Wild Greens

Where will our voyages take us? From the West Coast of New Zealand to Memphis, Tennessee. Falling in love, ending a relationship, the heat of the seaside sun. Traveling through time as we age; traveling to new planets in the cosmos. In this issue, ad astra; the stars are the limit. Close your eyes, pack your bags, and come on this voyage with Wild Greens.

“Early Morning Trek,” a photo by D C Nobes, captures a group of researchers beginning their day. The poem “Are We Aging Out of This Scene?” by Blair Kilpatrick explores the journey of growing older as an artist and musician.

 Maggie Topel’s “Voyages” logo for the issue depicts the spaceship home of a traveler. Doug Jacquier’s short story, “The Parallel Universe of Memphis,” is a mostly-true tale about an Australian in America. The first of two photographs by Christopher J. Martin, “The Art of Hanging in There,” captures the fleeting moment of a boardwalk summer.

Lauren Kimball’s series Turtle and Hare is back this month with a new comic, “Go Your Own Way,” where our characters ponder an odd historical motif: three hares running in a triangle. Mysterious!

The haibun “billowing” by D C Nobes recollects a trip to Istanbul, and is accompanied by a photograph from the trip. “Love is a Riviera Train,” a poem by Colette Tennant, remembers a coastal trip on the train from Venice, Italy to Nice, France. “Seaside Pattern,” in watercolor by Melissa Lomax, uses shades of blue and repeating patterns to evoke a beach memory.

“We Were Complementary Colors,” a poem by Atria Pacaña tells the epic story of two friends torn apart no matter how desperately they fight to stay together. “Gravel Mountain” in graphite and ink by Lynne Marie Rosenberg shows the Sisyphean task of working so hard to get somewhere; believing you need to arrive when in fact there is nowhere to get to.

Angela Patera’s “Ship sailing by Skala Gialou Beach” in watercolor and white gel pen shows a view from the artist’s childhood island home. “The Wave --Wanderers,” a poem by Sarah Das Gupta, takes as its inspiration the Anglo-Saxon poem “The Seafarer.”

“Lost in Your Head,” the second of two photographs by Christopher J. Martin, portrays the mind wandering. “Not in Love,” a poem by Naila Francis, follows the end of a relationship.

“Asian Beach” in acrylics on canvas by Judy Robinson is inspired by the shifting beauty of the natural world. Bran Winkler’s short story, “Early Aughts” takes us into the rich imagination of a child who finds splendor in nature.

Journey before destination, readers.

-Rebecca

Are We Aging Out Of This Scene?

The Parallel Universe of Memphis 

by Doug Jacquier

I am an Australian visiting the universe of America. I have rented a car to drive from Washington, DC, to Austin, Texas, just so I can imagine myself in every American road movie ever made. 

I leave the rental garage and drive into a surreal world where people drive on the wrong side of the road. I discover a new level of terror as I navigate out of the city onto the freeway, where at least there is an expanse of distance between each direction and I get used to the inside and outside lanes being counterintuitive. I overtake another vehicle, return to the correct lane and slap the dashboard to celebrate my graduation from newbie school.

Later, the fuel gauge starts to flash me a warning. I negotiate my way off the freeway into a small town that personifies my vision of rural America and find a ‘gas’ station. There is no fuel cap lever in the car and the cap has no key. I sidle into the gas station office with a ‘moron’ sign flashing over my head and ask the woman at the counter for assistance. She points out that some modern cars have fuel caps that you simply push and they open. She is very kind when I go into pay and says ‘Honey, it happens all the time.’ I very much doubt it but her smile is sincere.

I stop for lunch at a truck stop. I study the menu and a woman with dyed blonde hair and a distinct shortage of teeth asks me what I’ll have. I give her my order and she looks at me as though I’m speaking Swahili. She says ‘Honey, just point at the pictures and I’ll bring it right over.’

In the evening I book into a motel and ask the manager for a recommendation for a place to eat. He gives me directions to a family-owned restaurant downtown and he’s on the money for my tastes. The waitress manages to cope with my Australian accent and we have a friendly conversation about how she’d love to visit my country one day. 

In the booth across the aisle from me, a young boy, there with his parents, has been paying very close attention. Between courses, he slips over opposite me. His mother, embarrassed, says ‘Bobby, leave the gentleman alone’ but I indicate all is fine. He says ‘You talk funny.’ I tell him that’s because I’m from Australia. He says ‘I like the way you talk. Say somethin’.’ So I tell him that when I was little I used to ride a kangaroo to school. His face expresses doubt but his eyes tell me he wants it to be true. He returns to his parents but watches my every move until I leave.

