By Lucille Domizio

    When I was in the first grade I thought my teacher was bald. She wore a big black bonnet and a huge black dress. All I could see were her hands and her face. One of the kids asked if she was married and she replied “I’m married to God.” I barely knew who God was but I knew he didn’t look like any of the other fathers in our neighborhood. 

    At supper that night, I told my parents that Sister Mary Gabriel was married to God and had no hair. My mother said “Oh.” My father didn’t say anything. Short of a house-fire, his fish sticks came first. 

    I asked my grandparents about it. My grandpa said, “Who told the child that the Sister shaved her head?”  Even though they’d moved here from Italy about 60 years ago, they always got everything wrong.  Then my grandma chimed in, “Maybe the Pope wants nuns to get married now.”  Then my uncle shouted “Where’s Sunday’s Bulletin? Maybe they have something about it in there.”  While my uncle was yelling and calling the rectory, my mom and I escaped through the back door. 

    The next day we played soccer at recess and the ball landed on a small hill. I ran up the hill and saw a tall fence with little spaces between each slat so I got closer to see what was back there. I saw three women hanging laundry and laughing. One of them turned around and it was my teacher, Sister Mary Gabriel. No bonnet, tons of hair. 

     Does God know about this? 

     My heart was pounding as I ran back down the hill. 

    At supper I told my parents what happened behind the fence. Mom said nuns are people just like us, but choose to dedicate their lives to God. I feel that I’ve got it in me to be a saint. But I’ll never wear a hat.       

                                                     # 

      By Ed Baranosky 

      How and when did some American cities become like a Third World country?

      It’s there for everyone to see on the Travel Channel. You can see when the 
   narrators go to the cities of Europe. Those cities were devastated in World War II. 

      The people of these cities prospered on what used to be American traits: initiative,
  and hard work. They restored the grandeur of their heritage.   

      The national spotlight has been turned on Baltimore and Detroit, point out 
  deplorable conditions in which the people are living. If people there are waiting
  for someone else to come in and fix them they will be waiting until hell freezes over.

      If Cleveland and Pittsburgh have been rejuvenated, what’s holding back Detroit and Baltimore?
  Common sense would tell you it’s the wrong people in charge. 

      Why aren’t the citizens of these cities asking where the billions of federal aid money went? Instead 
  of Elijah Cummings, the Maryland congressman, using the opportunity to rally the people of
  Baltimore into action to better their conditions, his comment is: “The president is a racist.” 

     Three thousand years ago Moses said to the Israelites: “Mount your asses and camels
  and I will lead you to the promised land.” 

      If the people of Detroit and Baltimore want  their cities to get cleaned up they had better get off their asses, snuff out their Camel cigarettes, pick up a shovel, kill a rat then use the shovel to pick up thrash. 

      If any one of the 20 Pied Pipers that were on TV in Detroit for two days had gone there, put on old clothes and picked up a shovel and started to clean up trash, they would have shown a leadership that might have helped their cause.

    The part that’s lost on Americans today is work is always hard and usually dirty.  

    In the end if they put their backs into it they will find the results are worth it.                                                #

By John-Paul Marciano

    “Wake him up!” Sgt. Jim Hanson demanded.  “Throw a rock in his hole and wake him up!  And make sure he’s got his damn shoes on!”

    “What’s the big deal, Sarge?” Bird Dog called out.  “Ain’t no harm in a guy catchin’ a few winks.”

    Mordecai Jones was a big strapping farm boy from Iowa who pitched in the Federal League before the war.  Learning Mordecai played for the Chicago franchise during a night of heavy drinking, Jim started calling him “Chicago” and the name stuck.  Now Chicago fumbled around in his hole blindly searching for a rock and came up with one about an inch in diameter.  He flung it toward Hillbilly’s hole.

    “Hey!” Hillbilly whined and shot up in his hole.  “What the heck’s that?” Hillbilly asked drowsily.

    “Wake up you idiot,” Chicago hissed.  “Yer snorin’s gonna git us all killed.  An’ Sarge says ta git yer dang shoes on.”

