Issuu

Any Other?

Valerie Curtis

Come now the sights we see the sights we touch not, have not, wish for more. The pawing wind in hot summer the specter that visits our night, no one, no other, comes to make us warmer.

@nevadabrushfire unrbrushfire.org

b r u s h f i r e l i t e r a t u r e & a r t s j o u r n a l

edition 78 volume 1

FALL 2025 EDITION 78, VOLUME 1

UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA, RENO

Copyright © 2025 Brushfire and its individual contributors. All rights reserved by the respective artists. Original work used with the expressed permission of the artists. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher. The opinions expressed in this publication, its associated website, and social media are not necessarily those of the University of Nevada, Reno or of the student body.

journal layout cover art artist

Brushfire Staff Untitled Shelbey Leco

Editor’s Note Brushfire has found itself in a season of transition. Recently, we found ourselves undergoing the challenge of finding a new space for our poetry night—an unexpected shift. Change often arrives unannounced; and here we are, stepping into a new era together. To the people who have stuck with us throughout this shift and to those who have recently joined us, thank you. I am grateful for everyone’s support and enthusiasm. Your presence, your voices, your willingness to adapt alongside us makes this community what it is. Change is inevitable, but how you work through it is your choice. Remember to be active in your future. As you navigate everything thrown your way, try to see each challenge not as a barrier but as an opportunity. Then go forward and make the most out of every opportunity offered. But don’t stop there—make your own opportunities. Don’t wait for things to fall into place out of luck or sheer convenience. Go out and ask for what you want, moving towards a future of your choosing. And throughout your journey, reach out to the people around you. Through the confusion, excitement, unknown—help might be closer than you think. The people around you can become the support you didn’t know you needed. Trust that you are capable of shaping what comes next. — Paige Krueger Executive Editor

Table

C o n t en t s

visual Shelbey Leco

Cover

Keilani Swift

Zeus

Judith Skillman

8-9

Green Sea

Shelbey Leco

Untitled

Ellen Harrold

12-13

Shelf

Athena H

14-15

Unknown Forces

Elias NA

Iris

Krystal Carter

Light Window Shadow II

Japhet Valentine

24-25

Untitled

Makena Fig

Untitled

Tammy Higgins

Shape of Things

Emily Stauss

It’s what she would have wanted

Bill Wolak

The Tenacity of Ecstasy

Krystal Carter

USA Today Deconstructed and Retold

Skylar Jory

Chasing Childhood

Riley Waters

3 in 1

Keilani Swift

Worn

Makena Fig

Pretty Girls

Kautriaun Singleton

Lost In The Lights

Charles Shirley

Internal Rationalization

Charles Shirley

50-51

Ghost of Fate

Keilani Swift

Swans in Berlin

Skylar Jory

Her Pearly Whites

Ellen Harrold

60-61

Sinkage

Athena H

62-63

Sanctuary

Kautriaun Singleton

multi-layered journey

Aaliyah Martinez

Indecisive Chaos

Eugene Melmani

At Least We’re Alive For Now

Makena Fig

Birthday Girl

Untitled

Table

Contents

poetry Kamryn Main

This Boat in Still Water

Claire O’Brien

To Earth

Aidan Peterson

Still Yet

Glenis Moore

Peeling

Gabriel Matthews

Lamoille Canyon Lament

Natalie Pfeifle

The Taxidermist Child

Orion Liggett

Obligatory Fish Poem

Tony Godino

Cecilia Sanchez

Chris Clemens

How to Become God’s Financial Advisor

Kyra Thornhill

Across the Way

Natalie Pfeifle

Edwin Prendergast

Thomas Darnell

The Birds & Our Creator (Музыкант и Ангел homage)

Kelly Talbot

Turtle Path

Nathanael O’Reilly

Rattle Me

Robert Beveridge

Idiot Child

Valerie Curtis

Back

Any Other?

prose Anna Bachvarov

Arroyo

Charlotte Diel

16-22

The Devil Inside

Lily Mauk

33-36

Shelly’s Soon to be Tomato Garden

Natalie Pfeifle

Edwin Prendergast

Robert McGuill

54-59

Plunger

This Boat in Still Water Kamryn Main I was on a lifeboat It was only me An absurd speck In an expanse of sea The bounds of the sky and the ocean Meet in a sort of divine line Their vastness consumed me I finally knew of the sublime I imagined the boat capsizing My bones cracked beneath the crests I imagined my final cry And I was bare In still water, I was aware of my fragile flesh The red ink circulating in my veins The red ink that once told a story This heart races These hands grip the sides of the boat In still water Then, a shroud appears over this divine line Zeus tosses his bolts like a javelin A wave thrashes this boat from behind I look upward, pleading Then I remembered I am a mere dot My arms are then outstretched I was made of water, I just forgot These waves were rocking me back and forth Like a mother And I laughed

Zeus Keilani Swift

To Earth Claire O’Brien What more can you give me? only the soft squeak of your sands on my feet, your sea’s sparkle and glint, your sky’s blue and white cotton dress. What more can you give up to me but rustling forests with tiny flitting life, ancient stones. I have gleaned all I need from your green, your shine, your flesh, your fruit, your glittery graves of treasure. What more can you surrender? Only the slow rain licking the leaves, sunflowers returning my gaze, pulsing breath from lilliputian lungs. I have subdued and used you, split you with my axe of asphalt. Bow to my biology I will consume you.

