A Sunday in October

By Ariel M. Goldenthal

 

The day after the Tree of Life synagogue shooting, I lied to my second-grade students: You are safe at Hebrew school. You will love learning the Aleph-Bet this year. Yes, you can open the windows and feel the early fall air ripple through the gaps between your outstretched fingers. You can have recess outside next week. Your teachers don’t need to be trained to apply a tourniquet. There’s nothing wrong with our classroom’s tall glass windows that look right into the front garden. I’m closing the blinds because it’s so sunny out. Let’s start with our usual morning activity. Today we’re learning about praying to God, which isn’t related at all to the reason your mom’s eyes looked red this morning and your dad whispered, “Maybe he should stay home today.” This happened in a synagogue very far away—not like where we live at all. No, this isn’t something that happens often.

I don’t tell them how the education director called all the teachers on Shabbat, a day when work is forbidden and rest is required, to tell us that despite, or perhaps because of, the horrific loss that day, religious school would still take place the next day; how the doors to synagogue, usually propped open on Sunday mornings to accommodate the flood of parents holding half-eaten bagels and their children’s hands, were locked; how we had to show our photo I.D.s to the officers in the main lobby who told us that we would collect our students and bring them to the classroom—parents wouldn’t be permitted inside; how Rabbis passed around handouts hastily adapted from the ones secular teachers received after the first school shooting this year, but didn’t need because they, like us, are used to the terror by now.

 


Ariel M. Goldenthal is an associate professor of English at George Mason University. Her work has appeared in The Citron ReviewFlash FrontierMoonPark Review, and others. Read more at www.arielmgoldenthal.com.

Photo credit: Sharon Pazner via a Creative Commons license.


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Ho’oponopono

By Kelsey D. Mahaffey

“In the book of the earth, it is written:
nothing can die.”  – Mary Oliver

 

The morning after it happens
again—weary with all
the thoughtless use of prayer,
I return to the Native path—

for solace,
for remembrance,
for release—

But grief is a heavy hold.

Last night, I lay awake
searching each shooting
star—the moon a wound
the sky refused to heal.

And today, as usual, the sun
woke from bended knees—
rising to break
the long hush of night.

So many have left
to hunt for arms—
answers or anger,
who can say? All around,

there are islands of dew
gathering the spring fields,
birds busy with work—
children still to feed.

Forgive us.

Somehow, a worn cradle of
moon still rocks—heaving waves
upon the shore. A ground dust dances
in the merciful arms of wind.

Dearest Mother,
if we ever choose to weep,
let it be tuned to the depths
of your whale’s forgotten song.

  


Kelsey D. Mahaffey rests her head in Nashville, TN, but keeps half her heart in New Orleans. She needs music and nature like breath and water, and walks the earth barefoot beside three humans and a bow-legged cat. Her work can be seen or is forthcoming in: Eunoia Review, Cumberland River Review, The Sunlight Press, and “The Keeping Room” at Minerva Rising Press.

Photo credit: Debbie Hall, photographer and author, and Writers Resist poetry editor.


A note from Writers Resist

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Search Terms

By Holly Stovall 

 

I opened the search bar, typed in “middle-aged women support Black Lives Matter” and narrowed the results to “images.” Google spit out a white couple, on the stairway in front of their mansion, pointing guns at protesters marching by. It’s not what I was looking for, but Google taunted me—Aren’t you curious? I clicked on the link.

What?! So now I’m standing under a pixelated oak tree holding a sign that says, “Abolish the Police,” while across the lawn, a man and a woman are aiming guns at me. The man with a gun is shorter than the woman with a gun, but his weapon is bigger. Their faces are pink, like pigs. Everything is lit—back lit, front lit, inner lit, and I’m in a multidimensional screen. I turn my sign over to show daisies on tall stems.

The woman is looking at me, but tilting her head towards him. “Who the fuck is this?” she says, and then, to me, “How did you get in here with us?”

Her pistol is polished. Her top is a navy French boating chemise with a sequin appliqué on the breast pocket. It overwhelms the pixel compactor and spews out blinding rays of fluorescence.

“Didn’t your daddy teach you not to point guns at people?” I say. “Aim it at the sky.”

I scan the perimeter of my vision for the “leave” option, but find none.

The woman explains that this isn’t Zoom; there’s no exit option. Her name is Kelly, and she doesn’t know how she and her husband, Brody, got swooshed in. They had been in opposite wings of the mansion. Kelly wants to know what I was doing when the search engine sucked me in, so I say I was just browsing the internet, clicking on random stuff.