As I head to Memphis, I begin to think I’m getting the hang of this adventure. For that the gods punish me, by killing my phone on the outskirts of the city. A man at a gas station gives me directions to a phone repair shop. I overshoot my target and have to do a U-turn. I’ve mastered the driving in one direction part but the Escher-like machinations of this maneuver is a new challenge. 

However, I complete it safely and pull into a parking spot. A Police patrol car pulls in right next to me and a cop of approximately my own generous dimensions emerges and tells me that was a very dangerous place to do a U-turn. 

I look back at the flat road with no restriction signs and light traffic but I’m not about to argue. For all I know he may very well be right. I apologise, promise to be more careful in future and stupidly tell him I’m not from this universe. ‘You don’t say’ he says and gets back in the car and drives off. Only later do I realise that he never even asked to see my licence. Now I know I’m in another planetary system.

I enter the busy phone shop and approach the counter. A young man greets me. I tell him I’m from another universe and ask for his advice on whether my phone can be fixed. He looks at it briefly and says he doesn’t think so but calls over his manager for a second opinion. It is concluded that I am from another place in space and time and there is no hope for the phone. 

On leaving the shop, I don’t feel like I’m lost in space but I have a definite sense that I may need to learn to speak Klingon. 

Desperate for something approaching a reality that I recognise, I drive in under the portico of the Heartbreak Hotel, which is indeed at the end of Lonely Street. I step out of the car and Elvis is blasting from outside speakers. Inside the hotel, the lobby is laid out like a 50’s American living room, complete with TV playing black and white Elvis movies on a loop. In my room, there is a giant portrait of Elvis over my bed but thankfully no piped music. 

Later, I go down to the bar and there are colour Elvis movies in a loop on the TV and the barman is an Elvis impersonator. I tip him generously and he says, in a deep Elvis voice, ‘Thank you very much.’ 

I change hotels the next day. I never did visit Graceland, in case the real Elvis was still living there. That is a vortex I don’t want to encounter in my fragile state and, besides, Lonely Planet tells me aliens are normal at my next stop in Austin.

Love is a Riviera Train

by Colette Tennant

We Were Complementary Colors

The Wave --Wanderers

Not in Love

Early Aughts

by Bran Winkler

The peaceful wind chime, angelic in nature’s gale, stopped sounding. The symphony of crickets that harmonize during damp hours of midnight stupor have quieted. Even the trees, whose sharp, craggy branches normally scrape against the bedroom window, were muted. A sense of stillness enveloped the small summit town like a vacuum, creating an atmosphere both intimate and immense. It was this silence that stirred Jo Ellen from her slumber. When she woke, she laid so still that she might as well have been sleeping. She didn’t dare move out of fear of the deafening silence, whose compounding weight was not heard, but felt, deep in the recesses of her body. 

She was fearful of a world collapsing in on itself—when gravity would finally exert its full force on Mother Earth, folding her forward and rupturing all of space and time. Reaching out past her window, just near the horizon, tendrils of peridot and citrine flickered in the sky. Dark lightning sent from Zeus’ palace.  

The absence of noise from her footsteps was a curious matter. The hallway floorboard, which serves as an unmistakable marker during pursuits of hide-and-seek, utters not a sound. Jo Ellen stamped her feet, expecting the familiar hollow thud to reverberate into the kitchen ceiling and cause the pendulous chandelier to swing from side to side. Growing frustrated, she was met with silence again. She careened her head into her parents’ bedroom. Their sleeping forms remain undisturbed.

A bag was packed with gear, supplies, and aberrant trinkets: a silver compass, a dog whistle, and a potion infused with lavender, rosemary, thistle, and cotton. The binoculars hung around Jo Ellen’s neck were larger than her slim frame and ate up her upper torso. The previous day’s rain had made the weather damp and suffocating. It was the kind of heat that descended mercilessly upon the throat, the underarms, the chest, imposing its suffocating presence, demanding existence outside an unwelcome realm of moisture and sweat.

