Minutes on Asphalt (DRAFT)

By Jem Ashton

In the second month of a new relationship while on a weekend road trip to a small town in the desert - one that’s more of a byproduct of tourism than an earnestly charming podunk - my then-new boyfriend dragged me to the one bar in town where fags might not get stared down. That weekend, fags were actively welcomed, actually. The local queers put a bare-armed effort into staging a full-fledged Pride Festival that drew queers in from all over the region. It also lured in some queers who intended to “just pass through town” but couldn’t resist the timeless charm of pop music barely audible through amped up bass and rowdy, drunk homosexuals. 

One was a rugged man with gray hair, tanned skin, and a beard that reached his sternal notch - bare, only hidden by the same chest hair that would guide your eye down to a vertex held together by a shirtbutton below his chest. He said we - me and my then-new boyfriend - fit the vibe for his company, which was looking for models. We should consider modeling, he said. He didn’t say what his company was and we didn’t ask, but we enjoyed his company enough to make him our friend for the evening. We kept talking and he stood behind me during the long wait for drinks at the crowded bar. He was passing through town with his husband, who was somewhere else in the crowd, and they caught wind of the party. They liked road-tripping on their motorcycles, they liked meeting new people. He liked our look - or maybe or looks, as distinct and separate as they are. 

He brushed his rough, asphalt hand along my wiry forearm and I shifted my weight back to lean fractionally closer to the affectionate man standing behind me at the bar. With the gentle movement of our bodies - shifting to drink or make way for the flowing crowd - his belt pressed into me. His body pressed against mine. My fraction of a step became whole and I pressed myself against him, signaling I welcomed his belt, his body. Signaling I welcomed his body pressing into me. 

He asked for my number, saying he wanted my number to keep in touch about the modeling suggestion, but I caught a glimpse of a more familiar invitation in his eye. His cheeks were rosy with lust and beer. His eyes were heavy like ripe fruit, plump and ready with visions of seeding fertile earth. 

I gave him a fake, because I wasn’t sure I wasn’t crossing the boundaries of my then-new relationship. Would my boyfriend mind my minute flirtation with this stranger? I both cared and didn’t. My fake phone number felt like the middle ground. 

I was saying “yes.” 

I was saying “no.” 

I was getting what I wanted and I was giving it up.

Because I took the lazy way out of a tricky situation, that was the end of the road.

A Great Flood

By Jem Ashton 

My knuckles are rubbed thin by my persistent, aggressive, maybe unnecessary handwashing. 

In the cold weather, the thinned skin cracks and my knuckles bleed. Sometimes, I don't notice for awhile, only realizing my injury when I finally have reason to look at my hands and see the frozen blood dew - dark red and sticky - on my knuckle peaks. As soon as I can, I wash my hands again. I rub the blood away along with more skin. 

In the following days, I'm more careful. I treat my hands gently. I talk myself out of believing every surface is so nasty that I need to rub away my skin after touching anything. I remind myself I need a healthy dermal layer to protect myself from germs. I moisturize, do what I can to retain the oil my skin needs to survive. Scabs form, my skin heals. 

My hands look good, as if I never washed my skin away.

I was raised a colonist

by lei molis

I never took my essays to my mom. I always asked my dad to look over them. He was the English major, the White Man, the writer. It made sense. What never made sense to me was the uproar from my Samoan mother. “Why don’t you ever ask me to read your essays?” she would ask. Naively, innocently, stupidly, invidious I would reply, “Oh, well I didn’t know you wanted to.” But it was more than that, and we both knew it.

 

It was my little winces each time she spoke in church. Her words choppy and backwards, just slightly the wrong shade of palagi. White, but barely. Eggshell, perhaps—the color she painted my brother’s room after he moved out. She had wanted a fresh coat of white to cover the doodles he had added in his stage of teenage individualism (brought to you by: America in the early 2000s). How she had not realized the paint she chose was not the white she sought, I do not know. And it really shouldn’t surprise me. After all, this is the woman who bought sugar-free yogurt, sugar-free ice cream, sugar-free oatmeal, not because she wanted to lower our sugar intake, but because she didn’t notice the giant red letters on every side of the carton that read: “SUGAR FREE.” And you know you really couldn’t get mad at her for it. Of course, I still found my ways, but no, not when she would so innocently and honestly admit she didn’t realize it was sugar free when she bought it. 

