THE RESCUE by Laura Bailey
“ARE YOU SURE YOU want to do this?” the kid asks, holding back the roller skates. He’s maybe 16.
“I’m sure,” Claudia says through clenched teeth. She’s still burning over the newcomer’s comments at the meeting earlier, and she’s in no mood for this.
The kid looks doubtful. “I gotta get my manager.”
For a second Claudia’s defeated, and she fights the urge to cry. She’s lost 364 pounds, her gut and intestines surgically rerouted and shrunk, and she eats less in a day than a grasshopper. But she’s still fat enough be considered infantile, incapable of acting in her own best interest. Over the years, Claudia’s lost track of the times shoppers have wordlessly reached into her grocery cart and swapped the regular Coke for diet, the boxes of macaroni and cheese and bags of corn chips for ground turkey and baby carrots. When you’re fat, people feel entitled to make pious comments on your health. Servers make menu suggestions: “Why don’t you let me bring the stir fry instead of the alfredo?” Once, an Applebee’s waitress pulled out her phone and showed Claudia before-and-after pictures of bariatric surgeries. “So inspiring,” she told Claudia. “I keep these handy for my customers of size.”
The rink manager arrives, a kid even younger than the kid who fetched him.
“This can be like, really dangerous?” the infant manager tells Claudia, tapping the skate with his finger. Everything ends in a question, as if the kid doesn’t know it’s the last word in the sentence. “They, like, do this thing called shoot the duck? Have you heard of it?”
Claudia inhales deeply. She’ll try humor. Jolliness is expected—encouraged—from overweight people.
“I don’t plan to shoot any ducks while I’m here,” she says, but it falls flat and neither laugh. She sighs. “I just want to roller skate. Like everyone else.”
She will not cry in front of these children. She will not.
The infant manager ignores her. “Shoot the duck is, like, an old school skating game where you go really fast, then squat down real low on one leg and shoot out the other leg like a rifle?” He squats, demonstrating. “And then you like, keep rolling and one-by-one skaters lose their balance and fall?“ He gives a little shriek quack and topples on his side. “See? You could really hurt yourself?”
“Listen.” Claudia swats both hands on the counter and glares down at him. “Three years ago, I was lifted from my bedroom by a mobile crane. I am not afraid of shoot the duck.”
Startled, the boy stands and slides the skates across the counter.
**
When Claudia decided to lose weight three years ago, she had to first convince people she meant it, because by then nobody believed her. By then, nobody was even listening. They’d heard Claudia’s promises before: No more binging, no more sugar, no white carbs, no red meat, no chocolate. She’d start exercising, start loving herself, start loving everyone else, start throwing up, start starving herself––anything to subdue her insatiable craving for food. She’d wake at night sweating, every cell pulling her toward the pantry, the refrigerator, to stuff herself until she had nothing left to eat for breakfast the next morning. Often, she was still bloated from the last binge when she started the next. Feeling full was beside the point. Eating was about the aroma, the taste, the chewing and swallowing. Food was Claudia’s sun. Eating defined her, and she understood women who stayed in abusive relationships––without the abuser, how was the woman necessary? Without food, what good was Claudia?
Claudia could eat an 8,000-calorie IHOP breakfast in six minutes. Two six-egg onion chili omelets (specially made by the cook who, grateful for Claudia’s appreciation, arranged to have it delivered through her bedroom window in a basket on an extension pole), Canadian bacon, half a loaf of French bread, and a half-quart of real maple syrup. Claudia didn’t know when the electric bill was due, but she knew a box of Twinkies and three two-liter sodas from Kmart cost $5.35. She could recite the intersections of every Taco Bell within 10 miles, and could count the meals she’d eaten with others on one hand. For Claudia, eating was a solitary pursuit. Like praying.
And, in some way, hadn’t Claudia even enjoyed her own helpless expansion, once it became inevitable? Finally, confined to her bed, hidden from judgment, she sank deeper into the drifts of white flesh. She’d sometimes imagine the parts of herself that she couldn’t touch or see anymore––parts tended to by weekly home aides, toward the end––the skin as unspoiled and precious as a god’s.
