2 The Closed Eye Open | Issue I V | July 202 1 theclosedeyeopen .com Copyright © 202 1 The Closed Eye Open C over i mage s by Corey S. Pressman Cover design by Aaron Lelito Editing and layout by Daniel Morgan, Maya Highland, and Aaron Lelito This volume may not be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means — electronic or print — without permission from the publisher. The Closed Eye Ope n reserves all rights to the material contained herein for the contributors’ protection; all rights revert to the authors and artists upon publication. 3 Contents Esther Sadoff 7 James Redfern 8 Andrew Furst 9 Julie Lloyd 1 0 Samara Landau 1 2 Victoria Costello 13 Victoria V 1 9 Nancy White 21 Hannah Maiorano 23 Kellen Bakovich 2 4 Corey S. Pressman 25 Lily Rose Kosmicki 2 7 Alex Aimee Kist 31 Fiona Hsu 33 Lauren Brockmeyer 34 Patricia Pedroso 36 Jacqueline Schaalje 3 7 Abigail Gray 38 Alexey Adonin 39 Natalie Coufal 4 2 4 Ann Christine Tabaka 49 Beverly Rose Joyce 5 0 Leon Fedolfi 5 1 Nicole Irene 5 2 Hayley Stoddard 5 4 Christopher Paul Brown 5 5 Rebecca Rush 5 6 Andres Aguilar 64 Jacqueline Staikos 6 5 Marianne Lyon 6 7 Jennifer Cahill 6 8 Julie Fritz 6 9 Christina Martin 70 Steven Capitani 7 2 John Timothy Robinson 7 4 Submit to The Closed Eye Open 76 List of Contributors 7 7 5 Note from the Editor “I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness―in a landscape selected at random―is when I s tand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of grat itude to whom it may concern―to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.” ― Vladimir Nabokov, in Speak, Memory I’ve always been fascinated with this quotation. “Believing” in time would ordinarily seem like a giv en, but Nabokov’s fantastical metaphor illustrate s that the narrative of time can quite easily be “folded up” — and of course this goes beyond simply closing the covers of a novel! The creative process can certainly be said to “superimpose” experiences from one time of life to another, layering images, concepts, and language that have been gathered over the course of time . One of the most gratifying parts of collecting the pieces for an issue is to see how a series of individual works — all with their own complex origins — fit together, resonate with each other, and maybe even become woven into the next person’s magic carpet Thank you for reading...and be sure to take a moment to watch the next butterfly you see! Daniel Morgan 6 7 Esther Sadoff Everything is ripe if you know how to search Some crave the artichoke's heart, honey dew clear as rain. I crave rind and bone, a search for the grifting tongue. I've never chosen a perfect melon, a juicy tomato dreaming of sugared sun. Don't care if the skin is sallow, the flesh all pulp and powder. I like the cool ebb of pink to white, the green of a latent bloom. My mother scoops the red center of each halved melon, leaves them rocking. Two upside hills to carve. I don't desire the sweet trickle, the squelch of a yellow cob. Give me the pale hard kernels like unformed teeth, my tongue slowly turning gold. 8 James Redfern the jazz great gardens now he says he now makes music with his vegetables and flowers in his two - hundred - fifty square - foot, sandy - soiled apartment back yard he was a great jazz composer, still is, but he lost his hearing years ago gradually, not unlike Beethoven, he lives like a monk now in silence all t he time. he lives with his woman, but they no longer use verbal language as a tool of communication between themselves. he plants grocery trimmings fertilizing the sandy soil with kitchen scraps, coffee grounds, and egg shells. before the gardening mon k lost the last of his hearing sound became amplified as its retreat left an echo chamber in its wake turning subtle sound into harsh noise when he closed his eyes tightly, he heard the roar of a conflagration up close it was such a torturous passage slouching slowly into silence sometimes the very thought of music, vibration itself, brings vertigo, nausea which is why the jazz great gardens now making music in yet another key. 9 Duplex Andrew Furst 10 Good t hings in sight Julie Lloyd 11 The battle Julie Lloyd 12 Samara Landau Unidentified I have no mirror to know myself Just the shadow of my figure, the reflection