M A G A Z I N E

new poems from

Kat Felician
Kati Sanford
Cara Chamberlain’s Claire Mikeson
A Christian Handyman

Julie Schultz’s
The Grief of Others

Alanna Wulf’s
art by
The Suburb Wars
Sheila Miles
Tavin Davis
Bryon rogers

i s s u e 2
2 0 2 1
 M A G A Z I N E

i s s u e 2

edited by Michael wade and Brie Barron

a rt c r e d i t s

Cover art: Sheila Miles. Chair in the Snow, 2017, oil

on canvas, 24” x 36”, Private Collection, NYC.
editor-in-chief michael wade
Page 1: Photo by Daniel Lurie, Rusted Metal.
co-editor & designer brie barron
Page 6: Photo by Daniel Kessel, Simplicity.
art editor dalayna christenson
Page 10: Photo by Ryan Parker, www.ryanparker.info,
art by Tavin Davis.
photography editors daniel kessel
kasandra kessel
Page 16: Photo by Daniel Lurie, Walk on the Beach.

Page 20: Photo by Kjersti Johnson.

Page 28: Photo by Daniel Kessel. Mixed Messages.

We would like to thank Dr. Tami Haaland for
Page 30: Sheila Miles. At the headgate, 2019, oil on
advising us in creating and maintaining this
canvas, 30” x 36”, Art Spirit Gallery, Coeur D’Alene,
project, and for her unceasing support.
ID.

Page 32: Sheila Miles.

Page 33: Sheila Miles. Hothouse, 2016, oil on canvas,

36” x 30”, Private Collection, IL.
Page 34: Sheila Miles. Two Lodges, 2019, oil on can-
vas, 12” x 20”, at Custer Trading Post, Custer, MT.
Page 36: Sheila Miles. The Bunkhouse, 2017, oil on
canvas, 36” x 42”, Private Collection, Absarokee, MT.
Page 40: Photo by Daniel Lurie. Forest Floor.
Page 46: Photo by Jasper Heins. House of Clark.
Page 54: Photo by Daniel Kessel. Icicles.
Page 60: Photo by Daniel Lurie. Paved Road in the
Fall.
Page 64: Blaine Flores.
FeverDream Magazine (ISSN 2694-0752) is published
thrice yearly. Single copies are available at This House
of Books in Billings, MT and at their website:
thishouseofbooks.indielite.org
Please address all correspondence to our edi-
tor-in-chief: michael@feverdreammagazine.org. For
more information, including submission guidelines,
please visit feverdreammagazine.org.
The short stories in this issue are works of fiction.
Names, characters, places, events, and incidents are
products of the author’s imagination or used in a ficti-
tious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, liv-
ing or dead, or to actual events is entirely coincidental.
The views expressed in this magazine do not necessar-
ily reflect those of its editors or sponsors.
I n th is i ssue

fiction Poetry

Cara Chamberlain 1 Kat Felician 6

A Christian Handyman where we can’t reach

Midway through her life’s journey, Sylvie found herself alone

in an old kitchen, surrounded by cracked plaster, peeling
Patrick Landry 9
paint, and termite-damaged floors. Never send a man to pick Sauntering in the Evening
out a house.

Poet Feature – Claire Mikeson 20

Alanna Wulf 28 Palm Springs
The Suburbs War The Hitch-Hiker
You’re young. 20-years-old, and there really isn’t that much Airlee
that matters to you.
Compass
Maria
Ashley K. Warren 46
The Caretaker Daniel Lurie 40
She carried her disappointment with her down the sidewalks Counting Crows (Who Done It?)
of their neighborhood, hoping it would somehow fall out of
her brain and heart and onto someone’s lawn and sprout
Snow White
into comforting daisies.
Precious McKenzie 51
Brittney Uecker 60 Girls’ Night Out
38 Miles Ago
Kati Sanford 54
Thirty-eight miles ago, these things mattered. I could have
taken them to heart. Thirty-eight miles ago, it was mid-morn-
Rickety
ing. The sun was climbing, the air crisp with morning dew, Eschar
and the spectators out on the course had not yet grown weary
of cheering.
Wisp

Brittney Uecker 63
N o nfi c t i o n Catholic Guilt

Julie Schultz 16
The Grief of Others

On the day we buried Dave, at a cemetery not far from I-95,

the major artery of the eastern seaboard, I watched six men
almost drop his coffin as they approached the strangely tidy
open wound in the earth.
I n th is i ssue co n t i n u e d
Photography
A RT

Tavin Davis 10 Jasper Heins 39

Summer Breeze Collection
Artist Feature – Sheila Miles 30
At the headgate Tyler Rel 44
Untitled
Hothouse Daniel Kessel 58
Two Lodges GoSlowStop
The Bunkhouse Sleepy Kitty

