Tag: RopeWalk Press

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Kirsten Clodfelter’s “Casualties”

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This excerpt is part of the story “My American Father”, from Kirsten Clodfelter’s fiction chapbook, Casualties.

If I look up my name in a baby book, it lists the meaning of

Sumrah as reward. The actual definition is a little different—gift

for a good deed. For my mother, a compensation. But this is the

first thing I’m going to tell my father when I meet him, that I am

a gift.

Mom tells the story differently depending on when I ask, so I

don’t know which parts are true. Sometimes she uses words like

insisted and coerced. She wants whoever’s listening to read between

and nod sympathetically, to understand why she had to leave,

that she had no choice, but I’m pretty sure there’s more than what

she says. That’s the way Mom is about things. Why else would

she still keep that photograph and the folded Ginsberg poem he

once copied for her hidden underneath the silk nightgowns in

her dresser?

In the picture, this young version of my father is twenty-one,

just two years older than I am now. His brown hair is cut close

to his scalp and he has the cocksure, unsmiling face most soldiers

wear in photographs. He’s dressed in his fatigues, but my beautiful

mother had asked him to set down his gun when she held up

her camera.

When I ask Mom to tell me about him, she talks around

him instead. She explains about Kuwait University’s College for

Women, her year of study toward becoming a language therapist,

her own father’s disappearance shortly after the occupation. She

reminds me that Iraq owed Kuwait billions of dollars after the war

with Iran, that Saddam was a liar. Sometimes I pretend it’s the

first time I’ve heard this part of the story, and other times I let my

breath out in an exasperated puff and remind her she’s told me at

least a hundred times before.

When I get like that, frustrated by what she won’t say, she slips

me little details. She tells me that the attractive American soldier

was named Timothy Arlington, that he told good jokes even

during a time of war, that he was convincing. In March of 1991,

when the U.S. troops began to move out of the Persian Gulf, she

said goodbye. But two months later she was on an airplane headed

to the United States herself, her stomach still flat and girlish,

Timothy’s phone number and address printed carefully in the first

page of her journal.

She was one of the lucky ones—this is what she says. She had

an uncle working for the American Embassy, and when I press

her further, when I ask what would have happened if she hadn’t,

she always begins, “Otherwise,” and then shrugs her shoulders, as

if there is nothing left to discuss.

I want to know why she never called him, why she chose to

stay with a distant cousin in Pittsburgh—someone she had never

even met—until she was finally able to support the both of us on

her own, why she didn’t even want to let him know she was in

America. She explains, “Our lives were too different. It never

would have worked here.” I want to stop being angry with her for

that choice, but I can’t.

My mother knows that I don’t agree, that I don’t find our

lives to be all that different. But what she does not know is that

Timothy Arlington has been easy to look up and track down on

the Internet. That after he got out of the Army, he went to college

for mechanical engineering in New York. That now he lives in

New Jersey where he owns his own company working as a safety

consultant for commercial construction projects. That right now,

I have borrowed her car to drive there.

I imagine my father as an inverse of my mother, an explanation

for the ways that she and I are not alike. When I envision him, I see

a man who talks a lot, the kind of person who laughs every time

there’s a pause in conversation—not because he’s nervous, but

because he’s happy, and it’s hard to contain that kind of happiness

inside of a body. I imagine that when he was with my mother, he

spoke to fill in her silences, and that this made both of them feel

more comfortable.

—

This selection is from Kirsten Clodfelter’s fiction chapbook, Casualties, available from RopeWalk Press. Purchase your copy here!

Kirsten Clodfelter’s writing has been previously published in The Iowa Review, Brevity, Narrative Magazine, Green Mountains Review, and The Good Men Project, among others, and is forthcoming in storySouth. Her chapbook of war-impact stories, Casualties, was published last October by RopeWalk Press. A regular contributor to As It Ought to Be and Series Editor of the small-press review series, At the Margins, Clodfelter lives in Southern Indiana with her partner and young daughter.