    “They hurt my feet,” Hillbilly replied.

    “Quit yer bellyaching and do what Sarge says,” Chicago shot back.  “And do it quietly.”

    “Yeah, yeah,” Hillbilly retorted as he felt around the hole for his shoes.  “If God wanted us to be awake at this hour he’d a given us head lamps!”

    “Jus’ git yer dang shoes on an’ stay awake,” Chicago spat.

    “Gitch yer dang shoes on,” Hillbilly mimicked under his breath while putting on his shoes.  H.B. McCall, a.k.a. Hillbilly, was a brawny, 19-year-old West Virginian with a fourth-grade education who stood 6=foot-6 ½.  One evening during basic training someone asked him what H.B. stood for.  When H.B. responded with a blank stare, Jim couldn’t resist and said he thought it might be Hillbilly.

    Jim slid under his shelter-half and lit a cigarette.  He glanced at his watch before blowing the match out.  It was 2:30 a.m., another hour and a half until day break.  He was hungry but didn’t want to risk breaking any teeth on his hardtack, the only rations he had left.  So he just lay there smoking his cigarette while listening to his empty stomach grumble. He figured it would take about half an hour to slow crawl back to his original hole; no rush.

    The division was supposed to be relieved last night but, just after sunset, a runner from HQ came around and informed them the relieving division needed another day.  Jim told the guy it was no big deal because he didn’t have any plans anyway.  Not knowing how to reply, the runner just crawled away and moved down the line to the next hole.  Soon after Jim crawled out of his hole to where he was now.

    Jim took a final drag off his cigarette and buried the butt.  He packed his shelter-half, grabbed his rifle, and took a deep breath.  After gathering himself he made the sign of the cross and slithered out of his hole, beginning the slow crawl back to his original position.

#

By JR Jurzynski

Metallic.

The smell.

No getting rid of the smell.

Spilled.

The knife was sharpened to razor-sharp.

Preparation.

Cuts like a knife.

Heh-heh.

Focus.

Stay focused.

Trace evidence.

Drip, drip.

Oil.

The honing motion leaves markings on the sharpening stone and the blade.

Round and round she goes, and where she stops, nobody knows.

Heh-heh.

Minute serrations.

The oil and markings can be identified.

Problematic?

Trademark.

Sadistic bastard.

Who?

Me?

Heh-heh.

The sun settling toward Greenwich.

It was almost time.

Did she know it was almost time?

Probably not.

I did not ask her to edit my work.

And now…

Heh-heh.

Someone else’s work is about to get edited.

Heh-heh.

Busy-bodies, dead bodies, no life.

Will she piss her pants at the same time?

She doesn’t wear dresses.

Most don’t.

DNA.

Blood yes, urine possibly.

Pig Mountain or high cholesterol?

Nope.

Heh-heh.

I stopped typing and thought.

Where did that come from?

1000-pound mammoth.

What do you do with it?

Can you submit to it?

Would you?

Reflecting.

Kick the tires.

Peek under the hood.

Snoop around.

See what you find.

Fear.

Parked adjacent.

Drive away from the curb, Jeffrey.

by Karen Cheney

Sins of the mother rot her soul, children chide and Father scolds.

Father’s sins are seen as play, rolling into another day.

Mother’s sins are branded deep, into her flesh and haunting sleep.

No forgiveness can be found, and in the rot she slowly drowns . . .

Down

    down

       down

          down

           to

             Death’s

                cold

                   and

                      grey

                                         #

By John-Paul Marciano

     Sgt. Jim Hanson lay face down in the shallow hole he had dug a couple hours earlier.  About an hour after the sun went down, Jim crawled out when he couldn’t advance any farther under withering machine gun fire.

    He slithered forward about 150 yards closer to the German front lines to where he was now.  It was a chance he had taken every night for the last four nights.  He figured it was safer to be closer to the Germans when their artillery fired their nightly barrage and the rounds went over his head.  The problem with that logic was if American artillery answered back and the rounds fell short.