Green Sea Judith Skillman

Untitled Shelbey Leco

Arroyo Anna Bachvarov “It all was just a dream” isn’t such a mundane ending to a narrative, the individual pondered, unable to name a single classic that ends in such a way. Though they had to admit, they hadn’t experienced a tale in such a while - heard, read, or saw. But the youth felt that she wouldn’t be shocked at all if he were to find everything that she ever experienced “was all just a dream.” The consistent decoupling they felt from their own flesh was all too dream-like—in the mirror she saw smoky grainsboro clouds and wisps where their hips and waist should be, his hands yards away from their shoulders, slowly flowing down to the floor in a cascade-like fashion but never actually getting any closer to the turquoise carpet. Staring too long changed her composition, her species—were they water-genasi or fawn or member of family papilionoidea or sea-siren or homosapian? But were they a dream? That felt like a more reasonable, not mundane, not bothersome, answer to him. It is easier to attribute something to chance than to define or explain. The junior knew this well. If prompted enough, the individual could admit that they are not always in a state of disconnect. If probed further, he would acknowledge that re-coupling occurs when they do not dream, however, not quite when they are awake. She had mastered the art of passing through rest without what sleep-doctors say is the stage of sleep where your eyes move quickly back and forth—the junior did not understand what that had to do with dreaming, but if she was not dreaming, she understood her eyes must be still. They found this addicting, sleep without any illusion of awakeness—this is what allowed them to connect, to feel their limbs lie intact with one another, the pewter fumes to retract. The only flaw in her habit was when the silver-ocean glow of wake returned every time, sometimes harder to see through than before their dreamless rest. They understood this to be inevitable, a side-effect of residing slightly outside of her physical form, easier to attribute to chance than to define or explain. He dressed, trying to ignore the pensive arroyo filling in their bedroom wall out of the corner of her eye. She didn’t want to start her day off lost in it. 11

12 They opened his bedroom door and entered the flooding hallway, wading through the approaching-knee-high water. The rain often scolded the youngin, beating down that her wakeless sleep was “unhealthy.” This morning wasn’t any different. The arroyo in the corner of her eye rippled outward- he caught a glimpse of heavy droplets in the growing creek. She tried to blink it away, best not to get lost, best not to get lost, they repeated with each blink. They knew all the rain could conjecture was its own small-minded definition of wellness.

She again tried to blink the growing reflective gully away, opening their eyes again only to see that the light dusty sky visible through the rippling windows had turned a deep stone blue. Her skin felt changed, dirtier, his eyes tired. The rain was still pattering on, how was your day, what did you do, why won’t you answer me. The individual did not know how to answer, but she was not worried—they had read a long time ago that people who have by chance drowned usually could not recall the incident. The youngin did not waste time finding an explanation for

Shelf Ellen Harrold

She reminded herself what they discovered before—he did not want health if it meant constantly existing in an immaterial state, her tissues floating apart and back together like a tide. But the rain did not have a tide, it only created tides, falling to the earth over and over again without seeing the damage it could cause when it collected. Best to let go and keep at it, they thought, what is health if not sacrificing one component for another?

After swimming back to their room, the youth undressed quickly and prepared for re-coupling. The sounds of the rain slowly drifted away, her members began to float back towards her torso, almost clicking into place like magnets—he let out a sigh of relief with each re-connection. Each breath was clear to the junior in iron puffs—this was a good sign, a tell-tale sign that they would not dream that night. They began to relax, she watched the arroyo slowly empty and they began to close her eyes, ready to be whole again, even if just by chance, just for a moment with no definition or explanation. 13

Unknown Forces Athena H

still yet Aidan Peterson I once read a poem that told me that this was that and that was this. Virulent, craven morality. Etching eyes into the backs of their heads with little crosses. Poetry is all about eyes you know. We are all about eyes. Believe me. The mouth still yet feeds without looking Whitman keeps telling me that the earth is enough. That it’s wrong to wish the constellations nearer. That the human body is the soul. Jung tells me to lower my gaze to see God. Within a host of monkish creatures lurch, stalking desperate still yet in need of sacrament The party all dressed and their chants laborious. Words precious and ideas collected. Haughty souls. Such reduction! Transmuters! Alchemists! You’d think with a grunt and symbol these beasts could swallow the world and themselves in it and still yet survive the philosophy Flesh strong abreast and my body permanent, they say. Sometimes it slogs thick and heavy. For now a mere vapor it barely holds, a truth ful word it barely holds. And for every starved animal within the fold the most spiritual among them prove still yet just as hungry The cold on my skin and a gasp incommensurate, a funny warm fear can wash me. Chest drum, skin beating, faith blind in a porous veil that must, must be enough for us. And despite all the wasted breath perhaps this wonderful animal grasping is still yet the purest drive 15

The Devil Inside Charlotte Diel

Usually, it’s easiest if you look at people’s shoes. She has these simple black pumps on, the kind that you look at and know she’s old enough to have a husband, and that she probably goes home every night and puts her shoes in the closet next to his. I have the image of it playing out in my mind: her pulling into the driveway, after dark, she works long hours like that, and him already home, and then the shoes in the closet lined up in this neat little row, one pair next to another next to another next to another. That’s usually about as far as I get before she starts tapping her black pump, which means she’s already asked a question and now she wants me to answer it. “Where do you think it started?” That’s easy. It started with this boy. This was back when I went to school. He went to my school, but that’s not where I met him. I met him after church, standing on the steps in the sunshine. I looked good that day, really good. She wouldn’t believe it if I told her how good I looked. I had on this nice purple dress, and lipstick, light pink. I would give anything for a tube of lipstick right now. Anyway, we were leaving, all of us, because it was over, and he followed me out, and then we talked on the steps and I knew he liked me. She wouldn’t believe it if I told her. He was blond. Not the regular blond, but this light, light blond, so that in the sunlight his hair looked like a halo. His eyelashes were blond, too. And everything about him was just right, his collar folded all perfectly, and the crease in his khakis totally straight. He was so perfect I had to look down, and let me tell you about his shoes. They were tennis shoes, and at first I was thinking they were brand new, because they were so white. They were so white that they looked like they’d never touched the ground before, even though they were touching the ground while I was looking at them. If only she could have seen it, everything would be totally different. I wasn’t totally sure what was happening at first, because I didn’t used to even get close to boys like that. And then I realized that, because we were on the church steps together, and I was in this dress, and I did actually look really good that day, I had tricked him. So he saw me, and he was thinking thoughts that he never would have been thinking if he knew me.