 

So eggshell and sugar free, these were just the versions of White I had to put up with. And that’s how I saw it, really: something to be endured, to wince at. Order order order. Ironic, isn’t it? How desperately I wanted to stand out, and yet how strictly I could police her for making us different from the sea of White who surrounded us.   

 

“Why don’t you ever ask me to read your essays?” It wasn’t even something to consider—ridiculous, laughable. “Well, I didn’t know you wanted to.” It was more than that. It was how I seemed to zone out every time she started talking during family scripture study. Speaking vaguely. Repeating phrases I assume she heard in church. Attempting to paraphrase, summarize? the verses we had just read, but it only came out as regurgitated scripture. Plagiarism. Like those Christian missionaries had indoctrinated her ancestors’ tongues until they became a broken record for their whitewashed daughters to roll their eyes at. No, I wasn’t playing the apathetic teen card; dad would chime in and immediately my ears would perk up. As if grace were only legitimate if starched. Dressed in a suit and tie. Spoken in perfect English. As if principles were only principles if pronounced in perfect succession. Correction. It’s just because we are grammar geeks, we tell ourselves. We the women molded to police other women. The children trained to correct the parents who were once children in a new land, miles from their island home. The children of diaspora. Peoples of the pacific relocated to America, trained to be the very mouths that called them cannibals. 

 

Like the woman who sat in our dining room. Messengers of God, our faith would have us believe. And we did. One from Hawaii—American. Another from Tahiti—not. We had just shared a meal with them. I was 16 at the time. Confused at my direction. Impressionable, listening. Listening as the Tahitian poured her soul into new American English that felt clunky and awkward in her French-trained mouth. But she was a messenger of God, and a good one. She would not let grammar rob her of an opportunity to speak of God’s goodness to a family trying to live in the shade of His grace. And yet her companion—a child of Oceania in some ways, too—would. As she spoke of love and grace and truth and hope and beauty, her American counterpart with brusqueness inserted “he” or “her” or “him” each moment she stumbled through her pronouns. Thinking back, I am annoyed all over again—if the meaning is delivered, what does it matter the format? Aepeita’i, in shame I realize, I am no different from her. 

 

We dress grace in shirts and ties. Declare a love that is intended for all. But is it grace still if that all refers only to those who can fit their mouths around American words? Well-versed in a selection of Mormonic phrases perfectly polished and performed? “Please bless the hands who prepared it,” “nourish and strengthen our bodies,” “I’d like to bear my testimony,” “I know this Church is true.”

 

I know this Church is true.

 

So, life is full of hypocrisy, and I stand before you, asking you to acknowledge the beauty of a populace I once scorned. Gently, inwardly, but scorn nonetheless. A populace I am half a part of. Which part?, I ask myself. If not the leg or the arm, the eyebrows, the mouth? Perhaps somewhere someone knew this mouth could do damage to ‘Western legitimacy,’ so they bent it and twist it and teach me to tell myself, “I just love English. I love grammar and spelling. It’s all that I’m good at.” I’m an editor, I love editing. Correcting. Making you more like me. Isn’t that all a colonizer does, really?   

 

High maka maka, mama called it. Shook her head at her brother whose college education and affinity for palagis turned him White on the inside. Or eggshell, maybe. Because the words, though big, which he weaved into his prayer, were right, but barely. Or because he said them with such authority no one dared question his usage, maybe. Not a round hole, but a square peg with a surface area two digits too high. Maybe. 

 

Even Dad scolded me for my constant corrections. Compared me to the neighborhood connoisseur of grammar and language. She was just a daughter like me, seasick from the shaking of her head against the grammar-ignorant phrases of her father. But not sick of the sea, as I was. Sick of the boat my mother should not have been fresh off of. How many decades had passed since she set foot on American soil anyhow? Was the soil she stepped on too Hawaiian enough to be American? (Hence the terms like “high maka maka” and “hanabuddah (or hanabata)” or “shi shi in a cup.”)

