Why Does It Always Start Raining When I’m Crying?

By Bojana Stojcic

Because when Bowie died, I heard thunders whirring in the air like choppers, music turning into indistinct chatter over the radio, which left me oddly detached from it all and it’s then that I became a hard-swearing, full-blooded agnostic, or possibly an atheist, and god knows I tried to take part in the present, even contemplate the future, it’s just that it was easier to understand the past, because with time I began to develop fear of the unknown which turned into fearing to go out alone, then go back into the house, fall asleep, because when your bizarre little habits progress into a full-on dependency, you know you got a problem, like every time someone looks at me the way I don’t want to be looked at, I start to tidy the contents of my purse or run my fingers over the back cover of the book I pretend to be reading, dots jumping about on the page like grasshoppers, because there is nowhere to run, no one to run to, so you run into yourself, because at home I gnaw chicken bones like I would my own, trail my hand over the side of my son’s ship, thinking there’s gotta be a way to sail it safely through the narrow passage, and when it stops raining at last, the sun holds me naked on its knee like a baby while I breathe breathe breathe, because I know that after the rain, crocodiles yawn like mantraps.

Bojana Stojcic is a teacher and writer from Serbia, living in Germany with her boys and a bunch of friendly ghosts.

Photo by Bojana Stojcic.

A Kind of Man

By Nicholas Dighiera

I'm listening to Frightened Rabbit, to singer Scott Hutchison’s lyrics—"Are you a man, are you a bag of sand”—and I hear a human so overwhelmed by care he wrote a song called “Swim Until You Can’t See Land” and died some years later after hucking himself off the Forth Road Bridge in Scotland, us knowing this imminence as he also wrote a song called “Floating in the Forth” ten years before the huck, in which he admits to saving suicide for another day, and can you imagine holding that, always being this close to that, caring so much about everything that life hurts, always, caring enough to be wholly overwhelmed by love and sadness and depression and joy and your heart’s own beauty, living a life that’s vibrant in every dimension, even the dark ones, which reminds me of my friend Ben, whose colloquium finished with, “Put off today’s scheduled suicide until tomorrow,” him not knowing that tomorrow would eventually come, and oh boy did it come for him, me, texting his ex-wife last night, asking how everyone is holding up without him, but for me it’s my now dead brother and me swimming in the river behind my house, in our early teens, Scott Hutchison and Virginia Woolf always underwater, Ben, a consummate lover of Woolf, but afraid of water and its darkness so he found a different kind of water to drown in, and now I’m out with my sons on five dollar Walmart innertubes paddling across Lake Crescent because the trail to the cliff is closed, 3/4ths of a mile over water of an undetermined depth, the title of a book by a friend named Rich, and remembering Rich’s daughter died of cancer and there’s not a goddamn thing he can do about that, reminding me that Sherry, his coworker and maybe crush, a woman of words, before she was accosted by a brain tumor, lost her ability to find said words, and there’s me and my boys up on the cliff at the end of those 3/4ths, looking at water so clear that rocks we know to be 40’ below the surface appear to be right on us, and we jump, into the blue day, the sun a nuclear weapon, far away, the only way to keep us warm without killing us, the three of us humans off the cliff into the air, the same air as my brother and I jumped through at the river behind my house, the same air Ben sucked into his dry lips, the ones that moved, even when catatonic, when the woman he loved more than anything put water on his lips, the last little droplets for a beautiful soul, the same air Scott Hutchison soared through, finding freedom from himself, the same air that stones in an overcoat’s pockets denied, the same air as the cliff jump in West Virginia where my oldest son outjumped me, the landing blowing his sandals off, the same as the winter air in Seattle, the three of us jumping off the frost-laden dock, in the dark, through the ice, the water so cold my youngest couldn’t walk after I yarded him out, the same water he swam in after walking 23 miles on his 9th birthday, his request, him, floating in the darkness saying, “My butt feels better,” the same water holding Woolf’s coat and stones and pain and love, the same water in the pond next to crematorium #1 in Birkenau, filled with ashes of the slain, where I sat on worn steps leading to infamous showers, and cried and cried and cried, the same water rolling in off the coast of Northern France, standing in a sea of white crosses trying to imagine volunteering to run into every machine gun bullet ever fired, dropping to my knees because it’s too much to bear, the same bear that ran after the van outside of Tok, Alaska, all my possessions inside, my sister in the front passenger seat for a ridealong, me, joy in my heart because I thought I could be loved, the same love that sailed out every window of every house I’ve ever been in because I shooed it away, the same house where I said I cheated, the same cheat that crushed a beautiful redhead, the same redhead that loved me enough to follow me anywhere, the same anywhere that’s now vacant, the same vacant that Ben now is, just dead ashes in the vial in my backpack in Eastern Washington, in the United States of America, a country founded on occupied land, on one of seven continents on Planet Earth, formed by an explosion a long, long time ago, one that still radiates in my heart, filling my chest with so much love, I have so much love to give, I just don’t know where to put it, as Quiz Kid Donnie Smith said, I clapped and yelled his name, an audience of one in a conference room of many, a meet and greet at a corporate Amazon building in Seattle, William H. Macy smiling back in my direction but not knowing me, him, with a face like a baseball glove, but my dad’s glove, that I secretly put my little boy hand in when he was at work and wondered what kind of man I would be, back to the river behind my childhood home, a couple years later, asking my brother what kind of men he thought we would be, him never becoming a man as he tried to swim in a dusty, dry ditch after getting hit by a car and dying on me, dying on us all, so here’s me, alive, sometimes against my will, holding all of this, the water and the stones and the air and the sun and the love and the vial of fucking ashes, always being this close to that, knowing now that this, this is the kind of man I will be, I am this man, this is the man that I am.