Iris Elias NA

18 It was chemical, sure, everything is chemical, but that’s the moment it hit me. I know because, walking back, I felt like the world had been turned inside out. It had rained, while we were in the church, but the sun was out again, and I could see my own distorted reflection in the puddles, and I remember wishing that he had looked at the puddle instead of my face, and then he might have understood me. On the walk there I had been thinking of how after the service I would go to a coffee shop and buy a muffin and read a book in the back corner, and on the way back, the devil inside of me had been awakened. I still went to that coffee shop, but I only took one bite of the muffin. Then I sat and drank my coffee and watched everyone, I mean really watched them in the way I used to when I was young, and my mother would have to kick me under the table to get me to act normal. She doesn’t understand, but really, what was I supposed to do? You go offer the devil inside of you a muffin. They don’t like muffins. They rarely want to eat at all. So eating became a small matter to me, one I forgot about very quickly. This is what she would call a symptom, and it’s what I would call the way things are. “I see. And when did you start going for your walks?” My walks were another proposed symptom. Sometime after I met the boy with the white shoes, I woke up one night, and I felt really awake, like the kind of awake you don’t usually feel even when you are awake, so it sneaks up on you and feels like ice water running down your back. I laid in my bed and stared at my dark room for a while, and my white curtains laced with moonlight, thinking of how they might flutter in the breeze if the window was open. The windows of my apartment didn’t actually open, because if any of the tenants committed suicide, the people who owned the complex didn’t want the corpse to be lying outside on the pavement next to the pool. I laid in bed and thought about this until the fear went away, and then I felt like getting up and going for a walk. Before, I sometimes went to thrift stores alone. I would listen to music and walk around and find something I liked, and put it down and walk around some more while arguing with myself about whether or not to get it. If I convinced myself to get it, I would take it home and put it in my drawer and then one day I’d take it out and think about wearing it, but most of the time it would be something unusual, and I’d talk myself out of

actually putting it on. Before my walks, though, I would dig out some of those clothes and put them on and not even look at myself in the mirror. The first time, it was this long skirt, so it could flutter in the breeze likethe curtains would have, and an old chunky sweater. It was dark, so it didn’t matter what matched with what. When I took my walks, they weren’t usually on the walking trails, because the walking trails led kind of into the woods, and the woods still made me feel strange, like there were spiders crawling around inside of me. So I would walk away from my apartment complex, past the pool, and along the edge of the freeway. The good thing about my walks was that it didn’t really matter how I looked while I was on them, or how far I went, or what time it was. It only mattered that I was back in bed by the time the sun rose, so the other me, the one who went to church and class and the thrift stores, didn’t know that it happened. So I would get back in bed, at two or three or four in the morning, and then when the alarm went off at eight, the other me would get up and get dressed in regular clothes and brush her teeth and do all these other normal things, because she wanted to be normal. I didn’t want her to find out about the walks because I knew she wouldn’t want them, she’d just want to do what other people were doing and go to sleep. She wouldn’t understand how badly I needed the walks, or how much better they made me feel when I was up in the middle of the night and I couldn’t take how dark and still and quiet my little room had gotten. So in the morning I’d let her be in charge and we’d pretend like everything was the same as it had always been. But it wasn’t, because before, she was in charge all the time and I wasn’t really there, or I was somewhere so far down inside that I’d only come out when we were arguing about clothes at the thrift store. But now I was in charge and she was just playing charades, like be a good student. Pretend to eat breakfast. Sit at the bus stop. And it would go on all day until my walks. I was dimly aware, all the time, that things had gone bad. I used to have this feeling when I was a child, sometimes when my parents were fighting, but also sometimes when no one was fighting and nothing was wrong at all. They would fight and then they would stop fighting for a while and we would play those kinds of charades. Be a nice family. Take pictures together. Go to the zoo. But all the while I’d have the feeling, because I knew. Because I remembered what it was like. Some people say that most humans are good, and I think that’s a nice 19

20 idea, but if we were good, why would we be bad sometimes? Doesn’t it make more sense that we’re bad, and we’re trying to cover up the bad, so we pretend to be good when really we’re bad the whole time? If I was, at my core, a good person, why would I do bad things? “Well, if you were a bad person, why would you do good things?” To hide the bad things so other people think I’m good so it’s easier for me to do bad things. Every morning, my mother would wake up, and she would put her makeup on, and then she’d go outside and tell everyone she saw how much she loved me and my dad and my siblings, and how special she thought we were. But she never told me I was special, because she didn’t want me to think it. She just wanted other people to think she thought it so she could be good. “Does this have anything to do with the boy?” Of course it does. That boy, and his smile outside the church doors, and his terrible white shoes. He was good. But how to know, when you’re looking at someone, if they are who they look like or if they’re just good at deception. Worse, what happens when you’re the deceiver? Either this boy had his own devil, one I’d meet in the worst way, and then I would be stuck playing someone else’s game of charades again. Or this boy didn’t have a devil, but I did, and he didn’t know it. What do you think Eve said to Adam when they were leaving the garden? I’m sorry, but the evil voice inside of me gave me a shovel and told me to dig, and I’ve ended up with a grave that’s big enough for both of us. No, you can’t say that. You have to blame the snake. “But Adam sinned too, didn’t he?” Of course, but he blamed Eve. And he was there first, so it worked. Everyone else will eat from the tree too, but it doesn’t matter. They’ll blame you, because they listened to him. Because he set you up, so that he is the human and you are just the rock that he tripped over. Your only way to defend yourself is to blame the snake. “So she feels like she can’t own up to her mistakes, because then she’ll have to take responsibility for everyone else’s.” Exactly. The devil inside of me was always the scapegoat of my mother. I was twenty years old before I noticed the devil inside of her. “And that’s around the time things started to change, isn’t it?” She thinks all of that matters, but it doesn’t. It’s like how, when you’re a little kid, you don’t really see in three dimensions. Stuff just happens

you can’t make sense of it. Then one day you can see and you get everything that happens and that’s what makes growing up so hard. And once you start seeing, you can’t go back, so most people just get numb to everything that’s wrong with the world as fast as possible. And I grew up and saw and got numb like everyone, but then one day I stopped being numb. And now it’s like I see in four dimensions instead of three, so people think I’m crazy. She starts writing, and then she stops writing, and her pumps are very still. Now I can picture them in the closet, next to her husband’s shoes. He would have a military-sounding name, like Mark or Robert or John. And they will sit on the couch and watch TV after she puts her pumps away, and she’ll say, “There’s this girl at work who said she was crazy, and I didn’t know what to say, because she is crazy, but it’s not polite to agree to things like that.” Then Mark or Robert or John will say, “There’s nothing wrong with telling the truth.” He probably doesn’t believe in mental illness. I bet it’s something that they argue about. My father doesn’t believe in mental illness either, but he pays my bill now. I guess that’s what they call karma. She starts moving her shoe again. She’s thought of something to ask. “You didn’t grow up going to church, did you?” No, I didn’t, I guess it’s that obvious. I went to a Catholic church with my grandmother once, and I broke the rules by taking communion even though I wasn’t a member. Nobody knew that, except maybe my grandmother, and she liked to pretend we were all Catholic so she didn’t say anything. It kind of loomed over me, that I had done one church thing in all my life, and even that thing was wrong. The only Catholic church I had seen before that was in a horror movie my dad let me watch even though I was too young, and then he and my mother fought about it because horror movies made me wet the bed and she really hated that. “So why did you start going to church after you left home?” Because someone invited me, at first. And then I went because it made me feel good. The building was always clean and warm when the rest of the world felt cold and dirty, and everyone there was very kind, and they put out free coffee in the lobby. I don’t think it was good coffee, I never tried any, but it was just a very nice thing to do, to put out coffee for strangers. It wasn’t one of those bad churches you hear about, where all they care about is how much money you give them and whether or not 21

