PREFACE
Karen Mulhallen

IN SEED TIME, SOW
Christine Fischer Guy - Reading Layton
Lee Kvern - I May Have Known You
Alex Leslie - Wire Boy
Lucie Moeller - Adam and Iveta
J.R. Toriseva - Buttonhole, Chain, Satin Stich


POLITICS, THE SELF AND THE OTHER
Virgil Burnett - The Red Villa (A Fantasy on a Roman Fresco)
Joshua Dedora - Cabbie-Driven Faith
Esmé Claire Keith - Purity
Rhonda Waterfall - Little Breaks
Jan Pendleton - Skin, Teeth and Bones


POLITICS AND THE FAMILY
christine estima - My Tryst with Sins
Joel Fishbane - Scenes from an Epilogue
Donald Francis - Jennifer’s Mother is Desire
Ginnah Howard - The Names of All the Planets
David Mason - Me, Avie Bennett and the Yiddish Question
Saint James Harris Wood - Torturing the Young Primitives

ANNALS OF TRAVEL
Adam Lindsay Honsinger - Silence
Jessamyn Hope - Spring on the West Bank
P.K. Page - Those Years
Tyler Stiem  - The Road to Jijiga

PORTFOLIOS
Maleonn
Anne Bertoin

Back of the Book
Contributing Editor’s Column Alberto Manguel
Contributors’ Notes
Co-Editor’s Diary Katie Franklin
Production Editor’s Diary Rebecca Niles
News and Notes
Advertisements

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… Adam is my son. I brought him life and he brings me joy. It is as simple as that.

I glance down at him; his arms are now stretched out and the ladybug marches up one of them, negotiating the folds of his navy sweatshirt with single-minded determination. His long, dark eyelashes are his father’s. His nose, his father’s nose. His lips, though, are mine. Over the years I have dissected his anatomy, every bony projection, every soft curve, assigning a genetic lineage. His versus mine. I have little to go on except memories; I don’t even have a photograph. There are elusive images that bat their wings and alight on my mind briefly: generic hotel furniture, a carelessly unmade bed, tangential light from incandescent street lamps crossing the room to lay geometric shapes across the sheets. And various parts of Adam’s father superimposed on one of these backgrounds, floating, without the remainder of the body to anchor him down. Sometimes a hand rubbing over my knee; sometimes his eyebrows, hitched together in concentration, shadowing his eyes. Adam has his father’s brow, too. But not his eyes. Adam’s eyes were transplanted from heaven, bestowed upon him with all that makes a pair of eyes remarkable: dignity, courage, equanimity. These are not mine or his father’s; these are his very own.
        I don’t remember how I arrived at the name Adam. Between moving my things into my mother’s home and attending prenatal classes, I somehow knew. I knew he would be a boy and I knew he would be called Adam. When he was placed on my breast directly from the violence of his arrival, all white and purple-pink like a tulip, slippery and warm, I greeted him silently, hoping those deep, dark, secret-filled eyes would approve of me.

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I drop to my knees and search for myunderwear. Pink with red stripes. The elastic band falls below my hip bone. They’re my favourite. I wonder if Zaev is dreaming on top of them. Like the suspicious Kensington cat, I meander across the carpet, which lightly burns my knees, to his side of the bed.
         White sheets in a dead-body heap. Warm air looms in his corner, like his mouth has been open all night. His midnight body hair collects in the usual places. Around the eye of his bellybutton. In swirls across his thighs. Peppered at the small of his arched back. Leading down to the mouth of his spine. Zaev has gone under the pillow, his breathing thick.
         Last night, we fucked but did not close the blinds. I imagine the apartments across the decomposed street enjoying our performance.
         I decide to abandon hope for my undies. I slink back to the window, pull the armchair up to the pane. Outside, the shadows on Mount Lebanon keep time better than a clock, a holy place to which the devout make pilgrimages. I recall the stories of Tammuz and Astarte my great-grandmother told. It was morning on the mount when Astarte first caught sight of Tammuz, unveiled herself before him, and buried his mutilated body when he was killed by a wild boar. The legend evokes the image of the earth being fructified by their passion and pouring forth an abundance of flowers and fruits, heralding the equinox.
         I lean back in the chair, raising my feet and pressing them against the glass. I slip my skirt up and position my womb against the chaotic city.
         I woke up this morning wanting to run my fingers over Zaev’s collarbone.
         And then break it.

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        At six o’clock the bus sputtered to life and ambled nightward. People were anxious to move on and there’d been a fight for the last seats. I wondered whether it mattered — at this point everyone would be travelling in the dark. But a mood of foreboding was palpable inside the bus. The women hugged their bags and comforted children; the men pretended to sleep. Outside a storm was gathering. Bean fields swished under a hard, crystalline sky.
        Then: a roadblock, manned by Ethiopian soldiers. They were fit, well-equipped, their expressions grim. We stepped off the bus into wind. Distant clouds drifted across the sky like a smack of luminous jellyfish, aswim in spectral light. Lightning tentacled from their blackening underbellies. Everyone knew the drill. The women lined up first, documents in hand, and they were searched while the men looked on in silence. The soldier tasked with the pat-downs was careful, almost deferential. Old and young, slender and stooped, the women cut austere figures. Their dresses — flickering yellows, reds, turquoises, purples — bled into the dusk, a mess of colour expressing what their inscrutable faces did not. They were a pageant of ghosts. I was taken aback by their beauty. So, I think, was the soldier. As they climbed back onto the bus, they were apparitions become flesh once more: mothers nursing fussy infants, old women minding painful joints.