Meagan Cass is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois Springfield, where she teaches courses in creative writing, independent publishing, and composition, curates the Shelterbelt reading series, and advises the campus literary journal, the Alchemist Review. Her fiction has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Pinch, Hobart Web, PANK, and Puerto del Sol, among other journals. Magic Helicopter Press will publish her first fiction chapbook, Range of Motion, in January 2014. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana Lafayette and an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Kirsten Clodfelter’s “Casualties”

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This excerpt is from the story “Where Will I Go in Search of Your Safety?” in Kirsten Clodfelter’s fiction chapbook, Casualties.

 

When he calls, Daniel tells me he’s still having that dream almost

every night, that we’re down at Otter Creek, skipping rocks on the

grassy bank that backed up against his family farm’s property line

in Terre Haute, where he grew up. He says it with a bit of wonder

edging into his voice, as if throughout these four months of his first

deployment I’ve had something to do with where his subconscious

mind takes him.

As he talks, his faint, uneasy laughter is swallowed by the

crackling static, and I’m reminded that what’s binding us together

in this moment is fragile—an electromagnetic transmission

carrying our voices through a distant satellite to cover the six

thousand miles between us—and the science of this feels so unreal

that it’s like magic. I try to picture that old farmhouse and the

creek from my husband’s childhood, but it’s too much like an

Edward Hopper painting no one remembers the name of, too

easy and idyllic for him to really dream us there night after night;

and I, ungrateful little ass that I am, feel sure that he’s lying, that

something so tender must be untrue.

But as he goes on, I hear the pitch of something dangerous start to

creep in, a flicker that hints at how close he might be to falling apart.

He won’t really talk to me about losing Carter last week in a firefight

outside of Mosul, or about how, only a few days after his company

first arrived at FOB Marez, while going through a checkpoint at

Kisik with his platoon, three PFCs in the armored Humvee in front

of his own suddenly disappeared, the instantaneous shattering of

bones accompanied by the loud explosion of an RPG, the twisted,

smoking shell of their split-apart vehicle coming to rest just outside

of the crater made by mortar fire.

“They were there, and then they weren’t,” he had said to me,

days later, when he could finally call. “There was nothing to even

look for.” His voice sounded lost somewhere inside his own body,

and that was the last time he spoke of it.

—

This selection is from Kirsten Clodfelter’s fiction chapbook, Casualties, available from RopeWalk Press. Purchase your copy here!

Kirsten Clodfelter’s writing has been previously published in The Iowa Review, Brevity, Narrative Magazine, Green Mountains Review, and The Good Men Project, among others, and is forthcoming in storySouth. Her chapbook of war-impact stories, Casualties, was published last October by RopeWalk Press. A regular contributor to As It Ought to Be and Series Editor of the small-press review series, At the Margins, Clodfelter lives in Southern Indiana with her partner and young daughter.

Meagan Cass is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois Springfield, where she teaches courses in creative writing, independent publishing, and composition, curates the Shelterbelt reading series, and advises the campus literary journal, the Alchemist Review. Her fiction has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Pinch, Hobart Web, PANK, and Puerto del Sol, among other journals. Magic Helicopter Press will publish her first fiction chapbook, Range of Motion, in January 2014. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana Lafayette and an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Kirsten Clodfelter’s “Casualties”

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This excerpt is from the story “The Silence Here Owns Everything”, from Kirsten Clodfelter’s fiction chapbook, Casualties.

 

III. Routines

I sit on Kendra’s bed while she French-braids my hair. She does

it over and over, gets to the bottom and then unthreads the strands

to begin again. She always needs to be doing something—she has

a nervous energy; this is what her mom sometimes says to me.

Kendra’s fingernails against my scalp are a comfort, and I close my

eyes and let that touch be the only thing.