I see in the window on the outside of people’s homes. The humans stare and point, freezing their bodies so that I freeze too. But I can see their bellies rising and falling, their lips whispering, asking the same question I ask myself. I relish in this moment. The moment where I am unnameable. Where all that matters, is our eyes frozen on one another Wondering more important than knowing 13 Victoria Costello New Room, Old Brain An excerpt from the novel The Orchid Child Maybe it’s the pattern of holes in the ceiling tiles — thirteen by eleven, diabolical — plus the whitest walls he’s ever seen making Teague feel like he’s a stowaway on the Cha llenger . Aunt Kate says it’s temporary housing for visiting scholars. This place is so clean he wants to cough just to add some microbes of his own. The mattress is made of some kind of outer - space foam, hard as a rock. He didn’t expect to miss the lumpy b unk bed he slept on his whole life. When Kate asked him if he was up for moving to Ireland where she’s doing her new study, Teague said he was okay with it. She might as well have said Iceland or India or Iran. It can’t be any worse than living in Upstate New York with his crabby grandmother, Maureen, who told him a bunch of times she’s too old to handle the weird kid he’s turned into. Yeah, sure, he thought but didn’t say, it’s easy enough to love a normal little kid. No problem , he told her. Maybe he’ll f ind someone weird enough to be his friend over here. Now he pictures his old room the way he left it a day and a half ago, empty and echoey, and wonders whether his old enemies are staked out in the closet waiting to make the next kid’s life miserable. Tea gue hasn’t told anyone about the voices that have been bugging him for months. Every once in a while he’ll catch a glimpse of one of them, more often he hears them moving around out of sight, trash - talking him. A supersize rodent with a Russian accent he n amed Ivan, after the middle brother in The Brothers Karamazov , tells him he’s an ugly piece of shit and the world is a junkyard of toxic trash and nasty people. It’s like he is trying to get him to drop out of the human race and join the rat race. No joke. Larry’s a pit bull who talks like a kid and always seems to know when Teague is having a bad day. A few times, Larry told him things weren’t going to get any better, so Teague might as well end it. When he learned the word sadist , Teague knew who to pin i t on. At Walgreens, Larry told him to steal a jumbo bag of Kit Kat bars. When Teague said no, Larry wouldn’t leave him alone. Teague put his hands over his ears, 14 yelling, “Fuck you! You’re not even real. You’re some trash that fell out of my brain.” Pe ople stared, but what was he supposed to do? Larry just laughed. “You wish, kid. Do it or I’ll be up your ass twenty - four seven.” “And if I go along with it?” “I’ll give you the rest of the week off.” Since Larry usually kept his word, Teague grabbed the bag of candy and ran out of there. That’s how his klepto career got started. Now it’s a habit he can’t break. Whoa, Teague stops himself. He shouldn’t be giving Ivan or Larry any airtime . It’s like say ing, “Come on back, guys, I’m over here!” He wipes his mind clean and fills the empty space with nonsense. Da, da, da, da, da, zippity, da dooooooooooooo . Da, da, da, da, da, zippity, da dooooooooooooo. “Teague, are you awake?” How long has she bee n standing there? “Yeah. Why?” “I thought we could go out for breakfast, then shop for food. If you want, we’ll stop at the student bookstore and get you some art supplies. How does that sound?” “I can’t go.” “Why not?” “I haven’t unpacked my books.” She looks at the three unopened boxes lined up against the wall and back at him. “Aren’t you hungry?” “Yeah. But I’ll feel better after I do it.” Her face is scrunched up like a sponge. “Fine. So, why don’t I help you? It’ll go faster.” “All right.” While s he gets a knife from the kitchen, he slides out of bed and puts on sweatpants. Besides the new pendant, nothing matters more to Teague than his books. When they were packing to come here, Kate suggested he give them away, since Ireland would have the same books and he could buy them all again. He didn’t want to sound like a wuss and say they were his only friends, even if it was true. In the end, he flat - out refused and she agreed to ship them. There’s an empty bookcase in his new room. Plus a desk he’ll ne ver use. “Shall I do the honor?” She holds the knife over one of the boxes. “Or would you rather?” 