The Climax: Volume 6, Issue 4

I didn’t know what to expect when I started this magazine in 2018. A few folks called me crazy.

Historically, we know that creatives have always sought community, and From Whispers to Roars embodies that sentiment. Thank you for continuing to grow with us.

This issue of The Climax feels more human than I could have ever imagined. These are raw pages, full of joy and kindness, alongside observations, anger, and an understanding of life’s complexities. I hope this issue stirs something in you.

XX,

R. R. Noall

Our Featured Writers

Climax Winners

RISE AND FALL by Julie Benesh
Transformation by Shannon George
Meet Me at Rainbow Park by Angelica Terso
Seltzer and Tomato Juice by Kristi Kulcsar

Honorable Mention

Phantom Limb by Elyse Brouhard
Bald Spot by Riley Henderson
And What Good Are All Those Thoughts and Prayers by Adrian Potter
Open Letter to Velveeta by Brian Dickson
Suburban Bliss by Ronald Walker
Directions in the World to Apply to My Head by Megan Wildhood
About Yesterday by Charlene Moskal
The Cat Woman of Tzin Tzun Tzan by Michael McLaughlin

The Climax

RISE AND FALL by Julie Benesh

Outgrew my dead mother;

awkward now trying to catch

up. When we were the same age,

we were so close. I did yoga

the way she bowled, mean-

ing all the time, never giving

up, but minus the ciggies and beer.

I could have stayed right there.

But I made my choice to grow

up. She still texts me in the form

of nose itches, reminding me when I mess

up; I slap back with shrug emoji or poem.

Now I take after my father:

the high cholesterol; the bad skin.

Though I don’t drink before I get

up and take better care of my teeth.

On both sides of my family the men

outlive the women. So many sides

to every story, it’s hard to keep up.

No, it’s impossible but essential to try;

to never stop looking/moving up

Transformation by Shannon George

Meet Me at Rainbow Park
by Angelica Terso

The world wakes up under a red sky.

It’s the last of the six events according to the scientists.

Birds will drop dead. Critters will retreat underground. Rivers will dry up. Fires will swallow the forests. Technology will cease to function. The sky will turn red.

And then the world will end.

I half expect my neighbors to scream and cry but it’s been eerily quiet this morning. I suppose it has been for months now. Panic and chaos dissipated not long after event five when the world turned dark. It’s as if we’re following the stages of grief and we’re now all in acceptance of our fate.

I swallow a spoonful of beans and count only two more cans in the pantry. I hope that whatever comes next comes fast. A shudder runs through my body as I think of what I went through to get these last cans of goods. I can still feel the brittle fingers I pried one out of, the owner of what I thought was a long-ago abandoned house I stumbled upon during my last outing well on its way to decomposing. I was lucky to find seven more under the sink, but there isn’t a part of me that wants to relive that again.

I push the bowl away from me, my fingers grazing the sealed envelope just within arm’s reach. I dug it out from my closet upon waking when red filtered through my windows.

To Camille – 30^th birthday, written in barely legible cursive.

It’s the last letter from Mom. She wrote one for every milestone birthday when she found out about the cancer. I don’t turn thirty until November, seven months from now, but I rip it open anyway.

The messy handwriting and jumbled words tell me she likely wrote this in her last hour. And not much gets me out of the house these days, but there’s a sentence that jumps out of the gibberish remarks, one I read over and over again that stirs something in me.

I find myself on my bike, riding fast in the middle of the road, the once instinctive need to veer to the side long gone.

There are people out in their yards, entranced by the color of blood above us. But most are inside, peering out from drawn curtains, waiting – always waiting.

There was a park we used to frequent when I was a kid. A lake surrounded by trees where we’d fish and laze until the sun went down. Mom would pack sandwiches and fruits, and often, we made bets on who could hold their breath underwater the longest.

I somehow always won.

“Careful up ahead. Paths are gone,” a man warns me as I enter the park. “Happy last days.”

“Happy last days,” I nod back.

I plant myself on our usual spot, except it looks nothing like it did back then. The once mammoth-sized trees before me are now reduced to ashes, smoke rising from their remains. In the middle is a massive hole, the only indication that it was ever filled with water are the few rotten fish stuck in dirt.

