Issue 217

Robert L. Giron
5 minutes ago
35 min read

Happy New Year!

This issue features

photograph by Luna Vandoorne Vallejo,

fiction by Joseph Allen Boone,

fiction by José Luis Cubillo,

poetry by Bryan R. Monte,

photograph by Pedro2009,

poetry by Elizabeth Ransom,

photography by Everett Collections Inc., and

creative nonfiction by Ron Teeter

Luna Vandoorne Vallejo

Handsome Man in Jacuzzi

Joseph Allen Boone

The Sound of Water

You stand watching from the edge of the jacuzzi as he lowers himself into the steaming water, as he yields to the hissing cauldron. Face turned skywards to the October moon, arms flung askew, he sinks beneath the churning surface holding his breath. Eyes closed; lips curved in ecstasy; smile visible despite the ripples breaking his image into a hundred refractions, tan against turquoise.

That sound as he went under, was it a gurgle of delight or the hum of the jets tumbling the waters? You wonder, knowing what you now know about the boy, studying his slender body, pale as moonlight in the underwater light, as he lazily sinks to the bottom, opens his mouth to expel a trail of bubbles, arms swaying like sea plants whispering a private language. Suddenly he springs upwards, bursting into the night air as forcefully as the spray of a Bernini fountain, eyes flashing and mouth grinning in the cloud of steam that hovers above the tub.

Little fishies, my little fishies: those were the words, you recall, that Tiberius used to describe the wantons who frolicked in the baths of his pleasure palace on Capri. Once the emperor tired of his minions, he casually tossed them off the island’s cliffs, their lissome bodies shattering against the rocks jutting from the surf below.

My little fishie, you want to say to him. I’ll never hurt you.

But you know he won’t hear.

You remember the first moment you saw him, that July evening when the heat wave nearly paralyzed the city. You opened the front door and there he stood in the cold rush of the air-conditioning, dark liquid eyes at once expectant and hesitant. Before you could invite him into your glass-and steel-house, perched high on the hills overlooking Los Angeles, his hand darted to his mouth, then he tapped his ears—all this as he shrugged his shoulders with a crooked smile. A split second of surprise, even panic, flashed across your face as you grasped the situation. When it came to masseurs, you thought you’d seen it all. But this was new: he was deaf, he was mute. Your momentary panic made you blush; you felt pity for his affliction; you felt, oddly, an arousal of interest.

That was the beginning.

The third time you hired him, in August, he revealed via the BuzzCard app on his iPhone that his name was David. No surprise there—you’d assumed that “Lance”—the name in his online advertisement for massage-plus services—was an alias. They usually were. He was Mexican American, an achingly beautiful young man who, once stripped to his black jockey Calvins, looked a full decade younger than his already young twenty-six years. His calves and legs were as impressive, and as furry, as those of a triathalon athlete, but his chest and arms as spindly and as hairless as an adolescent’s, begging (so you tell yourself) to be hugged, protected. Despite such bony arms he was amazingly strong; all to the good since you’d hired him (so you tell yourself) to work the knots out of your back. He seemed genuinely to like you, though you were more than twice his age, your hairline receding, body starting to slacken, and too many white chest hairs for you to bother plucking out the recalcitrant offenders anymore.

How did he cope, you wondered during that first meeting: cope with being deaf and mute and gay? With being deaf and mute and gay and doing this for a livelihood? Did any clients, flustered at his inability to speak, turn him away on sight? You wanted to ask all these questions and more, but they felt too complex to condense into the Buzzword texts he and you used to communicate. ASL? David shrugged. He’d learned the rudiments, he told you, but with his family he had developed his own language of signs plus he read lips fairly well. Nowadays he used his iPhone to communicate, he could peck out messages as swiftly in English as in Spanish: ah, nimble fingers of youth, you think. The same fingers that seemed to feel nothing odd, nothing shameful, in touching your naked body, telegraphing your desire back to you in the orgasmic dribs and drabs that at the conclusion of the massage were the best you could muster—but for which pleasures you were, at the end of the day, grateful.

Most of all you wanted to ask how he had come to be so well-adjusted, so normal in spite of the difficulties of growing up deaf and gay and Latino in America—for that was what David radiated, more than any other quality; an almost irritatingly wholesome normality; as if he were just any youth barely out of his teens, vague about his future but filled with self-confidence and dozens of friends, a youth who claimed to live on a shoestring budget but was somehow able to afford vacations back home to Texas and trips to Europe, a youth on intimate terms with parents and siblings—they’re fine that I’m gay, he tells you, they’ve known forever. But do they know what you do for a living, you wonder; what did you tell them when you took off for Budapest last spring? Some of his background you know because David’s told you; some you’ve learned by tracking his online posts. But you crave to know more. You rue your incapacity to plumb his inner world. Whence this craving? Why do you care?

What you do know, after several weeks, is that water is his element. On his Insta account you’ve seen the photos of him posing on countless beaches: Santa Monica and Venice of course, but also Oahu, Puerto Vallarta, Sitges. And at indoor pools; the great baths of Budapest and Istanbul. When he takes a shower in your bathroom after finishing the massage, he often doesn’t emerge for half an hour, the steam doesn’t dissipate for another thirty minutes. Then he discovered that you had a jacuzzi on the deck, and he started inviting himself over to relax in the heated water while the city below shimmered like a mirage in the mist rising from the foam.

