Foliate Oak November 2019

Fiction
​
Frail Creatures of the False Night
By T. Ben Bryant

The deluge from the second typhoon of the season ended at two thirty-six in the afternoon on June seventh. Just after sunrise, clouds the color of wet cement pushed orange fire and lacy streaks of pink and white from the west Tokyo sky. The still atmosphere rolled away or was forced inland and crushed against the northern alps. Trees with limbs that hung heavy and drooping began to dance on the rising breeze. The surface of the lake became a shrunken sea. When the first stinging drops cut free of the clouds and sliced their way through the mass of air separating heaven from earth, the trees were doing their warm up stretches before the tropic squall of the lake. By eleven fifteen, when the first assault of razor-sharp drops gave way to the main volley of fat drops which landed with thunderclaps and forced craters into the sandy soil of the walkways and footpaths circling the lake and taking twisting detours into the surrounding forested park, the trees were in the final throes of climax. The eager hands of the lake yearned for them to topple from their warped stage into its cold embrace. At one in the afternoon, the water’s wish was granted, and a willow cherry plunged lazily into the black water. Its roots remained reaching skyward, washed clean by the torrent.
 
The rain ended. The first to return were the birds. They emerged en masse from their hidden places and reclaimed their spots among the still swaying branches and gently trembling leaves. The birds were the first to see the boy, face down in the muddy path that ran along the northwest of the lake. Three massive pines stood honorary over his broken body. The pale gleam of his skin was a beacon for a handful of curious sparrows. They bounced around his body on their toothpick legs, but none dared approach too closely. The pigeons were the next to approach, but they too were too cautious to come closer than a meter from the boy’s marble fingers buried up to the second knuckles in the coarse silt. The crows were the first and only to disturb the discarded cherubim. They plunged their overthick beaks into the fatty flesh of his cheeks, thighs, and arms gorging themselves on the glistening rends of meat they worked free.
 
The first person to reenter the park was the photographer, Naoki Sakurai. He entered from the north and spent some time taking a great number of black and white photographs on his seventy-year-old Hasselblad. Naoki only had two subjects in his portfolio: trees and ex-lovers. The ancient lizard skinned pines rose from delicate mirrors pierced by their own cast-off needles. He placed his camera at careful angles to emphasize the most important elements of the scene. The hard slam of the mirror raising signaled that the light from that fraction of a second had been suspended in silver crystals.  The hard slam of the mirror raising echoed the thrum of his heartbeat with each frozen moment. After precise chemical interactions the scene would be rendered in infinite shades of grey, of which the human eye could only detect thirty. He filled three rolls of Ilford PanF 50 with trees and continued along the path. He intended to develop them in a weak bath of Rodinal as soon as he arrived at his tiny one-bedroom apartment. He stepped clear of the last row of pines and saw the boy lying prone and reaching towards the lake. The crows rose black and violent against the sky. He walked around the body in a loose almost-circle. His hands didn’t tremble as he set up the Hasselblad and spent two rolls capturing the boy from all sides and angles. When he later developed the film, his favorite image, and one that would haunt his restless mind long after the original negative had been destroyed in a house fire, was of the boy’s outstretched hand and the fingers grasping the softened flesh of the earth. A few grains of dirt, in sharp focus, dotted the back of the hand and the rest of the image fell out of focus; the boy’s fine hair just a smear of gradated greys. The hand grasped for something attainable but just out of reach, the tips of the fingers almost connecting. If he focused hard enough, he imagined he could see what the hand sought. Naoki studied that hand as closely as if it gripped his throat.
 