I close my eyes, picturing the perfect summer afternoons of my childhood. Water lapping, birds chirping, sun on my skin, mom laughing as I reel in my first catch, mom laughing as I run away from the ducks, mom laughing as I mimic the geese flying. Mom laughing.

I re-read the letter.

When you feel sad, remember Rainbow Park. I’ll see you there, my Camille.

The ground shakes underneath my feet as successive lightning bolts strike the ground, re-igniting the lingering brush around me. The red sky starts to darken ever so slowly, the world welcoming its demise.

I kiss the last line on the crumpled paper, love, mom.

“Yes, I’ll see you.”

Seltzer and Tomato Juice
by Kristi Kulcsar

“I think a homeless man just walked in…” I whispered in his ear.

Not able to control his hand (or his heart) my boyfriend waved to the man as if he knew him and called him over to the bar where we sat. He looked like he had just rolled out from under a bridge. He wore a lightly striped collared shirt, but the sleeves were unbuttoned. He wore expensive-looking beige slacks, but they were multiple sizes too big for his sunken frame and his belt could not keep them up. We could see the top of his blue hanes boxer-briefs sticking out from the top of his pants, because his shirt was un-tucked and the bottom button had fallen off, leaving his belly-button exposed.

“What can I get you, my brother?” my boyfriend asked him, and motioned for him to sit down. He was carrying his life in a clear plastic bag. A few papers, some food, and what looked like an extra pair of clothes. He shoved the bag down at his feet, embarrassed, but thankful for the hospitality he was being shown.

“I’ve been told the kitchen is closed, but I’d appreciate a seltzer or tomato juice,” he said.

“Which one do you want?” the bar-tender asked, “we have both.”

“Give the man both,” my boyfriend chimed in.

He was served both (and ordered 2 more rounds of both before the night ended). We were hungry for information, but he was just hungry. Imagine my surprise when he claimed to be a physician. It was “complicated”, he said. Up until a few months ago, he was a different man, he said, a successful doctor, “the peoples hero.” Now, he was trying his damnedest to keep his pants up and fill his grumbling belly with seltzer and tomato juice.

Sitting at the bar, conversing with my boyfriend, he looked like a vulture: shoulders pushed up around his neck, head hung low, searching for scraps. He was candid with us, more open than any stranger has previously been. He’d gotten into “some trouble” — the usual these days: a problem with pain medication. He was well-spoken, respectable (despite his appearance), and I believed him when he said he really thought he was helping alleviate people’s pain when he prescribed them powerful narcotics.

It was a pleasure to be in his company (despite his fallen state), and when the bar was closing we offered him an Uber to wherever he needed to go: “A friend’s house — it’s a 50/50 shot, she went to a Billy Joel concert.”

We ordered the Uber; he called his friend to make sure she was home; she was, but she was annoyed. He was invited to the concert, but didn’t attend, and she was offended. She doubted his friendship and her own willingness to let him sleep on her couch. We heard the entire conversation and his embarrassment again showed in his hollowed cheeks. He would go anyway; she seemed defeated and unconcerned.

On our way home, I Googled him: the first name that he gave us, and the last name I assumed was his when he hesitated giving an example of a patient’s request for medicine: “Hey Dr. Ben, I’ve taken my medication, but I’m still in a lot of pain and cannot function this way…” (I should have been a detective.)

When I found the articles with his picture in the NY Post and U.S. News, I couldn’t believe that our new “friend” would soon be on trial for second degree manslaughter (the result of allegedly trying to “help people”, but ending in a fatal overdose). I do not know him. I cannot say that this disheveled doctor did not commit the crimes he is accused of committing. But the human being I saw suck down 3 seltzers and tomato juices was still a human being. A likable one, in fact (before we knew his history).

As indecisive as he was between seltzer and tomato juice is how indecisive I was about whether or not I liked this man. He was good to us, but was he bad to others? He looked innocent to me, but was he guilty? He said in conversation that his job as a doctor, deciding whether or not a patient should be prescribed pain medication, was never black and white, but always shades of gray: like seltzer AND tomato juice, like my view of him.