Bryon Rogers 52

Blaine Flores 64
In loving
memory of

Heidi
 fiction
A Christian Handyman
Cara Chamberlain
Midway through her life’s journey, Sylvie
found herself alone in an old kitchen, surrounded by cracked
plaster, peeling paint, and termite-damaged floors. Never send
a man to pick out a house.
They’d been living in Northern Maine. North of
Northern Maine. North, even, of the “Welcome to Maine”
signs. They’d been living on the St. John River, in view of New
Brunswick, Canada, and a two-hour frost-heaved drive north
of Caribou and Presque Isle. They’d been surrounded by
third-growth timber and potato farms. They’d been suffering,
constantly, from Seasonal Affective Disorder. So they’d lunged
at the chance to move to central Florida, a land more alive in
Sylvie’s imagination than the frozen snow mounds outside her
door.
Florida would be hip-deep in bougainvillea. It would
swarm with alligators and Colombian drug dealers, suave and
cultured in palm-leaf hats. Its days would be soaked with light
glittering from butterfly wings, and its nights would swell with
the sounds of Cuban exile, the beautiful, yearning ballads and
stunning merengues. The rivers would run orange juice, and
the two oceans would break and fall on the two coastlines with
a Spanish cadence. Margaritas and swordfish steaks would be
dinner every evening, mangoes and mimosas breakfast. Sylvie
would sit on the verandah and read Hemingway.
Her husband Gale accepted the job offer from a small
private college and, since he could stay on campus for free,
went alone to look for a house. Every night he called, discour-
aged by how real estate listings—hundreds of them—evapo-
rated under the realities of mold and termite damage in Lake-
land, Florida. He was left with three choices: Two ugly tract
homes and one charming depression-era cottage. About the
latter he enthused—“enthused,” anyway, as much as he ever
did. “Yes, it’s got character. Lots of character.”
Buying a house in Florida when you lived north of
Northern Maine was tricky. Waving notarized closing papers,
Sylvie and Gale chased the UPS man from the Stop and Shop
to the Citgo to Pierre’s Poutine Palace. The house inspection
revealed termites (frass and detached wings), so they arranged
for fumigation, a complete tenting of the structure. The drive-
way would need minor repair, but everything else was in “ade-
quate” condition.
1
 Sylvie threw out, boxed up, and sold pieces of their
lives that had somehow followed them through many previ-
ous moves: mugs without handles, curtains that had fit the
window of a basement apartment in Denver; a pair of size-five
jeans she’d been hoping to fit into again after her pregnancy
in California eighteen years ago. She discarded the old aquar-
ium they’d been storing in the basement. She’d never forget
the three dead mice she’d found inside and would imagine
them swimming with whatever angelfish, tetras or gouramis
that would manage to stay alive if she set it up again. She put it
out by the curb and was glad to drive up North Perley Brook
the next day, past Babe’s Garbage Service, and see it, salvaged,
sitting in front of Babe’s house, faithfully proving that it could
still hold water.
For two months, each new box of books Sylvie added
to the stack to “definitely take,” as her sign read, added heft to
the reality of the pending move. In fact, those books proved
to be one element of her financial despair. When the movers,
perhaps being unfamiliar with printed and bound documents,
diligently provided an estimate, their idea of the household’s
weight was 2,000 pounds lighter than the legally binding scale
eventually used for the bill. Oh, Sylvie had considered renting
a U-Haul. But Maine to Florida in a U-Haul sounded gruel-
ing—they’d already done a Colorado to Maine voyage that
way.
There was no furniture to speak of, only a couch
that had followed Gale from Denver and looked just a bit dis-
tressed by the New England hills that drove Sylvie mad, so
narrow were the valleys and so limited their prospects.
Driving to Florida from Maine was a relief at first. It
was easy to forget everything, to enter a kind of grace, a sus-
pension. As Sylvie strolled from their cabin at Natural Bridge,
Virginia, all the pent up winter in her joints melted, the ulti-
mate ice-out after four years of cold. The air smelled of cloves,
and it was soft. The only ominous note was a bathroom tan-
go of ants from behind the toilet to inside her suitcase. Sylvie
wondered if Sheridan’s men would have, from the air, looked
similarly threatening.
In South Carolina and Georgia, Sylvie felt dropped
into a Flannery O’Connor story as a displaced, recalcitrant
character bereft of visions. The kudzu and red clay and mold-
ing wooden houses collapsing under a weight of cicada song,
cockroach dung, mildew, and prejudice, startled her heart into
palpitations of a force she hadn’t felt since arriving in Maine.
“Oh, God,” she prayed, “don’t let Florida be like THIS.” At the
BP gas station in Valdosta humidity pounced into the car as
soon as they turned it off, and the few weeds and lumpy grass
plots seemed gasping for space, for freedom. A weight of heat
bruised her skin.
But Florida churned out a bank of clouds and a rain
heavy as three biblical plagues cascading simultaneously. They
had to pull the car over and sit with steaming eighteen-wheel-
2 Cara Chamberlain
ers as pint drops of water knocked on the windshield. The
air was cool as they resumed their pilgrimage through Dade
City and thence to the very door of their new refuge, which, at
night and after 1600 miles, looked like the promised land.
Morning brought a fount of revelations, but Sylvie
didn’t have time to take it all in before the movers arrived, a
Dickensian family who had been in the business for three gen-
erations. Two pirate-bandanaed men set up Sylvie’s card table
and the father—grizzled, pot-bellied, loud-talking—set out
his inventory check-list and his Coke can, and settled down to
work.
“Number 35 red!” his sons, or the urchinish four-
teen-year-old grandson, would shout, reading a tag that had
been placed on some item of Sylvie’s household goods.
“Careful with that, boy!” the old man would yell.
“These folks value their possessions. What was that? 35 or-
ange?”
“Red!”
He’d check off the item, then continue. “Been in the
business fifty years. Just getting the boy started.”
“236 red!”
Check. “Boy’s gotta learn to take more care, though.”
“135 orange!”
Check. “No we’re up near Jacksonville. Travel all over
Florida with United Van Lines. Hell, it’s a living.”
“10 red!”
“What’s that?”
“10 orange. I mean, red!”
Check. “Told the wife I’m fixing to retire. Keep her
hoping. Boy, don’t carry them boxes balanced like that ’ere.
Sure do like them folding bookcases, though. Add a lot of
weight and easy to move.”
“63 orange!”
Check.
By some miracle, nothing seemed to be missing. For
weeks, though, Sylvie didn’t unpack anything.
Her husband started his job. Her son was off to
school. Sylvie was left to survey the wreck of a house they’d
just bought, the wreck of their financial ark (the gigantic mov-
ing bill Satanically unfurled on the card table), and the curled-
up bodies of five palmetto bugs on the kitchen vinyl, each
as long as her thumb. This was interior Polk County—not
a sandy beach, merengue, or swordfish steak in sight. There
was, yes, indeed, bougainvillea—thorny fairytale stuff col-
onizing the backyard. Of more immediate concern were the
crumbling inside walls, the termite-riddled floors, the strange-
ly bowed ceilings. Over the course of a month, Sylvie called
high-powered contractors whose faces fell when she assured
them she didn’t want a bunch of upscale improvements. She
tried specialists—flooring people, plaster people, cement peo-
ple, paint people, roofing people, plumbing people, tile peo-
ple, wood people, plastic people.
Sylvie resolved to do everything herself, but after fill-
ing the house with asbestos from a segment of the vinyl floor-
ing she pulled up (or nearly filling the house—an inspector
from a St. Petersburg firm tested the air and found it contam-
inant-free, but warned her that it was better to leave such filth
in place, to cover it over with a new surface, and not to tempt
herself with ideas of fresh starts), after contracting bursitis in
both hips as a punishment for her lonely rash attack on bath-
room decay, and after testing every painted surface for lead
and coming up with positive readings, she was ready to give
up. People all over the world lived in situations thousands of
times worse than she did.
Nearly resigned, Sylvie was sitting amid the ruins of
spackle and wood putty cans and still unopened cartons of
books when a corner of the newspaper that she’d been using as
a dropcloth revealed itself, as if she’d never seen a newspaper
advertisement before. Under the Classifieds in the Lakeland
Ledger was this cryptic note: “Christian handyman, all needs
met. Lowest prices.” She made an appointment.
“John Benedetti,” he grinned as Sylvie opened the
door. “Your Christian handyman, ma’am.”
She invited him in with his steel-toed boots and
white jumpsuit, covered with an infinitude of paint splotches.
He was almost as short as she was, but powerfully built, with
Popeye forearms. His hair was thick and dark, and his square
face had a touch of that pasty yellow hue she associated with
liver cancer patients she’d worked with at the Northern Maine
Medical Center in her previous life as a receptionist, just the
last in a long line of unstellar “careers.”
Benedetti spoke with a Brooklyn accent. “When’d
you say the house was built?”
“1937.”
He rapped the wall with his knuckle. “Made ’em good
back in the day. Lots of tough lumber. Had termites, I see.” He
pointed to the characteristic undermining of her floorboards.
“No damage to your structural wood.” He gazed out the win-
dow. “Good trees, too. Live oak. Two-three hundred years
those trees’ll grow. That’s what the old-timers here say. Not
like that water oak acrost the street. And what’s this? You need
some new wallboard. Can I just climb up here?” He pointed to
a chair, and Sylvie nodded. He stretched his screwdriver out
and tapped at the ceiling. “Yes, ma’am. You’ll need ceilings,
too.”
Benedetti’s estimates turned out ridiculously low,
“prodigal son prices,” he called them. So by the end of an hour,
Sylvie had contracted for new floors, new ceilings, new win-
dows, new paint. “We’ll have you fixed up before you can say
a novena.” They shook hands, and he promised to return the
next morning with his work crew. As she watched his 1984
Toyota, paint-splotched as if to match Benedetti himself, pull
out of the driveway into the street, it occurred to her that, un-
like so many workmen she had dealt with lately, he had never
once asked if she needed to “talk it over” with her husband.
Yet, the next morning arrived and progressed, and
there was no sign of Benedetti. Sylvie began to wonder if she
should have “talked it over” with her husband. Had she been
swindled out of her 250 dollars deposit, a sum they could
hardly afford to lose? At one o’ clock in the afternoon, a beat-
en-in white van, the kind contractors invariably drove, pulled
in. It was Benedetti and a three-man crew. He was all repen-
tance. “AA meeting,” he said. “With a wet drunk. Told him I’d
contracted to work for a woman who’d understand my being
late.”
He set his crew to work, furring out some of the old
ceilings, tearing down the plaster on others. Clouds of dust
rose through the house, and Benedetti stood amidst the clam-
or, haloed with the lost skills of previous workmen. “See here,”
he told her at one point. “Those old timers did everything by
the rules. Each rafter is exactly fifteen and three-fourths inches
apart. No short-cuts here. This is one solid house.”
They worked like demons for hours, taking brief
breaks to sip bottled water and sit on the tailgate of the white
van. She noticed a bumper sticker: “I tried to contain myself,
but I escaped.”
Benedetti surveyed the demolition. “We’ll be ready
for the Duroc tomorrow. I’ll bring in a big jack for lifting these
sheets, and there’ll be some sawing. Sorry about the demo.”
“I understand,” Sylvie said.
“I’ll get my friend Sam to give you an estimate on
tiling. He’s a good guy. Vet, though, and has a few problems.
Can’t keep a regular job. But an artist with tile. Might take lon-
ger than some people, but he’s good. And Jim, here,” he point-
ed to a cadaverous, bow-legged man with thinning sandy hair,
the one who’d been ripping madly at old plaster, “he’s the best
painter for brushwork I’ve seen.”
Weeks of disorder and industrial vacuuming and ap-
plications of epoxies and paint and who knows what. Weeks
of Sylvie watching Benedetti’s kindness with his tag-end crew.
Weeks of Benedetti’s nuggets of wisdom: “Termites can’t eat
this old virgin hardwood. Makes ’em gag. Now, your new,
fast-growing Weyerhauser lumber—they gobble that up like
Twizzlers.” He had a deep appreciation for plants and ani-
mals. Took care not to disturb a wren’s nest under the porch
eaves. Played during breaks with the neighbor’s dog. Rescued
orb weavers and brown anoles before setting to work on a
dark corner. “Takes a little longer that way, but it eases my
conscience. You understand.” And, in fact, Sylvie did under-
stand. She couldn’t offer him beer, but she sometimes brought
doughnuts for him and the crew.
Sylvie and Gale slept in the living room or the hall-
way or the kitchen nook, depending. They ate at Long John
Silver’s or Schlotzsky’s Deli or Denny’s. Sylvie went on job in-
terviews, trying to explain the gaps in her resumé and trusting
Cara Chamberlain 3
Benedetti with the house. “Looking good,” he’d give her the
thumbs up as she left. “Break a leg.” Her son complained about
homework and the mess. Life took on a certain normalcy, as
if squeezing between buckets of Dap and Kilz and Bondo and
T-88 was normal.
And then somehow it came about that everything
was finished except the tile, and Sylvie was stunned by the
low bid for that, too. The tile guy Sam wore cowboy boots and
jeans so low-slung his tee-shirt failed to meet his pants. “Indi-
an,” he said, eyeing her. “Seminole and Muskogee. That bother
you?”
Sylvie shook her head.
“Raise wolves. They’re beautiful, you know. Belong
here more than you. St. Francis talked to ’em. What’s this
here? Tile, John said.”
Sylvie showed him the kitchen.
“Any pattern?”
“No, just tile.”
He worked for a week, setting and resetting; swearing
and apologizing; getting the palsy, as he called what looked
to be a bad case of essential tremor; and taking a nap on the
backyard grass, much to the amazement of the Brewers, the
next-door neighbors who’d never seen anything more enter-
taining than the new family’s exploits (or so Sylvie judged, by
the way they were driven to putter around their front yard at
odd hours). All the time, Benedetti wouldn’t allow anyone in
the kitchen, even covered the doorway with oak tag, and she
had to wonder what Sam was creating.
Gale rationalized. “He’s cheap anyway.”
In the end, when Benedetti ripped away the paper
seal, the finished floor was a revelation, symmetrically pure,
so level a marble wouldn’t roll (as Sam demonstrated), and
cleverly laid out so that every tile’s subtle pattern differed just
slightly from that of the one next to it. The effect was of an
intricate mosaic. “It’s art,” she said.
“It’s wolves,” Sam assured her. “Keep me on track.
And Benedetti here. Keeping the faith.”
Benedetti made an “aw, shucks” sort of grimace.
Sylvie realized she was completely won over.
The house was done, clean, solid, shining with Pale
Amber and Tuscarora and a host of other subtle off-whites. “I
don’t know what to say,” Sylvie gushed to Benedetti.
“We’re very grateful,” Gale said. He’d ventured out on
the porch, having graded a stack of papers. It was Saturday, and
he was home. Their son was off with newfound friends.
“Came out nice, didn’t it?” Benedetti beamed and
stood awkwardly though he and Sylvie had been together for
months. After a minute, he shook Gale’s hand. Then he em-
braced her, as seemed inevitable. In fact, he held her just a lit-
tle longer and tighter than she thought a Christian handyman
should. Not that she pulled away. Then she walked him to his
4 Cara Chamberlain
car. “I’m off to Sanibel Island.” He patted the check she’d just
given him—the last of her savings—and settled into the driv-
er’s seat. “Hope to dunk myself up to here—” he pointed to
his neck—“every day in the Gulf.” Sylvie noted how the crystal
cross dangling from his rearview mirror made a little prism on
his nose.
His Toyota rattled off up the street, and Sylvie set to
work vacuuming the remaining dust. As she’d always done,
she took off her jeans and T-shirt so they wouldn’t be contam-
inated and got out the new Hoover with its undoubtedly woe-
fully inadequate HEPA filter. The asbestos incident was still
fresh in her mind. After she’d finished what would be her son’s
room (they’d all ended up sleeping in the foyer, as Gale called
the screened-in porch), she stood up and glanced out the win-
dow. No curtains yet—and there was Benedetti walking up
the driveway to her garage. He glanced in and saw her, and she
knelt to make herself as small and unobservable as possible,
wrapping her arms around her chest. She and Benedetti didn’t
make eye contact. He walked past. Through the open window,
she heard him talking to Gale. “Came back for my vise grips.
Left it in your garage, I think.”
“Let’s see, then,” Gale said.
“Happened to notice your missus cleaning some-
thing in her underwear!” Benedetti said.
“She does that,” Gale agreed, unperturbed by the
confession.
They were gone for a while, poking around in the ga-
rage, she guessed. Sylvie ran for the bathroom and slid back
into her clothes. Everything was perfect, but everything was
ruined. What a little thing! What a trivial embarrassment!
But she’d been spied on, she had to think. Irrationally, maybe.
She’d been the one to strip to her underwear, after all. Still, he
could have rung the doorbell. Maybe he did, though, and she
hadn’t heard it over the vacuum.
In the living room on the other side of the house (she
was not going to be seen by anyone for a while), Sylvie stared
at the plumb walls, the solid ceilings, the shining floors, the
stack of John Benedetti business cards she’d promised to dis-
tribute to friends, if she ever made any who were not in home
repair themselves. It was going to drive her nuts. It was as if
she didn’t own the house after all. It was Benedetti’s. It was her
husband’s. Her things really belonged to United Van Lines, had
slid through their world, been lugged around by men. Women
were flighty, weak creatures who “do that”—inexplicable and
self-abasing things. She hadn’t even been able to have a daugh-
ter to keep her company and bolster her. She was a chronically
underemployed English major.
Benedetti’s van drove off—for the last time, she
hoped. Maybe he’d been as embarrassed as she was and wasn’t
willing to face another good-bye. Gale stayed outside, unchar-
acteristically tinkering in the garage, it seemed. She brewed
herself a cup of herbal tea, trying not to realize that she’d mem-
orized Benedetti’s phone number. She could feel marvelous-
ly unencumbered and relieved of materialism, and just drift
through a Florida autumn. Or she could get a job and pay for
all the coming repairs herself because there was still the exte-
rior, the roof, the driveway. Pen in hand, she tackled the Clas-
sifieds again, but after a few minutes she caught herself staring
into space.

about the author (bougainvillea, kumquat), taught me a lot

Though born and raised about human nature (Florida is crammed
in Salt Lake City, Cara
Chamberlain has lived panhandle to keys, coast to coast, with
and taught in numerous people of all kinds), and made me realize
states and Canada. She that I was not born to be in home repair.
is interested in anything I suppose this story is in homage to those
that manages to grow in
her garden, in all sorts of who paint, drywall, spackle, tile, install
music, in mushrooms, in underlayment, and in all other ways fill
birds, and in archeology. their lungs with noxious chemicals and
She does not seek to belong to any artistic movements
or schools. As Groucho Marx said, “I refuse to join any
hazardous particulate matter in order to
club that would have me as a member.” make something practical and beautiful. I
have undying respect for people who are.
bigskywritingworkshops.com
My one overriding creative
“‘A Christian Handyman’ is based on a true principle is that if I can’t get a
story with, to be honest, very little fictional short story or poem out of an
liberties taken (names have been changed,
of course). The seven years I lived in Flor- experience, I am not paying
ida expanded my botanical vocabulary enough attention.”

Cara Chamberlain 5
 feverdream magazine’s ugly love poetry contest winner

where we can’t reach

Kat Felician
the innate innocence of south cali punk
bled through the speakers of the car
of that kid i knew while he
looked at me with mirrormoon eyes and said
get in, let’s drive.

winter hit – helium became

an ideal form of entertainment.
who doesn’t want to sound
like someone else for a little while?
& i loved hotel sheets, the curtains
that block out all the world
as much as the next lady. i can’t
make sense of hgtv like he did.

do you know the world is ending?

i asked and they laughed at me like
the madman, like zarathustra.
my tightrope walker
was just a drunk girl in the bathroom
of the bar with the basketball court,
& i couldn’t save her or even
bury her in a hollow tree.
i just went back to his hotel
where i wasn’t supposed to
keep my cat.

my father called to ask

how the ice was treating me & my best friend
sent me playlists from the city;
songs conceived before our parents.
i watched that kid’s face while i played
egyptian shumba and he laughed, shaking
his head at me. i said i wanted the forest & he said
he wanted the sea, so we headed for the coast
before we ran out of fuel or ambition.

6
i melt unnaturally. spring outruns me while
we run south. i wasn’t built to exist
where the pretty play. i had beat up
cowboy boots once. i knew things about
mushrooms & mosses once.

i don’t know nothing now

about sportsball
& this kid doesn’t either, but all his friends
live and die by their colors, so we pretend
to understand. somehow home builds shape
where the fortunate live & the food i find us
seems quaint. i think i hate golf
most of all. i say that just to piss him off.

i don’t know nothing, but that makes me wise

though not in the eyes of his moneyed
associates, and i can’t comprehend how
we got so far from that innocent noise.

i like the masks more than i ought.

did you know, we’re running out of helium?

on a universal scale, it’s rather abundant,
but most of it is where we can’t reach.

about the author

K. Felician was raised in rural Wyo-
ming and spent her childhood swim-
ming in the creek and searching for
horny toads beneath sage brush. She
is currently completing her final se-
mester studying English and philos-
ophy at the University of Montana.
Her interest in folklore, mythology,
and oral tradition inform much of
her writing. Felician believes that
we forge our identities through the
stories we tell and the stories we are
told. She has a cat named Louisa
May Alcatt, and she is really proud
of that pun because she is a nerd.

7
8 Kat Felician
 Sauntering in the Evening
a poem by

Patrick Landry
As I walked between the Sun and Moon,
I heard the messages they sent each other
through the wind. I heard of the love they share
well known by the other planets. They said,

“Quiet… The Earth is to never know!” But

they soon became surprised that a human
being overheard their dark secret,
now both act peculiar around me.

I whispered into the wind that I would

tell no one, but now the Moon glares at me
and the Sun hides her face behind the clouds.
Now, star and satellite do not trust me.

I think they will feel foolish when they find

out the Earth has exploited them both for eons.

about the author

Patrick Michael Landry has a Bachelor of Arts in English and works for the Billings Fire Department. In his spare time, he
trudges through literary theory, and accepts the perpetual confusion it creates for him.