Now, post-bariatric surgery, Claudia’s stomach is the size of a Cadbury Egg, and if she tries to eat one (she has) she’ll vomit immediately and for hours (she did).
So instead of eating chocolate eggs and mammoth breakfasts, Claudia tries one new activity a month that she couldn’t do before she lost the weight. Her bariatric support group, The Flabber-Gastrics, holds her accountable.
Claudia walks with her skates to the seating area. Inside the windowless rink, time disappears. Strobe lights stab her eyes, the B-52s twang away about the Love Shack, and people hurl by faster than cars, laughing and screaming as if they all know each other. At least nobody is shooting the duck.
“Love Shack” ends and suddenly Claudia’s very conscious of the stwitch, stwitch, stwitch of her nylon leggings as she walks. A fat person’s swaying, loud walk. Skinny people don’t make noises performing normal activities: Walking, sitting, eating—even sleeping is louder when you’re fat. Claudia feels both conspicuous and invisible. People are staring and then looking away before she sees, but their eyes contain that tell-tale, willful blankness. They’re pretending Claudia doesn’t exist––which is much worse than pretending they don’t see her. If Claudia doesn’t exist, then what has happened to her body cannot happen to theirs.
Claudia shakes her head, impatient with herself. What’s wrong with her today? She should be brimming with accomplishment, not sinking in self-pity. Roller skating would have been unthinkable even a year ago. But coming here directly after the Flabber-Gastrics meeting was a spur-of-the-moment decision, and perhaps not a good one.
Claudia blames her rash behavior and her bad mood on the newcomer. First, he’d hijacked the good news she’d waited for days to share with the group. But then what he’d said about her was so jolting! This random stranger had watched her biggest humiliation on television and presumed to know her feelings about it, the same way people presumed her weight made her body public property.
Rescue.
Claudia shuddered. The hated term she’d heard so many times that she unconsciously used it herself now.
“A local woman was removed from her apartment during a daring rescue,” the reporters said, as if Claudia were a whale trapped in Lake Michigan.
That was three years ago but as vivid as yesterday. The whirring saws, the hospital bed swaying high over the street, the sudden cough of wind, the bed sheet billowing up, the chill on her skin. Even now, gawkers still recognized Claudia and stared, trying to place her. Once, a woman passing her on the street nudged her companion and whispered, “That’s her. I think she’s the one.”
**
Claudia finds a bench across from two ponytailed young women minding a group of children. A little girl with cheeks moist from tears stops crying, mouth agape like a broken gumball machine, and stares at Claudia. Claudia stiffens. Here it comes, and always their childish inquiries so loud: “Is there a baby in you?” or “Your stomach is so big. Can I touch it?”
But before the little girl can speak her mother notices the child staring and jerks her around, then squats and whispers something in her ear. The only thing worse than a child’s loud inquiry is the parent’s even louder apology.
Claudia moves to a different bench, sits, and kicks off her loafers. A size 11 before losing the weight, she’s now an 8 1/2. Who knew feet got fat?
“Everything gets fat,” Claudia’s surgeon told her. “Even earlobes. Your earlobes will shorten. You can wear earrings again and they’ll hang right.”
The surgeon was right. One morning, Claudia peered into the mirror and her earlobes had shrunk; they no longer resembled long, thick shrimp. But, her ear piercings were now long knife slashes––more hole than lobe, as if her flesh were receding. As if, eventually, her whole body would be just a black and empty space.
**
When the Flabber-Gastrics started filing into the church basement that afternoon, Al, the newcomer, was already sitting at the table in a grey sweatsuit and grubby white tennis shoes, like an island wreathed in mist. His wet breathing echoed through the room, and when he looked up and smiled at Claudia she thought, That used to be me. Claudia smiled back. She’d come so far, and today she’d share the fantastic news that capped off her journey.
The meeting began with the slight sense of competitiveness that happened when the old-timers shared their stories with a newcomer. Claudia had heard all of them at least a dozen times. Sharon led with her rollercoaster share.