Phantom Limb by Elyse Brouhard

Today you would have been twenty-four. The number of hours in a day. 8,393 of those since you died. And I forget but I don’t forget. My body is a better memory-keeper than my brain. The day you were born it was dark, or it wasn’t. The Christmas tree was in the living room. I hid in the closet when mom was moaning in labor. Mitch hid with me, but he wasn’t scared. He cut the umbilical cord later. You slept in my room. I learned the rhythm of your breath. We kept each other awake when we were supposed to be sleeping. You had blue eyes and a head full of dark hair. The rest of us have brown eyes. We have light hair and freckled skin, our smiles are shades of each other. Our hands are warm. When you died, your lips were blue. I can’t remember if you ever said my name. I know you said “ball” and “hot” and “doll.” I remember that you toddled, that you pressed your tiny hands to my face. I will always love your laugh. Even now when I cannot remember its sound. What name would you give me now? Would we share clothes and shoes and secrets? Would I call you when I’m sad? Would I still be the kind of person I want to be, if you hadn’t died? Twenty-three years is too many years without you. Sometimes I dream that I am holding you. You feel in some ways like a myth, in others like a piece of my body I lost long ago. The phantom pains remind me it was once there. I miss a lot of things that never happened. I miss watching you pick out an outfit for the first day of school. I miss the times we ate so much ice cream we thought we would puke. I miss having a sister whose spouse I could shove out of bed, because you were mine first. Perhaps too, I miss the little girl I was who died when you died. Maybe they are buried together, and I am holding you still.

Bald Spot by Riley Henderson

My dad pulled me aside during a family trip to Yellowstone to remind me that I’m balding.

I don’t know if he expected me to be surprised, as if there’s someone else scraping the hair

off of my head every morning (there’s not).

He also wanted to remind me – as if I were not born with unfettered access to every form of shame in a box in my pocket – of how the world looks at balding men, specifically balding men

who want to be artists…or I guess, more specifically, how it doesn’t.

He didn’t wanna hear about Chris Martin, or Paolo Coelho, or Michael Cerveris, or Shel Silverstein. He didn’t wanna hear about the fact that people only care if you’re bald

if the only thing you’re giving them is hair.

He disclosed conversations he had with mentors and employers when he was my age

and still leading worship, and had his hair falling out in clumps, all but explicitly tying his position as an artist and a leader to what strangers may think of his hair,

neatly wrapping up his identity and his livelihood in a genetically irrevocable bow,

before offering to help fund my toupée (I’m 26).

I wanted to be pissed, but all I could be was sorry.

Sorry he let people talk to him that way.

Sorry he allowed another person’s view of the world to override his view of himself, and volunteered his time to communities who would revoke their subscription to a person’s talents,

qualifications, fitness, and kindness, based on criteria that boldly primeval.

Sorry he decided that the voices of such people were worth not only anything at all, but worth so much that he saw it fit to warn me of their power, and that the best advice he could think of was to play dead before the flaccid imagination of people who would just as soon find some other thing about him to pick at.

Sorry that he gave his agency over to people so nauseatingly petty that they’d carry his hairline in the same breath as his name.

I appreciated the gesture, I think. Life sucks, and toupées are expensive, but it reminded me of all the times my mom would look at me sideways for picking up snakes in the yard, with all the fear of her mother, and her mother’s mother in her eyes.

But I’d read the field guides they put on the shelves.

I knew what I had in my hands.

I had the world. I had the whole scaly, legless world, with nothing spared for comfort,

or covered up on the words of people

who didn’t know better.

And I was always so, so sorry

I couldn’t make her get that.

And I’m so, so sorry

you let the world

feed you poison

because some wax-faced goons

with rubber lips and paper hearts

said not taking it

would kill you.