I hate that I cannot French-braid hair. I hate the moments

that I have to admit this at sleepover birthday parties or during

homeroom when Mr. Jackson isn’t paying attention to the girls

sitting in the back row. I hate that there are so many things my dad

has taught me—not to wear black shoes with a navy-blue dress,

how to stop a run in tights with clear nail polish, how cold water

best removes a bloodstain from underwear—but that he is unable

to teach me this one thing.

Kendra is my oldest friend, my only friend who met my mother

before she got sick, who ever even knew my mom at all. I don’t

like to talk about this with anyone, but Kendra somehow knows

without me ever telling her, and she says the words about it that

I cannot. “You must miss her,” or “Tell me something else about

her,” or “My mom is basically in love with you, so we can share,”

but today she does not say any of these things; today she just braids

and unbraids, braids and unbraids.

—

This selection is from Kirsten Clodfelter’s fiction chapbook, Casualties, available from RopeWalk Press. Purchase your copy here!

Kirsten Clodfelter’s writing has been previously published in The Iowa Review, Brevity, Narrative Magazine, Green Mountains Review, and The Good Men Project, among others, and is forthcoming in storySouth. Her chapbook of war-impact stories, Casualties, was published last October by RopeWalk Press. A regular contributor to As It Ought to Be and Series Editor of the small-press review series, At the Margins, Clodfelter lives in Southern Indiana with her partner and young daughter.

Meagan Cass is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois Springfield, where she teaches courses in creative writing, independent publishing, and composition, curates the Shelterbelt reading series, and advises the campus literary journal, the Alchemist Review. Her fiction has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Pinch, Hobart Web, PANK, and Puerto del Sol, among other journals. Magic Helicopter Press will publish her first fiction chapbook, Range of Motion, in January 2014. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana Lafayette and an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College.

 

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Kirsten Clodfelter’s “Casualties”

Image

This excerpt is from the story “The Silence Here Owns Everything”, from Kirsten Clodfelter’s chapbook, Casualties.

 

II. Welcome Home

When Kendra’s brother comes home on leave, her parents

tie three balloons to the mailbox—one red, one white, one blue.

He’s been back for almost a week now, and the balloons are

mostly deflated, hanging limply on their strings. Today they look

especially sad, a reminder that something fun happened here

recently but is now over. Kendra and I walk into her kitchen when

we get home from school, and Gavin is standing at the counter

with a bag of chips, drinking a beer. He nods at us but doesn’t say

hello. He’s tan and his hair is short, and a part of me wishes he

were still wearing his fatigues—I like the way he looks when he’s

dressed up in his army outfit.

Kendra takes two beers from the box in the fridge and passes one

to me from the other side of the counter. Gavin lifts hers from her

hand and says, “Not old enough,” and Kendra snorts. “Neither are

you,” she says as she opens the refrigerator door and takes another.

“I’m fighting in a war, I can drink if I want,” he tells us, and the

way he says it makes me think he’s been practicing that line in his

head for a while now, waiting for a chance to use it.

Kendra squints until the sharp blue of her eyes dulls. “You’ve

been in Nevada for the last ten months. Shut up.”

The noise of her can cracking open in the still, warm air of the

kitchen makes me jump, and Gavin laughs, and this is a good thing

because somehow it eases the tension between the two of them.

I watch Kendra hold the aluminum to her lips, and I think about

the way the bitter liquid is splashing cool and bubbly into her

mouth, and then Gavin slams his hand down hard on the counter

and yells, “So, Natalie, how’s it going?”

“You know, fine,” I say, and then I open my can and raise it in

cheers because I can’t think of a single thing to say. I don’t want to

hear the sound of myself swallowing, so finally I ask Gavin, “What

were you doing in Nevada,” and sip my beer slowly as he replies.

“Military defense by satellite,” he tells me. “Some pretty intense

shit.” He takes a handful of chips out of the bag and adds, “Enough

to deserve this fucking beer, anyway.” Kendra rolls her eyes, and

I think of telling both of them that not everything has to be a

competition, but I let the words wash back down my throat. When

I finish my beer, I shake the empty until Kendra hands me another.