The walk through the mulberry grove to Cèsar’s house, normally brisk, was slowed by the formation of marshlands that occur after a day of storming. The grassy patches—which were already limited to begin with—were swallowed up by congealed pools of mud and bodies of rainwater. Jo Ellen has fond memories of when she was little and the grove’s firm ground went slick with mud puddles. She donned her swimsuit and attended to the mud pools with an air held by aristocrats attending a luxury spa in Greece.

The path to Cèsar’s was narrow and required expert dexterity and precision to cross the mud pools unscathed. Jo Ellen tossed down a tree branch and stepped onto the moss-laden bark. She held her arms out wide, T-pose, for stability. Slowly, she bent down, careful not to topple face-first into the mud, and reached for the branch that lay behind her, repeating the process. Each time she tossed the branch ahead of her, she strained to listen for the telltale thud as it hit the ground. There seemed to be a faint whisper of a sound, yet, the forest swallowed up any other noise that was regularly permitted, leaving her unsure if it was real or just a figment of her imagination.

The grove was darkened by the cover of the mulberry trees; rough patches of foliage stood guard over their fruit that glowed luminously by beams of moonlight homogenized with the flicker of vibrancy emanating from out over the reservoir. Those orbs of cherry red and galactic blue, extracted only from a star’s core, guided her to Cèsar’s home.      

His home was overtaken with plastic tarps that were dressed over the cracked shingles that proliferated the rooftop. The edges of the tarp, secured loosely by bags of sand separating at the seams, rippled in the wind. The house was darkened, embers of light extinguished with the tipping of Cèsar’s bottle. Jo Ellen tiptoed past his front door, careful not to make much noise before she realized her futile effort and chuckled at her own expense. She could unload her Father’s 20-gauge and the noise would evaporate like morning dew before it ever reached the drunken man’s ears. 

Cèsar’s dock crept out to the entrance of the reservoir like a hand reluctantly extending for a shake. Untrimmed clusters of pond weed and watermeal clutched greedily to the sides of the rowboat. Water sloshed about the hull in unison with the rhythmic knocking of the boat against the dock. A white bucket, slick with algae and leftover fish entrails, hung on the dock’s banister. Jo Ellen stood in the vessel and pushed off using the single oar left in the boat. 

Cities of mosquitoes swarmed low to the water. Their cyclical movements were similar to the flow of subatomic particles. Jo Ellen dipped her oar into the murky water, pushing hard on the reservoir’s floor to narrowly avoid one group of mosquitoes, only to direct herself to another. As she passed, adventurers, delirious from the scent of her blood, followed suit. Jo Ellen swats at a few of them before they can jab their long mouth parts into the tender areas of her body, but she is unable to fend them all off. They pricked at her thigh, her ankle, those spots soon to grow red and puffy with their venomous saliva. She touched the welt that morphed at her ankle and withdrew a finger damp with blood. Bug repellent hadn’t been considered for her midnight journey.

Her boat traveled down the alligator gait—not named for the reservoir’s inhabitants of gators (it doesn’t) but for the delta’s resemblance to the frame of a gator. Impossible to distinguish when traveling through the delta, but for those who ascend the summit of the Crag overlooking the reservoir, the sight resembles an alligator emerging from the water and venturing onto the land. 

The mouth of the delta, being the ‟gator’s tail,” is pointed and slim. It’s bundled between a canopy of twisted branches and mountain moss hanging out past the shoreline. Jo Ellen frequented the gait on hot days when the sun was blistering and the wind only accentuated its demand. Her parents permitted the frolicking of the neighboring groves and shaded areas but forbade her from venturing to the reservoir.

Their dismay would be hostile should they ever discover that she’d been taking Cèsar’s boat out for rides around the reservoir for some months now. Evening galas with the fish that swam dreamily under crescent moons, she’d ride out past the gait and was teleported to the reservoir that swallowed up the world. The first time she witnessed the expansiveness of the reservoir, tears welled in Jo Ellen’s eyes. She had never seen such a beautiful sight, and for it to have been just beyond her reach for so many years. 

It was a paradise she had thirsted for on summery days when she’d grown bored of climbing mulberry trees or visiting the great oaks in Tammy Ferguson’s backyard. Her parents had scared her when she was younger and inquired about what lay further. They told stories of little girls getting lost out over the reservoir or climbing up the crag, only to fall and eternally rest at eight years old. But none of that seemed to be true. Each time she visited the reservoir, she felt at peace. When she drifted across the water, which seemed to stretch towards eternity, she likened herself to an astronaut suspended in the vastness of space. She realized she could keep drifting indefinitely, perpetually adrift in the boundless expanse. 

