This selection, chosen by Managing Editor Krista Cox, is from How Blood Works by Ellene Glenn Moore, released by Kent State University Press in 2021.
Johnny Tremain
I.
I did not find out what happened to Johnny Tremain. He was a good-looking boy. Here is what I remember: cobblestones, stolen goblets, a candlelit hallway. At the bottom of the stairs, my mother flooded the kitchen with light from the refrigerator. Why are you crying, she whispered. The light sharpened her hands. I won’t say my head was full of papers.
II.
In Chapter 2, Johnny Tremain suffers a terrible accident in which liquid silver spills from a cracked crucible and burns his hand, fusing his thumb to his palm, crippling him, I think forever. This is significant because, because Johnny is a good-looking boy. His head is empty, and now his hand is burned.
III.
In the afternoon, my father carried a box full of papers to the door and down the front steps to the street. My mother cried as she stalked through the empty house. Papers fluttered to the brick sidewalk. Johnny Tremain lived on a street with cobbled stones, in a house with empty hallways. I won’t say I left my book on the rug and watched my father slam shut the car door, rub the grit from his hands.
IV.
Johnny brings home limes in a chapter I cannot remember. He got them, I don’t know where. Sailors, that’s right, or possibly many tented vendors along the cobblestone streets. If he stole them, I am sure he hid them in the silver goblets. I am sure he hides himself in the hallway, the kitchen, the window filled with grit.
V.
I won’t say I lied when I said I couldn’t find my homework. It was sitting clean on the white rug, on my bedroom floor, or maybe stuffed in the back of my desk. I won’t say I put it there, half full of nothing. I pressed my forehead against the window and did not watch as Johnny’s pride fell away.
VI.
I never did learn what happened to Johnny. I received a B on the final test. I won’t say I hid a study guide in an empty napkin disposal can in the bathroom. My desk was empty. My head was full. When I was through, my hands were seared with graphite.
Ellene Glenn Moore is an American writer living in Zürich. She is the author of How Blood Works (Kent State University Press, 2021), winner of the 2020 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. Ellene’s poetry, lyric non-fiction, and critical work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Best New Poets, Poetry Northwest, Brevity, West Branch, and elsewhere. Find her at elleneglennmoore.com.
