Bread Making

By Jan Priddy

I was still a young girl, still trying to be the sort of person society expected girls to be in the 50s and 60s by doing the chores expected of girls, when my mother stood over me in her kitchen and taught me to bake bread, following her recipe from before I was born, stirring the soft flour with the packet of yeast and water and corn oil, kneading the yeasty dough before folding it into four loaves that rose waiting for the oven, and me waiting the long hour while my bread baked until it came from the oven: beautiful fragrant loaves all golden brown and steamy, tipped out onto racks before I was allowed to cut warm tender slices, thick and crumbly and spread with margarine my mother bought to save money, and the bright red jam Mom made from sugar and fresh strawberries that I helped her pick north of Seattle, and each bite deep into the gooey slices left my cheeks sticky with jam—all those years ago—until here now, I bake bread in my own kitchen, serving the bread to my husband and myself, the berry jam homemade too just as my mother taught me, even while the world diminishes these womanly crafts, and punishes me for insisting, for demanding that not merely what I make but what I am—be valued.

Jan Priddy is a walker of beaches and weaver of wool and words whose work has been nominated or became a finalist for numerous awards including a Pushcart, and appeared in CALYX, Liminal Stories, The Humanist, North American Review, anthologies about running and race, and dozens of other publications.

Art by Jeff Kallet.

Out, Father

By Kristin M. Distel

The wood creaked beneath our knees, as I, amid a procession of the faithful, ascended the steps inside St. John of Lateran Church, where the ancient marble staircase—too holy to trod with human feet and tourists’ dirty sneakers—is covered with an exoskeleton of oak, so each penitent can slide their hands in the carefully carved-out slits and touch the steps that once led to Pontius Pilate’s palace, but when I reached the convex glass circle that, a pamphlet I’d picked up at the front door insisted, protected droplets of Christ’s blood, I heard myself wince when I bit my tongue; an old woman next to me, the creases in her skin so deep that her tears formed little rivulets on her face, mumbled prayers and rubbed her knee, groaning quietly with pain—sia fatta la tua Volontà she repeated, saying it twice on the twentieth step, and I wondered whether it was a mistake, whether her pain had distracted her while she slipped her closed fist, full of rosary beads, into the wooden crevice and searched for remnants of Christ, as we all did, and I listened to my coarse and empty hand slide over Pontius Pilate’s marble and realized I’d forgotten to pray, that I’d forgotten the language for speaking to god: “Reciting the pater noster prayer on each of the twenty-eight steps will liberate a soul from purgatory,” my pamphlet claimed, but in 1510, Martin Luther climbed these steps on his knees, and standing at the top of them, counting the souls now loosed from purgatory, asked aloud, “Who knows whether this is true?” and as my tongue throbbed and pulsated, and as I tried to speak the prayer and release a soul from limbo, the not-hell of heaven, I accidentally said “out, Father,” and a bead of blood spilled out of my mouth, staining the wood beneath me.

Kristin M. Distel holds a Ph.D. in English literature from Ohio University; her work has appeared in Glass, The Broken Plate, The Stockholm Review of Literature, The Minetta Review, Juxtaprose, and elsewhere.

Art by Jeff Kallet.

Six Feet Apart

By Claire Elder

A man bent over and expelled his hot breath in my ear, if Johnny Cash was the man in black you must be his woman; his vulgar wink prompted a bile of discomfort and repulsion to climb and burn the back of my throat—if I wore red I would be too seductive, glitter a tramp, gold an ornament for his lap, lace a Victoria’s angel modeling lingerie, pink a Barbie with nice tits and the perfect size four waist, leopard print his feisty prey, leather his submissive to be bound and gagged, purple a jewel bought and kept in a box, white an innocent virgin, but black should be unapproachable because black is the color of mourning—I mourned my eighteenth birthday when it became legal; my mother mourned my adolescence after my first period; I mourned that night in the backseat of my high school boyfriend’s car after he couldn’t help himself; I mourn the moment when the man mistook black for a green light—when I turned away from him, I feared he would whisper in my ear that black means I should smile more; black means I’m easy; black means I'm a slut, and sluts don’t get boundaries.

Claire Elder currently attends Ohio University's Undergraduate Creative Writing Program and interns for New Ohio Review.

Painting ("Self-Defense") by Liv Dempsey.