22 somewhere where they cared whether or not you had a cup of coffee. And then I started seeing in four dimensions and I realized how bad I was, and no matter how much I wanted to, I felt like I couldn’t go back. The first thing I bought at a thrift store was this short skirt, and when I came downstairs wearing it, my mother said I looked like I belonged on a stripper pole. My mother always said the truest things about me, so I started to feel that way sometimes, like I didn’t belong or belonged somewhere dirty, where men would lurk and stare at me and treat me like an object. So picture this girl, this girl who belongs on a stripper pole, on the steps of a church with this boy who looks her in the eyes and says it’s really nice to meet you. Not just regular nice, but really nice, as in he actually means it. And she realizes she is not just deceived but deceiving, because the people here have been the opposite of her mother, saying not-true things about her. “How do you know what’s true and what isn’t?” That’s not a question I can answer. You just know. For months, I would leave my apartment in the morning, and I would go to all of these clean, warm places, and I would talk to all these nice, normal people. And then, at night, I’d put on my stripper skirt and walk along the shoulder of the freeway. Which of those people was really me, the one who made sense, or the one who didn’t? If I could choose, I’d be a person who makes sense. But I can’t, or can’t always, so I ended up here, where they try to teach you to make sense by forcing you to live a life that makes sense. We eat breakfast at eight and lunch at twelve and dinner at six-thirty, because that sounds right, and in between I talk to her or other people like her, who try to help me think the way they think. It might work one day. I don’t know. I wish it was working already. I stopped pretending to be normal after they brought me here. I think it was because they took me during one of my walks, so I couldn’t go to bed before sunrise and wake up as someone else. I was walking, and there were these sirens, and then I was sitting in the back of a police car, and the officer was talking on his radio. I was relieved when it happened, because I finally realized how nervous I had been. All that time I was walking around in the daylight, I had been getting more and more anxious, but I didn’t even notice it until that night. Until all of a sudden, looking out the window at the officer’s black gun against the dark of night, I felt so calm I could have laid down and died.

Light Window Shadow II Krystal Carter

24 Untitled Japhet Valentine

Peeling Glenis Moore The shed is losing its paint, sloughing it off like sunburnt skin, the edges curling up and brittle until they fall into a turquoise mess on the sun-baked lawn. Discarded bits of summer sky floating away on the breeze as the shed’s wood basks, relishing the warmth on its knots and grains so long excluded from the living world. What hides beneath is revealed until I paint it again to cover the pits and scars that we all carry away from the light.

Lamoille Canyon Lament Gabriel Matthews for a brief time as a child i lived in a sheep rancher’s guest house high in the nevada mountains in the only other house beside the rancher’s on hundreds of acres of expansive ruby mountain wilderness and i remember the first time it happened collision, dramatic flashes of white, brown, grey a hard drop, then nothing. it made sense i guess the house had big windows we lived in the middle of the mountains but i still don’t understand how you can blame something for trusting the place they’re meant to belong i fixated on the faint outline on the window a gruesome imprint of an unexpected final flight where captivating and horrifying became one i couldn’t pull myself away my dear avian acquaintance, i knew you very little but know you didn’t deserve an ending like that your only crime was feeling safe

Untitled Makena Fig

The Taxidermist Child Natalie Pfeifle In the year of the copper rain, when streetlights wept rust into gutters, you taught me how to preserve things that were already dead. The first lesson: glass eyes come in boxes of twelve. Each morning you choose which shade of love to wear. I’ve counted them all. There are methods to this: The scraping of reality from its skin. The way cotton replaces memory, stitch by stitch. In dreams, I am a museum of borrowed warmth. Display Case: Exhibit A The girl who learned to pose like something real. The second lesson: arsenic soap keeps specimens from rotting. You wash your hands with it before every almost-touch. I’ve seen the others—your perfect specimens. How their joints move so smoothly, how their fur gleams with an authenticity I can’t master. At night, the workshop fills with impossible taxonomies: a peacock made of switchblades, a deer with television static for eyes. You mount them all so carefully, these children who knew how to stand still, to hold their shape, to keep their sawdust hearts intact. The third lesson: everything can be improved in death.

Shape of Things Tammy Higgins

30 Wire replaces bone. Wax lips never say the wrong thing. I practice in mirrors: how to arch my neck at just the right angle, how to let the light catch in my fabricated eyes. Soon I will be perfect enough to join your collection. My label will read: daughter, common. origin disputed. And you will polish my case each Sunday, proud at last of how lifelike I’ve become in my magnificent stillness.