She lowers the gun and asks me about my search terms. Hers were “middle-aged women righteously threaten protesters with gun.” I don’t say what I’m thinking. First, that the adverb, righteously, is unnecessary. Also, that she’s the only middle-aged woman who rose to the top of Google results for waving guns at people practicing the right to free speech. Last, she embarrasses me.

I ask her if she has any theories about why Google generated me for her, but before she answers, Brody informs us that Google is an algorithm.

“Are you familiar with mansplaining?” I say, and then regret it because he’s wielding a fat automatic attached to a black strap slung across his hot pink Polo shirt. Even though we’re just pixels, the threat feels real, and I’m afraid. I don’t know the rules in here, but it seems I shouldn’t have pissed him off.

Kelly thanks Brody for his Google wisdom. “Hun,” she says, “go on up the steps. You should be above the rest of us.” He falls for that.

Kelly asks me if I was caught on video threatening nice suburbanites with BLM signs and causing Google to throw me out onto the first page of her search.

I explain to her that no, I live in a small town, west of the city, where we just stand on the edge of the park, next to the highway, and hold up protest signs for the delivery cars and hog carriers to see. There’re no mansion dwellers there who would aim guns at us.

I don’t tell her that I wrote an op-ed for the local paper, criticizing police for Kayla Montgomery’s death. Kayla was a blond woman who worked at the gas station and called me “dear,” even though I’m old enough to be her mom. A sheriff’s deputy pulled her over for what he claimed was “impudent driving” and shot her five times. She was unarmed. My column went viral on social media and generated pushback. That must be how I got on Google’s radar.

Brody descends to butt in again. “Did you hear me? Google results are generated by an algorithm. It’s just about how many hits a site gets. That’s all.”

His hot pink polo shirt contrasts nicely with the gunmetal of his weapon. His belt, though, is brown. Christ. He could have bothered to match his belt with his weapon. I tell him to Google “mansplain,” but I do it in a sweet voice, so I have an out if he gets angry.

“I’ll knock the lights out of you,” he says. He holds up his fists and lets the gun fall across his belly like a guitar. The pixels simulate smoke shooting out of his ears.

Kelly turns to him. “It’s a compliment, hon. Mansplain is what men do as an act of generosity towards women because our brains are small.” Brody turns and climbs back up the stairs.

Kelly wants to escape. She tells me that, before she got sucked in, she had a client who sent her an email saying she was trapped in a pixel compactor, and could Kelly please get her out and sue the search engine. The client claimed that when two people are Googling at the same time and their search terms intersect, the engine can get tangled, generate energy, and suck you in like a black hole.

I point out that she and I were each searching for middle-aged women who were involved in the protests.

“And we must have hit return at the exact same time,” Kelly says.

I ask her what made her enter “middle-aged women” in the search bar.

“I wanted to see women who look like me,” she says.

“Me too, women who look—” And before I finish my sentence, I’m swooshed back to the safe side of my laptop.

Later, Kelly phones me in this world, where things are soft, shadowed, cold and hot. I ask her what happened to Brody. He’s still in there, and she calls his current home the “mancompactor.” She claims he loves it because he can watch Fox News through the sight of his gun.

 


Holly A. Stovall has published short fiction, personal essays, literary histories, literary criticism, and scholarly research. Her creative writing appears in Writers ResistLitbreak Magazine, and is forthcoming in Belle Point Press’s Mid/South Anthology. She holds a PhD in Spanish literature, an MA in Women’s History, and is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at Northwestern University. She lives in rural Illinois with her spouse, teenage son, and standard poodle.


A note from Writers Resist:

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

 

For the Bookshelf: Bestsellers in the Age of Trump

By Tara Campbell

 

All the President’s Mendacity

How to Screw Allies and Idolize Dictators

Where’s My African-American?: the Great Picture Puzzle Book

Foreign Policy for Goddamn Idiots

Windmill Noise-Cancer is Not a Thing, and Other Actual Facts

The Man, the Myth, the Legendary Shitstorm: An “Illegitimate” Biography

What the Fuck? Asking for a Nation

No, Seriously, What the Fucking Fuck? The Sequel

We’re Sure as Shit Through the Looking-Glass Now, Alice

Love in the Time of Cholera: Attracting and Dating Survivors of the Anti-Vax Era

Decorating with Vessels: A GOP Guide to Marriage

Fun with Puppets: The NRA Goes to Congress

Incels and Ammo: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Putting the “I” in Democrisy and the “Me” in Melitia: A Patriot Speaks

The Spitball Cure: Injecting Spontaneity into Your Podium-Based Medical Practice

Liberal Tears: Not an Actual Fucking Strategy, Bro

How to Succeed at Culling the Population Without Really Trying: The Plutocrat’s Guide to Public Health

The Constitution: Look, We Wrote it in Memes, Would You Please Fucking Read It?