You, of course, have been more than happy to oblige: your version of offering a happy ending. Sometimes, when he’s finally had enough of the heat, has lifted himself to the edge of the tub and lies back on his towel with only his knees dangling in the water, you’ve paddled up between those muscled limbs—such a contrast to his thin chest—and, as you’ve propped your elbows on his pelvis, he’s let you play with his penis, languid, soft, then slightly turgid, you’ve kissed his inner thighs, massaged his downy calves, and when he falls asleep your heart is ready to burst.

One evening David explains that under water he feels as if he is no longer deaf; water speaks to him; its rippling movements communicate; his floating limbs sound in the shallows and depths, his body hums with intimations of what it might be like, in the world above water, to hear.

You think: not to know the timbre of a bird’s warble, or the evening rustle of crickets, or the thrashing of branches in a gust of wind—what would such a world be like? You try but fail to imagine the universal silence. Can David conjure the crash of a door slamming? a chapel bell ringing? the whoosh of a fart, expelled?

You’ve known him for two months, hired him for a half-dozen massages, when you happen upon his escort ad. Not on Rent Masseur, your go-to site, but on Rentmen, which you only skim once in a blue moon. David’s photograph stares out at you on page four, the same beatific face you’ve come to know up close. It’s the identical headshot he uses on Rent Masseur—but here it is followed by a parade of sexually explicit nude photographs, gleefully whorish poses, the naughty leer of dark eyes daring the viewer to beg for more.

You are surprised; taken aback, perturbed; perhaps even a bit betrayed. You thought you’d started to understand the way he balanced his world of normalcy, of family and friends, with a profession that pushed the limits of respectability—after all, you told yourself, what gay masseur in Los Angeles, professional or otherwise, doesn’t include a bit of sensuality as part of his services these days? But the thought of David overtly escorting—the web site showed he had been actively posting his services for three years—adds an indeterminate note to the portrait you’ve composed in your mind: he’s selling his body brazenly, not a qualm in the world. Yet he’s not desperate; not jaded; neither calculating nor conniving; there is no whiff of the hustle that you’ve encountered in the handful of male escorts you’ve known, nothing furtive. An open face, genuine smile, hopeful eyes: that is your image of David, the little fishie, little minnow, who likes to float in your hot tub, his limbs fanning out like sea plants as he absorbs the sound of water in silent glee. That is the image of the boy you’ve wished into being.

Not the escort whose list of services glare from the computer screen: Open to all kink, dom/sub, mild to wild, role playing, pushing the limits. Plus: Great international travel companion.

David, you wondered. Who are you, David?

You don’t dare ask: who am I?

The next time he appears at your door, you scan his face for a clue, a talisman you might have missed. Yet David looks more boyishly innocent than ever: carefree, that’s the word, that’s the aura he always emanates, carefree and impish in a manner without guile. But you find yourself worrying about him, about this very guilelessness—does he always enter strangers’ homes so trustingly as he has yours, so lacking in caution? You fret—you know that all escorts, all masseurs, face potential risk when they make outcalls to unknown clients; but what special dangers might befall a youth like David, so slight in build and unable to utter a word—much less a “safe word” during the rough sex that seemed part of his escorting repertoire? Can he signal that enough is enough? Or is enough never enough? Does his inability to speak add to the thrill for his johns; does the uncertainty, the risk, add to the pleasure for David?

As you usher David, dressed in satiny blue gym pants trimmed in white, inside, you flash on Coach Roper’s phys ed class. You were a high school sophomore; the Dark Ages for kids of David’s generation. Roper’s reputation for cruelty preceded him. But particularly abusive was his means of teaching the class to box. Once your right hand was mitted with a glove, he tied your left hand to that of your opponent, then blindfolded you both. Your mandate was to pummel each other until one of you dropped. The victor’s reward? To help his fallen companion limp to the locker-room showers, sluice the bloody traces of triumph off the loser’s body. You’d been lashed to Billy, the perfect scholar-athlete you (and a horde of his classmates) idolized—a schoolboy crush before you understood the nature of your crushes—and he’d soundly walloped you, blows to the rib cage bringing you to the point of girlish tears. And when, alone together in the showers, he’d lathed the soapy water over you as blood from a split lip trickled down your chin and dripped into the white foam, you’d gotten hard and had to turn away. But for the next two weeks, you revered the purple bruise on your left rib cage—tracery of an erotic awakening as you begin to lust for all the Billys of the world.

David precedes you down the hallway, reaching behind to grab your hand and tug you in his wake as he leads the way to the bedroom. Beyond the glass walls the lights of the city float below. You’re in heaven. David’s step across the bedroom carpeting is light, almost a skip; a prance; a dance; and you can’t resist the impulse to reach forward with your free hand to slap his firm ass through his skin-tight jeans: loud whack! that you—only you—hear. He glances over his shoulder at you, a look of startlement, a smile of frisky delight. Later, when you flip onto your back, your head hanging over the mattress’s edge as orgasmic ripples cross your limbs, David reaches forward and swats your face with force, it stings. He tugs on your penis with a quickened pace as a glint shows in his eyes—even in the candlelit dark you see the glint, the mirth—and then he slaps your face again and again, a thunder of small blows till you see stars, smack-smack-smacks that cease only when you finally shove his hand away. No: this is your version of sign: no.

