These are 2013-2014 Writers and their Alternates.

Fall 2013 Caroline Walker
Natalie van Hoose – Alternate

Winter 2014 Sion Dayson
Melinda Moustakis – Alternate

Spring 2014 Anzhelina Polonskaya
Josh Kalscheur – Alternate

Summer 2014 Maya Sloan
Mariko Nagai – Alternate

‘I am your doctor’ he said, and pointed at the bed like he was instructing a dog into its basket.

‘You’re the reason I’m alive?’

‘You were never in danger of dying’ he said, and took a clipboard from the end of my bed.

The ascending artery was being held open by a metal spring, successfully inserted by the skilled doctor who was nowhere to be seen. I was just saying yes, yes, yes, in my head the whole time this man was speaking. I was supposed to be dead. I’d already come close to making peace with it. A bright day outside when they let me go, just a few small clouds. I thought I might float off into the sky and that’s when I pulled an umbrella from the stand. There’s nothing more life affirming than umbrella theft! If I’m alive it may rain on my head. And you may be dead and won’t need it. It’s just a game of chance isn’t it? But chance kept me alive and I’m choosing to take the umbrella for myself!

Down the street I wondered, how long have I got? Twenty years? Thirty even, they’d said. That’s the same as saying forever. And also the same as saying it ends tomorrow. I kept stopping and feeling my chest. I paused at the main street and looked at the yatais all folded up. That was me, I thought. Folded up. But just like the yatais are each night, I’ve been unfolded. I’ll live to drink again and Chihiro had promised to come see me. Was this really my life? For one moment I thought I heard someone shouting my name. I imagined feet and running. ‘Umbrella thief! Stop!’ But it was nothing. Or maybe it was the train crossing the old bridge or the tide going out. Everything seemed white, and I stopped on the street outside my apartment. I opened the umbrella. I didn’t care anymore if anyone saw me. I’d just say it was mine. It was mine! It’s mine, I said out loud. In the shade I could see the ground more clearly and I walked up and down searching for that coin that my angel had thrown from the window. Was I alive because of that? The doctor had asked me if I was superstitious, but this went beyond that. Really, it did. I could smell that fresh hair of hers. So young, my old heart went racing. I touched my neck, looked everywhere, even down the storm drains. It was gone! There’d been no rain since yesterday. Someone else must have chosen to take it just like I had chosen to steal this umbrella.

If you were here. Her shoulders slumped. You could worry about Mother. You could make sure she eats. You could figure out how to make money. You could figure out how to put gas in the car.

She closed her eyes, and was conscious, for the first time, of all she had taken on her shoulders. It’s not fair! some part of her cried, and was silenced by the part of her that had shouldered those burdens in the first place. Fair or unfair isn’t the choice, it said. It’s family or nothing.

She opened her eyes again and retrieved her hat, then crossed the yard and went inside. The kitchen was dim. She crossed to the stairs and climbed without turning a light on, and halfway up, she heard something fall in the attic. She stopped mid-step.

The God damned raccoon. So now it was reorganizing the attic to make itself more comfortable? Well, that would stop. It was stopping right now.

She turned around and went down the stairs, dropping her hat and purse on the kitchen table before kneeling to open the cabinet nearest the door. It held odds and ends of her father’s things: his pliers, his ball of twine, his liniment, his spare pipe tobacco. She breathed in the smell of him for a moment before reaching for the big aluminum flashlight he used when he went out to the barn at night. She turned it on and light came out, orangey instead of yellow but strong enough for her purposes. Something clattered in the cabinet; she reached in and picked up the hammer that had fallen, then, instead of putting it back, she hefted it. The wooden handle was dark where her father had gripped it.

Put it away, she told herself. You don’t need it.

But her arm would not move to replace it in the cabinet. She stared at the dark iron head; the shiny face with its faint, crescent-shaped dents. She lifted it, and felt again the strangely satisfying heaviness of it.

Something hot and angry was churning in her stomach. She told herself it was logical to take the hammer up to the attic, but something deep inside her, so deep that it was almost beyondthe reach of words, spoke in an ugly voice: He wouldn’t have insulted your mother if you’d had the hammer in your hand. He wouldn’t have pushed you if you’d had the hammer in your hand. They’d mind their tongues. They’d mind you.

—

We have bred our kind into aberration;
too many people in too many closed communities;
too much medicine to keep the babies coming, cure the cancers,
keep the suicides from trying;
too much poison in the animals we glut on.
There is a wild flaw loose amongst us,
amongst our fragile gene pool.
How many in a hundred now
will dine upon their neighbors,
defecate upon a corpse of their own making?

—

Am I really saying
Josef Fritzl, Andrea Curry-Demus, Jeffrey Dahmer, Joseph Edward Duncan,
and all of the others come to us
because of Oscar Meyer
and Clomiphene?

—

Yes. Yes I am.

She rolls her brush through gray and adds the rain
in tiny flicks, glinting arrows of cold.
My sister’s painting this: a hill, a lane.

Last year our mother died, as was her plan.
It’s simpler to imagine something could
have intervened. The centered tulip-flame

startles the scene; the surrounding ones are plain
pastels, while this one’s lit with a crimson fold.
My sister’s painting this: a hill, a lane

of cobblestones, a watery terrain
of dripping flowers. Her strokes, elsewhere controlled,
flare out and fray around the tulip-flame

as if it were an accident, a stain,
a blaze in the mid-point of a wet field.
My sister’s painting this: a hill, a lane,
a tulip field, and one astounding flame.

originally published in Shenandoah