 

Losing a mother changes your perspective on the world. “To lose your mother,” writes author Yann Martel, “well, that is like losing the sun above you.” In the years since losing my mother, my sun, I have sought her in any crevice, any corner, any crack in the cruel fabric that separates my reality from hers. And while I know my sun is not interchangeable with the light that pours all over Oceania, over le atunu’u o lona fale, there are rays that overlap. It was these areas of overlap I craved. The way an aunty would roll her eyes, click her tongue in disapproval, mutter, “Oka fefe,” under her breath. The way any Samoan would laugh—a music book of memories to my grief-stricken ears. The way the mouth of a sacred Samoan aunty, with her hands lifted in prayer for me, carved over and around the letters of her prayer, forging new paths through English pronunciation—new to others, perhaps, but not to me. Sounds I once might have scorned. Sounds that are now reminders of a mother’s love for her child of diaspora, who didn’t ask to be diasporic, who didn’t ask to be lost in a world where someone who pronounces “bowl” like “beaux” can’t possibly have opinions, much less wisdom regarding the role of nihilism in Crime and Punishment or the nature of God.      

There’s a line to a song I sometimes think about. It’s not a song I think my mother would have liked, but still, it reminds me of her in some ways. “There's no point in trying to take ourselves so seriously,” the singer croons. And the drums kick in. 

And I think of her laughing. I think of the time the two of us curled over, almost in tears from the laughter that rocked us. The laughter because of her English that broke mid-sentence. My hands deep in half-moon pie dough, seeped in sticky and tired from kneading with all my afakasi strength (which wasn’t much). “Eh,” she had said, “haven’t you ever heard of,” a pause as she searched for the words, “...da kine too much?” She finished weakly, wavering, but not with confidence, with laughter. And the dam that broke. The laughter that ensued. How we roared and wheezed at her English that broke mid-sentence. At the seriousness that gave way to her utter love for life. At the joy that spilled all over her words and into my heart through my fingertips into our pies and everywhere else between. How Dad had turned his head from the computer screen, confused, what was so funny?, he asked, but no words could explain.

And that is perhaps why this lesson took me so much to learn and still I keep unlearning: because it is a space without words. Beyond them. A space where laughter tells you all you need to know. A space where my mother—with her smile, with her love for God, with her ability to fit the pain in her pocket long enough to be present in those pews, with her quiet reminders to an elder sister to not let bitterness eat you up inside (reminders auntie would cling to and think of every time she spoke wrong, every time she looked up at her dead sister’s picture), my mother with her refusal to stop caring, stop loving, stop fighting for a world for her children to thrive, with her jokes of death and ‘chemo brain’ because what’s the point in taking ourselves so seriously?, with her smiles at the doctors and nurses who prodded her for the second half of her life and in return she gave them something to laugh about, a reason to smile, with her refusal to be anything but who she is—a land beyond words where my mother resides. This place I cannot find. This space so foreign to my displaced, Western-disciplined, grammar nazi me. 

 

A land it took her dying for me to seek. 

So, I suppose it’s a loss worth smiling about, for in searching for my sun, I found the darker parts of myself.    

Historical Moment: The Carcass Wash Incident

 By Jem Morgenstern

Ron Clark was pinned under an overturned cattle truck - right under the gas tank, which was mangled and leaking fluid over his body. His jaw was broken, his leg was twisted, and he felt a sharp pain in his back that turned out to be a dislocated vertebrae. He could only smell the gasoline that drenched his clothes and wet his skin. He could hear the other children, his friends, crying out - some sounding in agony, some begging to be killed because the pain they were in was unbearable, some praying. Ron himself prayed for the first time in awhile, as he’d recount 30 years later in an interview with Dennis Romboy for the Deseret News from June 10th, 1993, which coincided with the dedication of the memorial erected in remembrance of the accident in Carcass Wash. 

“I kept asking ‘why why why?’” Ron said.

Tom Heal and Brian Roundy were both tasked with making their way up Hole-in-the-Rock Road towards Escalante to find help after each narrowly avoided entrapment. Tom had tried jumping from the back of the cattle truck as it began to veer backwards, but his foot caught and he was pulled into the wreck. He found himself buried beneath loads of camping gear with several broken ribs, but he was able to wriggle himself out from beneath the truck, after which he quickly passed out. When he woke, Kilmer Roundy, Brian’s dad, handed him a canteen and sent him with Brian up the road. They expected to walk the whole 47-mile stretch of dirt road, but the boys came across a rancher just two miles up, who drove them into town and brought them to the police station. 