How to Lose a Republic in 1460 Days

From Russia with Love

 


Tara Campbell is a writer, teacher, Kimbilio Fellow, and fiction editor at Barrelhouse. Prior publication credits include SmokeLong Quarterly, Masters Review, Monkeybicycle, Jellyfish Review, Booth, Strange Horizons, and Escape Pod/Artemis Rising. She’s the author of a novel, TreeVolution, a hybrid fiction/poetry collection, Circe’s Bicycle, and a short story collection, Midnight at the Organporium. She received her MFA from American University in 2019. Read more about Tara at www.taracampbell.com.

Make American Great Again painting by Illma Gore. Follow her on Instagram.

Mock book cover by K-B Gressitt.

 

A Modest Proposal

By Dina Honour

 

From Business Day:

A big name greeting card company today announced a launch date for its highly anticipated new range of greeting cards. The Second to None cards were designed in response to the increase of gun-related casualties, and specifically targets consumers looking for a way to reach out to friends or relatives affected by gun-violence.

The range differentiates itself from normal sympathy cards, the company said, by addressing the tragic unavoidability of gun-violence rather than focusing on grief or loss.

“We noticed the words ‘tragic’ and ‘unavoidable’ had reached a saturation point in the media, particularly among politicians and media outlets,” said the company’s spokesperson S. Wesson. “Our thinking was there was enough of a gap in the market to warrant some research into how such a range would go over.”

“Our research showed that a large percentage of Americans view gun violence as an unavoidable fact of life in the United States. We wanted to give the public a way to express their feelings about gun-violence in a non-confrontational, non-denominational, non-threatening way,” Wesson continued.

A limited test run of a card featuring a tasteful black and white copy of Second Amendment text, with the message “Our thoughts and prayers go out to you,” proved to be successful enough that the company expanded the concept into a full-blown collection, including a number of original designs.

“It’s a uniquely American problem which deserves a uniquely American solution,” Wesson said.

The company is quick to point out its goal was not to make a statement about gun-violence, but merely to offer an alternative.

“We don’t hesitate to send a birthday card as a way to acknowledge an important day. This is no different really. With victims of gun violence on the rise,” Wesson added, “it’s important for our customers to feel like they have a way of reaching out.”

Wesson is most proud of the company’s More Guns is the Answer line. The creators worked closely with designers to develop a collection of high quality cards, each featuring red, white and blue drawings of eagles and American flags. The cards open to reveal messages such as “May you find peace in knowing that, had your loved one been armed, he would surely have saved lives.”

Other sentiments, rendered in Comic Sans font, include “Guns don’t kill people, Planned Parenthood does” and “This wouldn’t have happened in a concealed carry zone” and “I hope your loved one’s death isn’t politicized. It’s too soon,” a personal favorite of Wesson’s.

The company is exploring plans for a lighter assortment of cards with such lines as the Right To Bear Arms, which features a heavily armed grizzly defending his front porch against a government militia and Stuff Happens, featuring cartoon drawings.

“Those cards,” Wesson said, “are obviously aimed at consumers who have had a more light-hearted experience or accident with guns. Think destruction of property rather than death or disfigurement.”

The most controversial of the company’s planned range includes what Wesson refers to as Victim Blaming cards. “The market research we’ve done has shown us there is a significant portion of our customer base who find it difficult to blame guns under any circumstance. For many, death by shooting has become an acceptable consequence for actions we used to take for granted. Talking or texting too loudly. Driving. Going to the movies. We’re simply giving our customers a way to express those feelings.”

The company has critics who have raised concerns that the card collection is capitalizing on the misfortune of others.

“America is a capitalist country,” Wesson responded. “For over 200 years we have rewarded those who have profited on the backs of others. This is no different. We are proud to be an American owned corporation.”

Wesson added, “A greeting card has always been a safe and acceptable way to express your feelings to another human being. Right now posting or delivering a greeting card doesn’t often result in getting shot. Though as recent events show, we can’t rule that eventuality out. If and when that time comes, we’ll revisit the products.”

The company is partnering with big-box retailers who have open carry policies in place. Cards will cost from .99 to 3.95 and will be available as of October 1 in time for the holidays.

 


Dina Honour is an American writer living in Copenhagen, Denmark. She writes about feminism, politics, relationships, and life abroad. Her work has appeared in Bust, Paste, Hippocampus, among others, and on popular parenting and expat sites. You can find her serious author persona at DinaHonour.com and her more profane blogger persona at Wine and Cheese (Doodles). Or if you prefer morsels, follow along in statuses and characters on Facebook or Twitter.

Image credit: Donkey Hotey via a Creative Commons license.