9

“I think of
my practice
as a kind of
exorcism, an
a l l ev i at i o n
of some
unwanted entity living in my
body that is dealt with via a
mechanism of discomfort and
time.
Popular culture functions for me as a tool which
ties my work to the existential, the spiritual, and
the religious. Similar to how one may treat religious
imagery, my process is filtered through the context
of films. Though films often put viewers into close
contact with intense emotional themes, they seem to
do so by tapping into a psychological catharsis – of-
fering a pathway to address related emotions with a
mind to digest or expel them. Perhaps the intensity
and immersive experience of watching films can be
10
Tavin Davis
expressed by the contradiction that, despite any good
intentions or aspirations, some films are often uncom-
fortably accurate in reflecting possible truths about our
society and ourselves.
By referencing specific scenes found in the pop classic
American Psycho, the formal qualities and titles of these
paintings become sites of identification, a common
ground for content and an emotion. Since I paint in a
manner expressive of a certain intensity of feeling; di-
rect, physical, and with a vulgarity suggestive of bodily
excretion – the work emerges from an emotional churn
similar to that evoked by the film.
It is my intimate way of working toward
the goal of achieving “better” feelings and
ridding myself of bad ones - or at the least,
confronting these disconcerting concepts
to gain a deeper understanding of them.
For me, the paintings are a theatrical means of ex-
ploring an intensified situation so that uncomfortable
emotions can be suspended and better understood. Ul-
timately, I strive to more deeply understand the spec-
trum of my vivid feelings. The situations I make are
ones of confrontation through which a process of
internal negotiation and time is initiated.”
tavindavisarts
Scene: 1

Somber but poppy string quartet…leave on for 10 minutes.

God, I hate Paul Allen. Jesus Mcdermott, you bastard, do you
want me to fry? You fucking ugly dry face. Bitch. (Smiling)
jewyouhavelittleornoalcoholBateman?! Lucky bastard... I want
to play around. In your shower gel cleanser. And blood.
Oh my god, what an idea. Mint facial mask. (Long pause) No.
Final protective lotion. Some Abstraction and coke and apply.
Me.

11
 Scene: 2

BATEMAN (V.O.): I can’t believe that Price prefers McDermott’s card to mine.
CARRUTHERS: Is something wrong? Patrick...you’re sweating.
PRICE: But wait. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
CARRUTHERS: Is something wrong? Patrick...you’re sweating.
He holds up his own card.
PRICE: Raised lettering, pale nimbus white...
CARRUTHERS: Is something wrong? Patrick...you’re sweating.
BATEMAN (choking with anxiety): Impressive. Very nice. Let’s see Paul Allen’s card.
Price pulls a card from an inside coat pocket and holds it up for their inspection:
“PAUL ALLEN, PIERCE & PIERCE, MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS.”
Bateman swallows, speechless. The sound in the room dies down and all we hear
is a faint heartbeat as Bateman stares at the magnificent card.
CARRUTHERS: Is something wrong? Patrick...you’re sweating.
BATEMAN (V.O.): Look at that subtle off-white coloring. The tasteful thickness of it.
Oh my God, it even has a watermark...
His hand shaking, Bateman lifts up the card and stares at it until it fills the screen.
He lets it fall. The sound returns to normal.
CARRUTHERS: Is something wrong? Patrick...you’re sweating.

12 Tavin Davis
Scene: 3

Pat
Al
I’m Pat
I’m Al
You drinking?
You insider Trading?
You reek of shit
You reek of shit.
I’m Pat
I’m Al
I’m sorry, I just don’t have anything in common with you.
You fucking loser.
What?
What?

Tavin Davis 13
 Scene: 4

Patrick, it’s so elegant.

What do you really want to do with your life.
I don’t know I guess.
Don’t tell me.
Well I guess I would...
Don’t tell me.
Do you feel fulfilled?
I want to work on growing.
Did you know Ted Bundy’s first dog was named Lassy?!
Who is Ted Bundy?
Forget it.
I think you should go.
Do you want me to go?
I think you should go.

14 Tavin Davis
Scene: 5

Face it. They will own the country before we know it.
Shut up no they won’t. What do you mean? Nothing, excuse me.
Did you get my message? I did! How funny. Stop. I did it. Killed
them. I chopped their fucking heads...I must be going. haha
hey! Ok wait. Listen carefully. I killed Paul and I liked it. It’s not
possible. I had dinner twice just 10 days ago. No you didn’t.
Yes I did. No. Excuse me, this isn’t funny anymore. Stop! Excuse
me, this isn’t funny anymore. I have no more barriers and my
confession has meant nothing. In fact, I want my pain to be
inflicted on others. My punishment continues. I want no one to
escape. I have gained no deeper knowledge of myself and no
new knowledge can be extracted from my telling. Excuse me,
this isn’t funny anymore.

Tavin Davis 15
 nonfiction

The Grief of Others

Julie Schultz

16
On the day we buried Dave, at a cemetery
not far from I-95, the major artery of the eastern seaboard, I
watched six men almost drop his coffin as they approached
the strangely tidy open wound in the earth. Despite their ob-
vious struggles, the box looked too small to hold him, and I
found myself wishing I had agreed to view the body, a regret
that still hovers on the edges of my grief a decade later. It was
a grey December day, the previous weekend’s snow forgotten,
absorbed into the earth, and I wore the swirling black coat he’d
helped me pick out when we strayed from our normal routine
of forays into nature and instead explored a suburban mall not
far from where I now stood. Underneath, I wore a black kriah
ribbon, a sign that the family accepted me as a direct mourner,
something that marked my status to those at the service and,
later, at the family’s house for shiva.
This was my first shiva. Although I had by this time
lost grandparents and attended memorial services, the rituals
of grief had remained largely on the fringes of my life. At the
funeral of my best friend’s younger brother, killed like Dave in
a car accident but a decade earlier, I remember being chastised
by an extended family member for wearing black, since appar-
ently the family had decided against that custom. I was stung,
not wanting to create any additional distress. It was my first
inkling of how ill-prepared we are for the anguish of others,
but also how rituals and ceremonies serve a broader purpose
than just facilitating the grieving process, how they ease com-
munication when nobody knows exactly what to say. Wearing
black is a way to stand in solidarity, communally. “We are with
you.” Something that goes beyond the banal platitude of “I’m
sorry for your loss.”
When someone close to you dies, you quickly learn
to feel like a failure. Even though people are sorry about it,
they remind you repeatedly that you have lost something, and
it is hard to escape the idea that if you had just looked after
it properly, kept it safe, loved it enough, you would still be
able to find it. I don’t have children, have never wanted them,
a preference blessedly shared with Dave after having caused
tension in previous relationships, but after Dave’s death, I sud-
denly understood why parents get so angry when their kids
break curfew without warning. The dread of losing someone,
especially someone you believe you might have protected, is
an incalculable terror.
Another popular, well-meaning prosaicism, “I’ll keep
you in my prayers,” bothered me less. As an out-and-proud
atheist, I would rather people just say “I’m thinking about
you,” but in the days and months after Dave died, I couldn’t
summon the energy for anger at what might be subtle, like-
ly involuntary, manipulation of grief for proselytization, and
I chose to interpret the intent as wholly benevolent. Part of
me also wished that I could nestle into the comfort of faith,
cocooning myself in rage at an unfeeling God or sheltering un-
der an umbrella of trust in his Divine Plan. I received several
religiously hued books on grief from kindhearted relatives,
many of whom are ministers and missionaries, but I found
the most consolation in reading philosophy. Boethius may not
have approved my specific choice, but Heidegger and a Hip-
po Walk Through Those Pearly Gates did more than the Bible
ever would have to help me comprehend the sudden absence
of what had seemed an irrepressible spirit.
Inexplicably, comprehension is not one of the tradi-
tional stages of grief, regardless of whether you divide them
into five or the supposedly more accommodating seven. Per-
haps that is a tacit admission that loss is enigmatic, but we
still try so hard to find reasons and justifications, to make the
sort of linear progress prized by a society that venerates ra-
tionality. Eventually I stopped wishing I had crashed into the
back of the semi with him. In fact, I think I moved beyond
that dark place quite quickly, although I have no idea how to
calculate fast or slow in this context. That progression, how-
ever, was the only linearity of the first few years, as I bounced
between anger and depression, never touching acceptance.
I even occasionally still have moments of denial, when I
catch a glimpse of someone who moves like him, unhurried
with confidence belied by a slight slump of the shoulders to
hide height. In the hours after The Phone Call, I was sure
that someone had stolen his driver’s license and his truck.
Despite an obsession with television crime shows—where,
if necessary, dental records are compared before family are
notified—I was convinced that a mangled body on I-78 had
been misidentified. As the improbability of that became clear,
I moved on to another television staple: witness protection.
This is the fiction that still flashes through my heart when I
see a ghost. Hope, like grief, is not rational, and it certainly is
not linear.
Six months after Dave died, I had an appointment
with my neurologist, a regular check-up to gage the progres-
sion of my MS. She asked how I was doing, and when I indi-
cated my still-fresh grief, she asked if I wanted a prescription
for something. I know she was trying to help, but it seemed
like an indictment of my process. Somehow I was taking too
long. Never mind that Victoria mourned Albert for forty
years. Never mind that, in a previous era, I still would have
been wearing black, complete with a weeping veil. Never mind
that the unveiling of Dave’s tombstone hadn’t happened yet.
I wasn’t invited to the unveiling, the moment in
Jewish culture when the tombstone is dedicated at the grave,
probably not close enough to Dave’s family, or their religion,
for inclusion. By then, though, I had stitched together my own
schema of grief: journals (always green, Dave’s favorite color),
yoga, Häagen-Dazs mint chip. Someone—many people, ac-
tually—had strongly suggested counseling, and I would have
done it, but the daily logistics of life already were more than I
could handle. I was never more aware of how demanding our
personal grooming standards are, how much time we dedicate
17
to wiping bits of us away, arranging the remaining bits, and
then adding other bits. The daily application of deodorant
was, for me, the most frequent casualty.
I must still have smelled okay, though, because
people talked to me. The beautiful silver lining of grief, it
turns out, is that it gives others permission to share their own
anguish. I learned about a good friend’s abortion, another’s
rape. The loss of a son in circumstances similar to Dave’s.
The intricate betrayals that run like invisible threads of
spider silk through the webs of people’s lives all around me.
It astounded me, the incredible reserves of strength required
by our cult of self-reliance and independence, to hide pain, to
keep individual suffering from inconveniencing others. My
own inability to hide my sorrow, it being a far more physical
experience than I would have expected, should have been
seen as a failure. Instead, I have never felt more intimately
connected to people, including some I barely knew. On a
weekend climbing trip in the Adirondacks a couple of years
after Dave died, my guide, whose name I do not remember,
shared the story of his entire family’s demise in a plane crash.
In an increasingly atomized society, where we stay single, put
about the author
Julie Schultz was born in Wyoming and grew up in Mon-
tana but left for college at Boston University and stayed
away for twenty years. After getting a master’s degree in
economics and pursuing a career in finance in New York,
London, and Bermuda, she slowly came to believe that
artificial intelligence could do her job better than humans
could. She decided to switch gears and moved back to Mon-
tana in 2016, settling close to family in Billings. Luckily
(because books are sanity), an independent, cooperative
bookstore opened shortly after Julie moved back, and she
joined the board of This House of Books in 2018. In addi-
tion to board responsibilities, she takes classes for fun at
MSU Billings, hikes the trails at Four Dances, and loves all
her friends’ pets. She also writes poetry that has been pub-
lished in Rattle. For more of her non-fiction writing, visit:
thedisgruntledrationalist.com
“Although I wrote this essay ten years after the
precipitating event, I had started some version
18 Julie Schultz
off procreating, and bowl alone, grief not only reminds
us of our shared humanity but also concentrates our
capacity for compassion.
Loss isn’t as common an experience as it was before
the advent of modern medicine and regulatory oversight of
everything from sanitation standards to building codes and
air traffic control. We are out of practice. Although we can still
offer indelible empathy one-on-one, we don’t have the institu-
tional memory of how, in social settings, to help others grieve.
Additionally, with the atrophying of religious affiliation, many
of us don’t have institutional guidelines, either. We all find our
own ways to process pain, but as I look back, a decade later, I
wish the rituals had been more clearly marked, not for my own
sake, but as a blueprint for others. Most of the people at Dave’s
shiva knew exactly what was expected of them. As his stepfa-
ther explained, it was duty that brought everyone to the house,
with its pail of water outside the door, shrouded mirrors, and
piles of kosher food. I’m not suggesting we all convert to Juda-
ism, but even just an acknowledgment that what we share is
more important than what segregates us could go a long way
toward assuaging the grief of others.
of it many times, trying
to make sense of grief
not only for myself but
for everyone around me
who wanted to know
how to help. Learning
to continue living, how
to continue living, was
a daily struggle, and, as I describe in the piece,
the only thing that seemed to help was writing.
It took a decade, but I finally was
able to say what I wish someone
had said to me at the beginning
(which was, of course, the end).”
19
 feverdream magazine’s issue II featured poet

Claire
Mikeson
When did you start writing creative- What do you do for work?
ly for fun?
I teach high school English—
I think I was probably 12 or 13 when seniors and college writing.
I started writing frequently, around the
time when you get preteen angst. I just Do you hate the children?
texted my dad to ask if I wrote when I
was little and he said, “Mom says yeah I love most of the children most of
but not a lot.” And then he launched the time. Sometimes (most times) I
into a description of their dog’s sneez- hate the grading.
ing fits.
Who are a couple of your favor-
Why do you write? ite authors? Who is your favorite
poet? Why?
To learn. I also need to have a creative
outlet or I feel a little bit crazy and un- I’ll always read something by Marga-
happy. It helps sort out my thoughts, ret Atwood, David Mitchell, or Da-
and it allows me to create something vid Sedaris. If I had to pick one poet
that memorializes or rewrites or creates an experience. The I would say Eavan Boland because I’m a fan of Irish history
philosopher Richard Rorty argues that metaphor is the way and literature and her writing is beautiful and angry in just the
we build and make new knowledge when old forms of thought right amounts. Also Margaret Atwood. She’s so skilled at writ-
or communication are no longer suitable. It destabilizes the ing things that are simultaneously hilarious and bizarre and
formerly familiar and allows us to learn. I love that. Like poet- dark and pretty.
ry is inherent to humanness and growth.