It took about four hours to get help from Escalante and the surrounding towns down to the crash site. The rescuers were able to pull bodies from the wreckage by jacking up one side of the truck, holding it up with flat stones, and then jacking up the other side of the truck to do the same. It was a long, delicate process. Eventually, it came to a point where two boys were left beneath the truck, Ron Clark and Lee Colver. The two were pinned by opposite ends of the truck. Lee had been riding on top of the cabin with two other boys, one of which jumped from the truck as it rolled back and was subsequently crushed to death under its wheels, the other rolled across the dirt and avoided the same fate. Lee was pinned into place by a rock and a steel toolbox that was pressed down by the weight of the overturned truck and crushed his right foot. The rescuers weren’t sure if they would be able to save both Ron and Lee. If they jacked up the side of the truck trapping Ron, it seemed likely the truck would roll again and crush Lee. If they jacked up the side that pinned Lee, the precariously stacked stones holding Ron’s side of the truck would likely collapse and the full weight of the vehicle would fall right onto him. The rescuers explained the situation to the boys, both told the rescuers to save the other. Both braced themselves for death.

But both were saved.

“Something physically or emotionally reminds me of it daily,” said Ron in his Deseret News interview, “I recall the day as if it were last Monday.”

sitting in church imagining my own gruesome death isn't blasphemy it's love

by lei

from where I sit I swear the angels see me

as strangers preach of God 

or whatever pain or peace ascribed to Him

I swear the angels 

they see me hidden 

behind the comfort of ivory sounds

alone

staring into the lid lock bar of a stranger's baby grand 

I swear they see my eyes seeing

suspension

--that wooden bar 

a deadly beam from some precarious construction zone

whose fate I imagine impaled in flesh 

aimed at the bridge between my eyes

glued still, 

but slipping 

with every falter of my resolve not to join them 

yet

Night's Approach in Willow Gulch

By Jem Morgenstern

            Under Broken Bow Arch, there’s a creek that falls into a muddy pond. A muddy pond with crawdaddies paddling their way across the floor, pushing their ancient bodies under rocks to hide from my eyes peering down at them. I could crush them like the 13 Boy Scouts who were crushed by a rolling truck 20 miles and 55 years back at Carcass Wash, but I am much kinder than the God they prayed to. I drop a couple spinach leaves into their water – just enough for me to feel like I might be feeding them but not enough for me to feel like I’m polluting. I don’t know if they eat spinach, but I like feeling like I might be making their lives easier for one moment.
            Aside from the crawfish and the ghosts of western tragedies, there are only two others in the gulch with me. Right now, they’re back at our camp that’s nestled in the dunes of an alcove directly across from the arch. Their feet rest in the cold red sand while they share a portion of the one bottle of liquor we managed to fit in our packs. The echoes of their conversation breaks the perfect silence, but I don’t mind the noise because I like listening to them talk.
            I hike back up the dunes to join them and share their dry spit and booze from that same bottle of liquor. The night slowly drips into the sky as the burning dusk falls below the desert walls of the gulch. The black birds swimming in the darkening sky look like they’re knit from their own shadows.  We talk about those birds and the stars that speck their shadow figures, because the moonlit sky is all we can see in the blackness that reigns over desert floors at night.

Children Passing Time

By Jem Morgenstern

Pebbles on the windows

Her eyes catch children

who bedevil haggard widows

A voice like sour grass

pointed, green

wincing bitterness

A face like cottage cheese

spotted by rot

slipping off bones with ease

The hag watches closer

now sat on the porch

in light, even grosser

We stare

at her ragged hair

cracked wooden chair

We wait

for the day

she goes away

Green River Autumn

By Jem Morgenstern


Roaches settle under milkweed patterned floors
Summer sets on churning bodies, wilting  
  daisies nestle on garden stones
Wooden homes along dirt roads, stretching 
  only from the one-eyed man's home 
  to the farthest point his eye spies

Quiet folk keen on speaking with pointed eyes
   and locking their doors before the gloam
To the well, they do not send their children fetching
   or else the beast will chew their bones
Passerbys' screams keep mother from her quilting
   and the locks stay on the doors

Family Above All

By Jem Morgenstern

In our Father’s Arms

Blood on the linoleum. Muffled crying. I could picture the scene in the other room clearly – I had seen it before, I had been in her position before. Children, like us, are dangerously likely to make small mistakes. He didn’t like small mistakes, he didn’t like children.

            Blood on the linoleum. Muffled crying. She could picture the scene in the other room clearly – she had seen it before, she had been in my position before. He had one hand over my boiling mouth and the other pressed down on my neck.

He said, “stop, you little bitch, be quiet.”

So we would be quiet.