It’s what she would have wanted Emily Stauss

The Tenacity of Ecstasy Bill Wolak

Shelly’s Soon-to-be-tomato-garden Lily Mauk

Out the back door, descending the rickety patio through patches of weed and grass and earth. Behind: A skeleton of a house that Shelly is determined to pour all of her love into. She carries tools in garden-gloved hands. They are foreign to her. Today she will teach herself how to use them: the correct angle, appropriate weight to till the soil for her soon-to-be-tomato-garden. It is April. Spring is ripe and awake, buds of life stretch eagerly to the sun. Shelly finds a spot in the yard that guarantees plenty of sunlight. Her tools collapse to the earth with the sigh that escapes her chest. She has not been up this early in weeks. Her exhaustion this morning felt like a weighted heap on her chest—now, she feels like she is clawing behind fog. On her knees, she pulls, careless of the dirt that begins to muddy her overalls as she identifies dandelions, crabgrass, and white clovers. Her pulling is a continuous motion, one that tows Shelly into her body. Present, she feels free from tainted memory, from guilt, from her internal monologue of self-hatred. Her eyes are free to jump from one weed to the next and then another. Their remnants are tossed into Shelly’s mulch bucket for repurposing—roots from the earth and now, tears from Shelly’s ducts. She keeps pullingpullingpulling and as the tears turn to sobs she sits back on her heels to catch her breath. Her chest heaves. Her skin is all-over-wet. Her nose runs, and she claws at the dirt beneath her; it is damp, cool to the touch, blanketed in shade. By early-afternoon, Shelly is exhausted. There is a glass of iced tea in her hand as she stands in her empty kitchen, staring at her soon-to-be-tomato-garden from the open window above the sink. Birdsong and breeze floats into her ears as the exhaustion begins to consume, but the dirt and sweat beneath Shelly’s fingernails starts to feel a bit to her like grime, so she drags herself into the shower with what feels like every fibre of her being. At the base of the tub, she finds herself admiring the dirt there, packed beneath the faces of her nails, before scrubbing it away. Later she lays on her pillow with dripping hair. When she wakes, it is night. She rises, completes crossword puzzles by candlelight, stretches and tastes the chilled humidity of the air outside. 33

34 Mid-May arrives. Shelly has proudly constructed planter beds for her soon-to-be-tomato-garden with lumber she purchased from the hardware store last week. That was where she had passed the batch of Early Girl starter seedlings, which stare at her now from the kitchen windowsill. She pictures the Girls as weeping little adolescents, endures their tiny voices that beg, that plead, Please, let us outside with the sky and the earth!, some absurd Wonderland conjuring. It is an image that lingers in the back of Shelly’s mind as she focuses on today’s task: fill the beds with fresh soil, with aged manure. This day Shelly’s outside ‘till sunset. Her patio creaks beneath her weight when she takes a tired evening seat. She sips on lemonade mixed with grapefruit juice, absorbs the rest of the sun this day has offered and returns to the kitchen, leaving the back door ajar. In the kitchen, dishes populate the shelves and sink—a coffee mug from this morning, plates, silverware from breakfast and lunch. A vase of tulips and a pothos breathe at the windowsill, dried citrus strung on twine rustles in the draft. She gulps the rest of her grapefruit lemonade in a single swallow, allowing the cold to burn down her throat. Shelly decides she will skip dinner, relishes in the scalding water beating on her skin as she later sits in the shower. When she lays in her sheets, her shoulders are a shade of guava. They radiate velveting pain, the petals of a bleeding heart. At night her dreams are tainted with early blight. Shelly fingers brown leaf-lesions, the first and most subtle sign of infestation. She traces them to once-round, shining red fruits, now squished and wilted tomato tissue. An opprobrium reverberates in Shelly’s eardrums: WHAT HAVE YOU DONE? Damp mildew ferments at her nose, triggering a near gag reflex as dream-Shelly falls to the dirt. She wants to look to the sky and pray to the God she doesn’t believe in for her soon-to-be-tomato-garden-casualty, to plead for forgiveness, to relinquish the wrath on her garden that should fall instead on Shelly’s shoulders. She begs for any punishment He might deem fit. When she wakes in the small hours of the morning, Shelly is drenched in sweat. Pain permeates her skull from a clenching jaw. She sprints from bed in shadowed darkness—the balls of her feet smacking against the

wooden floors of the hallway, down the staircase, and as she catches a barefooted-fall before breaking outside. Out the back door, her feet now collide with cold, wet grass as Shelly nears her anticipated soon-to-betomato-garden-failure, goosebumps flocking over her limbs instinctually to the night’s chill. It is twilight, mere moments before dawn has broken, and Shelly is wearing a thin white nightgown as she inspects her juvenile stocks with fervent obsession. She looks like a spectre of herself against the grainy blue. Her eyes, marred by veined bags, squint as she examines those gnawing leaf-lesions, concrete against the tactility of her fingertips. Her gaze flits to another, then another, another, and one more: it is like a living, breathing scar, a victim Shelly kneels before. The leaflets’ voices tremble as they cry, You’ve done it, you’ve done it now. Dread consumes Shelly, manifesting like a set of dominoes crashing to tile in miserable slow-motion as she begins to shriek, a devastating, guttural shriek. The days and nights that follow are sleepless. Shelly lays in her nightgown, eyes wide and bloodshot and fixated on the ceiling above her bed. The window in her bedroom is open and looks down upon her backyard, where the tomato beds can be spotted in Shelly’s scrappy lawn, that clearing of trees, bathed in moonlight. Every few minutes, she springs from bed, over to the sill, her paranoia ardent and true-blue. The chill of the night brings the haunting blight to the forefront of Shelly’s mind, where it never really left. She’s beginning to think she needs to monitor the garden. The end of May adorns Shelly with muddy-browned knees from kneeling in the darkness when Shelly chains herself to the garden and vows herself as its protector. Now, June. The sort of quiet like the morning after a storm. The intro to The Cure’s “A Letter to Elise” drifts from the walls through the open windows of Shelly’s home. Her soon-to-be-tomato-garden eases from soon-to-be and the emptiness in her backyard has dissipated along with the cardboard boxes inside. Furniture is sparse, rooms have yet to be filled, but she breathes slow, a sweating can of tomato juice in hand. Birds sing. The air is still. Shelly swears it doesn’t get dark until nine p.m. and thinks that June might be her favorite month. The thought is fleeting like 35

36 the ladybug on her wrist that morning. She is up late tonight—reading, pondering, subjecting herself to the constant motion of her mind as she studies the texture of the walls, the smudges on the glass, the type of green on the leaves outside, and most importantly, watching television. Before her, indiscernible heads drone on the screen she contemplates selling tomorrow. Her third glass of wine sits near-empty on the coffee table. It induces a headache that she wants to drown, but her face already feels as if it is melting from her skull, and the wine’s smell is suddenly churning nausea in the pit of her stomach. She dumps it into the sink and returns to the couch, dozes into a dreamless vignette of hot tub and wrinkle-releasing cream infomercials until the sun rises once again. The end of June gifts premature, shining green bulbs anchored on beaming stocks. Shelly’s living room sits empty of a television; the space has yet to be filled. She has taken up frying eggs each morning, crumbling leftover shells like confetti in dark, saturated soil. Despite the blight’s grip on part of her crop, Shelly’s soon-to-be-tomato-garden nears no-longer-soon-to-be. To Shelly, the ending days of June feel like an everlasting morning. She sips coffee slowly, admires the soon-to-be-fruits of her labor. She looks at the green, thinks with an almost-smile about the juice that’s yet to dribble down her chin when she can finally take her first bite into a freshly ripened, raging-red tomato.