Mitsuho Hata came around a bend in the path just in time to see that strange photographer, Sakurai she thought his name was, straighten and place his old camera back into the patched postal bag he always carried and sprint off along the path in the opposite direction. She watched his dark jacket fade into the shadow of the trees before she noticed the boy lying directly in front of where the photographer had just been. She moved forward. Her feet sucked into the ground. The blazing white of her sneaker soles ringed with thick mud. She knelt in front of the boy and studied the ruined parts of his face that were left visible in the mud. Her mind danced back to an autumn trip to Europe twenty-five years earlier where she had seen the same skin in the paintings of Vasari. The crows perched in the line straight branches overhead. After the initial shock subsided, she took the powder pink phone from her track pants pocket and dialed the local police box. The line was engaged so she sat on the low concrete fence that had been cast formed and painted to look like roughhewn logs and waited for a long five minutes. The sun played on the water creating pleasing patterns that could almost distract her from the dead child directly in front of her. The second time she phoned the police box an officer answered and introduced himself as Ohta in a soft voice that floated like bells. Her first instinct upon hearing the officer’s voice was to hang up and flee. She suppressed the urge and stayed on the line. She told the lady voiced patrolman what she had seen. She heard him sigh and chew the end of a pen. He asked her to stay put until he arrived and let slip with a strain of worry darkening his chiming voice that she was second to report the boy and that the original caller would be returning to the scene shortly. The policeman hung up and Mitsuho sat cold in the brightening day.
 
Sakurai returned to the lake and was surprised to see a woman in her late middle years sitting vigil with the lifeless cherubim boy. He cleared his throat as he approached and gave her a nod when she started. She smiled and a single silver tooth in the upper right of her mouth sparked in the light. She introduced herself as Hata and asked if he was the other who had called to report the body. He confessed that he hadn’t called but had come upon the boy and rushed home to get his phone before returning to call it in. They sat together on the fence as if the very presence of the other could ward off further misfortune.
 
Patrolman Ohta arrived twenty minutes later on a stripped silver bicycle that made the navy of his uniform appear black. He greeted Hata by name but was noticeably confused when Sakurai didn’t answer to Kimura. He took a small pad from the covered box on the back of his bicycle and a brass ballpoint pen from his breast pocket and took down the details that Sakurai offered. He asked about the time three times during Sakurai’s recounting and made furious marks on the pad. When he had finished taking the accounts from both Hata and Sakurai, he called for more assistance through his crackling belt radio. He and Sakurai smoked cigarettes and dropped the butts into a portable ashtray Sakurai carried in his back pocket. After each cigarette Ohta surveyed the boy and tried to note new details.
 
The child was male. Naked. Lying face down in the prone position with his left arm extended towards the lake. The little, ring, and middle fingers of that hand were pushed up to the second knuckle into the soft soil. The index finger was pointing towards the water and lay pristine above the mud. There were splatters of mud on the back of the hand but no soil on the index finger and none under its nail. The right arm was at his side with the hand facing palm up tucked under the hip. The shoulders were straight and flat. The face directly in the mud and submerged three or four millimeters. The left leg was straight with the foot turned outward. The right leg was slightly bent at the knee and the large toe and inside of the foot were pressed into the ground. The body was a hard unnatural white splattered about with mud and pine needles. The fine ash brown hair was muddy but not tousled. All over, the softer parts had been pecked and torn by crows leaving open gashes that did not spill blood.
 
Ohta sat on the fence pulling the last fires from his Lucky Strike deep into his chest and imagined frail creatures that resembled the best of men wrought from the stolen light of the moon fleeing from the false night of a brief summer typhoon and returning home to the gloom and sanctuary of the hidden depths with their reflected sky fracturing on the eternally dancing surface.        

T. Ben Bryant is from rural Tennessee and lives and works in Tokyo. He is an internationally published writer with stories appearing in various magazines around the world.

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To Covet
By Jade Marzolf

Sometimes it feels like all I ever do is bus tables. The days marching from booth to booth at The Roost become faded and blurred together, like a watercolor painting, only not beautiful.
 
Today, as I walk through the tables, the flyer folded in my back-pocket crinkles. The crackling is a melody of hope that makes my spine straighter as I slide into a booth with the cutlery bin to fold silverware for the upcoming dinner rush.
 
Reggie, my co-worker who has taken to following me around during my shifts instead of doing his job as the dishwasher boy, slides into the seat across from me. He’s noticed my reluctance to engage in mindless chatter with him is more determined than usual and has taken it upon himself to guess what’s on my mind. As I fold up a bundle of tableware inside a napkin, he folds his hands in anticipation.
 
“Your last test was an A minus instead of an A.” Even though he’s just finished his freshman year at Lacamore College and never went to my high school, he still knows of my studious reputation.
 