“And then, the kid running the ride tries to jam the safety bar over my boobs but it won’t close,” Sharon recalled. “I says to him, ‘I’m too big there. It won’t shut,’ but they wouldn’t let me out.” Sharon crossed her arms with a shudder. “They call in more workers, like a whole special crew dedicated to pushing the safety bar closed over the fat girl’s chest.”
The newcomer watched, impassive, his loud breathing monotonous, hypnotic. As Sharon cried softly, the newcomer reached beneath the table and crinkled loudly in a paper bag, retrieving a Styrofoam container, which he set on the table and opened. A mushroom cloud of steam haloed his face, and the smell of onion rings and tangy corned beef drifted into the room.
“I keep saying, ‘I’m stuck…” Sharon said, and then trailed off, staring with the rest of them as the newcomer began to dismantle and rebuild the Reuben sandwich inside to his satisfaction.
Claudia had never looked at porn, not even during the two years confined to her bed, but she couldn’t imagine it looked any better than that container of food. She looked away and swallowed a mouthful of penny-tasting saliva. Obviously, someone needed to explain the rules about snacking in meetings. Carrots and rice cakes were okay. Twinkies and Big Macs weren’t.
When he’d finished rearranging, the newcomer pressed the sandwich flat and took a huge, wheezy bite. Just then, Claudia caught Al’s eye across the table. His lips twitched with suppressed laughter, which nearly surprised Claudia into laughing, too.
Al.
They’d sat through three years of Flabber-Gastrics support group meetings together, but it surprised Claudia that Al found this funny. She realized she didn’t know anything about him. What was Al’s last name? She didn’t even know that.
Jim shared next. “My wife used to sew together two Under Armor shirts to make one big enough to fit me. Under Armor’s best for flattening the man cans,” he always said.
Fluuurtttt! The newcomer squirted a packet of mustard onto his onion rings, and breathed into his plate.
He looked up and smiled. “Sorry,” he said, licking his fingers.
Don’t be judgmental, Claudia ordered herself. He can’t help it. She’d been there. But there was another way. She was proof. She was.
Jim resumed his story and, as usual, he finished with the same corny double entendre. “My wife stuck with me, and I only need one shirt now, so it’s an uplifting story.”
Breasts. One more body part to make life hell for fat people. Claudia’s were making her life hell now, lumped on her lap like two grocery bags filled with potatoes. Breast reconstruction after cancer? No problem. But lose 364 pounds and you’re yoked for life with those extra seven yards of loose skin, like a huge wedding dress you can’t remove after the divorce. Redundant flesh, the insurance company calls it.
Then it was Claudia’s turn to share. She always gave the abbreviated version for newcomers: The leaden loneliness of a girlhood bullied at home and school, scooping whole jars of peanut butter under the covers at night with her fingers, shopping Lane Bryant by junior high, skipping driver’s education because she couldn’t fit behind the steering wheel, quitting college over the shame of too-small lecture hall seats. Then, fast forward to the final two years, trapped in her bed like a huge infant, thighs so thick that for a year her knees never touched, the creak of the winch when the weekly home health aides turned her to prevent bedsores, and finally, Claudia lifted by crane through an opening sawed into the wall of her bedroom––lifted out into a sunny, bird chirping afternoon amid applause and whistles and a surprise hiccup of wind. Darkness to light, like traveling through the birth canal.
Claudia told her story emotionlessly, and without self-pity, as if delivering a history lesson. Still, she couldn’t bring herself to share about Ben, not yet. Maybe not ever. She’d heard last month that Ben and his new wife were expecting a child. At the time, an overwhelming, leaden sense of loss rippled through her, as if she’d already experienced all the happiness she could expect in life.
Now, finished with her share, Claudia waited for the newcomer’s response. He stared at her, unreadable, feeding onion rings into his mouth like someone might feed wood boards into a table saw, and chewing robotically.
“And here I am,” Claudia said, spreading her hands. “Over 360 pounds lighter. Still a few to go, not exactly a former fatty yet, but a former super-fatty.”