In our Mother’s Arms

            She put an arm around me and told me it was okay, so I believed it was okay. Blood would stop leaking from my nose. Bruises would come and go. The room was bright with the sun’s light. I believed this was a good place.

            She put an arm around her and told her it was okay, but she knew it wasn’t. Blood would stop leaking from her nose. Bruises would come and go. The sun’s light poured through the windows from outside. She knew a better place was out there.

            She said, “he won’t do it again.”

            But he would do it again.

Brandon, OR/ID: Part VII

Suspended Pinks
By Jem Morgenstern

A cello sits quietly in the corner of the room. Its dark body stands out against the blushing pink walls. The wooden floors are similarly dark. Anne is sitting on a yellow chair. This is a room she hasn’t been in before. The cello in the corner is a stranger to her - a distant relative to her own cello. She is staring at its peg box. The head of each peg is parallel to the others - an impossibility that leads Anne to ask questions that she doesn’t intend to answer or vocalize. She wonders if the cello is tuned properly. She wonders why it wouldn’t be. She wonders if the cello’s cellist has a method of tuning the cello in a way that keeps the pegs perfectly aligned with each other. An impossibility.

She stands. Her shoes are between the doorway and the wardrobe. The left side of her left shoe is parallel to the right side of the wardrobe, the right side of her right shoe is exposed to the air flowing in through the doorway, the heels of both shoes are against the wall behind them. Their laces are undone. Each time she looks at the shoes, she is bothered by the end of the lace on the right shoe that is frayed. She is planning to replace the laces soon, because she is trying to minimize the number of small details in her daily life that make her uncomfortable. The next pair of laces will be the fourth pair of laces that have been on these shoes. She replaced the first pair because they were a particular shade of blue that didn’t match well with the peachy yellow of the shoes’ bodies. She still has this pair of laces stored in the bottommost left drawer of her own dresser at home. She has considered lacing that pair onto the shoes rather than buying a new pair, but she decided the combination of colors would cause the same amount of discomfort as the frayed end that she is attempting to ignore now. The shoes are now on her feet and she is walking down the stairs. The stairs are steep - otherwise, her pace would be quicker.

There is a long hallway at the bottom of the staircase. The walls are bare, likely because it is hard to pair artwork with the intricate wallpaper. The floors of the hallway are the same as they are in the room with the cello. There is a small decorative table near one of the doorways. Nothing is on the table. The rooms in the house are wide and spacious, but this corridor is suffocating.

The tiles in the kitchen are a muted white that is similar to the tile on the countertops, the cupboards and walls are a heavy blue. On the countertop near the sink, which is below a wide window, there is a wooden cutting board. There is a column of drawers next to the white fridge - two cutting boards that are identical to the one on the counter are in the middle drawer. The knives are all kept in the drawer above the cutting boards. The drawer below the cutting boards contains miscellaneous tools that are not used often. None of the handles to the cupboards or drawers are matching. There is an asparagus green kettle on the stove and Anne hears it begin to whistle. Two teacups are set next to the cutting board on the counter. Something is placed on the cutting board - Anne is unable to identify what it might be by just the sound of its heavy body landing on the wooden board. She enters the kitchen and does not look at the cutting board.

“I have to go. Are you busy later this week?”

Anne knows that he is busy later this week, but she feels that asking this question makes her unexpected exit seem more polite. Her question and presence in the kitchen are met with a concerned expression.

“Yeah, the rest of this week will be kinda busy, but I can see if I can find some time. Is everything okay?”

She knows that ignoring his question might spark some suspicion, but she chooses to anyway.

“I’ll text you later. Let me know if you can find time.”

She can tell he isn’t satisfied with this response. They talk for another short amount of time before she is able to leave. She’s glad that she decided to leave before he was further into the lunch-making process. They both exit the kitchen and walk down the narrow hallway towards the front door. There is a table next to the door with a stack of small books. Anne glances at the titles and finds that they are almost all contemporary christian fiction. She’s glad that she decided to leave before she was further into the romanticizing process.

It has been two hours. Anne is walking through the mall to a store she believes will have shoelaces. The mall is crowded and she worries for the unsupervised kids who are chasing each other around the always ignored mechanical rocking horses. She thinks about coming to the mall with her parents - she is surprised by the lack of change and she experiences a mild sensation of loss while thinking about the things that have changed. She wonders if the children understand how temporary childhood is - though she then hopes that they don’t, because she doesn’t want them to worry about the impermanence of their childhood freedoms. She doesn’t want the pleasure of childhood to be spoiled by the aggressive reality of temporality. Her thoughts sway between the consideration of childhood as a concept and memories of her own childhood. She remembers the excitement she felt when her parents gave in to her begging for a ride on a mechanical rocking horse and the dry embarrassment she felt when she got on the horse and discovered it wasn’t as fun as she had imagined. She tries to pinpoint the exact moment her childhood ended, but eventually determines that the loss of childhood is a gradual process of it being torn away rather than a single moment.