The brilliance of colors she witnessed earlier silently clashed against the darkened sky still. However, she found it curious that they were contained only to the perimeter of the reservoir. She didn’t once witness them branch out past the large body of water or its surrounding woods. Dropped from the heavens, the electric spears would collide and recoil with fury. When they made contact, bolts of green and yellow surged through the air, echoing in the opposite direction. It was difficult to distinguish if they would produce a sound like thunder when lightning claps or if the duel was inherently silent, similar to the absence of noise during the movement of clouds. 

Jo Ellen moved the boat under the silent destruction. She raised her binoculars in hopes of viewing the source of this light show. But as far as the binoculars extended her vision, the bolts continued upwards into interstellar space above.    

She imagined these precarious bolts of lightning like medieval knights, their swords contained the essence of the galaxy as they fought. The peridot sword would be slapped thirty feet to her right, and then rebound with an extinguishing blow that would send the citrine sword to the furthest corner of the waters. It would disappear for a few minutes as if it needed time to regain its energy before the fight would continue back above her. Jo Ellen watched the peridot sword get pushed, shoved actually, up against the crag. The green source scraped along the surface of the mute giant. It carved long lashes into the side of the rock, its strength more cutting than laser beams in popular sci-fi novels.

Jo Ellen screamed; she knew because of the gesture, the opening of the mouth, the scratched feeling at the back of the throat after expending the force, but still the sound was absent. She screamed for after the fight was pushed against the crag, two large, amber eyes opened at the crag’s peak. They opened and closed slowly, an infant lifting from a deep slumber. Then, the sky seemed not like the sky at all but of Earthy fissures and brown tufts of flinty tallgrass. The crag had stood, four stumpy legs, made of rock and sift, lifted out of a kneel that had sunken deep within the soil. Waves of water rushed at the rowboat, jostling Jo Ellen from the bench and onto the wet floor. Lake water and a few fish lapped over the edge of the boat and landed on Jo Ellen. The fish floundered on the boat floor, their panic not so different from Jo Ellen’s. 

The crag swatted the arguing bolts of energy away like one does with pesky flies. A torrent of wind followed and ripped at Jo Ellen’s face and whipped at her clothes like she was caught in an awful rainstorm. Though the noise was absent still, she sensed the force and pressure it exerted as it reached her eardrums. The rock creature looked down at Jo Ellen. Petrified, all she could do was peer back up at the pondering crag, whose body was shaped like reptiles that took sun baths in the tropics. When it pointed its rocky snout down at the young girl, debris, and rock bits rained down on her head. Jo Ellen scrambled for the oar, but the boat’s rocking threw her off balance when she moved to her feet. 

The crag uprooted an oak tree, pulling it up as easily as one does a weed in their vegetable garden. The rounded rocks that Jo Ellen supposed were its teeth chomped down on the branches. An angry squirrel had fallen from the tree and scurried away from the giant.

Jo Ellen got hold of the oar and pushed against the water sloshing towards her boat. She put her back to the crag and rowed even after the fish quit shivering on the boat floor. She pushed with the oar till her arms throbbed and grew numb. She kept her eyes down, examining the water. It grew less murky as she moved away from the awakened mountain and turned to a cool blue. She could spot fish again, who moved in excited schools from the movement of the reservoir. She spotted a great big turtle, whose head was lifted above the surface, and its sturdy legs treaded below. In shallower water, Tadpoles darted from place to place, their activity erratic and lively. 

Dawn was making her ascent. Blood orange filled in at the edges of the sky. A pair of American Robins sang their morning duet. Slowly, then all at once, the void was filled with noise again. Jo Ellen touched her oar to the water’s surface, hearing the light, damp slap of contact. She heard the wooden groans emitted from the senior boat she commandeered. The wind, slightly cooler now, but still stuffy, whispered in her ears. 

With the magic of the rising morning, her fear of the curious crag disappeared. She felt guilty and wondered if her reaction had upset the giant or if it had feelings whatsoever. Still, only once Jo Ellen reached the opposite side of the reservoir did she look behind her. She lifted the binoculars to her face once more and moved them across the crag, whose rigid posture was back to his original position. As she pulled her binoculars down though, she witnessed those large amber eyes look up at her one last time. Open and close, slowly, sleepily, an infant drifting back to a deep slumber.