“No.”
 
“You found a rat’s tooth in your meatloaf today.”
 
“Nice try. I don’t eat the cafeteria lunches.”
 
His eyes glint, the corners of his mouth twisting up to reveal a mischievous set of teeth. “Your underwear doesn’t match your bra.”
 
I cease folding up silverware and fix him with a frosty stare. “Okay. I think it’s time for me to just tell you.”
 
He laughs, delighted to have provoked a reaction out of me. “No, not yet. I like guessing.”
 
“Stop.” I shake my head. Reggie is one of those guys who thinks he’s charming and irresistible. He believes he can have anyone he wants. He’ll say or do anything to win someone over. He’s what my little brothers might define as “a bombastic nincompoop” if the three of them were locked in a name-calling battle.
 
“All right, all right. If it would make you happy, you can just tell me.” He flutters his wide sapphire eyes, trying to convince me of his righteousness.
 
I fidget and the flyer knowingly rumples in my pocket. “I’m contemplating whether or not I should apply for a scholarship.”
 
“What? That’s it?”
 
“I know you were expecting a huge, delicious secret, but alas, that is all.” I pick up my dinnerware bin and walk back to the kitchens. I’m not ready to buckle up for another four hours of clearing tables and pouring waters. A few times, I’ve thought about what would happen if I didn’t fasten the seatbelt of the employment mobile – I could get fired, lose my only source of income, and not be able to go to college. I would crash through the windshield.
 
I kneel down to place the dinnerware bin back in the cupboard and take out the busser bin. When I stand, I see Reggie has followed me again. He leans against the counter watching me. “So, what scholarship are you applying for?”
 
Since I’d rather not get stuck playing another one of his guessing games I respond tightly, “A study abroad trip,” and then march out of the kitchen to clean a few tables.
 
After I return to empty the dirty dinnerware in the sink he asks from his spot at the counter as if the conversation never ended, “A trip to where?”
 
“Madagascar.”
 
“Madagascar? Why do you want to do that?”
 
I lift an eyebrow. “Haven’t you ever wondered if there’s more to life than spending your days doing school work and loading the dishwasher?”
 
He leans forward even further on the counter and props his chin up with a lazy hand. “No way. Working here is so …stimulating.” Normally I’d reward his sarcasm with an eye roll and add onto it. “Yes Reggie, loading dishwashers for four hours straight is my dream job too!”
I can’t. Not with the flyer in my pocket. Not with the dream of escaping even for a while, a concrete thing.
 
Unfortunately, as hope has become a physical thing, so has the exhaustion I usually push aside. I’ve been working here six days a week since I turned fifteen and Mom asked her friend who is the manager to hire me. The tiredness has become an ogre sitting on my shoulders, yanking my hair. It’s a cancer manifesting inside my bones, whispering to my body it should lead me back to bed and not let me get up again. Until I saw the flyer posted on the bulletin board outside the main office, I thought the only way to get rid of it was to wait until college came. Because then, my life would change. Everything was supposed to change when you went to college.
 
But now, there’s a way to escape earlier. Or at least, win a two week break from it.
 
It’s torture. I want the escape, but I know what could happen if I actually take it.
 
Unsettled by my lack of response to his joke, Reggie adds, “Plus, you know, we get those free bagels on Sundays.”
 
I nod. “Bagels. The real reason why I decided to work here.”
 
“Wait. I thought it was because you like my hair so much.”
 
“What?” I balk as he flops a few strands of his comb over back from his face. His hair is naturally brown, but he bleaches and dyes it until it’s the color of fresh snow.
 
“You don’t have to lie, Willow. I already know.” He runs fingers through the tufts of snow, smirking, waiting to hear what I have to say.
 
I never cared about Reggie’s hair. But now that he had to shove it in my face, I’m forced to admit it does look soft and feathery. And I’ll never be able to un-notice.
 
This is why I hate him.
 
He tilts his head. “Face it, I think you don’t really want to leave because you would miss me too much.”
 
“More like the other way around,” I scoff.
 
“That’s what they all say.” I resist the urge to toss a dirty fork at his face. “But seriously, study abroad sounds cool. I think you should go for it.”
 