USA Today Deconstucted and Retold Krystal Carter

Obligatory Fish Poem Orion Liggett

You dangle your dick at me Like I’m a fish and it’s a lure. Like I’ve never been caught before. But boy, These lips, They got scars for days. Pricked and punctured, Again and again. Like Elizabeth’s tremendous trout. Too sad to kill. Lips like a pin cushion, Eyes like the moon. Empty and waning, Slippery and cold. No luck tonight.

Chasing Childhood Skylar Jory

Cecilia Sanchez Tony Godino

On the way to our first date I saw an ambulance on the freeway with my birthday on the license plate I got there and we sat close, touched knees but it’s like passing a street name you know when you’re two towns over, you gotta reverse to be certain. It wasn’t long, a few weeks maybe, before she told me crying that I look at my women the way I look at beers. Later I let her hit me. I drove home drunk and drank and watched quiz shows while she cried in the middle of the bed but I’m like you - I’m like all of us - I still believe someday somebody on the TV is gonna turn and start talking to me. They’ll break from their co-anchor or cast member and say, it’s time you see the difference between simple and easy, the difference between the streets. Repeat after me, it’s not the same road. Repeat after me, you don’t need to know. Repeat after me, it’s time to let go. For 4 or 5 weeks I let her believe I was going to work. I parked behind the bowling alley and every day, at a quarter past 3 I paid my tab and drove home to dance alone in the kitchen full of cheap relief sometimes she’d waddle in and pinch me laughing but only sometimes. Sometimes

3 in 1 Riley Waters

nobody’s dancing. Goodbye Cecilia Sanchez, goodbye Cecilia Sanchez, nobody’s dancing, repeat after me, goodbye Cecilia Sanchez,

Worn Keilani Swift

How to Become God’s Financial Advisor Chris Clemens

Ringing clamoured in Hanan’s ears, drowning out her thoughts and dreams. After three days she sought emergency assistance: neurology, whirring scanners, plastic pills. Looks like nothing’s wrong, concluded the exhausted doctors. But if you have insurance, try private care? Ring-a-ling-a-ding-dong, said Hanan. At the private clinic, they did more tests and found she didn’t have any money. Interesting condition, diagnosed the jovial doctors. Spend more time in nature? Huddled in a tent beneath the expressway, Hanan discovered the solution for free: when your mind is ringing, you have to pick up. God has some basic questions about investing in biotech. #

Pretty Girls Makena Fig

Across The Way Kyra Thornhill I stare out the window Everyday All the same The light shines through the trees in this melancholy kind of way Warm like childhood Cold like its scars My window frames the couple that lives across from me Young girl running to her boy Are they blissful? That’s the funny thing about windows, you only catch glimpses of what’s on the outside Do they bicker? Or lie in bed at night feeling alone? Surely they can’t be more alone than I Staring out the window Everyday All the same Lump of envy in my throat What does it feel like to run to someone, To know that they have you I have myself I’ve had myself for 20 years A beautiful thing yes, But an echo chamber on white walls Yellow wallpaper of the soul Do you love me? Or is it only the kind light of the moon I feel I look out the window The couple’s cat stares back The lovers departed 45

46 The gray eyes of the cat hold the night’s heaviness Looking down at the stairs for its companion Stuck in the box We aren’t too different We stare out the window Everyday All the same At least the cat has someone to wait for And the couple has someone to come home to I think how I haven’t come home to anyone in quite some time I feel the emptiness of my box Talk to myself Fear schizophrenia Take a crazy pill But I am untethered I’m not afraid to be alone, to float Have a glimpse of freedom Something the cat yearns for Something I supposedly possess Despite my opposable thumbs, The box always finds me And the freedom isn’t true But you’re only as free as you realize And the cat’s eyes are mine And the couple’s embrace radiates in my chest And my eyes stay fixed on this window

Lost In The Lights Kautriaun Singleton

Edwin Prendergast Natalie Pfeifle

The day Edwin Prendergast lost his mind began, as most significant days do, with a mundane cup of tea. Not the superior loose-leaf Darjeeling he typically favored, mind you, but a forgotten Tesco Value teabag discovered in the depths of his secretary’s desk drawer, origin unknown, vintage uncertain. Had anyone asked Edwin about the moment his sanity began to slip—and several specialists at the Maudsley would later attempt this line of inquiry—he might have pointed to the instant the tepid liquid first touched his lips at 9:47 AM. Or perhaps it was 9:48. The tea tasted of dust and forgotten appointments. Of missed connections at Paddington Station and half-remembered phone numbers scrawled on rain-dampened receipts. Most peculiarly, it tasted of Thursdays—not the promising Thursdays of a week still young with possibility, but the defeated Thursdays of months overstaying their welcome. By 10:15, Edwin had reorganized his filing cabinet according to the periodic table of elements, convinced that client surnames contained hidden atomic numbers. By noon, he’d composed a fifteen-page memorandum to the board of directors suggesting that the company’s fiscal strategy should be based on the migratory patterns of European swallows, with particular emphasis on their velocity while carrying coconuts. His colleague Margaret from Accounts Receivable would later testify that she’d noticed nothing amiss, save for his habit of addressing all office plants by their full Christian names and titles. “Good morning, Lord Reginald Ficus,” she’d heard him say to the pot by the water cooler. “Splendid weather we’re having in the fifth dimension.” The truth about madness, Edwin would later reflect (during one of his more lucid moments at the private facility in Sussex), is that it spreads through the mind like loose tea leaves through hot water. First, a gentle dispersion—barely noticeable—then a gradual darkening of the waters of consciousness until, quite suddenly, one finds oneself completely steeped in an entirely different reality. The doctors never did determine what caused Edwin’s brief departure from sanity. The teabag, when tested, revealed nothing more sinister than stale Orange Pekoe and the accumulated despair of a thousand

Internal Rationalization Charles Shirley

50 corporate meetings. Some theorized it was the final crack in an already stressed psyche, the last drop in a cup that had been filling for years with the pressures of modern existence. Edwin recovered, mostly. He switched to coffee, took up watercolor, and developed an inexplicable ability to predict the exact moment pigeons would land on windowsills. He never did finish that memorandum about the swallows, though occasionally, on especially strange Thursdays, he finds himself calculating air-speed velocities in his head, just in case.