15 “I’ll do it.” He slices the tape and pulls open the flaps. The smell gives him an instant high — and not just because he sprinkled weed in the pages of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Kate doesn’t seem to notice. She’s on her knees by the bookcase with an armful of paperbacks. He holds his breath. Worst case, he’ll just have to re - shelve everything. She stares at their spines and turns to him. “I bet you have a system.” Phew. “Yeah. Alphabetical, by author.” “Of course.” She smiles and takes down the books she alre ady shelved. “Except Fyodor.” “Fyodor?” Her head is cocked to the side. “Alphabetical worked okay when I was just reading sci - fi. They’re good but there’s no way those guys can sit on the same . . .” He picks up his dog - eared copy of The Idiot. After he fo und it on the Metro - North last spring, he barely looked up for five days. When Prince Myshkin said, “ If I had had the power to prevent my own birth I should certainly never have consented to accept existence under such ridiculous conditions,” Teague couldn’t believe someone could know his all - time lowest thought without knowing him personally. “Of course, Dostoyevsky. So what did you think?” “It’s t he best book I ever read.” His flat tone belies the awe he still feels as he traces the embossed letters above the Prince’s haunted portrait. “I’ll take your word on that.” He snaps to attention. Is she making fun of him? “I always took the easiest non - s cience electives I could get away with, and Fyodor is not exactly a beach read.” Probably not. He’s always thought of his aunt as such a brainiac. Maybe geniuses can only be good at one thing because there’s no room left over for anything else. He isn’t s ure what his one thing is yet. Or if he’ll even have one. Lately, his paintings have been, well, boring. The same half - human, half - robot creatures, just different body parts. Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? got him started drawing hum anoids. Now he’s cranking them out like he’s a copy machine. It must be his new medication keeping the good stuff beyond his reach. He opens to the page in Electric Sheep he marked with a 16 purple sticky, his color for stuff to read when he can’t feel a fucking thing and needs something to remind him other humans have survived in this condition. “So I left the TV sound off and I sat down at my mood organ and I experimented. And I finally foun d a setting for despair. . . So I put it on my schedule for twice a month; I think that's a reasonable amount of time to feel hopeless about everything, about staying here on Earth after everyone smarter than you has emigrated. Don’t you think?” Yeah, Di ck - man. You better believe it. Kate stands up. “That’s two shelves done. So, we’ll leave in a half hour?” “All right.” He puts Electric Sheep with the other Dicks and gets back to sorting . . Le Guin, Rowling, Tolkien. He forces himself not to look up at the ceiling. They’re just holes, even if whoever thought them up is out to get him. Teague runs his hand over a column fronting the Bank of Ireland in Ballymore’s Old Town Square. At three stories, it’s the tallest building in town, not counting the ca stle. A plaque by the entrance says it used to be a jail, then a lunatic asylum — they actually use those words — and now it’s a bank with an Italian restaurant off the back. He walks past a row of tiny stores — jewelry, hats, cigars, newspapers; no more than two people can fit in any of them — and stops at a pile of rubble on the same block. The bones of a house. Are they waiting fo r some ghost family to come home and clean up the mess? Maybe they are. Great zombie Jesus, it’s like living in Wizarding World. The towers of Ballymore Castle stick out over the trees. Yesterday, when he took the tour, the guide said the Normans built it in the twelfth century to get a good shot at anyone trying to steal their cattle. He went up one of the towers and checked out the angle it offered on cars driving on the M6. It would have been a perfect