And What Good Are All Those Thoughts and Prayers
by Adrian Potter

if our world keeps falling apart? After all, no one can even recall why the flags remain at half-staff, which means we are either suffocating our

memories or letting our memories smother us. We live only by that which still allows us to survive. The flag, for instance, triggers us to either sense

pride or grief, depending on how high it flies and what news keeps trending on the internet. I suppose we are being carefully asphyxiated by our

recollections: online troll postings, bodycam footage, school shootings devised by tormented souls who execute others to ease their pain and when

their aches persist, they turn a gun on themselves and their suicides become symbolic of our country. We might pledge allegiance to whatever

windblown fabric we must in order to continue breathing with knees pressed against our necks. We may stand and salute as the anthem gets played,

knowing we remain victims of a recycled melody. We listen as the flag flails in the breeze and we whistle back in memory of a friend who got buried

and didn’t make the headlines. Here we are, again, our mouths agape in shock and awe. Synthetic outrage gets passed off as genuine emotion.

Maybe things have always been this way, and we’ve just recently grown disenchanted with feigning optimism. We witness far too many tragedies to

know when the mourning should cease. People claim the first wholly American style of music to gain traction and recognition across the world was

the blues. Maybe it’s because the blues speak of sunshine and storms from the same mouth. Maybe it’s because each refrain feels like another late-

night prayer kneeling on the line between life sentence and death penalty. Maybe it’s because they preach two-headed sermons, spitting scripture

and blasphemy in the same breath. If we keep singing the same blues, this nation will become nothing but water and sky. Polluted, in memory of

whoever, our blood will run forever, these blues will never die.

Open Letter to Velveeta by Brian Dickson

You got me good
with my hand in
the crockpot after
a potluck. There—
at the bottom—
with a scoop
and sponge
the sludge,
I wanted to say,
Lady of El Queso!
Come quick! Come!

I self-portrait
with sodium phosphate,
with sodium citrate,
with sodium alginate.

I aggregate with
Vitamin A palmitate
palpitations.

With a scoop
and sponge
the sludge

And there’s my mom instead
with memory’s rope
strung out with her voice
between Tostitos, Taquitos,
El Río margaritas.

Anyone want queso with Picante?

With a scoop
I’m swimming back
with my siblings to melt
to dip
to haul those bricks
into time capsules for Space X.

With a scoop
and sponge
my hands
are slimed, are primed—
we thought nothing of scrape,
of hunched over for a hunk
of burning, crusted love,
mounds of mild slush.

With a scoop
and sponge
the sludge just to get by,
she could top
the classic with
Hormel chili con queso.

Nobody was hormonal over it,
crumbling crackers
for the bi-weekly wretch.

Come get your chili!

Ugh.

Viva Velveeta,
my early, other
gut bucket.
We stack blocks of you to the rim
of our childhood. There—

more of you, rubber texture to
our innard-road,
to our grilled-cheese beds
nestled in our hearts.

Suburban Bliss by Ronald Walker

Directions in the World to Apply to My Head
by Megan Wildhood

As seen at the doctor’s office: Please sign in.

As seen on a plane: this area needs to remain free of luggage.

As seen on a road trip: Caution: Falling Rock.

As seen at the zoo: Please do not feed the lions.

As seen at Starbucks: Caution: contents may be hot.

As seen on a grad-school application: Please provide three references.

As seen at the dentist’s: Please unplug for the evening.

As seen on TV: A limited-time offer.

About Yesterday by Charlene Moskal

A dervish went off inside my head.
Meltdown, frightened me,
five years old again,
done something wrong, knew it,
no denial, desperate to undo the fuck up.
Couldn’t. What was done was done;
punished myself for stupidity,
lack of judgment, wanting it now,
for all those times when I needed answers,
needed them now regardless of consequence.

I covered my face, Screamed
Just stop it
Over and over.
Tears streaming, red cheeked, snot,
the whole works. I was wracked.
Never in seven decades had the floodgates
opened so wide.
Not when I was rejected
Or hit
Or put down
Or frustrated
Or fearful.
Always swallowed it whole.

Until yesterday. Years of the hidden child
inside the old lady came screaming out
birthed through my mouth without recourse,
bloodied and wet.

Today is Wednesday. I see Tuesday;
me in the chair, knees to my chest,
curled almost fetal. And I feel so much regret
that I waited so long for yesterday to happen.

