Her foul stench offended his nostrils; however, his curiosity drew him closer.
“Go on. Tell me of your divine conversation.”
As she began to speak, the woman’s eyes rolled to the back of her head as if in a fit of convulsion. “A mighty oak will fall,” she warned, “leaving acorns behind that will compete for the soil in which they lie.”
“Excuse me, she-wolf?” Leonius stepped menacingly toward her. “What is this madness you speak? Speak plainly about the coming battle, or I will silence your tongue.”
The woman laughed maniacally. “A battle between brothers looms on the horizon,” the woman said, “yet you stop your eyes from looking toward it. Blood will be forced to go against blood of its own as the bond of brotherhood falls to-”
Leonius plunged his gladius through the woman’s stomach.
“ENOUGH! I have no patience for riddles and lies.”
Falling to her knees, the prophetess reached out to cling to Leonius’s waist. Gasping for a final breath, she gave one final threat. “So quick to use your claws, you impetuous brute. When the lion uses them against the eagle, the eagle will bite back.”