20
Where do you usually write? What is the environment
like?
Usually I write on weekend mornings on my couch in my liv-
ing room because it has the best light in the morning, and I am
like a cat who likes to lay around in the light. Or I’ll write in my
bed with my dog, Birdie, doing her big sleep groans.
Tell me about procrastination. Why do you do it? How
come you don’t care about the feelings of other people?
Okay, so there’s actually a level of procrastination that is pro-
ductive to getting your best work done. So, you’re welcome?
Also, procrastination is correlated with perfectionism, and I
am a perfectionist.
Your aura has been described as “bright yellow,” and very
accurately so. This is not a question, but more of a state-
ment. How does that sit with you?
I find it pretty fitting because I love that color, and I’m always
laughing because I think literally everything is funny, which I
find delightful about myself, which seems like a bright yellow
thing. (Also see next question). But I also have a really dark
sense of humor and my personality tends to repel the kind of
people that trap you in conversations, so what’s that color?
Also, what is an aura even?
Who is your favorite musician? Why?
I like forcing my friends to dance to ABBA with me.
Talk to me about teaching Creative Writing at Dawson.
I’ve been an adjunct there for a couple semesters. I really enjoy
teaching creative writing because I can be totally in charge of
the curriculum, and it’s more about improvement and self-ex-
pression, so it’s easier to grade and just more fun for everyone.
I do think I prefer teaching college writing though because,
for me, poetry is something you can do alone, and it’s just as
rewarding, whereas understanding of rhetoric is increasingly
necessary to a functioning society, and it’s something that’s
learned socially.
What are a few things that typically inspire your poems?
(Men, dogs, men, etc.)
Oof. Plants, running, dogs, friends, men, family, strangers,
conflicts, memories, skies, and objects. In specific landscapes
or places. Usually I start with something from my own life, and
by the time I’m finished it’s been pretty fictionalized. I would
like to be paid to travel and write poems about all the places.
Will someone pay me to do that?
Does writing feel like a cathartic process, one that eas-
es the potency of your emotional state? Or does writing
strengthen those emotions while you’re doing it?
Both. I feel moreso than easing any emotional state, writing
helps you to better understand your own emotions and expe-
riences. It can also teach you something about yourself you
didn’t know you felt and strengthen or create new emotions
and associations in that way.
Is creativity something that you can find? Or does it have
to find you?
You find each other when you’re actively looking for it and do-
ing the work.
Name three artists (musical, visual, written, etc.) whose
work deserves more attention.
This is hard because Covid’s been around for almost half the
time I’ve been in Billings, so I don’t feel informed. My friend
Lia Petriccione is an artist who works primarily with acrylics,
and her paintings are so happy. I’m also excited to see the full
version of Stan Parker and Pete Tolton’s Vietnam documenta-
ry when they finish it.
How often do you dabble in watercolors? Do you find the
feelings and mindset associated with that process at all
comparable to writing?
I’ll go through phases where I paint a lot for a few weeks, and
then I’ll go months without doing it. I find it’s a little harder
for me to start a painting because if I make a garbage one, the
evidence is more tangible than a poem. Both take really close
focus to the point where I will completely zone out any other
stimuli, and time will pass really quickly. But writing is more
brain work and problem solving, and painting is more numb-
ing and soothing mentally.
Do you believe in God?
No.
Define art.
Anything that effectively and thoughtfully communicates
emotion and makes a space for shared knowledge (Venn di-
agram “shared,” not unified understanding “shared”) between
people. Or person.
21
 Claire Mikeson

Palm Springs
Palm Springs feels probably a little bit like Mars,
or like if you were floating a bit above the surface of Mars
while a hot wind swirled around you like you were banana bread in a convection oven
(and what is this body made of if not sugar and carbs, batter in a mold,
organs like overripe fruit in a bowl forgotten along with the gas bill at home,
cook, cook, harden, decay).

Running in Palm Springs reminds me that I can be useful,

if I can feel heat and pain and incline, discern concrete from clay beneath my feet,
(which I fear are growing infinitesimally flatter with each passing year
as I am slowly crushed earthward by the gravity of the universe playing its slow game)
I must surely exist today, or some day, in the California desert. Right?
And the mountains (are they mountains or the simulacra of mountains?),
they don’t loom because up there, they’re indifferent to the motion of my lanky banana body
down here in the valley, practically dragging itself now along the banks of what might at some point in
history have been a river or a lake or an ocean but right now, or someday, is parched and gaping
and sweet as the gullies on a dried peach.
Like all ravines, its language is the townward tug felt deep in the stomach, an urge and repulsion to fling
your body from the mold, pour out the batter.

At the intersection of South Camino Real and East Sierra Way I run into the loitering coyote,
her svelte limbs born from centuries of desert wandering and stone stepping
her small feet treading the heat of meticulously paved asphalt,
kitty corner to the gay bars and grocery stores and thirsty moon-reaching palms.
She’s obviously confused because this all
wasn’t here yesterday, or the last century anyway.
Her eyes are bug-specked amber mockery and now, or the other day, she is naked fur and tibula,
feral lifting off the pavement in weightless, self-assured blast-off, smirking like the most audacious nudie
pic you’ve ever received from the comfort of the mattress you ordered online.

And back at the house I tell the girls in their pink pool floaties shaped like sprinkled donuts
that I saw Her, that we’re all skin and flesh and bikini straps and undigested mint leaves in a June Mojito
that is truly to die for, like so much organic matter in the sand,
and they smile politely into their phones
with lips decorus as gravity.

See, it’s all so heavy, and we cannot see your constellations down here, squinting through this desert
sun.

22
 Claire Mikeson

The Hitch-Hiker
I wasn’t the first man from North Carolina to tell her she laughs too much and too loud,
that it’s a real bummer when you’re hungover in bed in Glendive, Montana
in an apartment you rent where the streetlights three floors down are magnified by the snow
throbbing wet-cold like Christmas lights, if you’re into that,
or the neon heat of the VFW where you danced together, smiling at strangers who called it love, or
something like that, knowing soon you’ll have to go back out into December.

You decide to buy into it for a few songs, even though you hate The Eagles, but you’re down to two
smokes, and in Montana it’s 12 below out tonight.

Out there, Merrill Avenue stretches east-west in a line tight as an ultimatum.

In January you smoke weed together on a stained couch twice your age that used to smell like Manifest
Destiny and peanut-butter sandwiches you made her on her lunch break.

You think of the east coast, question the legitimacy of your name in the byline of the local newspaper,
which, upon further inspection, dissolves like so much dried mud into the shag carpet.

What you write instead is this: A pretty mistake made under the duress of all that snow. Easily
redeemable. Nothing that hasn’t been done before.

And perhaps my greatest fear is that I am the woman on that episode of The Twilight Zone who
reminded you of me,
who drives and drives that line only to realize, at a cafe in the middle of Arizona,
that her destination never mattered at all.

23
 Claire Mikeson

Airlee
I burned the motion of your two middle names
into my muscle memory,
tongue clumsy with Kingfisher and sibilance
watching the bright before the spreading
of your chest, the gesturing
of the potato bong,
the story.

We made maps from the smoke of our tobacco breaths

mingling up
toward the one fluorescent light in your
one-room apartment in India,
fridge humming,
my pale feet bare, beer-stained, resting
against your empty mahogany drawers.

In the morning, I would teach my

students about Mexico
fraudulently
unpeeling histories like green bananas, blue jeans,
as if I had any idea what I was doing.

24
 Claire Mikeson

Compass
Arrow, you reenact memories
still full as pomegranate seeds, as
the moons of your fingernails beaming like
subjunctive Jupiter that night Orion was still upright,
like embers against our inky, tacit lake.
Your rum portraits curved me blonde, centered muse.
And when I am tangled here in snow,
I remember the angle of your laughing teeth
against devouring Kodai cloudscapes
the angle of verdant cliff in Vattakanal
how the greens dripped into each other
until I could not tell voice from vine, and
unbounded, popped the light bulb
and, we, awoken to the prayer of dogs,
lied like baby birds on your mattress laughing.

25
 Claire Mikeson

Maria
I have pictures of Western Ireland that don’t remind me
of the way the cliffs surrendered to the Atlantic like
the abrupt knowledge of our grandparents.
Enough was enough on some ordinary spring day,
the suicide sign on the fence I stepped over,
stick man flailing. This is not allowed.
The cows eating grass on the edge were not allowed
to misstep the 700-yard-long
story I imagined telling you over spring rolls at the Chinese restaurant in Cork
we made our own.

When I try to write about Ireland it’s just the word verdant
until its syllables unhinge and all the sound leaks out.

I remember your kitchen table like any other kitchen table,

how your face shifted like a pile of stones when I told you
the coastal trees grew leaning with the wind
their eastern muscles atrophied, adapted,
your lawless laughter punctuating our evenings, seeping
like watercolor into the gray morning hangover.
Your wine-stained incisors scraped the paint off your fingernails
like sustenance when your red lipstick started to peel
and we poured another glass still laughing,
talked of living here in this shitty apartment forever.

On the third day I knew you, you curled your hair

Like long rinds of a blood orange,
long enough to make us late to class, hurrying
along the mile you walked in bare legs, rainbow sandals, the tight black skirt
you wore even in the Irish rain.
When we got to class you told me about your abortion
like you were talking about your old high school,
a bluntness that startled me into friendship,
and still now when I think of you, you are in noisy technicolor,
orange hair, rainbow sandals, shouting secrets,
an unapologetic reminder to stand too close to the edges of oceans.

26
Claire Mikeson 27
 feverdream magazine’s flash fiction contest winner
The Suburbs War
You’re young. 20-years-old, and there really isn’t that
much that matters to you. Cheap pizza, Friday and Saturday
nights, fake IDs, a gallon of BV, $70 glass bongs, and music.
Music is the bonding agent. The alcohol doesn’t hurt either.
Anybody can get drunk or high with anybody, though. The
sense of comradery is cemented in the music. You all saw
Odesza at the Palace last week and got so high beforehand it
felt like a dream. Everyone’s trying to escape something, just
not exactly sure what, so you escape together into Arcade Fire,
A Tribe Called Quest, some LCD Soundsystem.
You’re going to school, studying as a math major.
Knowing what math majors should be when they grow up, it
28
Alanna Wulf
feels like an abstract you don’t need to worry about too much.
You just know that math has always come easy and the home-
work isn’t hard. You’re a computer genius too. That’s the way
of the future, there’s always going to be money in that. The
hangovers aren’t really hangovers. They just make you kind of
tired, but you still get an “A” on the Applied Calc exam this
morning.
Pretty soon, you’re skipping class on Friday so that
you can drop acid, trip for an entire day in the Bitterroot, and
then proceed with your regularly scheduled weekend pro-
gram. A bunch of rabble rousers we are, you say with a smile.
And Monday’s Anthro class is just a Gen Ed requirement, and
all the lectures are posted online, so Sunday ends up lasting
longer and longer. Time Bender.
This is great! You go hiking, get more in touch with
nature and your true being, your oneness with the universe,
and know in your heart that we’re all just stardust. You’re so
connected, in fact, you decide that next year you won’t go back
to school. Working a nine to five revolts you, being a slave to
The Man is an affront to your humanity, to all humanity.
Going home isn’t an option, and you’re glad of it.
Yes, you’ve found your little niche in America. A place where
like-minded, young ruffians meld together until your ideas
and your lives distill into an essence indistinguishable from
one person to another. No, no, it isn’t that way. You just find
people an awful lot like yourself who listen to the same music,
who hate Capitalism in theory but not in practice, and whose
parents didn’t love them in the right ways. But you’re unique,
yes. Complicated, most definitely. You are beyond compre-
hension, so unique you are.
So you move in with your friends, and one of their
roommates just so happens to occasionally deal coke. You’ve
had a healthy fear of the stuff for a long time since finding out
your dad had a problem with it before he and your mom got
married. He also had a problem with alcohol, but you don’t,
and you’re different from him anyway. So—what do you know
– the coke habit develops itself.
You don’t have your work study job at the University
anymore, and all of the drinking, weed smoking, acid drop-
ping, shroom taking, coke snorting, and rent needs to be paid
for so your buddy who works as a cook in a bar downtown gets
you a bartending gig at the VFW. It fits. You chum it up with
the professional drunks drinking to forget their war crimes
and the trust fund youths drinking to forget their pointless-
ness. They all buy their favorite bartender shots. You’ve got a
way with strangers, and you’re proud. You’re bringing smiles
to long faces, playing therapist. I’m helping them, you tell
yourself.
You get so fucked up at a birthday party, you strip to
Def Leopard free of charge. You give head to Batman in the
alley behind a packed bar on Halloween and people watched.
Saying no isn’t in your vernacular. And even when it is, it
doesn’t make a difference. A master of your own sexuality.
You drink every day. On your days off you start with a
double vodka soda with extra lime at 1 pm. And at some point,
you ask yourself, “What am I afraid of?” But by your second
double, you don’t feel afraid of anything - just a comfortable
stupid. Eight hours later, a full shift on the barstool, you get
a ride home and throw up in the shower. You’re still sticking
it to The Man, not playing by society’s rules, and you wake
up with the feeling that you’ve wanted to die ever since you
can remember. Nothing at all like your father. Your pants get
tighter, and you wear the dark circles under your eyes like a
badge of honor letting everyone know you’ve been through
some shit.
The knowledge of derivatives, bounded functions,
and absolute convergence is a thing of the past, and you can’t
figure out the equation to the volume of the pit growing in
your stomach. Aren’t you just a miserable excuse for a human,
same as anyone else? Even when you catch yourself looking at
a rotting corpse in the mirror, a life evaporating from an open
beer bottle, you can’t admit that you were wrong. That you’ve
always been deathly afraid of the universe. You can’t admit
you’ve been trying to kill yourself slowly, inflicting maximum
pain for years, because you don’t deserve it quick and easy.
You don’t listen to music anymore. Not really. The
booze cements you to others now. You’re turning 28 tomor-
row. I’m still young, you say. There’s still time. And since it
does you no good to dwell in the past, you’re off to get stupid
again.
“I’d love a double vodka soda with extra lime, please.
And a shot for the both of us.” Just to speed things along.

about the author

Born and raised in Billings, Alanna Wulf moved back to the Tragic City after
spending 7 years in the western part of the state. During the Time of Covid,
she‘s been lucky enough to continue her work as a political organizer from
home with her animal family (Shadow Cat and Winnie Pup). Also in the
past year she’s discovered the unbridled joy of dipping Oreos into milk, her
love for Sci-Fi horror movies, and that the dentist’s office isn’t as scary as she
thought it would be. As soon as the world safely opens back up, she plans
to fulfill a lifelong dream of exploring Maine – hopefully an experience that
proves less like The Lighthouse and more like Moonrise Kingdom.

