How Anything Can Grow From This

By Beau North and Kwame Phillips

A relationship ends with a meal. A southern town disappears, bit-by-bit. Two sisters sit in a hospital room, sharing a piece of strawberry cake while children are thrust into a strange new existence of abandoned superstores and unrelenting fluorescent light. A cataclysm hovers on the point of a knife as brown-skinned schoolgirls make peace with

• Language: English
• Publisher: Beau North
• Release date: Oct 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9780692196915

Book preview

How Anything Can Grow From This

How Anything Can Grow From This

A Short Story Collection to benefit RAICES

Shelley Ann Clark Karolinn Fiscaletti Chris Ludovici Beau North Gena Radcliffe Adam Strong Desiree Wilkins

Edited by Brittany Hegedus

Copyright © 2018

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ISBN-13: 978-0-692-19691-5

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All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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Cover by Josh Hollis

Created with Vellum Created with Vellum

Contents

Foreword

Like A Word Grows Ripe In Silence

Brown

Beautiful Dreamers

Emergence

After The End

Murmuration

To See Them As Us

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Kwame M.P. Phillips, Ph.D.

Earlier this year, I sat by the living room window in an armchair, with my evening cup of tea, only half paying attention to the news on the television in front of me. My mother, stretched out on the matching couch beside me, took a sip of her matching evening cup of tea and said Can you believe these people? I looked up to see a news report on the Windrush scandal, a political embarrassment in the UK that acutely resonated with my Caribbean family. The ‘Sons (and Daughters) of The Empire’ who landed in ‘Mother England,’ at Tilbury Docks on the HMS Windrush on June 22, 1948, were promised full rights of entry and settlement, and full British citizenship. But this scandal saw those same members of the Windrush generation being denied services, denied legal rights and threatened with deportation - or actually being deported - from the UK by the Home Office. I muttered something indiscernible that matched my mood on the subject. I sadly could believe those people and it felt even more infuriating because the wave of global immigration panic had now found its way to my shore. My mother continued. How can they just tear apart families like this? People just disappearing in the night. I took a sip of my evening cup of tea. It’s a bunch of bullshit, I said with full discernibility.

And it is bullshit. The Special Relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States has extended to include quashing those huddled masses yearning to breathe free. So it is fitting that this collection that explores dreams and broken dreams, fantasies and nightmares is written with the proceeds going towards reuniting families. The threat and realization of being torn away from everything you love is a unique horror, especially when measured against the promise of the American Dream. These seven stories of solitude and separation, of detachment and disconnection, speak perfectly to this particularly fraught time in history.

This is a collection about family and about the intricacies of family. This is a collection for families, and one hopes that every penny it earns that goes towards the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services is able to help underserved immigrant children, families, and refugees find safety and solace in this world that so often breaks its promises. We now live in a world of new promises. A British Prime Minister promises to ‘take the country back’ and effect a British exit from the European Union. An Italian interior minister promises to end migrant arrivals by boat. An American president promises to build a wall along the Mexican border and make the Mexican state fund it.

But these are not stories of hopelessness, rather they are expositions of life, and offer words for the indescribable sentiments of often unspeakable events. Karolinn Fiscatelli’s poem Like a Grows Ripe in Silence finds comfort in loss through the power of dreaming. Desiree Wilkins’ Brown reveals the loss of innocence when children gain understanding of the lived realities of race. Gena Radcliffe’s Beautiful Dreamers reminisces on life over a slice of cake, from a hospital bed. Shelley Ann Clark’s Emergence fantasizes about what life could have been for two lovers. Chris Ludovici’s After the End stares unflinchingly at an impending new world. Beau North’s Murmuration remembers a disappearing town. And Adam Strong’s To See Them As Us holds and pulls apart the trauma of the separated family. These stories, like the real stories of families ripped apart by petty politics, are timeless.

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Kwame Phillips is an anthropologist and filmmaker, specializing in visual and sensory media production, ethnographic documentary and soundscapes. Born in London and raised in Jamaica, he joined John Cabot's Department of Communications in the Fall of 2016. Professor Phillips has traveled all over the world teaching digital storytelling in underserved communities. He works with Filmmakers Without Borders, an organization committed to leveraging the filmmaking process as a vehicle for promoting student empowerment and cross-cultural exchange in the developing world.

For The Kids

Like A Word Grows Ripe In Silence

Karolinn Fiscaletti

In a dream I saw my mother

Only in a dream

In a dream I wore my father’s sweater

across the continent

There was my grandmother

A black tree, distant

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A table. The stairs

ascending. Figures

huddled together

in frames facing me

There was not then the large bed

looming in the front room

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not then the gap of sky behind me

There was my brother

knowing nothing

of pain and everything

swimming in his river

and Jeff

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his life cut short before him

yet unknowing

eyes closed

the hush about him like night

and he singing out into it

a whistler in dark woods

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We all of us in the grocery store

in the backs of carts

looking up at the sterile ceiling

at the cold strobes

at the figure of our

mother managing cans

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and later at the crows’ nests

in the giant Os, or, leaving those wreaths

gathered in their private peaceful murders

on the grey rooftop above

think: I could even make a home here

It has everything I need

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And we some of us in the dream

were on the beach in grasses

talking about living

in the same place in

different houses

Clothes hung on the line

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There was a small dish

I carried around

Something was wrong

The dish broke. I ran out

In the yard there had been a storm

all the familiar plants damaged

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In the dream

through a window

I saw strangers

open gifts

in the pale light

of an unfamiliar moon

Karolinn Fiscaletti is co-founder and editor of Old Pal, a magazine of literature and art. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Lana Turner, Fourteen Hills, The Gravity of the Thing, the Submission series chapbook, the Hong Kong Review of Books, and elsewhere. She lives and teaches in Portland.

Brown

Desiree Wilkins

Maya looked around the lunchroom and for the first time in her young life, felt the darkness of her skin. Like a burn. Where she came from nobody looked different, because everybody looked different. Before today, she would have said she was white; but here, she saw what white was, and knew that she was in fact brown.

A kid waved her over – Ryan she thought his