The Cat Woman of Tzin Tzun Tzan
by Michael McLaughlin

Mexico

With a tree branch as a staff, ageless Maria walked slowly with skinny bowed legs up cobblestone streets, her body swaying, defying gravity, back and forth, magic held her up from falling over. She had a chocolate face of deep wrinkles and dark seductive eyes. Her silver-gray hair was tied in thick braids and colored ribbons – the Maya would have recognized her as one of their own. But now she carried fruits and vegetables home in a white plastic bag instead of on her head.

Maria walked the streets with the pride of five cats, and not even the macho street dogs dared approach. If one did, the cats would gather and crouch around Maria’s legs, their hair standing, backs arched, and teeth showing. When the devil was in the dog, Maria raised her tree branch and the cats and she would disappear into the shadows—then taken by the wind away. Some in the village said La Bruja, a witch, to describe Maria.

This day the black and gray sky sparked with lightning, thunder rumbled through the dark mountains. The air was laden with moisture for the rains to follow. Maria stopped, and in slow motion turned her face up toward the dark clouds. The thunder came again and she stood motionless, hoping to hear a hidden message in the distant echoes. The thunder was messages from beyond the mountains where all peoples of the Earth returned. For her, dreams, passing conversations, hallucinations, and newspaper headlines all have equal weight in understanding the world. There was more than one explanation for life’s happenings. That is what the ancestors taught. This was her world.

She arrived at her brown adobe casita along a dirt path through high grass. The sloping terra cotta roof tiles were mossy, dark green, and black from age. There was no window glass, only lacy cotton curtains held out the cold and dark. The oily and shiny wooden front door had green patina brass metal hinges and no lock.

Maria paused to lean on the tree branch next to the door, lower the bags, rub her hands, and count her children, making sure none were left in the shadows. She had lost cats to shadows before. Shadows were neutral in the affairs of the living.

Upon entering her house, her first duty was ritual. To make sure all would be right in her world. She walked in a clockwise circle around the room and touched a corner of the picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe with her left hand, the corner white window lace with her right hand, as soon as she passed the light crack on the floor, she walked exactly seven steps toward wedding picture and cradled it carefully with little hands of deformed black knuckles. All objects are touched every day to keep life in them. Then she heard the thunder again and froze, listening, her lips moving, trying to translate the moving air. Once young girls showed her a cell phone and said the voices came through the air. Maria said that was not new. She could hear voices in the air without a phone. The girls laughed and ran away.

In the distance, the church bells tolled and that meant someone had died. Spirits would be in the air soon, and names would be called in the night. Some day her spirit would cross over the mountains. Her husband was over there and she would laugh with him and walk in the forest hand in hand. He waited for her with a smile. A cat meowed and Maria looked down and smiled in agreement. The cats were wise spirits too.

The shadows on the floor rug signaled it was time to eat. She cut green onions, peppers and tomatoes into a small oiled skillet, added chopped meat and stirred. She lowered the flame. The cats were alive and the room spoke cat. Ahora me amas. “Now you love me.” Maria smiled and every wrinkle came alive on her face. These would be the only words she spoke out loud all day. Her sacred cats were her children. She was a cat woman they all whispered.

Feeling tired, she sat in her chair by the window and stared up at the mountains and the gray floating mist that shrouded the mountaintops. The air was sweet and moist. The rains started last month and the corn was planted. It was always like that when the rains came. Always.

The sound of thunder again awoke her from her daydreams. It was a busy message day from beyond the mountains. What were the others on the other side trying to tell her? Spirits gossiped too. The mountain trembled in thunder, the sound bouncing from the heavens down onto the uneven earth.

Maria sat in a wooden chair by the lace window. When the lace fluttered the light from the moon dashed and dotted light patterns on the dirt floor. The sparkling light amazed her. Her daydreams came more often now. A sure sign she would soon cross over…The wind rustled the curtains open. The cats meowed and Maria knew spirits from beyond the mountain had come to supper. Maria smiled a second time. Would they take her back to the mountain that night?

The cats meowed, and they were right. Food is more important than what is over the mountain. In slow motion, the cat woman carefully filled the small plates for her children and put them on the floor by the window. She sat again, ankles crossed, hands folded on her lap, eyes closed, listening to the wind in the high mountain tree. Waiting for the thunder that would make her smile.

Our Featured Writers