    That would turn the hole he dug into a grave.

    It was 2:15 a.m. July 22,1918 and what was left of Jim’s company found themselves just east of Berzy-le-Sec.  They had taken the railroad station by noon Sunday and were advancing on a sugar factory.  They began taking machine gun fire from an exposed left flank where a French Division was supposed to be and the advance stalled.

    Now here he was in no man’s land while German artillery probed to find the American front line.  For the past hour Jim pressed his body to the earth trying to make himself a smaller target.  His Springfield rifle lay in the hole next to him; useless in the black of night.  His gas mask was strapped to his chest and he used his body to shield his musette bag.

    Occasionally a German .77 mm artillery round would explode close enough to seemingly lift Jim’s body an inch or so before gravity took hold and slammed him back to the ground.  Stones and clods of earth showered him as he lay prone, afraid to move.  Long-range German artillery whined lazily overhead toward some unknown target in the rear.

    The cacophony from the bombardment helped drown out the cries of the wounded lying helplessly in the field behind him.  His nostrils were filled with dirt from pressing his face to the ground.  But even the smell of dirt couldn’t overcome the sickeningly sweet stench of decaying corpses which hung over the area.

    As suddenly as it started, the shelling abruptly stopped.  Jim lay on his stomach a few seconds longer and then rolled onto his back.  He stuck his filthy fingers in his mouth and nostrils trying to remove the dirt but to no avail.  Water would have helped but some Hun bastard shot a hole through his canteen that afternoon and now he had no water.  He could have stripped another off one of the many corpses he passed but he didn’t think it was worth the risk.

    “Bird Dog,” Jim called into the night.

    “Ho,” came a muffled reply.

    “Chicago,” Jim called.

    “Here.”

    “Honker!” Jim called a little louder.  A shot rang out.  Almost immediately Jim heard a thump in the pile of dirt he had pushed toward the German lines when he dug the hole.  A German sniper was trying to find the range.

    “Y’all right, Sarge?” Honker asked.

    “Yeah, fine,” Jim replied as he fumbled for his rifle.  He rolled onto his stomach and felt for the firing slot he made himself in the mound of dirt.  He gently placed his rifle into the slot and squeezed the trigger.  A German Maxim machine gun answered back spraying the area with intermittent bursts.  Jim shifted the rifle to aim in the general direction of the machine gun and squeezed off another round.  The Maxim gunner replied with another burst to the right of Jim’s hole.

    “Hey, Sarge!” Bird Dog called out.  “Quit screwin’ round.  Yer jus’ pissin’ ‘em off.”

    Jim squeezed off another round for good measure and dropped his rifle back in the hole.  He rolled onto his back and called, “Hillbilly?”

    No reply.

    “Hillbilly,” Jim called a little louder.

    Still no reply.

    “Hillbilly!” Jim called even louder still.

    “Sarge?” Chicago called back.

    “Yeah?”

    “Hillbilly’s. sleepin’.  I can hear’m snorin’ from here.”

                                             #

By J.R. Jurzynski

We called it Clarke’s pond and we were told not to go there.

Shimmying the fence or popping under where the nightly creatures made way was easy enough.

Once over or under onward through the front meadow, down an embankment, upstream along the brook, crossing a gravel road, onto the spillway.

Young legs and adventure were never tired.

A spit of water trickled down from a stagnated surface. Tall summer grasses hedged the sun’s side—pies and muck lazily trod by cloven hooves the other.

Upon the croak-it belched authority, “Mmwrava, mmrav, mrav.” 

The responsorial hymn, “Bbr, bbra, bbrava.”

A flat stone garnered from the gravel when properly flicked against the surface mirrored circular waveforms. Each new attempt a practice in the arts.

Always from the other side, from the yard, from beneath giant maples lining gravel, she would appear waving her cane in the air, summoning powers and yelling, “You kids get out of here.”

“Get off my property.”

“You don’t belong here.”

Not all scattered.

