CutBank 92

2020

Contents

The New Guard
An Interview with Tommy Orange [Read an excerpt…]

They Came to Montana to Suffer
Fiction by Maureen Langloss [Read an excerpt…]

Barley Days
Poetry by Ian U Lockaby

Expectations
Nonfiction by Rachel Weaver [Read an excerpt…]

Luck
Poetry by Kevin Neal

what we hold in our belly
Winner: Big Sky, Small Prose Flash Contest, by JJ Peña [Read the story…]

My Sister and Other Big Things
Runner-Up: Big Sky, Small Prose Flash Contest, by Darcy Casey [Read an excerpt…]

Our Little Tradition
Runner-Up: Big Sky, Small Prose Flash Contest, by Stephen Hundley [Read an excerpt…]

Hand to Mouth
Poetry by Rochelle Jewel Shapiro

Power
Fiction by Andrew Joseph Kane [Read an excerpt…]

In a Therapeutic Boarding School for Adolescent Girls
Poetry by Michael Juliani

Freeway Market, Anaheim, CA 1982
Visual Art by Ed Hamilton

Small Fry and Couch Potato
Visual Art by Mickey Haldi

Ocean
Visual Art by Megan Scherrer

Winsor
Visual Art by Aspen Kelly

Sunk
Visual Art by Elijah Janka Garrard

Mudslides
Fiction by Matt Greene [Read an excerpt…]

Primitive Gut
Poetry by Terrence Owens

How to Disappear
Nonfiction by Caitlin McGill [Read an excerpt…]

Redolence
Poetry by Katherine Fallon

Three Liquid Miniatures
Poetry by E.C. Belli

The Blue Umbrella
Fiction by Jieyan Wang [Read an excerpt…]

Drilling It In The List Long And Prone To Paper Cuts
Poetry by Thomas Osatchoff

The Road to Billings
Nonfiction by Joshua Doležal [Read an excerpt…]

A Change of Sky
Poetry by James McKee

Maureen Langloss │Fiction

They Came to Montana to Suffer

It didn’t take long to learn the most important thing about being a guide: don’t bring tourists right to the fish. It turned out I had a knack for knowing where trout would bite. I could follow multiple currents at once and see which one the fish slipped into. I’d take clients to island rocks where the fish practically committed suicide on their flies. But catching trout by the dozen was not what rich tourists wanted. They came to Montana to suffer. They wanted to put on protective gear and squash big, tall grass with their boots. They wanted to go up some hills and down some hills. If it was all flat, their tips sucked.

Jane didn’t come with all the gear, which I respected right from the start. She wore a necklace of concentric circles painted a white that was a notch above normal white, each one a little bigger than the last, like the nesting toys Mom gave me every Christmas. Sometimes I still broke them apart and pieced them back together. Red and blue and green. Dolls and pigs and frogs. My favorite was John Lennon, dressed in Sgt. Pepper gear, holding the neck of a guitar. I kept it in the truck for good luck.

Jane acted like that truck was a carnival ride. 1966 Chevy C10 in fire-engine red. Dad let me use it with New York clients because its country-music vibe appealed to them—that is, if they got past the lack of seatbelts.

The seatbelts always triggered a frown, a passing glance at an internal risk-assessment decision tree.

“Thank God for this,” Jane whispered to her husband Christopher when she noticed they were missing. “We’re here to touch a little danger.”

Rachel Weaver│Nonfiction

Expectations

The day I went to a murderer’s house alone, he hadn’t killed anyone yet.

But he would, on a fall day like this one. His victim a woman whose feet made the same sound mine did on the crushed gravel of his driveway on this edge of Alaska.

At the sound of the truck, Nick appeared around the side of the house. “Come on in,” he said. He pushed up his glasses offhandedly the same way he always did, the same way I imagine he did that morning, just before raising his rifle, the one big enough to kill a bear.

He’d offered to let me borrow his smoker to deal with all the salmon I’d been stocking my freezer with for the winter. I had come to pick up the smoker, had expected to load it into my truck and be off. But Alaska is quiet in the late fall. If you’re not used to the way the weather zips up, you can begin to feel like you can’t breathe. I figured Nick needed a little company to get the air back into the bottom half of his lungs. And if I was honest with myself, on that particular day, I did too.