Something new, something unspoken but not unacknowledged, enters your encounters. There’s the time you spontaneously sit up mid-massage and pull him over your knee as you yank down his Calvins, bringing to his ass cheeks a crimson flush; he moans sounds as close to speech as you’ve ever heard him utter as he curves his ass upwards to meet your palm. There’s the time he pushes his forearm across your throat, elbow cutting deep into your thorax as you are about to shoot, you black out. And the time showering together when you feel another hot stream spraying your leg, its arc rising as he grows hard. Neither of you makes mention of these moments afterwards; you go about your normal routines, getting dressed, exchange of money, a bit of Buzz Word banter about weekend plans before he leaves, off to meet friends at a new club on the Strip or in Echo Park. Always, friends; his life spread across the face of the city.

August: the traditional vacation month for your tribe. But from the opening of your psychiatric practice, you insisted that September be your chosen month of solitude, your respite from the dark vortex of your patients’ inner anguish. Then you’d travel abroad, go anywhere that struck your fancy—almost always allotting one week in London to see as much theatre as seven days allowed. Was it really a decade ago that you saw Stoppard’s Invention of Love at the Royal Court? You’d chuckled when the mythic Charon, exasperated by A.E. Housman’s incessant chatter, asks his recently deceased passenger if he can just be quiet for a moment and the man mordantly replies: Yes, I expect so. My life was marked by long silences. For all his verbal wit, silence had resonated throughout the Victorian poet-scholar’s life—product of the unrequited gay desires he kept closeted to the end. You, in contrast, child of the Seventies, came out in med school, perhaps not the flaming rocket that Wilde in the afterlife admonishes Housman for not having been—but you’d made a statement, yes in your own way you’d been brave. Nonetheless, your spine tingled with a flash of recognition, a feeling of loneliness and inadequacy that had never entirely faded, when the actor spoke those pregnant words. So, too, in your life: so much left unspoken, so much brooding silence, listener rather than talker by profession, stalled midstream, midlife, in a limbo of your own choosing.

It’s already the middle of your vacation month, September, but you feel too restive to leave home—oddly reluctant to travel, to commit to a plan. Now, listening to the sounds of David splashing in your hot tub, under a starlit night, watching him sink lazily beneath the foaming surface, his hands swaying in their private language, you wonder: why this bafflement? what do you need to hear spoken to fill this void?

You fantasize taking David to the Gulf of Mexico, showing him the secluded beach on the spit of turf off Dauphin Isle where your family vacationed when you were a child. Alternating streams of emerald and aquamarine hue marked its transparent waters, you remember watching the shells waft on the sandy bottom by your toes. The waves were gentle, little crests slapping you lazily across the face, more salty tickle than a slap; but the undertow was sometimes unexpectedly forceful—and once (you were nine) you were tugged under, the solid world slipping away as you found yourself flailing in deepening waters. But your father had seen and swum out, he’d wrested you from Neptune’s muscular vice with his even stronger iron grip.

“I wasn’t in trouble!”

So, you protested.

“Don’t lie to me, my little minnow.” Your father held you by your thin shoulders and fixed your gaze sternly. “You almost drowned. As sure as I’m looking at a very scared boy.”

Would David go with you? He might, after all he loves travel—and you certainly wouldn’t be the only older man to seek out his company on a vacation for the right price. But would the homely backwaters of your youth, your long bygone youth, be enticing enough for so worldly a traveler as David? You want to offer a glimpse of your past to David—but what if he doesn’t care? Is that what you are afraid of? You scold yourself. Go ahead and take the risk—what’s lost by asking? You’ve more than earned a trip, so what if it’s not Europe this time round?

So, as if in a dream, you find yourself in Alabama, driving a rented Fiesta from Mobile to the shore, where you will hire a motorboat to carry the two of you across the Stygian Bay to Dauphin Isle. You imagine the surprise David is sure to display when the gulf’s warm currents enfold his eager body in their embrace. Only the two of you, in the hidden cove you discovered as a teenager, far away from the main beach, basking on towels spread over glistening white sand.

You watch as David stands, his eyes darting right and left mischievously before he unties his floppy surfer trunks, lets them fall to his feet as he preens in the sun, autumnal breeze ruffling his dark shock of hair. He shrugs with a smile that speaks volumes—or maybe nothing at all—and lies back down, closing his eyes in satisfaction. Who is there to see? Who but you to admire the pearly whiteness that runs from his hairless navel down his thighs, stopping at his kneecaps? You want to swoon: the sun is exploding prisms in your head.

Then you find yourself in the water with David.

The mild surf is seductive, it invites you to lose yourself in its mazes. You and David float together, suspended in aquamarine depths, suddenly he throws his arms around you, squeezing tightly, in turn you squeeze him tightly, flesh hard against flesh. He looks into your eyes, abysses of solitude open in his molten pupils as they meet yours, and his gaze throws out a challenge, a dare. Answering in his silent language, you accept, and the two of you wrestle, playfully but aggressively, each holding the other more and more tightly as the water funnels you downwards, your bodies a rotating vortex. Your legs fan out in the currents, you perform an intimate pas de deux as you sink, pirouetting in the deep downward spiral, each of you wrestling for ascendancy.

It could be the hot tub in your backyard. A beach on Oahu. Anywhere.

Underwater, you open your eyes and he is still staring at you, smiling, daring you to see how long you can hold out. You are both struggling now. He won’t let go. You can’t stay under much longer, your lungs are bursting.

You listen to the water jets spraying out their thunder. Hot steam is rising somewhere, rising above the rippling surface that breaks the black sky into fragments.

The water speaks with its touch. David speaks with his touch, his vice-like grip, refusing to release you.