I stare at him, surprised at this rare, serious tone he’s put on. He looks evenly back at me. “I can’t,” I say. “I need the money for college.”
 
“But you work all the time. And you just said there was more to life than working.”
 
“I want there to be.”
 
“So what’s the problem?” He grins slyly. “Unless you really would miss me too much.”
 
I roll my eyes. “I don’t think my mom would allow me to go. She’d freak out about me doing something irresponsible like taking off two weeks from work.” She’s been a single parent to me and my two brothers since I was five and Dad took off without an explanation. Missing a day from work and basically throwing away money isn’t done in this family. Especially because I’m supposed to go to college in a year and no one is sure if I’ll be able to afford it, even me.
 
“What’s the harm in just applying? You don’t have to tell her.”
 
“But what if I get it? Then what am I supposed to do?”
 
“What if your house burns down tomorrow and I have to bust through your window and carry you out through the inferno?” He turns around to check his reflection in the steel of the refrigerator. Mirror Reggie winks at me. “Are you going to worry about that? Or just cross the bridge if you get to it?”

Jade Marzolf is currently a student at Chatham University where she studies media arts and creative writing. She is a professional daydreamer and flash napper. Her work is forthcoming in Germ Magazine and has been published in The Minor Bird and by Z Publishing House. You can read more here: 

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Trust
By Tom Roth

I came by one afternoon to pick up the leaves and found all of Dad’s fishing poles and tackle boxes and nets in front of the rusted shed. Mom struggled out the door with a pair of old boots in each hand.
 
“What?” she said after setting the boots in a row.
 
Yellow leaves covered the backyard. Tall oaks stood everywhere. Their long branches made shadows that swayed on the mossy roof of our house. Dad said that someday a few of these trees would need cutting. I never got to it because who can you trust in this damn town? When I was little, I caught one of the roofers drinking our milk. The son of a bitch chugged the jar and wiped his mouth and spat on our porch. His coworkers laughed inside their truck and motioned him to hurry back. He burped when he tossed the jar behind the tall juniper bushes on the side of the house where they pissed, and probably smoked pot. Mr. Watkins saw him do it too. I could tell from the way he looked at me as he opened his car. We just stood there, waiting for the other to make a move.
 
“I said I’d get to it,” I said when I followed her inside.
 
Hooks and knives and scissors hung on a pegboard. Ice fishing spears crowded a corner. Orange life jackets sprawled all over the floor. A dusty fluke anchor stood on the long, tall table that ran through the middle of the shed. Bobbers and sinkers scattered the rest of the table. On the other wall was a worn map of Ohio lakes, rivers, and streams. I pulled the chain above the anchor and gold light washed the center of the table.
 
“Ten years,” she said as she bent down to scoop up jackets, “and that bulb has done more work in here than anyone else.”
 
“How did it get like this?” I asked as I followed her back out with a camp stool in my hands.
Mom set the jackets down in a line and crossed her arms when she looked up. Grey streaks ran through her black hair that hung just below her chin. Wrinkles lined her sunken cheeks. I was the only one with the same blue eyes as her. The Ohio State sweater draped into red ripples below her arms. Her weight worried me. They wouldn’t listen. They still don’t. Danny was snooping around with that bitch from Halloway at the time and Jessica was always blind to begin with. I swear that fucking snake she’s still seeing is no good. You know he’s under investigation? Lord help that child. Anyway, they were no help.
 
“Ross,” she said, drawing out my name. She used to have a way of tracing my thoughts. Like she could somehow connect the unclosed spaces and make a shape of them to help me understand. Ever since Dad died, though, her words made me wonder if she was hiding something from us. It got me thinking of other things she used to say when I was younger. How much of it was true? “Things just end up out of sorts whether you wanted them moved or not. What you thought in the first place has got nothing to do with where they end up.”
 
I followed her back into the shed. She began throwing all the tools from the pegboard into a garbage bag. I held a sinker up to the hanging bulb. Before we fished one morning, I asked dad if he’d ever been shot. He was threading my line through the ring of a sinker. A faint reflection of the sinker dangled in the lenses of his half-rimmed glasses after he tied the knot. Mosquitos spotted the black surface of the lake. Darkened spruce trees stood against a purple horizon. He said he was shot in Korea.
 