JJ Peña│Fiction

what we hold in our belly

Darcy Casey│Fiction

My Sister and Other Big Things

At nearly six feet, my sister is tall. At three times my width, my sister is fat.

Her size makes sick demands of her, like having to check the weight limitations of chairs under the gaze of curious restaurant diners and then walking away, hungry, because there were no booths and the tag said 300 pounds. Like last Thanksgiving, while our family argued about outdoor survival and Dad, not comprehending nutritional deficiencies, insisted my sister would last longest because her body would eat fat for weeks. Her, putting down her next bite of sunflower-yellow squash, saying nothing but probably, maybe, thinking about survival.

Her tolerance is the persistent but barely perceived tolerance for taking up space in places that try hard to reject her like skin rejects a splinter.

Stephen Hundley│Fiction

Our Little Tradition

Every time I leave, I take a stone from your driveway. Any rock will do. I slip it in the pouch of my cheek to keep a while. To press and bully with my tongue. To force against the roof of my mouth until the crushed granites rattled out over the path to your home wear smooth. Until the dusty quartz shines new. Then I swallow.

When you see this behavior, you are not surprised. You say your mother walked through a desert. After Poland and the occupation. You say she carried your brother on her hip and sucked a stone when she was thirsty. It’s a trick of the mind, an old farmer’s tale, but the stone, you say, will absorb the saliva, will hold, in the recesses of its geology, whatever seeps from the glands tucked against your gums. But there are no deserts in France, my love. In Belgium, the dikes are blown. The farmer’s fields are sown with salt. And your mother, she doesn’t have the stomach for the oil spot beneath your car.

Andrew Joseph Kane│Fiction

Power

When they shot Sailor Boy, Juney McKittrick left the road and walked straight into the White Bear Lake, and it wasn’t till sunset the Mahoning Police caught her wading up to her earlobes. And it was sad to see her brought in like that, her dress dark even under that blanket the deputy put on her—not wrapped in, just laid on her shoulders so it hung like a sort of cape—though with all the ruckus she kicked up some of us might’ve shook our heads, knowing what we knew.

Juney’d say it started with the UpTownElectric man, but we knew it probably went back further to her husband Pat McKittrick—some used to call him Paddy McKittrick. Pat, or Paddy, he worked, like all the old guys, up in the mines, and then, like all the old guys, collected disability. His check wasn’t from black lung like most (though he had it). His was from when the mines were still open. In the end, in the ‘60s, Number 9 it must’ve been, down in Lansford, he had some terrible accident, and they had to take his foot and half his leg. He’d married Juney before this, but now he only had the one leg so she had to fend for the two of them, the disability only covering so much.

So Juney went and got work with the church, the rectory, and cleaning too at the school, sweeping and scrubbing after the kids. Soon enough they put her out to digging graves with the men, miners her husband Paddy’d worked with, all of them wheezing with pleurisy and cigarettes bobbing down there in those holes. She went down there swinging a pick and let the men scoop out the diggings. Afterwards the men set to filling them. Men burying men till most of them were gone.

Matt Greene│Fiction

Mudslides

Nine-to-five I was co-teacher of the “Forest Kids,” and we pretty much did nothing at all. In fact, when Miss Sally and I tried to plan a big activity, the kids would get mad, call us names, whine, scream, throw chairs and rocks, knife our tires. I admired them for their spunk, their honesty, and hated them all the same. Because for all their strength they were also weak, quick to cry, to whine, to turn against each other over a touchdown or missing Pokémon card.

Miss Sally, my co-teacher, was an alcoholic. Her twenties had just escaped her and soon mine would too. We clung to our youth like cadavers, hustled the kids at Monopoly, ate seconds and thirds of special snack when they weren’t looking. We made for a good pair, except on the days when both of us showed up hungover.

One day a child took a piece of broccoli and flung it at the girl who talked to her stuffed animals.

“Go sit in the corner,” Miss Sally said. She never needed to raise her voice. When she spoke, they trembled. They listened.