The emerald eddies, flowing in and out with your breath, are filling you with liquid music, the ocean’s undertow is sounding a soulful counterpoint to David’s melody. His limbs are singing to you, and the pressure in your lungs is unbearable.

You give in, exhale as a thousand bubbles rush out and inhale as the bitter salt of the sea rushes in. You listen to the murmuring currents, the bass profundo of the Gulf, the symphony of sounds exploding your brain as he pulls you under, sinking, his ecstatic smile mirrored on your face.

You are not there to see David spring from the bubbling froth—erect as the spray of a Bernini fountain and gulping in gasps of oxygen with the vigor of the newly born, the resurrected—not there to see him spring out of the steamy mist of the roiling waters and into the colder, sharper

rush of the October air.

First published in Bridport Prize 2019 Anthology.

About the Author

Joseph Allen Boone is the author of four books of nonfiction, including forthcoming The Melville Effect (Columbia UP, spring 2026), as well as the novel Furnace Creek (2022) and the short story collection Conditions of Precarity (2024). He has just finished the draft of a new novel on community theater experienced across three generations and is working on a psychological thriller that he calls a blend of Los Angeles noir and Southern Gothic.

José Luis Cubillo

Translation from Spanish by Thomas Prudente

Speculations

The phone was burning. When I was about to pick it up, my hand was burning because of the heat it was giving off due to the continuous calls I was receiving. They came from museums, archives, galleries, magazines, scholars, curators, media in general... The article I had published in "Photographic World", with no other intention than to have fun speculating, had caused a cultural earthquake.

– Olivia, is it true what you write? ––my friends asked me–. What a discovery!

The phenomenon had started a few months before the LGTBI Pride Day in Madrid. The gallery "La Factoría" and the foundation "España en sus Imágenes" had commissioned me to organize a photographic exhibition on the centenary of the birth of Henri Endre-Pohorylle, in my opinion one of the greatest photojournalists of the first half of the last century, along with Robert Capa, Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau and Alfred Eisenstaedt.

The arduous work in organizing such a complex anthological exhibition, involving worldwide negotiations, searching for works, requesting authorizations, contracting insurance, coordinating with various archives and collectors and other thankless and exhausting bureaucratic tasks, my team and I were enjoying contemplating, for the thousand times, the photographs while we began to generate ideas for designing the exhibition when one of his most iconic snapshots, "Kisses of Peace", powerfully absorbed my attention.

In case anyone doesn't know which one I'm referring to, or doesn't remember for the title, it's the one from the early fifties in which two couples, their backs to the camera, advance, entwined and kissing, towards the back of a hidden street with half-ruined buildings in the heart of Barcelona's Chinatown.

The picture belonged to a time when Henri Endre-Pohorylle toured Spain reporting on the country's economic recovery after the end of the Civil War and World War II, and from the very moment of its publication on the cover of Life it became a hopeful symbol for humanity where life and love triumphed over death and destruction. It is one of the most reproduced pictures in history.

By the way women looked and their surroundings, we can imagine they were prostitutes and by the way men dressed, in sailor's uniform, we can imagine they belonged to the American ship docked in the port. They wanted to take solace in the neighborhood "of the women who smoke" after lonely and exhausting months sailing stormy seas.

But why did that image absorb my attention with such powerful magnetic force, as none did before? I couldn't say for sure. Perhaps it was the fleeting impression that the sailor´s back on the left of the composition left on me, as soon as I set my eyes on it, it bounced, like a ball thrown violently against a wall. From this change of view on the right, towards the back of the sailor, who closed the composition of the two couples, arose the enigmatic and surprising contrast, my attention was caught by that image from which it was impossible to escape.

To be specific, and according to the impression I got, the sailor on the right had a muscular back, in the shape of an inverted triangle, like a swimmer, and the one on the left, on the other hand, had an undefined back, more like a rectangle, with shoulders as wide as the hips.

The sailor on the right wore a tight-fitting T-shirt with sleeves tight to the arms, while the sailor on the left wore a somewhat loose-fitting T-shirt with open sleeves, and the wide, boat-style collar over the shoulders gave the impression of being puckered rather than smooth and taut.

The sailor on the right had hardly any ass, or it was very flat, so it did not show in his low hip pants, while the one on the left, with his high-waisted and tight pants, had two firm and fleshy buttocks. And even the haircut, on the nape of his neck, which was the only part that could be seen under his caps, and within the shaved style typical of the military, seemed different in the two sailors. The one on the right had a quick cut, improvised, somewhat rough, as if to get out of the way, while the one on the left had a cut that looked neat, with volume and a certain style.

The woman walking with the sailor on the right was clinging to his arm, at the elbow, as if the man had given it to her like a handrail on a ship in the middle of a gale so that, by a blow of the sea, she would not end up dragged on the deck. The other couple, on the other hand, walked with their arms down and relaxed, their hands intertwined, complicit.

My intuition sizzled.

– Are you alright? –my assistant asked me, with a worried expression, after discovering me transfixed, silent, contemplating the image in an obsessive way for a long time.

– Yes, perfectly –I answered euphorically–. I've never felt better looking at a picture!

I took the snapshot and one by one passed it to my collaborators. They looked at me without understanding what was happening.

– Take a good look at it –I suggested.

My collaborators, at first, did not know what to say. They thought it was a ploy to relax after a hard day's work.

– Do you see anything that catches your attention? –I insisted.

To their bewilderment I gave them a clue.