Ghost of Fate Charles Shirley

Swans in Berlin Keilani Swift

The Birds & Our Creator (Музыкант и Ангел homage) Thomas Darnell Here, under the plain muted sky, near where someone lit a match and let the smoke turn into the clouds, stone shelters a grassless patch. Sat on the old bench, the one on the next plot, around a bend and facing a stranger, I might turn to the side to almost face my friend. Geese began embarking through here last week, at the end of fall. I put the ineffable into words there, just to him, them, and God in their call. And the louder I let my voice rise, the more tempestuous, into the thick pine, the quieter they listen, more than he did in his life, more than God did in mine.

Plunger

Robert McGuill wherever you go, wherever you throw those dice, the blues come following down You look west, boulders rising in staired steps toward the ragged peaks. Above them a soulful blue sky daubed with puffs of dreamy white clouds. The day could be a postcard. Is a postcard except that, rushing at you in a frothy rage comes the river, swift and savage. Crashing over rock and stone. Exploding in rainbow mists that rise and fall and perish like rumors under the autumn sun. There isn’t a pebbled run or glassy oxbow on this river you don’t know or haven’t fished a thousand times. Its waters are in your blood. Yet it’s this very thing, this familiarity with the river that could claim your life one day…and if it does, you can be sure there will be a rancher sitting at his kitchen table back in Spikebuck or Cotopaxi who’ll rustle his morning paper and say to his wife, Look here, Jorie. Another one drowned at that damned ledge hole. They never learn, do they? But hypotheticals don’t concern you. Not the way they concern others. For you, life is a game of chance. A series of wagers not to be missed. Every flip of the coin, every roll of the dice, every turn of the cards is a pulse-fluttering rush of adrenaline…or a grim lesson in the cold inevitability of heartbreak. Yes, the river is as faithless as it is beautiful. But you share a history. A love for one another. You can still recall the days of your youth when you and your friends came here with tubes and kayaks to ride the whitewater—to get high and party with girls whose lust for excitement exceeded even your own—and you know that if it had wanted to kill you, it would’ve done so long ago. Strange, maybe. But you never thought of it as cheating death back then, what you got away with when you were doing the things you did. Yet, maybe you were. Or maybe you were only borrowing from it, withdrawals against a ledger that would one day demand to be balanced. Perhaps for every rapids you ran in a rubber raft, for every cliff you leapt from without fear or caution, for every underwater cave you

Her Pearly Whites Skylar Jory

56 explored without the benefit of common sense, there would one day be a reckoning. A collection of debts. You don’t realize it yet, but time has plucked away at you over the decades. Larcenous fingers pick-pocketing little bits of who you were when you were young and too busy looking the other way. One year it stole a twitch of your reflexes. The next, a flash of eyesight. The year after that, it left you with a maddening case of tinnitus. But you wrote it all off, all of it, because you never had the need to call on it in a time of desperation. You don’t even know your youth is gone until you reach for it on a day like this, in a place like this, and discover it’s no longer there. That like so much else that was once in your possession, it’s deserted you while you were laying wagers, playing the odds. These are life’s little treacheries. The river’s treacheries. Soft and insidious. So when you step into the water today and feel the first feint pull of the current against your waders, you’ll think nothing of it. You’ll smile, in fact, reminded of the playful tug of your grandfather’s hand. The whistle of his sawdust voice in your ear—Hey there, Sport! Wait up! What’s your hurry? It’s a moss-covered stone, mid-channel that upends you. You’ve slipped in the water before—the footing is always tricky in the river—but today it’s different, somehow, because your reaction is uncharacteristically clumsy. Unexpectedly inadequate to the moment. You reach for balance, toddling sideways in a silly dance. But though you recover your footing, it’s only for an instant, and only after dropping your wading stick while trying to right yourself. The hickory staff is a small loss as money goes, but an embarrassing one for a seasoned angler. So you’re already concocting the little white lie you’ll tell your wife when you get home this evening and she sees you’ve lost it. You tumble backward, and your mind races in panic. Your arms turn to windmills, and in a sudden, cold shock you fall, and the frigid water gushes into your uncinched waders, flooding your boots, numbing your feet from the toes up in a stinging assault. You know, immediately, that unless you free yourself from the weight of the water the current is going to drag you under. But after losing the staff you’re angry, and you don’t want to lose the rod as well to the bullying current. A free hand might save you here, but there isn’t one to be had. So you hold onto the rod, unreasonably, refusing to forsake it to the river. Refusing to believe it might betray you to your death. The rod is twenty-seven years old. You bought it when you had a good

job, when you were flush with money. It was custom made in Steamboat, Colorado, the old man who built it long dead, though his signature lives on, engraved in gold ink under a coat of clear Chinese lacquer. Like any beautiful thing meant to test itself against other beautiful things, the rod was delivered into this world with the curse of original sin. But you baptized it into eternal life. You carried it over legendary rivers, christening it in channels of clear, deep streams that chastened its soul. That filled it with the divine. You fished the hell out of it, literally, leaving it pure and shriven and cleansed of the bad luck it was born with. You turned it from a simple stick into an instrument of faith and goodness. A relic of inestimable luck. So, no, you can’t let go of it. If you let go of it, you’ll die...of grief. Of loss. Of shame. You aren’t superstitious. You’ve never trafficked in omens or premonitions. But you aren’t an atheist, either, and just this morning when you were dressing out your line, a hummingbird lit, trembling, on the rod’s tip, cocking its head and turning a solitary eye upon you. This meant something, of course. It had to. It meant something powerful, something sacred, though you still aren’t sure what it was. When your head goes under, your hat unseats itself and floats downstream, gaily, like a barefoot lover teasing you with wayward glances. And there’s nothing to do except let it go. Bid it a yearning farewell. When your face breaks the surface, you cough and gasp and sputter for air. And it’s then that your rheumy old-man eyes catch sight of two people high on the granite ledge downriver. A boy and girl. They’re standing on a stone slab that stretches far over the lip of the water, and one of them is watching you. It’s the boy. He’s staring at you as you tumble through the rocks like a rag doll, already broken, already lost to defeat. You try and summon them for help. But the gesture of your hand looks more like a weak farewell. A gloomy goodbye. The boy drops the picnic sandwich the girl’s made for him, and motions with a sharp flap of his hand for her to come see. Come quickly! You go under again, the water’s turbulent hands gripping you by the shoulders, but before you disappear into the dark world below the current, you hear the girl let go a stabbing shriek. “Oh, God!” she gasps, gripping the boy’s arm. “Was that a man?” The boy nods, grimly. “We have to do something!” the girl says in a panic, pressing her palm to the boy’s chest. “Do something!”