Caitlin McGill│Nonfiction

How to Disappear

I’m a twenty-four-year-old grad student who stands before a class of undergraduates each day, attempting to focus on their words but often distracted by my empty stomach and the diuretics waiting inside my bag. I ignore the fact that my peers have watched my body wane and likely wondered, Is she okay? I ignore the fact that my family is probably wondering too. And I recoil when my boyfriend David’s lips slide across my stomach and neck like fire. My seared skin triggers memories of Carlos’s hands, pushing my mind toward the controllable scale, the controllable bulge of my belly. My buried past and my restriction intertwining, conflating, impossible to distinguish.

I am baffled by my inability to stop biking and pull over, by this addiction that’s been building in me for years and finally began controlling me a year ago. No less than 1,200 calories a day; any less, I’ve read, is not safe. Half a cup of cereal in unsweetened almond milk. Hummus and carrots, spinach thirsty for dressing. An afternoon apple to avoid cramps. Tilapia with a fistful of broccoli and brown rice but no oil and maybe—maybe—nonfat yogurt or plain popcorn or sugar-free Jell-O at night. I only eat less when my daily allowance depletes—after ice cream runs with my roommates or barhopping with David. While chocolate melts on my tongue or alcohol burns my esophagus, I try not to worry about numbers, but I usually can’t stop the thoughts. I conceal them with a smile, secretly avoid costly activities. Before and after the rare days when I pass the daily limit—1,700 calories; enough, I calculate, to maintain my weight—I eat less. I save calories like money. If I withdraw too many on Saturday, I deposit extra on Sunday.

Jieyan Wang│Fiction

The Blue Umbrella

Yesterday, when the autumn rain was particularly hard, I became my mother’s blue umbrella so that I could watch her childhood self. From my seat above her head, I saw her walking home alone from school for the first time. This was before my grandmother became wrinkled; she was still in her twenties. My mother carefully stepped around the puddles on the streets in her squeaking yellow boots. Her backpack sagged around her shoulders in the rain. She breathed in the wet air and the sound of the whirring cars. It was then that she realized that she was lost.

She stood there for a minute, clutching my handle in her hands. Scared of speaking to strangers, she sat on the doorstep of a convenience store. As she watched the men and women in heavy coats walk by, she counted the minutes on her pocket watch. One. Two. Tick. Tock.

It was fifty-eight minutes before my grandmother noticed that she had not come home and called the police to find her. That night, my mother returned home in a white-and-black police car. When my grandmother asked what had happened, all my mother did was shiver.

Joshua Doležal│Nonfiction

The Road to Billings

The plan was to drive straight through in shifts to save time and the cost of a hotel. I had volunteered for the first shift, and when Aven took the wheel for the stretch out of Missoula, I slipped into the back to rest. The sun was setting behind us, the timbered ridgelines magnified against the burning sky. The red light caught the dust on the rear window like blinds, casting stripes of shadow and color over the back of Aven’s head. Soon the car was dark and the world shrank to the column of light from the high beams, the interstate corridor, and the dark lines of mountains against the stars. I burrowed my pillow into the duffels stacked next to me and slept.

When I woke, we were sitting still. The dash said eleven o’clock. Were we getting gas, taking a bathroom break? A rest area, from the looks of it.

“It’s the radiator,” Aven said, before I could ask. “There’s no water. We’ll have to wait for someone to come along.”

We sat in silence for a moment, and I tried to distract myself by imagining the traffic on the interstate by sound. The growl of a diesel pickup. A tractor trailer moaning and rattling by. The whine of a sedan.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“Outside Butte.”

“It’s a lonely stretch between here and Billings.”

Aven said nothing. He had taken on the quiet resignation that we had both learned growing up. Stick to the plan, nose to the grindstone, don’t complain. Someone will happen along. It was a way of turning helplessness into resolve, refusing to weaken, the way we sometimes convinced ourselves that we felt sorry for people with money. It was how we turned hand-me-downs and mended clothes into badges of honor, even superiority. We can get by with less than you. We don’t need what you’ve got. I was looking forward to professors asking me about my travels. “Great,” I’d say. “Drove back with a friend who fixed up a car he bought for fifty dollars.” Then the look of surprise. Two thousand miles in a junk car? Yes, my expression would say. No problem. The trick was to turn poverty into a story, a conquest, a depth of character that no one else could claim.

So I sat with Aven in the dark. We listened to traffic blowing by in both directions on the interstate. And we waited.