– The sailor on the left –I said–. Is it a man or a woman?

They definitely thought I was joking, or that I had lost my mind. Everyone knew it was a man. It had to be a man. There were no women sailors in the U.S. Navy at that time, so what was the point of a woman in a sailor's costume holding hands with a prostitute, and accompanied by another couple consisting of another sailor and a second prostitute?

I then began to tell them my impression after observing the physical differences I had perceived between the two sailors and concluded with my newly enlightened hypothesis that the sailor on the left was not a man but a woman. I created doubt in their minds, and they began to debate it.

– If true – my assistant told me–, it would be the most astonishing discovery in the world of photography since Cartier-Bresson's "Mexican Suitcase" was found.

The rest of the collaborators confirmed the importance of the finding.

But my hypothesis was only speculation. According to it, that instant stopped and fixed in time by Henri Endre-Pohorylle's camera lacked any logic. However, my curiosity was so strong that I decided to investigate it.

The first step was to contact anyone who had information about the actual circumstances when the image was captured - family members, editors, collaborators, friends - but unfortunately, I found no one. So many years had passed that there was no one left with any recollections. I decided then to go to the place of the event, to Barcelona, maybe there I could find some clue.

The neighborhood of the "women who smoke" had been refurbished but still comprised the same maze of winding in the downtown streets as when the picture was taken. As then, there continues the oldest activity in the history of mankind, exchanging false affection for money.

I met many prostitutes, both in the streets and in the hotels where they waited for their clients. None of them remembered anything about the image or its characters. However, when I told them my hypothesis, they replied that it might be true. "You hear all kinds of stories," they would tell me. "Some young girls who come to compete with us veterans think they are inventing the world, but there is nothing new under the sun. Neither then nor now." And then they elaborated. "We are not surprised that something like what you suggest would come about. Those of us who have been here so many years that we don't even remember when we started, we have seen all that you can imagine, and we have been asked for all kinds of perversions."

Back in Madrid, without conclusive proof of my hypothesis, but with the conviction that it could be correct, I wrote an article with my theory, given the most sensible explanation I could think of the scene shown by Henri Endre-Pohorylle's picture. And I sent it to the journal. Fortunately, they were interested and as soon as they published it, pandemonium broke out.

A few days later, among the countless calls and emails from all corners of the world, with requests for more information and interviews, a mysterious email stood out like a flashing red alarm light. It was from a person who claimed to know from his family the story of the picture and wanted to meet me and tell me about it. "Could it be true," I asked myself, "or could it be one of the many disturbed people who swarm the social networks trying to take advantage of any circumstance, no matter how strange it may be? I felt a big conflict. My long experience as a curator had taught me that the most unsuspected paths could lead to dazzling discoveries that completely changed the known history of works of art. I could not pass up the opportunity.

I arranged a meeting with this person, who turned out to be from Barcelona, and was coming to Madrid in the next few days, to participate in the LGTBI pride day parade. We met that morning in the cafeteria in the Plaza de Atocha´s hotel. I was sitting in the cafeteria, sipping a glass of white wine watching by the window the bustle of people coming and going already dressed and made up, for the afternoon parade, that would start in a nearby street, every year was more colorful and crowded, when I was approached by a woman who identified herself as the person I was waiting for. At the moment I was very surprised, almost not knowing what to say, perhaps because I was distracted by the spectacle of the street, or maybe I did not expect to see, my prejudice, a woman like her, with a hypnotic natural elegance. However, we immediately began to chat with that sincerity and fluency that sometimes happens in a mysterious way with people we do not know, as if we had maintained a long and intimate relationship with them, perhaps the effect of mirror neurons.

The woman's name was Griselda; she was co-director of the LB WORKING foundation. They worked to end the historical social and labor discrimination of lesbian and bisexual women. She was invited to read a manifesto at the closing party of the LGTBI pride parade.

– My grandmother bragged about being one of the women who appeared in that famous picture – Griselda began to tell me–. I hardly knew her, but it was one of her many anecdotes that my mother often told me.

– Did she have any proof? –I asked her.

– No. But as she said, someone identified her at the time and showed her the picture, telling her that she had become very famous. That image was published in foreign magazines. She was the woman on the left. She was recognizable by her physical build, by the clothes and by the place she frequented. And of course, by the service she rendered that day. For that she had a prodigious memory. In the midst of the famine of those years, each customer was a stab in the back that she never forgot. She was herself. She was sure of it.

– And did he tell you any details about those sailors? –I insisted.

– Yes. In spite of his sad and eventful life, he took everything with a lot of humor. And with philosophy. He often gossiped curious anecdotes about his clients, and very funny ones, which my mother in turn told me.

– And why have you never said anything until now?

– The truth is that we never gave it much importance. It was when I read your article that I thought it might have some significance.

I felt anxious about the proximity of the confirmation of my theory, and at the same time I was terrified that it would be refuted after the cyclone of unforeseeable consequences that it had provoked; it could be the end of my career buried by an extravagant buffoonery.

– Do you know that you have very beautiful eyes? –I said to buy time, to prolong the moment that would reveal the truth, afraid of its double edge of panic and attraction.

– Yes, I've been told that many times –she answered as she blushed.

– They remind me of the Afghan girl that Steve McCurry photographed and was on the cover of National Geographic.

Griselda smiled without knowing what to say, looking away. Then, already looking at me fixedly, she continued.

– And you have very sensual lips –and like a feather she slid her hand over my arm, making me shudder.