The store’s shoelace options are more limited than she had imagined. There is white, black, off-white variations, and a small group of neons. None of them are particularly attractive to her. She takes a few off the rack and holds them against her shoes. A sedated blue, a muted yellow, a pristine white, a violent neon pink. She puts the neon pink and the white back on the rack. She holds the blue and yellow against her shoes again. She puts the blue back on the rack.

At home, she replaces the laces on her shoes. The old ones are placed in the garbage bin. She feels like throwing them away is a waste, but she knows that keeping them around will do no good. With the new laces on her shoes, she is relieved that she won’t be bothered by frayed laces again until these ones are also worn to their limit. This small chore was the only activity Anne had planned for her day. A moment of stillness follows the completion of this one goal as the embrace of her achievement loosens. The stillness is a midpoint between her short pride in her small accomplishment and the inevitably approaching fear that the empty hours following will be filled with nothing but the questioning of what to do next. Anne is ashamed of her ruthless habit of killing time - the guilt of idling while time passes overwhelms her before the time she is afraid of wasting has begun to pass. There is some dirt on the rug in her bedroom, she thinks, so she decides to vacuum. She knows this will only occupy a small portion of the time to follow, but she is happy that the few minutes it takes will be spent in a way that she considers productive. With the vacuum on and the bedroom door closed, Anne doesn’t hear the knocking at her door. She would never know there was a knocking at the door and she would never know why.

Anne is able to occupy the rest of her day with small activities similar to vacuuming the rug in her bedroom. She finds a short time to play her cello, but she hasn’t yet forgiven her talent for the work it created when she was invited to perform at the Philadelphus Lewisii Music Hall nightly each day of the previous week. She punishes herself for the stress she has caused herself. At this time, playing her cello evokes the same stress her practice sessions had before, which is unpleasant. Overall, she is satisfied with how she spent her time.

She receives a text from the date she abandoned. He has found some free time later in the week and wants to know if this time aligns with her schedule, because he would like to see her again. Anne isn’t sure if she wants to see him again. She doesn’t respond.

Anne’s shoes are in the hallway. Her left shoe is on the right side of her right shoe - the toe is against the wall and its heel is against nothing. Her right shoe is pointed in the opposite direction. Her socks are still on her feet. She is sitting at the kitchen table in silence. There is an empty floral white bowl on the table in front of her. The head of her spoon is resting in the bottom of the bowl. There is a matching plate to the right of the bowl. On the plate, there is a small portion left of the bread she cut herself from the loaf she bought the day before at a supposedly French bakery. The texture of the bread isn’t as satisfying as it was the day before. Anne hasn’t yet decided if she will finish eating the bread. With the potential for love and the bread on her mind, she’s reminded of one of the many Johns she has known throughout her life. His absence doesn’t darken her mood. She wonders what he might be doing with his life now - she knows he’s no longer a gardener and she knows the friends they shared haven’t heard from him for a long time. Although she doesn’t care about him, she hopes that he is doing well.

Tunnel Shears

By Jem Morgenstern

The walls were once slick with condensating excrements and the scent of feces was an inescapable force that lingered in the air at all times. Now, the sewer corridors are as dry as the desert above them. Putrid scents come and go as the winds blow through galleries of semi-petrified masses of ancient feculence - or the scents are carried from fresher excrement after the wind passes through corners of the sewers reserved for stews of waste and rotting dead of the present day.

These corridors, once solely the home to pests and shifting excretion of the old age, now house the people who could not bear the striking heat of the dual suns and the jagged sand winds. All who abandon the arduous journeys above for the security of the sewer passageways face the questionable hospitality of the indigenous craftspeople known as The Sewers.

The Sewers are the last remaining people of the Northwestern Landmass who have the skills needed to manufacture clothing. Because it is the only skill that offers them an advantage in the trading networks, they cruelly guard the secrets of their techniques. Without their secrets, the only product they could offer to the markets would be the petrified manure of the ancients. With only that to offer, they would find themselves starved and dying because so few ask for the petrified manure.