—

This selection is from Kirsten Clodfelter’s fiction chapbook, Casualties, available from RopeWalk Press. Purchase your copy here!

Kirsten Clodfelter’s writing has been previously published in The Iowa Review, Brevity, Narrative Magazine, Green Mountains Review, and The Good Men Project, among others, and is forthcoming in storySouth. Her chapbook of war-impact stories, Casualties, was published last October by RopeWalk Press. A regular contributor to As It Ought to Be and Series Editor of the small-press review series, At the Margins, Clodfelter lives in Southern Indiana with her partner and young daughter.

Meagan Cass is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois Springfield, where she teaches courses in creative writing, independent publishing, and composition, curates the Shelterbelt reading series, and advises the campus literary journal, the Alchemist Review. Her fiction has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Pinch, Hobart Web, PANK, and Puerto del Sol, among other journals. Magic Helicopter Press will publish her first fiction chapbook, Range of Motion, in January 2014. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana Lafayette and an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College.

 

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Kirsten Clodfelter’s “Casualties”

Image

This excerpt is from the story “The Silence Here Owns Everything”, from Kirsten Clodfelter’s chapbook, Casualties. 

I. A Lesson for the Young Cartographer

After the final bell, Kendra and I walk the mile from Bloomington

High North to our neighborhood. Even with a breeze it’s too hot

for May, and underneath my backpack my tank top is damp and

sticks to my skin, a heaviness waiting to be peeled. Wind tangles

Kendra’s straight, blonde hair until she looks like one of the wolf

girls Miss Collington told us about this morning in world history.

I picture the grainy, black-and-white images she showed on the

overhead projector, of the little girl found in a forest in Ukraine,

running naked on all fours with a pack of wild dogs, growling and

clawing to protect her own—a girl and not a girl without even

I step over a crack in the sidewalk and tell Kendra, “You pretty

much look feral right now,” and she sweeps her messy hair behind

her shoulders and laughs a big laugh. I turn to watch her face and

see the pink of her tongue like a treasure.

She came in late to homeroom this morning with bruises

around her mouth like she’d been kissing too hard or back-talking

her dad or eating plums. I’ve wanted all day to ask, and when I do

she grabs my hand and squeezes my fingers hard together so I won’t

leave, but I’m not leaving, and I want to say that but I can’t find my

voice anywhere in the warm that rushes up from my stomach and

rises and rises until it blooms behind my ribs, stretching my body

from inside until I’m sure it will leave whispery lines of proof in

my skin. I want to lick the purpled marks from her mouth like a

stain. Kendra’s waiting or maybe not waiting for me to speak, but

instead I stay quiet and am careful to look down at nothing but

the pattern of triangles on my skirt, to keep everything as still as

possible. My fingers tingle against her palm and I don’t move them

and she doesn’t move them, and when the silence finally presses

too heavy between us, I trace my thumb slowly over and over the

pale-blue veins on the back of her hand like I’m reading our map

back home.

—

This selection is from Kirsten Clodfelter’s fiction chapbook, Casualties, available from RopeWalk Press. Purchase your copy here!

Kirsten Clodfelter’s writing has been previously published in The Iowa Review, Brevity, Narrative Magazine, Green Mountains Review, and The Good Men Project, among others, and is forthcoming in storySouth. Her chapbook of war-impact stories, Casualties, was published last October by RopeWalk Press. A regular contributor to As It Ought to Be and Series Editor of the small-press review series, At the Margins, Clodfelter lives in Southern Indiana with her partner and young daughter.

Meagan Cass is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois Springfield, where she teaches courses in creative writing, independent publishing, and composition, curates the Shelterbelt reading series, and advises the campus literary journal, the Alchemist Review. Her fiction has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Pinch, Hobart Web, PANK, and Puerto del Sol, among other journals. Magic Helicopter Press will publish her first fiction chapbook, Range of Motion, in January 2014. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana Lafayette and an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College.