I had to react quickly in order not to show my trepidation.

– Could you confirm if the sailor holding hands with your grandmother was a man or a woman?

– Yes... –And after a few seconds of uncertainty while he took the opportunity to take a sip of his drink, which took forever, suspending my attention on his future words that would reveal the mystery that had been tormenting me for months, he continued–. It was a woman.

I felt an intense, liberating, and pleasurable ecstasy similar to an orgasm.

– But it was not the sailor's wife –Griselda clarified–, nor was it anyone who followed him around the ports where he docked to disguise herself as a man and have foursome relations because it was her favorite game to get excited and enjoy sex unrestrainedly, as you state in your article. The truth was completely different.

And Griselda then began to tell me the real relationship of those characters in Henri Endre-Pohorylle's iconic photograph, which turned out to be the most fascinating story anyone could have ever imagined of a rapturous forbidden passion.

The End

NOTE: This story is a playful speculation based on the photograph titled "Sailors visiting Chinatown" (1953), by Francesc Catalá-Roca (Valls, Tarragona, 1922-Barcelona, 1998). Tarragona, 03-19-1922. Barcelona, 05-03-1998.

About the Author

José Luis Cubillo holds a degree in cinematography, with a focus in screenplay and direction. His love of literature led him to cinema. He has published short stories, collected in the book And if He's Not Here, Where Is He? His work has been published in various literary magazines in the USA, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, and Spain. His novel Gender Violence will soon be published in the USA, first in Spanish and later translated into English by Pierian Springs Press. His screenwriting career includes Nijinsky: Marriage with God, a biography of the great Russian dancer Nijinsky Vatzlav, which won the award for best original idea at the 2018 Global Motion Picture Awards (USA). His film Film in the Style of Jafar Panahi, a tribute to Iranian director Jafar Panahi and his film This Is Not a Movie, stands out for diction, per Amazon: FilmIn.

Bryan R. Monte

Comfortable in His Own Skin

She…

at three took off her Sunday dress and shiny shoes

at her grandfather’s wake in front of his coffin,

at seven wore her brother’s old T-shirts and jeans

never played with dolls; climbed trees and rode a bike

never wore pink or light blue, but dark colors, especially black,

at 13 got bullied and beat up in the girls’ toilet

was in the vice-principal’s office more than in class

walked the hallways at lunch eating a sandwich

saw a stranger when she looked in the mirror.

He…

at 33 wears overalls, boots and a company shirt

works hard in the home improvement department,

cuts boards to size, mixes custom paints,

never mocks anyone for how they look, walk or talk

sits with his co-workers on break or at lunch

is regularly in the office for management training

goes out weekends with friends

sees himself when he looks in the mirror

finally feels comfortable in his own skin.

The Green Valleys Beyond

“I’m going to your country!”

the thin, 75-year-old man

with white, scruffy hair

said in his squeaky voice

as we climbed aboard the gym’s

side-by-side stationary bicycles

to ride another five kilometers

and build up our vacation stamina.

You always mistook me for British

as many of your countrymen

in trams, trains or on the street

when they encountered my Dutch,

not believing an American

could ever speak it so well.

I was told you checked into a B&B

a week later, unpacked your suitcase,

laid out your clothes for the next day,

went to bed, and never woke up.

I hope on your way out you dreamed

of the next morning’s full English breakfast

and walking past the former mining town’s

gray hills to the green valleys beyond.

Pedro2009

Lockers numbered white & blue for clothing

& personal items

The Switch

High school gym class was torture,

ruled by athletes who shaved daily

by fifteen, drove and dated by sixteen,

who scaled the gym’s vertical, knotted ropes

and slapped the ceiling before I’d left the ground.

They laughed as they leisurely showered together

and I passed quickly, barely getting wet,

trying not to slip naked on the slick tiles,

as I lunged to catch my towel,

tossed out of the laundry cage,

by the teacher, before it hit the ground.

However, a few months later,

they suddenly shrank and were silent,

when they saw me behind the counter

of the rarely busy, old-fashioned pharmacy

with a different family name on the sign out front.

In that moment their heads hung down

and their hands stuck together,

pink, small and delicate as an opossum’s,

unable to even point at what they wanted.

Until I asked, “Red, yellow or blue?”

the colors of the condom boxes

in the glass case behind the counter.

And suddenly, they looked up and spoke

because I knew what to do. I put their choices

in brown paper bags I taped shut,

took their hot coins and wrinkled bills

from sweaty hands, rang up their sales,

the bell over the door ringing before

I could even give them their change.

About the Author

Bryan R. Monte was a finalist for the 2021 and 2025 Gival Press Oscar Wilde Poetry Award and the 2021 Hippocrates Open Poetry Competition. His poetry has been published in Gathered: Contemporary Quaker Poets (Sundress Press, 2013), Immigration & Justice for Our Neighbors, (Celery City Press, 2017), Voices from the Fierce Intangible World (SoFloPoJo Press, 2019), and The 2021 and 2022 Hippocrates Prize (Hippocrates Press, 2021 and 2022) anthologies, and in his book, On the Level (Circling Rivers, 2022).

Elizabeth Ransom

Expat Flora

At the Loudoun County market in spring, the farmer shrugged,

Offering no instructions for the exotic yet familiar potted plant.

What a discovery! Jasmine, climbing vine of my youth,

Evoking the fragrance wafting from my Damascus bedroom balcony.

Could I keep her alive in Virginia, the wrong Hardiness Zone?