29
 Sheila Miles
feverdreammagazine’s issue II featured artist
Do you remember when you first realized that you were
gifted at painting?
I started drawing horses all the time when I was very young.
By the time I was nine I announced to my mom that I was go-
ing to be an artist. Even at that age, I knew it was the only thing
that made sense to me. I could draw anything realistically by
the age of 14. In Indiana, if you could do a decent horse, cow,
or a barn you were an artist! It wasn’t until I went to college
that I got to really be “creative.”
Where were you born?
I was born in Indianapolis, IN. I was one of six children and
had to make my way on my own. I often went out into the
woods by myself to collect just about any living thing I could
catch, to ”study” it. Perhaps making art was some kind of com-
pensation for what I didn’t have: freedom and self-realization.
30
Who is your favorite visual artist?
I have too many favorite artists to list, but here are a few: Max
Beckman, Henri Matisse, Lois Dodd, Ensor, Edvard Munch,
Richard Diebenkorn, Michael Lucero, Gerhard Richter, Mars-
den Hartley, David Hockney, Alice Neel, and Gauguin.
My aunt was an artist, and my mother was always doing cre-
ative things. When my mother gave me a book on Gauguin,
when I was 10 years old, I said, “I want to be that kind of art-
ist.” In college, I was hooked on Degas, Bonnard and Matisse.
Who is your favorite musician?
I have so many favorite artists, but I mostly listen radio sta-
tions around the country. I like 60’s and 70’s Rock, Americana
and Western music.
What is art to you? Why do you do it?
I make art to invent, to organize my mind, and to discover.
My most creatively inspired time making art is when I have to
solve a visual problem. I bore easily, so I look to art for excite-
ment. I know it is about communication, sharing how I see,
and what I think about— but I will paint anything, or draw,
or make art with anything at any time. Most of my inspiration
comes from the creative process and playing with materials.
Where is your favorite place to paint? Do you paint out-
side often?
I paint in my studio. I lock the door and disappear into another
reality for several hours. I love to do plein air, but it has some
complications, like weather (winter and extreme heat here in
AZ) but I do think it can produce the most immediate and
fresh work
Do you often attempt to convey a particular message in
your work?
Before I start to make a piece, I ask myself why do I want to
paint it? Sometimes I paint it because I don’t have an answer
to that question. How much of a scene do I need to paint to
tell the story? Should I edit half of it so it is more impactful?
I think about what I want the viewer to experience. I can say
now, that after 35 years of painting, my focus is on recording or
expressing beauty and along with that, asking, “what is beau-
tiful? Personally, I have been attracted to quiet, private places,
sometimes neglected places, that are secreted away, maybe the
building behind the building. And any place that I can medi-
tate in or that takes me away into another reality (ie. The wil-
derness).
31
What advice would you give to
young artists who are trying to pay
their bills by pursuing their pas-
sions?
I never said no to anyone who offered
me an opportunity when I was start-
ing out. I would take on any commis-
sion and consider it a learning expe-
rience. I showed in cafes and many
galleries. I gave away a lot of art and
shared with other artists. I worked my
job and went home and made art. I
still paint six or seven hours a day. You
can’t show or sell any art unless you
make it. It has to be a passion, an in-
trinsic motivation to make art far and
beyond showing or selling.
How do you feel about the state
of art currently? How do you feel
about its future?
I think Museums and Galleries have to be suffering
financially from the COVID shutdowns. Every-
32 Sheila Miles
thing is on pause. These vital cultural
institutions need public and private
support to continue programming.
Montana museums were a critical
component to my growth as an artist.
And I am so grateful to have patrons
who regularly bought my work and
funded my shows. If I think about the
discipline of art, what is being created,
the opportunities are wide open. We
live in a visual world. There is always
some great original work and some
bad copy-cat art, or art that is badly
crafted.
What is the environment like during
one of your painting sessions?
I like to have a clean space that is or-
ganized. I listen to music. I have track
lighting and Solatubes. I paint stand-
Sheila Miles ing up, with my canvas hanging on a wall so I can
move in and out of the space to see how it looks
(as if it were on your wall) and then move up close
artistmiles.com to do detail work.
Sheila Miles 33
34 Sheila Miles
Sheila Miles 35
Do you feel as though your work has evolved over time?
What may have caused the change?
My work evolves constantly. That said, I do circle around to re-
curring themes like landscapes, figures, and portraits. For over
35 years, I have included houses in much of my work. I used
to do narrative art, and hope to return to it. I change because
my art changes me, and the political and social environments
make me change. Also, moving from Indiana to Massachusetts
to NYC and then to Montana (Laurel, Billings, Miles City,
Bozeman, Missoula), then to northern California and to San-
ta Fe, New Mexico and now to Oracle, Arizona, I have been
changed by new places and people. I also read from five news-
papers a day, in order to stay current on the news along with
the National and International art scene.
36 Sheila Miles
What type of work were you doing before you started
painting professionally?
I started selling art when I was 15. When I went to college,
I did medical illustration for the Biology Department to put
myself through college, and was a Teaching Assistant in Grad-
uate School. When I left college, I was a Museum Director in
Provincetown, Massachusetts but I made art and showed at
the same time. In NYC, I played music with my (then) hus-
band in clubs, bars and at weddings etc. and we busked music
all over the city. When I moved to Montana, I taught at MSU
(Billings and Bozeman) and later at UNM (Missoula). In
1983, I started a residency in Miles City through the MT Arts
Council. It was a wonderful opportunity to teach half time and
paint half time. When I was Curator at the Yellowstone Art
Museum (1986-1990), I was working half or three-quarters
time so I could make art. So, I have always made art. Unless an
artist is wealthy, an artist has to work like this if they want to
be a successful artist.
What is your fondest childhood memory?
My fondest memory is riding a horse bareback along the river
(and making art!)
Does your source of artistic inspiration change, or does it
remain consistent? What are some of the things that you
feel inspire you?
Now that I work from photos, I have 67,000 photos in my
phone’s gallery. My husband drives me through the backroads
from Nebraska to Kansas to Montana, all throughout the
Rocky Mountains, down the California coast— and I pho-
tograph about 3000 photos each day. These provide unlim-
ited inspiration. I also do commissions from photos and use
friends’ photos (with their permission). I go into my studio
every day and think about where I want to “travel” that day.
Are there any upcoming projects, visions, or sentiments
you’d like to share?
I have three upcoming shows in 2021 (Santa Fe, NM, Magda-
lena, NM, and at Art Spirit Gallery in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho).
I hope that by next year I will also be teaching painting work-
shops in Tuscany (postponed because of COVID). I also have
a major upcoming exhibition at the Yellowstone Art Museum,
Billings, MT. I am in the process of donating selections from
the body of my life’s work to the Missoula Art Museum and
Yellowstone Art Museum. I have already donated 20 pieces to
Montana museums.

Of all the places you’ve painted, which was your favorite

to visit? Why?

I love to paint everywhere I go, and I travel with watercolors.

Some of my favorite places I have painted are at the seashore,
the gardens of Paris or at Notre Dame. I was in Florence, Italy
as a guest artist for five weeks and my apartment had a terrace,
which was great fun. Some of my favorite work is done in these
places because it is immediate, intimate, and current.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve been given as an art-

ist?

I had a professor my Freshman year who (because I was al-

ready selling) told me, “don’t think that because your art
sells that it’s good.” (Of course, the opposite is also true.) It
reminds me to have a standard for the quality and integrity I
want in my work.

How much time did you spend in Montana, and where

were you situated? What did you like about it?

I first arrived from NYC to live in Laurel, MT. I started teach-

ing at MSU/Billings two months later and later started the gal-
lery there. Then I had a residency in Miles City. My son was a
month old when we moved there. Then I went back to Laurel
and MSU Billings to teach, until in 1986 when I was offered a
job at MSU/Bozeman for a year teaching and running the gal-
lery. Then I was asked to apply and got the Curator job at the
Yellowstone Art Museum. In 1988, I moved to Billings. Final-
ly, I moved to Missoula for nine years. I was in Montana and a
single mom, so I followed jobs across the state for 26 years. I
usually visit Montana at least once a year. From 2017-2020, I
had five shows in MT so I was there for the shows and to give
art workshops. I still think of Missoula as “home”. I lived there
the longest— for nine years.

Sheila Miles 37
38 Sheila Miles
“During the summers I would take walks around neighborhoods and the unique architecture
of homes is inspiring to me. I imagine what life is like for the persons living there. What their morning
routine is, what coffee or tea they drink. What music plays as soon as they wake up. For me it was the
song by Seal and Croft; Summer Breeze. This was the inspiration for this small collection of photographs.”

Summer Breeze
Jasper Heins

39
 Two Poems
Daniel Lurie
about the author
Daniel Lurie is a super senior at Montana State University Billings, studying Organization-
al Communications and English. He originally hails from a small town in Oklahoma, called
Talala; popped over to live in the Middle East, Israel, for four years; and has now resided in
Montana for the past eleven years. He enjoys the outdoors, hiking (especially solo), backpack-
ing, camping, and kayaking. He is obsessed with traveling and plans to visit all National Parks
in the U.S., and to solo-hike the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), which spans 2,700 miles. Daniel
falls in love easily when it comes to cats and poetry. Upon graduation, he wants to pursue a
Master of Fine Arts in Poetry, to learn how to master activism writing, in order to protect the
environment and nature.

40
Da n i el lu rie

Counting Crows (Who done it?)

Grave still shallow, I’ve kept it that way—
Flocks of corvine taunt me in the parking lot, as I remember

how my father loved crows so much he became one.

I thought I would kill two birds with one stone, let grief lift me,

but two crows are defined as an “attempted murder.” My family

never migrates as we stuff baggage into boxes. Whenever

my sister and I are together, we pull over on the highway.

Without saying it, we count crows, looking for the murder.

41
 Da n i el lu rie

Snow White
We are on the way to meet my family,
as a squall engulfs the cracked windshield.
Whiteout—

In this moment, it is the first time I am aware

of my epidermis, and your brown skin. What
will they say? If my father were present,
the words he’d speak—
Although, we can now sin in three religions,
and I wear a Vegvísir around my neck.

Did you see my dying in the onions, last night,

as I chopped them into tiny bits?
Save the pearl ones. When my mouth cannot
form words, please hear the coded messages
in my Spotify playlist. My Dear, Blue Monday
is not just a day for me.

Roll the creamy dough out for Baklava, I watch you place
walnuts in perfection. Like tiny ships sinking
into dusk. I have never felt so inferior, yet loved.

Tiger eyes, I cannot meet you tonight,

I beg. I like to think our fathers are breaking
bread. But like the shooting stars that fall
from my ceiling—they’re plastic.

42
 Blue
Streak
Distributing
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 Tyler Rel
about the photographer
Tyler Rel is a Billings, Montana native that enjoys adventure in this beautiful state of ours. He
also fabricates and installs quartz countertops locally and always tries to support local. He is a big
brewery and distillery fan, with whiskey being his favorite spirit.