Nick Dighiera is a meat machine animated by electrical signals generated in the brain by a mélange of chemicals necessary for survival amongst mammoths and short-faced bears, he strives to put love into the world with his writing, and would like to grab a beer sometime and give you a hug big enough to smash his heart together with yours so that, for a brief instant, you both will feel less alone in this terribly beautiful existence.

Photo provided by Nick Dighiera.

Power Outage

By Bud Jennings

Even with his most successful years a blur in life’s rearview mirror, he finds ways to enjoy the annual summer vacation in Provincetown—where youthful vigor is the local currency, where he’d once spent lavishly, swinging ample arms, puffing a buoyant chest, sweeping his forelock back to unveil the pair of radiant, flirtatious eyes—because there’s still the beach, the heralded Cape Cod light and the gallery openings, where doddering or pulling out a crumpled handkerchief or other reminders of Time’s kleptomania don’t offend other attendees; but on his last Saturday night the power goes out all over town, making it impossible to read his book and daring him to venture out of the rental cottage and proceed carefully under a milky crescent moon that isn’t much help, his hands outstretched to protect him from obstacles cloaked in blackness, until he reaches Commercial Street, a rivulet of phones and flashlights wielded by crowds that have been pushed out of the bars and clubs, a phytoplankton tide of pissed-off queens who paid a full cover charge for an abbreviated night; and the only way they can salvage their moment is by hooking up al fresco—everywhere (liaisons on porches and behind rhododendron bushes, three-ways at intersections, schtupping in alcoves, special deliveries on the steps of the Post Office), their groaning the musical score to accompany the wispy strings of almost-light draped atop the immobile cupolas overhead and the gyrating forms at eye-level; so with the darkness blindfolding the throngs like the statue of Justice, the man seeks a brief respite from his banishment…as he approaches an animate little assembly in the parking lot of Land’s End Marine Supply, and he is grateful that no one pushes him away or can see him enough to look through him as if he were harbor mist, is emboldened to inch forward to where his shoulder brushes another’s, and when someone gently draws him into the fold, the man closes his eyes, opens his arms to memories of the long-ago epoch, evenings when some stranger’s hand would caress his skin, would summon a shudder—but then there is a flicker of light that is not lightning, followed by a few more, and finally the heartless electricity reignites at once all the town’s lamps, startling the man, who steps away from the circle, doesn’t even glance at any of their faces or let any of them see his as he turns to walk back to the cottage and his book—like the old days, when the touching stopped and he’d remember he was alone.

Bud Jennings is a former polydactyl, completed NYU’s Graduate Creative Writing Program, was a finalist for a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship, has been and will be published in several literary journals, teaches English in a public high school, and with his husband is the obedient parent of two adopted cats. 

Photo by China Jorrin.