And yet, the adaptable expat luxuriated summer-long,

Doubled in size on the baking rooftop patio,

Survived Leptoglossus oppositus, a ferocious leaf-footed bug.

And now, wintering in my kitchen, she sends waxy tendrils to the window,

Blooms bright white and even purple petals.

About the Author

Elizabeth Ransom is a communications and public relations strategist who leads Persuasive PR, a small business based in Arlington, Virginia. Trained in radio journalism with Voice of America in Washington, D.C., and Cairo, Egypt and in international health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Elizabeth works as a global health communicator. Her publications include an opinion on Devex about the power of breastfeeding and a report about the value of cleft palate surgeries, which won the 2024 Shorty award for best research report. She’s certified as a Virginia Master Naturalist and serves as a member of the Advisory Council at George Mason University School of Art.

Everett Collections Inc.

Séance

Ron Teeter

Walking the Table

My parents’ friends Marge and Joe lived in a maroon cottage on the Severn River in Maryland. To reach their house, you had to drive down a seemingly endless snaky, narrow road where the trees pressed in close, oncoming cars meant hugging the side of the road, and you had to know exactly where you were going, because—to my father’s repeated frustration—the mouth of their steep gravel driveway was unmarked and he often had to double back more than once. I went there along with my parents a number of times in the late 1960s, when I was around twelve and thirteen, then events moved the family on in their lives and our families fell out of touch.

I loved visiting Marge and Joe (they insisted I call them by their first names). They had boisterous cookouts, sometimes with members of their extended family, where everyone brought loads of food and Marge carried out trays of her savory homemade blueberry muffins. A lengthy staircase carved into the riverbank led down to their wharf, and I swam in the Severn, leaping off the wharf with their German shepherd close behind. They had a speedboat, and Marge was a fine water skier—I can still envision her in her white one-piece bathing suit, leaning back, and smiling with the water winging out around her heels on both sides. As a kid, I took to water skiing immediately and stayed perpendicular for a reasonable amount of time (when I tried it in later years, not so much). Even better, though, was the river in winter because Maryland had real winters back then. The Severn froze rock-solid, and once Marge had coaxed me upright on the blades I spent a fine dreamlike afternoon among the legions of skaters traveling along the silver surface. I recall that Marge wore a red knit cap on the ice that day—funny how the details stick.

We knew the family because Joe worked with my dad in air traffic control at what was then called Washington National Airport. Joe was a big, sturdy guy with buzz-cut white hair and sun-browned leathery skin. He was nice, quite jolly in fact, but Marge—she was something else. Marge was Joe’s second wife, and Joe was her second husband (at least). She was probably in her fifties at the time I’m thinking about. She had short curly black hair with some gray, she wore white cat’s-eyeglasses, and smoked Silva Thins. I thought she was a little brassy, which I meant as a compliment, and I once told her she reminded me of Miss Kitty on Gunsmoke; my mom looked panicked, but Marge was delighted. She called my dad “Teeter” instead of using his first name. In summer she practically lived in a bathing suit and flip-flops, and like Joe, she was deeply tanned from spending time outside. She and Joe could both, as my dad put it, “knock ‘em back,” and sometimes when it got late Joe would disappear into the bedroom and we could hear him snore, but Marge was indefatigable and could play cards deep into the night.

Their dog, Stranger, a German shepherd, loved kids and would take bits of hot dog gently from one’s fingers. I never once heard Stranger growl, but Marge liked to tell the story of how one day a salesman came to the door, and there was something off about him. She said, “Joe was at work that day, but I had the suspicion that this character wasn’t even really a salesman,” and Stranger, quite uncharacteristically, snarled at the guy, hackles rising, and Marge had to hold him firmly by the collar. “That dog knew there was something wicked about this guy,” Marge declared proudly.

Marge believed in “the spirits.” Occasionally, she told us, she saw one, as did her sister Harriet. I’d certainly never met any adult who’d claimed to have seen actual ghosts, and I hung on Marge’s words when she told stories like that. My parents were religious Methodists in a mild, conventional way, and metaphysics came up only rarely in our household. They were fond of Marge and never criticized or ridiculed her beliefs.

I can’t recall Marge ever being in less than a good humor, often with a mischievous smile, but my mother believed that Marge had a “tragic” air about her. “It’s in her eyes” she would say. Our friend had indeed seen deep sadness: the details of the story are foggy and may be suspect in my mind after many decades—if in fact I ever had them right as a kid—but Marge’s son (from her previous marriage), had been left profoundly mentally disabled after a surgery when he was an infant and could not speak or take care of himself at all. In his twenties at the time, we knew them, he needed constant care and had been institutionalized for several years, and Marge and Joe visited him often. But Marge was never at peace with her boy’s institutionalization, and somewhat later, they brought him into their home to live.

But back to the spirits. One summer evening as night sunk over the river, we’d finished with a cookout in the square of electric light on the patio, had dessert, and Marge (probably with a cigarette in one hand and a Tom Collins in the other, bless her heart) announced that we were going to walk the table. This operation was sort of like a séance in that you were communicating with the spirits, but it wasn’t as intrusive, as they wouldn’t be commandeering anyone’s body or voice. Instead, the spirits would answer your questions by controlling the table; you’ll see, Marge assured us—it’ll make sense when we start.