@getrelphotography getrelphotography

44
45
 fiction
The Caretaker
Ashley K. Warren
He did not want children and hadn’t for a long
time, and quite recently, though unexpectedly, Samantha dis-
covered she did. His not wanting children carried conviction.
Her inkling of a desire carried no more power than curiosity.
At her exam, after she miscarried, they found a tumor and re-
moved it, along with some of her parts. And so she couldn’t
create a child anyway.
She carried her disappointment with her down the
sidewalks of their neighborhood, hoping it would somehow
fall out of her brain and heart and onto someone’s lawn and
sprout into comforting daisies. There had been a storm the
previous week and the sidewalks were still littered with leaves,
needles, and a few broken branches. She felt sympathetic to-
ward the trees. To her they looked armless, as if they had lost
something too.
At the corner of a street, she caught a pastel glimmer
in her peripheral vision. On second glance she saw the corner
of a giant pink house she’d never seen before. It looked so strik-
ing; she couldn’t believe she’d missed it.
Samantha retraced her steps until she found the
house’s thin paved driveway— so discreet it could be mistak-
en for a trail. At the end of the driveway, the house was pro-
46
tected by a short iron gate, only intimidating enough to keep
the geese out from the nearby pond in the park just one block
over.
Hanging in the center of the gate, a red and blue fam-
ily crest with a gold shield covered the lock that kept the gate
closed. She pulled the small notebook from her purse she used
for reminders and wrote a note to the owner:
Dear Sir or Madame:
I am a neighbor of yours and I feel so bad that I haven’t intro-
duced myself. I’d love to meet you. My number is on my business
card.
And by the way, I love your house!
Sincerely,
Samantha
She slipped the note and her business card—Samantha Dan-
ielson, Copyeditor—inside the mailbox at the end of the
driveway and walked home. She second-guessed the use of
“love” twice in the note and thought she should return and
supply a revised one, but the mundane activities of her eve-
ning distracted her more than the worry of redundant writing
and she let it go.
After a week with no response, she grew curious.
Maybe her note had been too forward, or the owner hadn’t
found it. She waited three more days before telling her hus-
band she was going for a walk, and then took herself on a visit
to the pink house.
The setting sun made the pink house look flush and
alive. A sliver of light shining between the trees illuminated a
white envelope sitting inside the mailbox, the lid open just a
crack. Her name had been written on the envelope in purple
ink—or at least what looked like her name. She could only see
the “–antha” at the edge and assumed it was for her.
The envelope hadn’t been sealed. Inside she found a key and a
letter, which read:
Dear Samantha,
I’m at the house so rarely, it was purely coincidence I found your
note. Please make yourself at home—the house deserves an ad-
mirer.
Cordially,
The Caretaker
The title presented that way— “The Caretaker”— made the
person seem more like a professional wrestler than someone
who managed a property. “Managed” might be too strong of
a word in this case. She read the note again, “at the house so
rarely.” Didn’t this person have a real name? And giving her a
key? If she were the owner, she’d have the Caretaker replaced.
She was ready to tuck the letter in her pocket and return home
when she noticed a spot of color on the front porch that hadn’t
been there on her previous visit. Two bundles of magenta-col-
ored lilies, in identical concrete planters, grew in jungle-like
patterns up the front of the house.
She loved lilies, and with magenta being her favorite
color, she couldn’t help but slip the key into the gate lock and
pad her way to the front door. With her nose buried in the lil-
ies, the whir of engines, scratch of tires on the pavement, and
other city sounds simply faded away.
Up close, the house towered above her and she took
in its full shape. Symmetrical bay windows curled around the
left and right sides giving it the look of a wide-shouldered
woman. The face of the house had timber detailing in criss-
cross patterns that reminded her of the inn where she and her
husband stayed during their honeymoon in Leavenworth. The
memory, and the scent of the lilies, made her feel younger, like
more adventure was possible.
The round door handle fit so easily into her palm, the
knob turned easier, and with little effort she found herself in
the entryway of the pink house.
The floors shone with fresh polish and reflected her
silhouette back at her, narrow yet curvy. The rugs in the entry
way had the vertical and triangular patterns of having just been
vacuumed, the way carpets look during an open house. From
somewhere further inside the house, the crackling of an old
record player released coffee house jazz that bounced off the
house’s wooden floors and ceilings. Everywhere she looked,
there was evidence of great care. She half expected someone
in a white tuxedo jacket to come down the hall and ask her if
she’d like to dance.
When no one met her, she called out to make her-
self known. She stepped further inside, then stopped abruptly
when she saw a small study on her right.
Shelves lined the curved walls from floor to ceiling.
Every book had a beautiful leather spine without any identifi-
cation. No titles, no authors, not even a shadowed impression
where the gold leaf printing had faded with time. She stood
in the center of room with her head tilted back. The room
smelled of sweet tobacco and oiled leather. It reminded her of
her grandfather.
From a shelf near eye-level, she pulled a book and sat
in a chair with ballooning, florid upholstery and opened to a
random page.
Sent from the witches in the Garden City no doubt.
The way the branches tore from the trees and sent the hail
smattering down on every surface it had to be retaliation for
last month’s disagreement.
It read like a diary. Funny too, the way it referenced a
storm similar to the one they’d experienced the previous week.
She assumed the reference to “witches” was slang. Despite her
invitation into the house, she felt now like she was intruding.
She closed the book and rose from the chair to see if anyone
was home. She had inadvertently given herself a tour in the
quest to find the house’s owner. She found four bedrooms and
two studies (not including the library), a chef ’s kitchen, a din-
ing room, a living room and parlor, a stone patio, and countless
closets— all of which were empty. Vacant yet welcoming; she
couldn’t be sure there wasn’t something dreadful about the
house that was yet to be discovered.
Back through the labyrinth of hallways, she couldn’t
help but appreciate the raised bumps of the intricate, painted
wallpaper. At the library, she took one more longing look at
the shelves of books and wondered if she’d be back again. On a
small table by the front door, the kind used for keeping track of
keys or mail, was a small box she recognized. She would have
thought it only a replica of the one she had at home, except the
box on table had a chip in the corner exactly like the chip her
own box had at home. She remembered the chip on hers came
from carrying it down the stairs of her parents’ home. She’d
been told the box was not a toy, but it had been given to her
for Christmas, and children received toys at Christmas, so she
treated it like one. When she accidentally stepped into a hole
in the yard, she dropped the box on a rock and wasn’t allowed
to play with it after that. Now it was tucked away in her base-
ment with other items from her childhood.
The pedestal with the chipped box tempted her. She
picked it up and held it gingerly in her hand, then opened the
lid. Inside, as if lodged in time, was her map and magnifying
glass—the ones meant for finding treasure buried somewhere
in her yard. In stories, she’d learned that when children went
digging they often found treasure.
47
She dropped the box and ran out the front door, her mind
flipping over itself. How had her box come to be in the pink
house?
Once home, she sat a moment at her kitchen table to
catch her breath. She took the note from her pocket and read
it again, then went to her office and placed it in a desk draw-
er. In a trance, she floated to her basement. In the stack with
items from her childhood, all of them undisturbed, was a box-
shaped hole.
On Wednesdays, Samantha had coffee with her friend
Bridget, a woman she’d met at a fundraiser for animal rights.
The Wednesday after discovering the pink house, she decided
to ask Bridget if she had ever seen it.
“You’ve lived here, what, seven years? Do you know
who owns that pink house between 8th and 7th Avenues?”
“Is it the one that looks like Frank Lloyd Wright de-
signed it?”
“No, it’s Victorian, well, maybe Bavarian. The front is
half-timbered.”
“Like that restaurant downtown?”
“Sort of.”
“I’ve never seen anything like that where you live.”
Samantha noticed that Bridget always found a way to
inadvertently separate the two of them.
She pressed Bridget for more details— who were the
architects in town? Was there anyone rich or important known
for having a house in her neighborhood? But, Bridget quick-
ly grew bored and shifted the conversation to her own kids.
Samantha convinced herself she enjoyed Bridget’s company
until the hour or so after they had parted. Yet, Bridget was the
only one of Samantha’s friends who always returned her calls.
Of all the traits a person could have, Samantha valued reliabil-
ity.
Samantha traveled past the pink house on her way
home. In the week since visiting, she had already made it her
default coping mechanism. She thought about the house al-
most constantly. When her husband seemed distant, or she
grieved for the two persons who almost existed, she imagined
herself sitting in the round room with a cup of tea, reading one
of the books from the many shelves. She thought of spring and
tending to the lilies, taking breaks on the patio with a glass of
lemonade. But then she remembered the box from her child-
hood and her fantasies became tinged in a yellow haze.
She drove slowly, so that when she came to the stretch
of road between 8th and 7th Avenues she could catch a new
glimpse of the house. When driving by in her car, the trees hid
the house from view so well that she almost convinced herself
it wasn’t there. On returning home, she traded her car for her
bicycle and set out again to make sure the house hadn’t van-
ished. Behind the gate with the family crest, the pink house
stood stately, unchanging. What a relief, she thought, it was
still there.
In the mailbox, she found another envelope with her
name on it.
Dear Samantha,
48 Ashley K. Warren
Thank you for coming to tour the house. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to
meet you. I’ve taken the liberty of leaving some supplies in case I
should miss you again. As always, please make yourself at home.
Cordially,
The Caretaker
She tucked the note in her pocket. She thought about the box
again and started to turn around, but she heard scratching
coming from the front door. She followed the sound and when
she opened the door, she found a small, grey rabbit.
The rabbit looked just like the ones she’d seen hop-
ping between the neighbors’ yards on her walks. They were
wild rabbits as far as she could tell, but this rabbit didn’t look
wild. It jumped at her shins like a Maltese, then hopped down
the hallway toward the center of the house.
Samantha didn’t know how to treat a pet rabbit, but
feeling very much like she’d stepped into Alice in Wonderland,
she followed the rabbit into the house.
On this day, she went to the kitchen to check the cup-
boards. She figured the food would give her a clue about the
owner’s tastes and stature. Though, perhaps the Caretaker had
selected the “supplies,” in which case whatever had been left
for her wouldn’t reflect on the owner at all. In the cupboards,
to her surprise, she found each one filled with her own favor-
ite foods—the little cheddar crackers shaped like turtles, the
chocolate cookies she’d eaten in Italy, Biscotti just like her
Aunt Bernadette used to make. In the refrigerator, Tupper-
ware containers filled with premade meals sat on every shelf,
waiting for her like little gifts. Fettuccine with marinara, wild
rice and roasted vegetables, and every condiment or embel-
lishment she could think of was available. Grated Parmesan,
fresh basil, sage, and thyme. On the counter, a bottle of red
wine sat next to an empty glass.
She chose the fettuccine, heated it in the stain-
less-steel microwave—just like the one she wanted for her
own kitchen—and sprinkled the cheese over the top. She
poured herself a glass of wine and sat at a barstool tucked be-
neath the granite countertop. Every bite tasted as if she were
eating in a restaurant, in a city, a real one, with tall buildings
and business suits, and rush hour. Somewhere less imposing
in its domesticity, somewhere she didn’t feel guilty all the time
for being childless and in her 30s.
She hadn’t known she didn’t like cooking until she
married. Her husband’s schedule made it so that she had to
cook all the time. Evenings in front of the stove, stirring and
waiting, she would have to remind herself it wouldn’t be any
different if she lived alone. The coagulated, disappointing
blandness of leftovers couldn’t be tasted anywhere in this
meal. Sitting on the stool, savoring each bite, a sense of com-
fort covered her like a cable knit sweater.
Her husband had just arrived home when she rolled
into the driveway. He’d slung the Canon bag containing all his
camera equipment over one shoulder, and was tipped to one
side to balance it. Samantha often repeated the English nursery
rhyme to herself when she saw her husband like that— There
was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile.
 “Did you go for another ride?” he asked.
Over the years she’d learned to just answer these sorts
of questions rather than point out their banality.
“Yes.” She climbed off her bicycle and pushed it into
the garage. “Have you eaten?”
“No— and I’m starving.”
Her indiscretion, though visiting the house hadn’t felt
that way until now, flushed through her like shame. “I’ll pull
something together,” she said quickly, and slipped into their
house as he trailed behind, lugging his bag of equipment.
She threw some lettuce into a bowl, then imprecisely
chopped a few tomatoes and mushrooms to throw on top. For
good measure, she popped a few pieces of bread in the toaster
and sprinkled some garlic salt on top. From her own cupboard,
she chose deep bowls so that he couldn’t see inside hers from
across the table. When they were seated, she waited until he
wasn’t looking and tonged one bunch of lettuce into her bowl,
something to pick at slowly while her husband ate.
He talked about his day, asked that she talk about
hers, and rubbed his forehead a few times the way he did when
he was stressed. There wasn’t much to tell him about copyedit-
ing. The most interesting thing about her day, she realized, was
the time she spent at the pink house.
Before she thought much about it she said, “I’ve been visiting
the pink house between 8th and 7th Avenues.”
Her husband took another bite and waited for her to
say more. She felt like he was ruining the effect she wanted the
statement to have.
“Okay…” he finally said.
“I took a tour.”
“What was it like inside?”
She told him about the library and the rugs and
the kitschy record player and the lilies. She described how it
smelled and the way the house felt like being miles away from
the world.
“Can I see it?” he asked.
She dropped her fork. She dropped her utensils often,
so it didn’t come across as a gesture of surprise.
“If it’s as nice as you say it is, I want to take some photos and
submit them to that local magazine, what’s it called—they’re
always wanting me to take pictures of houses around here,” he
said.
They set out on foot together after dinner and she
held out her hand the way she used to do when they were
dating. She’d display her palm as if asking, “Why is my hand
empty?” and wait for him to take it. He’d stopped noticing this
gesture years ago and didn’t notice it now, so she let her hand
fall at her side.
He talked as they walked and she let her mind wander
to the house—wondering what would she show him first and
if there’d be anything new on this visit. Eventually they came
to 9th Avenue and stopped.
“I thought you said it was between 7th and 8th ?” her
husband said.
“It is. I was distracted.”
They retraced their steps and when they came to the
block between 7th and 8th she couldn’t find the little path that
led to the pink house. Where it should have been, sat a bor-
ing, tan house with brown shutters and a Chevy Corsica in the
driveway. She walked a little further but all she found was an-
other boring house.
“It’s the strangest thing. I swear it was on this block.”
Her steps quickened, and her husband followed as
she checked the next block and the one after that. She tried the
adjacent blocks and the one kitty corner to where she started.
“Sam…”
“I swear there was a house here.”
“Maybe it’s like one of those Neil Gaiman stories.”
“You’re making fun of me.”
“I’m not, honey. I’m just saying it’s...fantastical.”
But her feelings were just hurt enough. They walked
home without speaking.
When she was able to find the house again the next
morning, she was relieved. She went straight to the library and
sat in the ballooning chair and let the cushions hug her at the
shoulders while the armrests pressed gently at her waist. Then
she began to cry, something she hadn’t done in years. When
she looked around the room for a box of tissues, she noticed a
book lying open on the table, the pages blank. A silver fountain
pen lay angled next to the book so that the lamplight made it
shine like Excalibur. She picked up the book and the pen and
crossed one knee to make herself a table, then began to write.
She wrote out every frustration she’d ever felt but
hadn’t voiced. The disagreements she had with writers where
she caved on matters of style, in fear of not getting paid. And
before that, the copy she wrote for ads that all carried the same
rhythm and cliched phrases that sucked the creativity from her
soul and atrophied her brain. Then having to go to Kentucky
at Christmas to visit her husband’s family (it was a smaller an-
noyance, but one she’d never admitted nonetheless), and her
indecision about wanting children and her husband’s adaman-
cy that he did not. When there weren’t any frustrations left,
she began writing down the things she wished could be differ-
ent, revising all the wrongs. Isn’t that what all of those self-help
books recommended, and that article she’d read in the New
York Times?
Her hand began to cramp and the pauses between
sentences became longer, so she decided to stop. She closed
the book and twisted the cap back onto the silver pen. As she
placed it back onto one of the shelves, lines of gold leaf ap-
peared on the spine. She brought her face toward the spine, as
if being closer would make what she saw less miraculous. On
the spine printed in gold leaf was her name.
When she returned home there was an envelope with
purple ink in her own mailbox.
Dear Samantha,
I came upon the story you left in the library. It’s a sad tale, but
I liked the ending very much. I like pleasant endings so much in
fact that I am obliged to help you with yours. If you would like to
have all the things you desire, and even those desires you’ve yet to
discover, I can give them to you.
Ashley K. Warren 49
 I can give them to you if you come and stay in the house.
Cordially,
The Caretaker
She had only been home for a few moments. The Caretaker
couldn’t possibly have read all that she had written and placed
this note in her mailbox before she returned home. She read
the note again, ‘stay in the house’—the phrase worried her.
The simplicity of the syntax made her feel it couldn’t possibly
be misunderstood, yet she couldn’t believe what was implied.
She turned the note over and pulled a pen from her pocket,
“Would I be allowed to leave the house?” she wrote. She placed
the note in the mailbox and went inside the house.
The next morning, she went to the mailbox to retrieve
the answer.
“no,” the note said.
She stopped visiting the house after that, fearing that
if she went, even for a quick visit, the Caretaker wouldn’t let
her go. Instead she worked. Editing had always been the sort
of distraction that kept her mind from collapsing in on itself.
She felt the faintest sense of joy when she could take some-
thing someone else had made and fix it. Even more joy when
she removed phrases all together. She lost track of time while
editing. It was the closest feeling she could get to being in the
pink house.
She realized one night that her husband hadn’t re-
turned home from work at his usual time. When she checked
her cellphone, a text with his usual idiom “On my way” ap-
peared in her notifications time stamped from two hours earli-
er.
She called out his name then checked the living
room, listening for the sound of his movements. She called his
phone, but he didn’t answer. She looked in every room and
paced the hallways, her search becoming panicked, but a panic
still small enough to be coated with denial.
Then he materialized from the den holding a book,
glasses in one hand.
“Where’ve you been?” Samantha asked.
“I’ve been here. I didn’t want to disturb you.”
She exhaled slowly and brushed the hair from her
face before remembering it was a phantom sensation. She’d
cut all her hair off over three years ago.
“I’ve been here the whole time,” he said.
Yet he hadn’t been, she knew.
The shape of him was still there, and the ratty sweat-
er, and the wiry hair, though even that was thinning. And the
words were right, but that was all.
She began visiting the house again and discovered she
could come and go freely. She visited every day, as if she were
going to the office, then went home at night. As the pink house
became firmer and more tangible, more reliably there when
she travelled down the block, her own house became less so. In
small pieces memories disappeared—memories of sitting in a
chair reading a book, washing dishes over the rusted kitchen
sink, planting flowers in the clay smeared dirt of her uneven
50 Ashley K. Warren
yard—and some memories she knew were already gone.
She was losing all sense of which thoughts had been
memories in the first place and which ones had only been
wishful thinking. For example, she couldn’t remember hav-
ing had a child, but she felt certain that she had. It was the
only explanation for the visions of cribs and rocking chairs
throughout her home. What used to be a corner with a white,
Victorian crib and blue bedding was now just a corner with a
white heating register and blue paint chipping from the walls.
Her closets had become miraculously empty, as if she’d hired a
life coach to help her go through every possession of her past
and donate, give away, or throw away the clutter until there was
nothing left.
The drawer in her desk had been emptied too. The
pencils and the calculator and all of the stray paper clips were
gone. It only held white pieces of paper, letters written in pur-
ple ink— all addressed to Samantha.
And one day, her husband didn’t come home, and she
felt no panic as she checked the hallways one more time for
him before she stepped out the front door.
The front door at the pink house was already open
when she arrived. The books in the library all had her name on
them by now and the trinkets she’d held onto all her life filled
the house as if they’d been there all along. From somewhere
deep inside she heard a tiny cry that made her ache with relief.
about the author
Ashley K. Warren writes
fiction and poetry. Her
work has appeared in
The Examined Life, Easy
Street, and in the anthol-
ogy Poems Across the
Big Sky II among other
places. A graduate of
the Stonecoast MFA
program, she has taught
writing at Montana State University Billings, Rocky
Mountain College, and to youth in the juvenile deten-
tion system through the nonprofit organization Free
Verse.
Girls’ Night Out a poem by