Eternally in her farm dress; fragile, strained, she would move closer down her gravel, raising cane and again, “Get off my property.”

“You don’t belong here.”

The land was hers yanked from history and as ancient as she was, she defended the right to call it hers.

Spillway separated bondage and freedom.

No longer a yell, nor raising cane nor vehemence she once more would offer, “You don’t belong here.”

Indelible etchings are unseparated by the sand.

We called her Rosetta.

Ω

By Ed Baranosky

    Chet Mc Donough is a jolly fun-loving fellow and when you meet him you can’t help but like him.

    In Fairfield, CT on any morning in 1944 at 7:30 a.m. on the corner of Knapps Highway and Black Rock Turnpike, if you were a high school student on the school bus, you would be sitting waiting for Chet.

     Invariably he would be running toward the bus with his untied tie around his neck and his shirt tails out of his pants. It was amazing to see how he held onto his books and lunch bag without dropping anything.

    Chet would never be there on time. The bus driver must have liked him because he never drove off without him. Chet was late for the bus his entire four years of high school.

    Graduating in 1947, Chet joined the Marines and signed up for three years. He was stationed at various posts around the world. His last assignment was in the Pacific on the island of Guam.

     In the second week of June, 1950 he was on a ship bringing him home with other Marines whose enlistments were also about to be up. On June 25, 1950 North Korea attacked South Korea. The UN passed a resolution to intervene to drive North Korea out of South Korea. The ship Chet was on was ordered to turn around and head for Japan. Destiny was pointing its finger at Chet.

   The North Korean forces were pushing into South Korea with surprising speed against South Korean and what small American army units that were there.  These forces retreated into a defense perimeter around the port of Pusan.

     Arriving in Korea in early July, the Marines were thrown into the Pusan perimeter with the South Korean and U.S. divisions, assigned to holding the perimeter against repeated attacks by far superior numbers of North Korean forces. Through extraordinary efforts they held on.

    The world finally got its act together and forces of the U.N. began to arrive to help. The fighting around the perimeter went on through the summer.

    On September 15, 1950 in a brilliant stroke General MacArthur, the commander of the U.N. forces, invaded North Korea at the port of Inchon. The intention was to cut across the peninsula and isolate all North Korean forces in the south. The move succeeded.

    In another stroke of genius, an amphibious landing was made on the eastern shore of the Korean Peninsula at Wonsan. Chet was with the Marines that went ashore. The Republic of Korea and American army divisions advanced along the eastern side of the Chosen Reservoir and the U.S Marines advanced along the western shore to a place called Haguri, heading toward the Yalu River, the Korean border with China.

     It was late November. The troops were saying they would be home by Christmas. Then the Chinese struck with 300,000 troops. MacArthur’s ego kicked in. He said “We’ll bloody their nose.” Against this onslaught all Allied forces on each side of the Chosen reservoir were forced to retreat. It was a fighting retreat during one of the worst winters recorded in Korea. On Christmas Eve, 1950 the Marines, the ROK and U.S. army divisions were evacuated at the port of Wonsan. Chet was not late for that ship. 

                                                          #

By John-Paul Marciano

“What are you doing here?”

That’s what I was asking myself while staring at the Munich U-Bahn map with no destination in mind.  I was 2½ weeks into a four week-vacation and I was supposed to be vacationing in Italy with my friend Matt.

My plan was to fly to Amsterdam, rent a car and pick up Matt.  From there we would spend three weeks touring the west coast of Italy.  Sounds like a great vacation, doesn’t it?  I sure thought it did.  “So why aren’t you in Italy?”  Let me tell you.

Two weeks earlier I arrived in Schiphol Airport on a flight from JFK.  After I picked up my luggage, I rented a car and drove to Matt’s apartment located on a dead-end road not far from Amsterdam Central Station.  On the drive over I thought we could go out for breakfast then go back to his place to load his stuff in the car.  What the heck?  We’re on vacation so what’s the rush, right?