shot. The drugstore looks modern from the sidewalk , but the wall behind the register is stacked with antique bottles labeled by hand. A rusty scale, stone bowls, grinding tools. These people don’t throw anything away. “That’s all we’ve got left of my great - uncle’s apothecary,” the guy behind the counter says. He’s Maureen’s age, on the fat side. “What happened to the rest of it?” 17 “The Brits burned it down.” His name tag says Sean Mitchell, Pharmacist “Why’d they do that?” “Retribution, subjugation, call it what you want. We had a little rebellion going on. I like the feeling of having my Great - Uncle Paddy looking over my shoulder while I carry on the family business.” Teague puts a pack of gum on the counter and fifty cents. Sean drops his eyes and lifts them again. “So are you planning t o pay for the candy while you’re at it?” “Oh yeah. I forgot.” He pulls the chocolate bar out of his pocket and adds a Euro. Sean raises his eyebrows and blows out some air. From his other pocket, he takes out a pack of batteries. “I don’t really need them. ” He gives them back to Sean and avoids his eyes. It’s like his hand has a mind of its own. Sean points under the counter. “Since I put in these cameras, I’m seeing a lot more than I’d like to.” “Sorry. I won’t do it again.” That’s wishful thinking but it can’t hurt to say it. Sean’s smile isn’t the happy kind. But at least he didn’t bust him. Teague is retracing his steps through Old Town Square when he catches the sounds. They’re words, parts of sentences scattered from whoever said them. But these voi ces aren’t talking to him — or about him. That’s new for him. Traitor I’m the same as you. On your knees He stops and does a 360 - degree turn. Main Street is behind him, the old lunatic asylum opposite, Saint Brendan’s straight ahead. Maybe that’s where they're coming from. Except there’s no one standing outside and the church doors are closed. You’ve got the wrong man. You’re all the same scum. When he stands by the rock wall in front of the church, the voices are louder and the loose words have found each other. Not my boy. Leave him be. 18 There’s a fire. Run! Nooooooo. Mary, Mother of God, tell me it’s no t so! What’s going on? He’s pretty sure these voices belong to dead people. Maybe they’re talking to each other. A lady carrying a shopping bag in each hand gives him a friendly look. Did she not hear anything? He leans against the wall and pops a fresh s tick of gum in his mouth. Maybe Ballymore people are sick of hearing from these guys. Like he’s sick of Ivan and Larry. So, they ignore them. Which pisses off the dead people so they talk louder. He takes a few steps away from the wall and the chatter dies down. He backs up and touches a rock and it’s like his hand is stuck in an electric outlet. Take them, please. I can’t feed my babies anymore. Mam, don’t go! a kid wails. He jumps back from the wall, whirls around, and makes for Main Street. Enough! At a crosswalk, his stomach makes hungry noises. He considers skipping three o’clock group. “Don’t worry, Ryan will help you fit in,” Kate said this morning. She can be so clueless. He stops at a juice bar for a banana smoothie. He’s slurping it, checking out a video store window, when his thoughts line up. Let’s say, a hundred years ago the British Army are marching down Main Street to crush the rebellion. The ones getting shot at or burned out of their houses are calling out for help. People are dying on this street. The bad vibes coming from all that suffering are so intense the sounds get absorbed by the rocks. He goes in the store and checks out a display of DVDs and video players. Maybe these rocks held on to their voices the way silicon chips store data. Silicon comes from quartz crystals. Duh. Quartz is a rock His arms and legs vibrate as he gets closer to solving the puzzle. So, the sounds stay in these rocks until someone comes along and tunes in at the right frequency to hear them. Someone like him. I t could be a quantum thing. Wow. Pretty fucking awesome. Or maybe he’s just thinking crazy shit. He’s still sorting it out when the church bell peals three times. Damn. He’s late for stupid therapy, which turns out to be the same kind of stupid all over th e world. 19 Don’t Say Victoria V 20 Nordic Spell Victoria V