58 The boy turns and looks at her. He’s too stunned to do anything but blink. “Like what?” he says, turning his eyes back to the river. “He’s already gone.” The cold water turns colder, darker, and your mind sinks into numbness. Before the light is gone though, before your last thought is washed over and erased from memory by the chill of unnatural night, your rod hits a boulder and snaps in two. Now. Now you want to die. And your wish is answered. A month will pass before the S&R team is able to locate and extract your body. First, there’ll be the inevitable inter-agency pissing match over how, and who will retrieve you from the underwater cave in which you’re trapped. It will involve environmental groups and their lawyers. Officials from both the state and county. The Forest Service will be there, too, along with many others. There will be courthouse battles over how and who will dredge your waterlogged corpse from a public river without tainting or disrupting the wilderness habitat. The infighting will be fierce, coarse and ugly. But in the end, before you waste away completely down there in the sieve of debris in which you’re trapped, they’ll come to an agreement that all deem sensible, and they’ll pencil-out a plan for your return to the world above where you can be interred in a proper grave of earth and stone. Flatbed trucks hauling massive cranes will growl up and down the dirt road on great muddy treads the day they finally come for you. Engineers will place and remove coffer dams, and between the placing and removing of these cement barriers, masked divers will perform a task no sane man would ever volunteer to undertake. The operation will last no longer than an afternoon. They know exactly where you are. Exactly how the extrication must proceed. But when it’s over, when the trucks leave bearing the cranes on their long flat beds and the ambulance has borne what’s left of you away to the county morgue in a rubber sack, the recovery divers will strip from their turnout gear and return to their pickup trucks, after which they’ll drive to the nearest tavern and drink themselves blind. Eventually your drowning will be forgotten by everyone. Everyone except a solitary old man. A friend you once knew, perhaps in high school. You can picture him, can’t you? But you can’t, for the life or death of

you, remember his name. Gene, maybe? Jake? You recognize his face, but the name is lost, and you wouldn’t be able to recall it now if the police threw you under a bright light and threatened you with rubber Gene, or Jake, is a bookish man, just as you were once a bookish man yourself. He’s a good man, thoughtful and circumspect, and he’ll drive down from Cheyenne in his ugly old flatbed to pay respects to your memory. In the back bed of your friend’s truck there’ll be a large iron cross. He’ll have fashioned this monstrosity from scraps found in the machine shed on his ranch. He’ll have welded it, and riveted a hand-painted plate to its transept that says FRIEND GARTH. This fellow, this old school chum, will unload the metal marker from his truck one hot summer afternoon and drag it down the rocky embankment to the river, near the place they found you, and there he’ll bang it into the ground with a post-hole driver. When he’s finished, he’ll step back from the monument and mumble a mouthful of solemn words no one in this world or the next will ever hear again. The iron cross will stand for years, through snow and rain and the blistering western sun. But one spring afternoon, when the mountains have shed their snow in a particularly heavy runoff, it will topple, clanking and clattering among the rocks where it will lie unseen for decades to come, turning first to rust, then dust, just as you have done on your way to eternity. Here in this spot, fifty years from the afternoon you drowned, in the place on the riverbank where the cross once stood among the prickly pear and thimbleberry, a wildflower will fight its way through the crusty snow and turn its face to the sun. ###

Sinkage Ellen Harrold

Turtle Path When I was a child, I saw a great turtle with a bamboo hut strapped to its back

Kelly Talbot

stride a narrow path through palms and fronds along a steep ravine upward, ever upward. Inside the hut sages and mystics argued and gestured over rites and rituals. I told my parents of my vision. Each week they ate their dead god and prayed. Now the water rises. I peel off my wet shirt and follow my turtle upward into the mists.

Rattle Me Nathanael O’Reilly After Robert Smith I sleep in the gutters of Fascination Street, wait for the time to ride the swell. Come for a swim

thought. Remember summer evenings sitting sipping

in my overflowing mind, splash out excess

coffee during Shakespeare readings. Rattle my panes, blow chill through my bones, make me shiver, recoil, sink through cold green eyes.

Sanctuary Athena H

multi-layered journey Kautriaun Singleton

The Idiot Child Robert Beveridge leads within leads a wedge of onion, pressed against the nose steamed by the sweat behind your ears your erasure the emergence of an older, sweeter sustenance the manhole disappears into the sky dropped into the ocean we asked the walruses for advice they told us to buy and hold 19jan2022

Indecisive Chaos Aaliyah Martinez

River Flows West Its glass-dark tongue tastes whitewater all night.

Donna Mendelson

On boats, some of us as round-rolled as wishing rocks, as asleep as granite. On beach-shelf, some cradled in sand. Wake to wind, water, Orion. Headlamps make here-light. Later sun’s slide-light slips down limestone. Someone calls coffeedoodledoo. We roll and clip drybags, ride the tongue into waves, onto blue-gold mirrors. Months past Upset Rapid, Lava Falls, Killer Fang, home in bed, still stone-sand asleep, tumbling awake to water-wind, to something you went into and never came out. Always above Lava.

Thank you for reading the first volume of Brushfire’s 78th edition. Our team hopes the poetry, prose, and artwork collected within these pages made you laugh, cry, and—most of all—think. It’s a big hectic world out there, but great art can bring us all a little closer together. To all of our submitters: we greatly appreciate your creativity, dedication, love for the arts, and freedom of expression. You are what makes Brushfire unique. Again, thank you for your enjoyment of the University of Nevada, Reno’s literature and arts. We’ve brought the Brushfire to you for 77 years and the fire continues blazing thanks to passionate readers like you. With your support, many more editions of Brushfire await. We couldn’t be more excited.

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Birthday Girl Makena Fig

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