I watched her continue shoving the tools in the black garbage bag. She worked quick, like she didn’t give a damn about what he loved, like the things around her meant nothing to him or me or any of us. Dad wouldn’t had done that to her piano. She exited the shed with the garbage bag over her shoulder.
 
The Ohio map looked ancient. I pressed my palm to its threadbare skin and then traced a river with my finger like I did in the summers. Inside, the dark shed nearly muted the outside sounds of mowers, bugs, and my friends still playing backyard football with Danny. I imagined I was canoeing down the river I traced in search of a lost child. One time I fell asleep on a life jacket and dreamed about it. The child belonged to an Indian tribe. I found the little girl kneeling by a bonfire in a clearing near the river. She wore a buckskin dress with a black fish in the center. Her brown hair was braided into a long ponytail. We talked about sports and she said she had a baseball signed by Bob Feller. The way back felt like hours and the little girl got older the more and more I paddled. When we finally arrived at the tribe’s spot, the tepees had fallen down, and blood was splattered on a few and car tires marked the mud. The woman muttered something and then ran back into the river and vanished beneath the water. I woke up to Dad shaking me.
 
After removing the tacks, I set the giant map on one knee as I rolled it up. Mom wasn’t outside. I put the map in the passenger’s seat of my truck and then walked up the stone path that led to the front door. When he got sick, Mom finished building the rock wall that edged the path. The pieces were heavy, rectangular slabs of dark rock. It was Dad’s final project. He hauled each piece from his favorite little fishing spot at Tolscara Lake. We’d always stop there to walk on the boulders that stood above the still water to skip rocks for a little bit before eating our turkey sandwiches. One afternoon, when the water shined so hard that it hurt to look across the lake, Dad initialed our names on a rock while he wondered about taking some of them back to the house one day. Mom placed that same rock between the wall and the garden to make a step to the front yard.
 
I opened the half glass door and found her sitting at the dinner table in the kitchen. She was watching the small television beside the bananas on the counter below the cabinets.
 
“Look at all those people, Ross,” Mom said.
 
They pounded sledge hammers and pickaxes and chisels into the graffitied wall at night. Some stood on top and helped others climb up the wall to join them in cheering. Then the screen displayed a crowd rocking a piece of the wall back and forth until it collapsed. A crane lifted the piece in the air. It dangled against a grey sky. I’ve never seen people so happy. Was that what Americans were supposed to look like too? My father fought for that happiness. He took a bullet for the sake of my freedom. I love this country and I believe in it, but why do I have to question what we really look like? God only knows, but He doesn’t say because who the hell can He trust with His word these days? That’s what it is about this country. I believe in it, but I don’t trust it. Look at the ways people live now. Look at Danny. Look at Jess. Look at those bastards on the highway exits who beg for your money because they don’t want to work for their happiness. Look at the kids who don’t give a damn about their education and their parents who spend the government’s money on booze and painkillers and cigarettes. Look at those snobs from Halloway who do anything they want with the money they got. Look at these sorry crowds and search for the hidden few with ashen cheeks and cracked hands, the forgotten ones who suffer from the widespread refusal of work, of freedom, of love, of America. We are invisible to them. What’s worse is that God can’t trust us either since we got too many things on our tired hands. And it doesn’t matter which side you’re on nowadays when so much trust has gone to shit.
 
“I can take everything,” I said as I walked over to the trash can and looked down at the broken eggshells. I pulled out the bag and tied it and dropped it by the door. “There’s some space in the basement. I’ll clean everything and reorganize it the way dad had it only it’ll be in my house now. I’ll take care of the shed too. You want it gone right?”
 
“But when was the last time you’ve done any fishing?” she said. “Not since that weekend after the funeral, right? And that was only because I made you take Danny up there. I thought you hated fishing.”
 
“I don’t want Dad’s things gone to shit, alright?”
 
“Watch your mouth.”
 