Precious McKenzie
After the bar hopping,
her leopard print bra hangs
abandoned on the bed post,
sweat soaked.
In the lucid light of dawn,
stuffed into a lingerie bag,
tossed on gentle cycle--
cold not hot
desire, washed clean away.
Removed and strung out,
drip drying,
drip drying.
drip drying.
Tear drops splashing
onto the bathroom floor.
Satin and spots,
and everything nice,
Girl, who are you waiting for?

about the author

Precious McKenzie is an associate professor of English at Rocky Mountain College. Her po-
ems have appeared in Gemini, Ellipsis, and as part of the Tupelo Press 30/30 Project. Her recent
books, for children and teens, include Cinder Yeti, Ruffian (Fall 2020), and the forthcoming The
Selkie (Spring 2021).

@PreciousMcKenzi @preciousmckenzie

51
 Bryon Rogers

52
 about the artist
Bryon Rogers grew
up in Belgrade,
Montana where
he attended high
school, and re-
ceived his B.S. in
Art Education at
University of Mon-
tana Western in
Dillon, Montana
in 1994. He has been active at summer festivals
such as the Livingston Festival of the Arts and
SLAM in Bozeman. He was also the co-owner
of the Freeman Gallery in Livingston, Montana.
His studio is located at 313 W. Mendenhall, Boz-
eman, Montana.

“I work in pencil, watercolor, ink and other

mediums. The subject matter includes wildlife,
landscapes, nudes, and vintage subject matter.”

BryonRogersArt

53
Three Poems
Kati Sanford
Kati Sanford is currently a post-grad student
/ corporate drone, with the someday-goal
of becoming a mental health counselor. She
loves grandma-esque activities including
crochet, baking, and owning cats, but she
54
about the author
keeps up with the times by downhill skiing
and wasting time via video games. You may
find her in a local coffee shop attempting to
write poetry or crying over graduate school
applications – always with a mocha in hand.
 Kati Sanford

Rickety
Persnickety, Pious,

Three-man band alliance

Tucking tired, tatty credence

Onto backs of fusty pews.

Indignity! Heinous.

No disciples – shameless.

Frail omission (admonition),

Plummet into subterfuge.

55
 Kati Sanford

Eschar
Blue eyes, fated future,
Light up my soul. Oh! that
Soul – a phenomenal
Actress.
We hear time heals all
Wounds;
Are open sores
With fingers searching each
Recess considered wounds
Or considered
A sentence?

Chasms, festered, know others

Since secrets loiter smugly
(maggots)
As time moves thoughts
From truth to that summer.
Damned not to fly: We don’t
Deserve escapes from
Wriggling beings reading
Minds, Soiled murmurs.
Please still my inquiring fingers.

No, I’m not in love, but

I’ll say that I am again
And again ‘til I’m dead.

56
 Kati Sanford

Wisp
Up she would go right into the clouds (that she’d make with her friends on a 70’s couch) so light and surreal and alone. The
most delicate breaths could blow her away, yet she’d grab them with ease, snatch up the reigns. Peering down, she would
quietly shout as loud as she could to companions with minds like chocolate. Sweet and lovely – or so one would think.
These were baker’s thoughts, no sugar, no heat. One bitter taste turned her sour and crumbly, though only a night at a time.

Looking at her, one would see right through to the backdrop of wherever one was, too. A wisp was she, floating and feeling
yet making no difference to her world. Enjoying tall figures adorned with shadows of the five ‘o clock variety, her solace was
found in musty sheets. Actions she took to maintain brittle connections pulled her apart and away with each vain attempt
to bring atoms back inside. Less there, not real, withdrawn to persist. Once she even gave up, yet it wasn’t enough. Long
shadows filled her midst.

Some years, some months, some hours went by, scrounging along at an unceasing pace as figures grew sparse and pages
piled with meaningful letters cluttering creased surfaces. At a point unknown, unwelcomed, this wisp had come to agree
that she did in fact have hands and she did in fact have teeth. Both could hold pens and one helped shout words and one
worked to clutter up pages. Praising new tools, she bore into reality, gnashing and scratching in search.

Now looking at her, one would see a soul as opaque as living trees struck down to create parchment with bindings. Hands
move across papers in an organized beat, they create, do not move idly. An intentional mind dwells behind eyes that work
to find magic and strength. Her teeth now have lips and these she loves most above anything else about her. For her words
may be shared and restrained and examined, but her smile creates instant change.

57
 Daniel Kessel

58
 about the photographer
Daniel Kessel is a visual artist based in Bill-
ings. From the moment he picked up a cam-
era and started shooting, he was hooked. He
loves sharing his artistic way of looking at
the world with others through photography,
and always operates under the idea that art
is everywhere, even in the most mundane—
you just have to train your eye and mind to
see differently. He is best known for his light
painting photography, a form of photography
involving long exposures and “painting” with
lights, but he enjoys a wide range of styles,
such as minimalistic, abstract, and landscapes,
as well as digital art. Daniel is always seek-
ing to grow as an artist, often experiment-
ing with new styles and ideas, always trying
to find new ways to express his creativity.
59
 fiction

38 Miles Ago
Brittney Uecker

about the author

Brittney (she/her) is a librarian and
writer who grew up in Billings and
now resides in Lewistown, Mon-
tana. She writes all lengths of fiction
and dabbles in poetry. Her work has
appeared in Stone of Madness Press,
Kalopsia Literary Magazine, Misplace-
ment Magazine, and elsewhere.
A chapter of her novel-in-prog-
ress appeared in the collection
Pages Penned in Pandemic in Jan-
uary 2021. She is @bonesand-
beer on Twitter and Instagram.