The Sewers reserve all garments they make to be sold in the world above them. Because of this, they all live their lives disrobed. The docile underground wind wraps its fingers around their bare bodies, refugees from the desert avert their gaze until they finally become accustomed to uncovered skin, nudity is only interrupted when they dress themselves in newly made clothing to ensure it will fit similar bodies in the dusty world above.

The Sewers’ utilize their nudism to distinguish themselves from the refugees whose bodies are veiled by clothing. Although those who are clothed are not treated poorly, they are excluded from greater sewer events. They are not invited to the occasional dinners afforded to The Sewers by their monopoly on skills of clothing production, but they are treated to the leftovers from these feasts.

The Sewers are kind enough to allow outsiders to participate in their industry, too. For a long period of time before they are truly considered part of the sewer community, the outsiders work as liaisons to the desert markets. They bring the clothing up and the traded goods down in exchange for gradual acceptance - plus, they are compensated for their labor with popular currencies and necessary comforts.

Eventually, some outsiders become Sewers and are offered the privilege of learning the skills hoarded by underground dwellers since the beginning of this age. There have been attempts by desert travelers to infiltrate the indigenous sewer communities by stripping their rags from their bodies and entering the tunnels while pretending to already be Sewers. The Sewers, having exceptional eyes for details, are able to distinguish a dust dweller’s skin from their own. With exposure to the desert, patches of skin are rugged with scars that do not occur in the sewers. If The Sewers discover intent to steal their secrets, the former potential thief is quickly tied and brought to an empty corridor that is strictly used for immolation. Afterwards, the body is transported to a waste corner where it is left to decay.

This brutality towards thieves is the only violence found in the sewers. There is no other place that provides the same asylum from barbarism. Above, even the air is savage. Below, the world is gentle enough for nakedness to be commonplace and for inhabitants to be so untroubled by their surroundings that they are able to socialize without irritation piercing through their interactions. Couriers, wealthy travelers, and even the Dust Raiders rest in the company of Sewers - to escape the suns, to rest without worry of Horrible Centipedes emerging from the sands, and to disrobe and refresh in gentle air.

my daily commute #1

by leiani

some lady's sobbing
in the car next to me
I don't ask her why
we just drive
block to block as red
fades to green
she's in a sphere
all her own
each car that passes
does not see the pain
blasted in uneven
holes across her chest
and those few who do
notice tears streaking shoulder
it off as secondhand
pain or pms -- anything
to keep them from worrying
God knows they've got enough on their plate
without the girl whose face hangs
in my rearview mirror
on my daily commute

Weekend Parking

It was this paralyzing fear. One I'd felt before, but never with the actual effect of paralyzing. I easily blamed it on lack of sleep, on the account of a dying mother, on a lack of desire--the usual excuses. But the shaking was new. Perhaps it was imagined? Some cruel joke played by a maimed, but otherwise healthy, mind? It's possible. (Is it possible to be both maimed and healthy? A conversation I'll have with myself later, I'm sure--but not in the way that would make you question my sanity, I hope).
But every outlook seemed bleak. If I went, I would subject myself to talking to people, if I stayed they would ask me why, I would question my sanity and hate myself for my incapacities and inconsistencies, imaginary or otherwise. Something so routine as taking the bus or finding available parking spots seemed more than a great burden - a legitimate, inexplicable fear. No amount of love for you and desire to see you could seemingly trigger movement in my motionless body in that moment of decision.
Somehow you convinced me to move. It was as simple as the comforting thought of a hairy hug from a secondhand sweater and the breezy feeling of wind on my open-kneed jeans: I didn't decide to go so much as I decided what to wear. As trivial as it may sound to anyone else, as trite as it actually may be, that was all it was and that was all it took.
But I didn't know what it really was--beyond anxiety (I so hate that word. That word holds claim over real people and real struggles, but I cannot begin to claim a destructive force I am nowhere near acquainted with, though we've exchanged pleasantries and have mutual friends), if you can call it that. And that scares me almost as much as the shake of my hands as a stranger took the cash I was offering willingly but without looking them in the eye because for a split second I unlearned how to leave the house and that felt like an edge I hadn't before neared, an edge that everyone could see in the angular, skeletal frame I try to cloak in oversized hoodies and sweaters. And I am left only with the thought: do I fear the shake or the possibility there might be a reason behind it?