We migrated inside and she shut off the lights throughout the house and lit a few candles. Some of the details are a little muddy in my memory, but I know that my mom, Marge, and I (and probably another person, but I can’t recall who) sat close together on the picnic bench Joe carried in from the patio, with our fingertips laid on the table’s surface and our pinkies and thumbs just touching. Joe didn’t participate; he hadn’t been a believer before marrying Marge, he said, but now he definitely was, and the whole business gave him the willies. He and my dad went outside onto the patio and talked in low voices about work while Joe smoked a cigar, which wasn’t permitted in the house.

Marge told us to shut our eyes and concentrate on coaxing the table to rise on its “front” legs; the “hind” legs would stay on the floor for leverage. Do not try to raise the table by pulling it or pressing down hard with your hands, she advised, because that will immediately interrupt the flow and offend the spirits, who will leave. We couldn’t have done this physically anyway; the table was made of heavy wood and weighed too much to lever up and certainly too much for us to make it rise, hold, and fall in a controlled way. Also, she warned, the spirits will leave—and stay away—if you walk in front of the table while they’re engaged.

Eyes shut, Marge said solemnly, several times in a row: “Come up, table.” My mom and I giggled and nudged elbows, but Marge disregarded us. “Come up, table,” she repeated. “Table: come up. Come up, please.” I overcame my shyness and meekly joined in: “Come up, table. Table, please come up,” all the time avoiding the big picture window, apprehensive of seeing a ghostly face floating there.

I felt a pronounced electric tingling in my fingertips. The table quivered, barely noticeable at first, then it gave a shudder and the legs opposite us, “its front legs” lifted off the rug, tentatively, an inch or so, balanced on its two “hind” legs, then plunked back down. Captured now, my mom and I weren’t laughing anymore. Marge continued, firmly, “Come up, table. We just want to ask you some questions. Come up.” The table tipped back on its hind legs again, swiftly, and decisively now, and, most improbably, the table froze at about a forty-five-degree angle and stuck there.

Marge told us how to use the table to question the spirits. You must specifically address them; phrase your question clearly; then request a response. I might ask, for example: “Table, please tell me if Cousin Kent stole my Justice League comic with Hawkman on the cover. Please tap one time for yes and two times for no.” Then the table—that is, the spirits—would reply by lowering the table’s legs one time, yes; he did, the sneak or two times: shame on you for your suspicions. Remarkably, the table would also rear back on its hind legs and drop its front legs to tap out numbers and even spell, short answer, such as a name by sequentially tapping out the alphabet: one for “a” and two for “b” and so on.

We walked the table for a long time. I was enthralled. Marge asked a lot of questions, and once we had seen how the table actually did move upon request, my mom and I stopped giggling and asked our own questions, which are lost to me, except for one: The table predicted that I would grow up to marry my eighth-grade girlfriend, Sandy. That didn’t happen. The table did a generous amount of work that night. The poor spirits—we must have worn them out!

Marge and other members of her family took it for granted that our world exists alongside an invisible one in which people who have died continue to persist in some energetic form and that we can, with the right attitude and instruments, contact them. Actually, millions and millions of people believe related things as well, calling the notion an aspect of faith, though only a tiny percentage would ever choose, as did Marge, to invite the departed into the living room on warm river nights when the dark dawdles then finally settles in. Well, I was ready enough to buy into the spirits at thirteen, but today . . . I don’t know; I’ve been back and forth on this all my life. Despite the cynical commercial manipulations of ghost-hunting TV shows where nothing genuinely compelling ever happens, and despite the refusals of the scientific establishment to consider, much less investigate in any serious way, the survival of personality after death, you can find plenty of accounts, if you approach the subject respectfully, that will give you pause. That said, I don’t think the spirits provided much of any real use that night. Nor have any psychics I’ve encountered here and there over the decades. So, just parlor games? Could be, but I have to admit that after reading The Exorcist many years ago, this writer won’t allow a Ouija board in his home. But the spirits were nonetheless an important source of guidance for Marge, whom I liked very much and who would go on to do some remarkable things.

Not long ago, humans believed the Sun was the center of the universe, and now we know that our galaxy alone has one hundred billion-some suns and thus far we’ve spotted several thousand planets. Reality consists of unseen things at levels so small they’re incomprehensible. Billions upon billions of infinitesimal particles glide through our bodies each second; physicists continue to discover others, previously theorized and not. Most kinds of light are invisible to our limited eyes. Multiple biosystems in our bodies, down to the level of the cell and beyond, operate flawlessly and in concert without our conscious knowledge, and our conscious minds are to our subconscious minds as ponds are to oceans. Our individual lives are subject to, indeed the result of, a hundred diverging and blending streams of history, not to mention the vast societal forces in the present, most of which we consider only occasionally, if at all, in our daily lives. This brief aside with its admittedly oversimplistic summary is just to acknowledge that, religion and spirituality aside, during each second of our lives, our individual and shared worlds respond to innumerable gigantic and minute forces that operate beyond the ken of our immediate senses. And there’s an awful lot, still, that we don’t know.

When my parents drove home that night after walking the table, I sat in the backseat looking through the window. Beyond the glass, the world was dark. But here and there, through breaks in the trees, I caught fragmentary glimpses of white waving on the black surface of the Severn River. I was sure I could feel the spirits hovering, riding along, lingering with me in the shadowy backseat, gentle and vague.

And then I fell asleep, and they were gone.

About the Author

Ron Teeter is a long-time Arlington resident who retired 2 ½ years ago and has been writing creatively ever since. He worked as an editor and technical writer in a number of fields, including psychology, pharmacy, and the biomedical sciences.