60
 “Let’s go!” this long, the runners were spread miles apart. I had no idea
how far ahead or behind me the trail was empty, but I couldn’t
“Lookin’ strong!”
think that far ahead. I couldn’t focus on what was beyond my
“Stay with it!”
immediate vicinity, what lay past the glowing orb of my head-
Thirty-eight miles ago, these things mattered. I
light illuminating the fifteen feet in front of me.
could have taken them to heart. Thirty-eight miles ago, it was
During training, I’d intentionally practiced this—
mid-morning. The sun was climbing, the air crisp with morn-
staying present. When my body began to hurt, when my legs
ing dew, and the spectators out on the course had not yet
felt like parking blocks and my lungs like dried-out sponges, I
grown weary of cheering. Thirty-eight miles ago, I could have
would be tempted to think ahead, to a burger and a beer and
run forever. I had glycogen in my muscles and a smile on my
a shower and maybe having sex with Emily that night. A good
face. Thirty-eight miles ago, I was only twenty-six miles in. A
distraction, but always temporary. I would inevitably gravitate
marathon distance. I had done this before. I had 0.2 miles left
back to the pain I couldn’t escape and it would increase ten-
to hold on to that familiarity until I was in uncharted territory,
fold.
having run further than I’d ever run before. I could no longer
To ride it out, to get past it, I had to stay grounded in
cling onto experience—I was at the mercy of my body.
the moment, in what I could see and feel around me.
Thirty-eight miles ago, I passed Emily at an aid station set up
I pushed the prospect of food and Emily out of my
where the forest thinned out into a clearing. Her eyes were ob-
mind and thought about the springiness of the moist trail
scured by the shadow of her hat and her arms were tan and
beneath my feet, the soft slap of my shoes against the dirt. I
peppered with freckles. She leaned over the fence that separat-
watched where the edge of the trail became woods, the delin-
ed the racers from the spectators and handed me a sandwich
eation between path and void, civilization and wilderness. I
bag full of gummy worms. Maybe she expected me to stop and
pumped my hands open and closed, felt the sting of my nails
chat, to take a second to eat something and pull myself togeth-
pressing into my palms, the stretch of the dried skin over my
er for the next seventy-four miles ahead. But I was steeped in
knuckles. I listened to my shaky, jagged breath entering and
the adrenaline of the moment and kept on running. I’d see her
exiting my body, felt the warm whoosh as it passed over my
again at the next aid station. There would be another chance.
lips and disappeared behind me.
It was at one of these races a few years ago that Emily
But my body was crumbling. By mile sixty, I was
and I first crossed paths, when we were both crewing a multi-
shaking uncontrollably and could hardly run in a straight line.
day adventure race for different runners. Crews and spectators
Everything I tried to eat came right back up, chewed but bare-
set up a giant camp in a meadow close to the trailhead, like
ly digested. I was running on fumes. My body felt lighter, but
an ultra-running Woodstock. I caught glimpses of her filling
only in the sense that every ounce of glycogen in my muscles
water bottles and squatting next to a camp stove and was in-
was spent, like the weightlessness of a dead battery. Sometimes
explicably drawn to her. Her laughter, boisterous and distinct,
in races or workouts I’d get a second wind—I’d feel terrible for
carried across the camp, and I eventually mustered the courage
a few miles but then something magical would kick in and I
to talk to her. By the end of the race, she was sleeping in my
could pull it together. But not this time. This was a brand new
tent.
type of unthought-of pain. I felt hollowed out.
As I sucked the sugar off of a worm, feeling the glu-
I hadn’t seen Emily for the rest of the day. This race
cose instantly hit my muscles like they had been thrown
was spartan, with many miles between aid stations and long
into a sizzling pan, I burned that image into my mind—her
chunks of the course on remote, inaccessible forest. It was pos-
half-shadowed face, the gap-toothed grin, her golden shoul-
sible that she didn’t time it right and we’d just missed each oth-
ders. I should have said something. I should have said fucking
er, or she got caught up cheering for our friends elsewhere on
anything.
the course. I tried not to take it personally, but as my body be-
Thirty-eight miles later, slowly closing in on thir-
gan to break down and I passed by another aid station with no
ty-nine, everything was falling apart. It was sometime in the
sign of her, I grew frustrated. I was annoyed that she couldn’t
middle of the night. My watch was dead—no pacing, no splits,
be there when I needed her, oblivious to the level of impor-
no time of day. I wallowed in a liminal, empty space with noth-
tance her presence held.
ing numerical to tie me back to earth. The spectators were long
I stopped and shut off my headlight. I looked at
gone, back to their campsites or hotel rooms, sleeping and
earth’s canopy above me. It was unfathomable, the clarity and
well-fed and stationary. I’m sure Emily was curled up in a ball
vastness of the night sky out in the wilderness. Constellations
in the center of her bed at the motel, the way she preferred to
and stars and planets that I had never seen in my life were alive
sleep, resting up for another day of cheering me through the
in stark, arresting detail. In the city, they were all the same uni-
final miles of this race. I was dying for that moment, for her
form dots of faint yellow light, just hints of stars. But out here,
golden shoulders again.
the fabric of the cosmos was varied and heterogenous, stars of
But right now, I was entirely alone. This far into a race
all sizes and intensities cast against waves of black and blue and

61
purple. I found the Big Dipper, tucked inside of Ursa Major
like an organ. Orion’s Belt. The Gemini twins. The red dot of
some planet. Cassiopeia, the crown, Emily’s favorite.
I don’t know how long I stood there motionless with
my head tipped to the heavens, but when I came back down
to earth, bringing my hand up to flick my headlight back on,
something caught my eye. It was a light ahead of me, maybe a
few hundred yards up the trail.
Another headlight. Another runner.
I started running towards it, but the stop had caused a
surge of lactic acid to pool in my quads, and I slowed to a walk
after a few strides. I didn’t stop to wonder why the headlight
was coming towards me, getting bigger, going backwards on
the course. I just knew I had to get to it, to meet it.
My headlight illuminated his face. The instant recognition
brought a rush of relief.
“Jared, man! What’s up?”
My friend, my training partner, someone who would
surely understand the depth of my physical suffering. I wanted
to hug him, to wrap my arms around familiarity, drawn to the
energy of another human. But I stopped when I saw the ex-
pression on his face. The forced, fleeting smile. The anguished
eyes. The tightness. Hints of pain.
“Hey, Kev,” he said quietly, trailing off.
Like the recognition, the feeling of doom was instan-
taneous. My heart dropped like a stone into my gut.
“What?” I asked. “What’s going on?”
I watched him grimace and look away towards the
same stars that I had just been marveled at, to Cassiopeia. I
watched him strain to find words. The intervening seconds
were interminable.
“Jared? What the fuck —”
“We’ve gotta go back, dude.”
My heart, having slowed when I stopped, now
thrashed against my ribcage.
“Go back? Why? What’s going on?”
He reached out to touch my arm, his skin electric
against mine. My headlight reflected off the tears in his eyes.
“It’s Emily, man.”
I couldn’t have heard him right.
“What?”
“It’s Emily. She, she…”
Cassiopeia flashed across my mind, my princess’
crown, and then I remembered her golden shoulders.
I hit the ground. I don’t remember exactly what hap-
pened, and I never had the heart to ask Jared how it played out,
that decisive moment of truth out there on the trail.
But that’s when the world broke open.
Not later, when we made it to the next aid station and
I stumbled catatonically into a truck that took us down the
mountain and to the closest hospital.
Not when I ran across the hospital parking lot and
62 Brittney Uecker
into the ER, past the humming doors and into her room, ran
faster than I had the entire race, some panicked phantom ener-
gy inoculating me with momentum.
Not when the doctor spoke to me in those harsh, clin-
ical terms, in a voice so calm it was cruel, words I could bare-
ly recognize or pick up. Aneurysm...sudden...not compatible
with life.
Maybe when I saw her I could say it broke open again,
or shattered further. It was hardly possible that this was the
same Emily that I saw thirty-eight miles ago, so vibrant and
alive. A makeshift airway down her throat parted her lips, and
a slew of tubes and lines rained from her limbs into machines
that beeped incessantly. Her head was bandaged, and I could
see where part of her hair had been crudely shaved to make
way for the craniotomy that would not save her. The baby
blue gown was sliding down, revealing the golden glow of her
shoulders.
Those shoulders.
That glimpse of her shoulders triggered a spiral of
guilt that would eviscerate me. The reminder that I had the
chance, thirty-eight miles ago, to take her all in for the last
time. To kiss her lips, coated in sour gummy sugar. To tip her
hat back and look into her eyes for the last time. For once, to
tell her that I loved her.
I splayed myself over her lifeless body and wailed.
One evening months later, after her ashes had been
spread in the mountains and after I cried over every scrap of
her belongings and after I hated the world and cursed the gods
and swore I’d never find joy again, I went on a run.
It was clunky and slow, the same pain after four miles
that I had felt after sixty-four. I wanted it to feel different, the
motions a new, unfamiliar type of movement, nothing like it
had been before. I didn’t want it to remind me of the last time
I’d run, when I was a different man entirely.
But it came back like it had never been gone, undeni-
able in my muscle memory. I thought I would hate it — that
with Emily’s death, everything good would be tarnished —
but I felt a lightening with each step. The movement seemed
to shake loose the sludge of my soul that I had let accumu-
late, evaporating to leave something else, something bare and
stripped and scarred, but new.
It felt good. I felt like I had her blessing. To run, to
continue, to feel joy again.
When I got back home, I laid down in my front lawn,
letting the grass tickle the backs of my already sore legs. The
sun had set and the night sky was awash in undulating dark-
ness. I was reminded of that night on the mountain, that last
moment of peace looking at the stars. It still hurt — it would
always hurt — but when my eyes traced to Casseopeia, the
glowing crown of my princess, I let myself smile.
Catholic Guilt a poem by

Brittney Uecker
Plastic bag left on the lawn:
a sweatshirt, CDs, a pair of underwear I never knew you stole.
A windstorm that night strew them about in the grass
and the whole neighborhood knew

Adolescence is nothing if not passionate impermanence.

Ponytail pendulums keep the time that’s passed
in basements and backyards and backseats.
Trying not to be seen, but there is always an ear to the ground.

We were brought together furiously before fully formed —

crooked teeth, limbs lanky, baby fat and bright eyes,
hearts pumping blood through vessels slickened by hormones.
Too fragile for our own good and too young to care.

You ripped me from the vine, unripened fruit.

Peach-fuzz skin but bitter meat on the inside.
Your lips on the cleft of my chin
where I always worried you’d sink your teeth.

You are my blueprint and I hate it,

the archetype to which all others must compare.
Years pile up and stretch but hardly distort.
I wish they would render you unrecognizable.

But my sinuses will always burn, and my stomach will always turn,
and my heart will always catch,
until I can consign you to oblivious
when I catch your dying scent.

63
 Blaine
Flores

64
 how to submit to feverdream

Our submissions are always open, and your submission may be accepted for an upcoming issue, if
not the next, depending on how it fits with the voice of each issue. All submissions should be sent
to submissions@feverdreammagazine.org as attached files.

Visit feverdreammagazine.org for specific issue deadlines.

poetry + prose fiction + nonfiction art + photography

Submit up to 10 pieces per submis-
sion! Attach in your email as one .docx
file, and each new piece should start on
a new page. Include titles, or make it
obvious that a piece is meant to be left
untitled.
Submit up to 10,000 words per submis-
sion! We accept short stories, novellas,
novel excerpts, critical essays, creative
nonfiction, dramas, original transla-
tions, and whatever else you have! At-
tach in your email as a .docx file.
We accept all forms of visual art! This
includes, but is not limited to: paint-
ings, drawings, photography, sculp-
tures, ceramics—the list goes on!
Please send your submission as a 300
PSI image.

Include a short biographical statement and picture of yourself (any one you like) with your submis-
sion—our focus is on our Montana writers and artists, and we want to show you off!

Optional: feel free to include an artist statement with your work. We love hearing the story behind
the work.

Email us at submissions@feverdreammagazine.org with any questions or message us on Facebook.

We can’t wait to see your stuff.

—FeverDream Editors

65
Feverdream Magazine Editorial staff

Editor-in-chief
Michael Wade recently graduated from MSUB. He was the editor-in-chief of The Rook,
a literary magazine that won an award for MSUB’s Most Outstanding Organization in
2020. He was also the winner of the 2020 Sigma Tau Delta Poetry Contest, the Lyle Coo-
per Award for Most Outstanding Graduate, and the winner of the Randall Gloege Cre-
ative writing awards in 2016 and 2017. He has an affinity for chasing storms, Tillamook
cheese, and Montana backroads.

co-editor and designer

Brie Barron is specializing in literature, linguistics, sociology, and environmental studies
at Montana State University Billings, and is the mother to two children who are, in fact,
the best. She has been a winner of Sigma Tau Delta’s MSUB poetry contest three years
running and her work has been published in Up the Staircase Quarterly, MSUB’s The
Rook, and Montana Research, Creativity, & Community Involvement. Most impor-
tantly, she can recite both of Mr. Darcy’s confessions of love in Pride & Prejudice from
memory.

Art editor
Dalayna Christenson was raised in small-town Montana where she perfected the art of
the mud pie in her mom’s garden and the local pool was an irrigation ditch. She com-
municates with belly laughs and is passionate about museums of all kinds no matter how
small or how boring. The hoard of house plants she tends to all have well thought out
names, and she takes pride in her title “The Lasagna Mama”.

photography editor
Daniel Kessel is a visual artist based in Billings. From the moment he picked up a camera
and started shooting, he was hooked. He loves sharing his artistic way of looking at the
world with others through photography, and always operates under the idea that art is
everywhere, even in the most mundane—you just have to train your eye and mind to see
differently. He is best known for his light painting photography, a form of photography
involving long exposures and “painting” with lights, but he enjoys a wide range of styles,
such as minimalistic, abstract, and landscapes, as well as digital art. Daniel is always seek-
ing to grow as an artist, often experimenting with new styles and ideas, always trying to
find new ways to express his creativity.

photography editor
Kasandra Kessel is a local Montana photographer and videographer based out of Billings,
MT. Her passion for photography and art first started around 10 years ago when she got
a point and shoot camera for Christmas. She specializes in edgy portraits, with the ma-
jority of her work being musicians, artists, and music videos. Her work has been featured
in a variety of newspapers, magazines, musician album covers, and currently has work
hanging at Craft Local in Billings. She also co-owns a photography team business called
‘Alienated Productions’ with her photographer husband, Daniel Kessel. Together, they
travel around doing a wide range of photography from portraits, weddings, landscapes,
and even light painting. Their unique perspective sets the tone for their style, and stands
them apart from other photographers in the area. You can find their work at Alien8Mt.
com , and their facebook page, ‘Alienated Productions.”
Past Issues

Issue 1
fall 2020

featuring the work of Haley Barthuly, Del Curfman, Daniel

Kessel, Jim Gransbery, Cara Chamberlain, Patrick Landry,
Precious McKenzie, Charlene Sleeper, Mary Uecker, and more.
F E V E R D RE AM MAGAZI N E I S
T H E WO RK OF COL L E CTO RS.

Here, we ask only for the fragmented pieces

of yourself that you’ve immortalized in art.

We want to know where you have been

and where you are going.

The Montana that we know is treasured

for a reason—that’s you and everyone else,
if you look closely—and we’d like to
put it in print.

At the intersection of chaos and form,

where you meet the page, the pen,
the brush, the lens,

that’s where we’ll meet you.