I happened to find a parking space in front of his apartment building which, in Amsterdam, is a minor miracle.  I was excited.  Here I was two hours into my vacation and I had a smooth flight over, my luggage made it across the ocean on time and intact, it was smooth sailing through customs, my rental car was waiting for me when I got there and I found a convenient parking space in Amsterdam.  What could possibly go wrong?

I walked into the building, rang the bell to Matt’s apartment and waited to be buzzed in.  No answer.  I waited a couple minutes and buzzed again.  No answer.  “Maybe he’s in the shower,” I thought to myself.  So I went outside and sat on the stoop.  I smoked a couple cigarettes and enjoyed the crisp morning air while waiting for Matt to come out of the shower.  I walked back into the building and rang the bell.  No answer.  “Hmm.  Maybe he had an errand to run.”  I went back outside and lit a cigarette.

I sat on the stoop and considered my options.  I really didn’t want to leave until I found out what happened to Matt.  A whole slew of scenarios crossed my mind; some of them quite unpleasant.  I decided to wait until I could talk to one of his neighbors before leaving.

I don’t know how long I sat there but, judging by the number of cigarette butts I flicked into the gutter, I’d guess close to an hour.  A young man rounded the corner and walked toward me.

“Hello, are you John?” he called out.

“I am,” I replied getting to my feet.

“I’m Peter, Matt’s neighbor,” he said extending his hand.  I shook it and he continued.  “I just dropped Matt off at Schiphol.”

“That’s funny.  I was supposed to pick him up here.  What’s he doing there?”

“He’s flying to America,” was Peter’s response.  “He wanted me to apologize on his behalf.  Something came up and he had to leave.”

“I just talked to him yesterday morning and he never said anything,” I said while rubbing the back of my head.

“I’m sorry but I don’t know anything more,” he said apologetically.  “Would you like to come in for a cup of coffee?” he offered.

I mulled things over for a few seconds and made up my mind to go to Germany.  “Thanks, but I think I’ll pass.  Where’d you park your car?”

He looked perplexed but replied, “A couple blocks from here.”

“Why don’t you get your car?  You can have my spot,” I said pointing to my car.  “I’ll wait.”

He hesitated and said, “Thank you.”

“No problem, I won’t be needing it.”

#

by Lucille Domizio

My biggest regret is not moving to Buffalo. It would have changed the course of my life.

Looking back, I recall my parents howled with laughter when I told them I was moving away to be with Joe. “He has mischievous eyes” said Mom. “And he’s a man.” Dad was equally skeptical. “What do you know about being married?” he asked. “You’re too young.”

I met Joe through mutual friends and we started dating in the summer of 1976. We saw a show at the Downtown Cabaret Theatre in Bridgeport and went to the Pike Diner for the best burgers and fries ever.

He told me a lot of personal things and I couldn’t believe he would confide in me so early in our relationship. I asked him why the sudden interest in me. He said he didn’t travel all the way from Long Island for nothing and thought it would be fun to go out with me. We also talked about marriage.

My heart was beating out of my chest when he kissed me good night. He said he’d call again and he did.

I woke up sick the morning of the followup day. I took medication and spent the whole day telling my mother that I was going on the date whether I was dead or had to go by ambulance. My aunt and uncle came by and thought I looked great. They said I should go if I felt okay.

So Joe shows up and when I told him I was sick he became extremely comforting.  We were supposed to see a play. When we got there I was freezing. Joe put his jacket around my shoulders. He kept asking me how I felt and when my teeth started chattering, he put his arms around me. I thought he was so cute.

When we got to my house we had a make-out session. He left around 3 a.m. And we continued to see each other until it was time for Joe to go back to school in Buffalo for his master’s degree. He asked me to go with him and I really wanted to go. But, at 20, I knew that my parents would never allow it. So after much angst I declined.

After the big farewell on my parents front porch, I gave him my address and he said he’d let me know his address when he got to school. Then I said, “Gee, isn’t it great that we’re not in love? This would be much harder if we were.” And Joe said, “We are in love. You just don’t know it yet.”

I never heard from him again.

#