“I’m not gonna’ let his property be misused by imbeciles who claim themselves true fishermen. That’s not what he would’ve wanted. To allow his valuables to be squandered by some fool who can’t tell the difference between his head and his ass.”
 
“Now you sound like a fool yourself when talk like that don’t you know? You want Julie to start picking up on those words? Cause that girl will the way she watches you. I sure hope Maggie still doesn’t put up with that crap. I don’t know where you got that mouth.”
 
“I said I’ll take care of everything.”
 
“Ross, when was the last time you fished?”
 
“Christ, you don’t trust me, do you? I said I’ll take care of it, dammit,” I said, faking a laugh like I didn’t take too much offense to it.
 
Mom brushed by me and walked down the hall. I turned off the television that showed East Germans shopping in West Germany and stood there in the kitchen and listened to nothing for a moment.
 
I wished she didn’t ask that. Calling me out when she let that goddam shed turn into a shithole. She never came with us. Then I realized she wasn’t supposed to come because Dad never asked her. And maybe, I think, Danny wasn’t even supposed to be there. If it was only me and him and the water, then maybe I’d fish more now.
 
She returned with a small cardboard box in her hands and then slid it onto the table.
 
“You can have these,” she said, opening the box.
 
I looked inside and found all his notepads stacked into three rows with a few shoved in the open spaces. I pulled one out and flipped through the pages of dated bullet points.
 
“I wondered how many there actually were,” I said. “This here is about when Jessica was born and a couple later, I bet,” I scanned through a couple more pages and found it, “yep, look. The day Kennedy was shot. Picked up Ross from school. Couldn’t answer any of his questions. Only told him it was okay when I knew it wasn’t.”
 
“I read them a long time ago,” she said.
 
“Why didn’t you show us these earlier?” I asked.
 
She walked to the window above the sink and stared at the dead cornfield across the street. Sunlight illuminated the wave of fawn, shriveled stalks rolled up against the horizon. In the distance stood the silhouette of a Gothic barn with side by side twins of towering silos.
 
“It just never felt like the right time until now, I guess,” she said, still staring at the barn. “Listen, Ross, when you read them,” she stopped. It seemed she waited on the biplane that sprayed the cornfield. She turned to me now. Her look held something back. Goddam those eyes.
“What?” I said.
 
“When you read them,” she said, “trust that your father tried, okay?”
 
I just stared back at her untelling eyes and waited to see what it was she meant.
 
“He tried,” she said again. She picked up the box of notepads. “I’ll put these in the truck,” she said as she swung open the door.
 
I don’t believe in hiding, but people do it all the time. Even the ones closest to you will bury secrets beneath their silence. She may know how to trace my thoughts, but I don’t trust her as much as I trusted him. Whatever he wrote in those books, I know it was the pure gospel of our lives. Of course he tried to tell it how it was. He wasn’t afraid of that. Most people, like Mom, tend to be.
 
When I walked outside, the biplane flew over the cornfield without any spray. I once told Dad I loved watching that plane fly, but he argued over the fertilizer. He worried about the drift. After a while, he went on that sometimes people do things that shouldn’t ever be done and there’s no stopping them from happening no matter how hard you fight. Sometimes, he said, you just got choose which wrongs to right and which wrongs to remember. I disagree. Not sometimes, but many times. Many times we’re forced to choose one and let the other haunt us. Many, many times.
 
I met Mom at the truck. For some reason, she had climbed into the bed and was staring at the plane. I looked at her standing above me. Her hand shielded her blue eyes. Then I turned to find the plane. I kept watching its flight as I spoke to her.
 
“I could take Julie fishing,” I said. “Teach her how to bait a hook and cast a line. Show her what it means to wrestle a fish. Read her something from Dad’s journals and tell stories about him. Go up to Tolscara for a weekend. I haven’t been there in probably fifteen years.”
 
And I’ll tell her everything. She’ll know everything about him, the good and the bad. In doing so, we’ll be closer. We’ll know each other for what we are. Goddammit, we’ll be an honest family.
 
“Why is Charlie Mordon flying the plane?” Mom asked.

Tom Roth works for Sandy Valley Local Schools. His recent writing has appeared in The Canton Repository, Riggwelter Press, and Fictive Dream.

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