Usually, the Flabber-Gastrics clapped when Claudia finished, but today their applause was tepid. Everyone was thrown by the newcomer’s goddamn eating. Was he even listening?
Claudia said, “And life just keeps getting better.” Her voice was louder than she intended, but she couldn’t stop herself. “Just listen when I tell you about the phone call I got this week!” And then the words spewed out, all wrong somehow, more triumphant than joyful. And by the time she finished telling them about the approval, and about how much skin removal and contouring the insurance company had authorized, the entire group was staring at Claudia, stunned.
The room exploded into cross-talk.
“You’re shitting me,” the usually soft-spoken Al said loudly, almost accusingly and Claudia winced. He shrugged off his hoodie down to his undershirt and spread his arms, displaying the thick swags of skin.
“I’ve been trying for 18 months to get these wings clipped. Insurance won’t pay. They say it’s elective surgery.”
“That’s what they told me, too,” Claudia said. “And then just last week they approved it, out of the blue. Truthfully, I still can’t believe it myself.”
“Brachioplasty, too?” Al asked, and Claudia nodded.
“And a belt lipectomy. Tummy tuck. Face and neck.”
You could have heard a marshmallow drop. They looked at her, speechless, and suddenly Claudia’s throat hurt with the scorch of those hot, gloating words crowing out of her.
“Maybe it’s because you were on television,” said Sydney, a white-haired teen who wore colored contacts and had BED. She studied Claudia with hard, pink-hued irises.
“Maybe,” Sydney said, looking around for support, “the insurance case manager knows your story.”
The others nodded, and Sharon said slowly, “That’s probably it.”
Claudia liked Sharon, had always thought they’d become friends. Somehow Claudia had just never reached out. Now she wished she had.
Then, still mechanically chewing––Jesus, how many onion rings were in there?––the newcomer’s face ignited with recognition, and he leaned forward and said to Claudia, “I remember your story.”
The Flabber-Gastrics fell silent. The newcomer swiped his mouth on his forearm.
“I watched it on television. Every second. The ambulances, the fire trucks, the crane, the lights, the saws, the news crews. The people there, watching. All of them gathered there for you. I could feel the love, and all of it for you.”
The newcomer paused. He seemed overcome, his face rapt, searching for the perfect words.
“All those people gathered together with a common goal––to save you! And then, when you came out, people were crying, cheering. You remember, right? The people crying? I remember thinking, ‘How could anything top that?’”
**
Claudia jams her feet into the skates, and when she stands she’s breathless from bending so long. She’s still uncomfortable much of the time, still knocks things over with her ass because she doesn’t know where it ends, she’s still bigger than most men. She looks at her feet splayed out before her, the ridiculous purple boot laces, and suddenly she knows with crushing finality that she will always be as big as two people and she will always be alone.
Claudia shakes her head violently. What’s wrong with her? It’s that newcomer’s fault, lip smacking through his Reuben and ruining the meeting, causing binge cravings in everyone and projecting his pathetic feelings onto her. She won’t let that idiot ruin this experience. Four years ago she couldn’t even stand up. And here she is now, crawling across the carpeting––yes crawling, she’s not about to break her neck before she’s even on the rink––but still, who’d have thought? Huge, bedridden Claudia on skates. Claudia, amid the packs of freewheeling, truant teenagers, skating for the first time in her life at age 43.
If only she’d thought to bring someone, but thinking that way didn’t come naturally. Loneliness is a hard habit to break.
“You’re the best person I know,” Ben used to tell her. “I wish you believed that.”
Claudia smiles a little to herself at the memory of Ben. She feels warm, happy She’ll call Sharon as soon as she leaves here. She’ll make amends for gloating. But she’s suddenly uneasy. Will Sharon forgive her? Of course she will––they’ll laugh about this over coffee. They’ll laugh, too, about Claudia at the rink, risking her life. She’s never called Sharon to socialize, and she’ll tell Sharon that they should have done this years ago, and they’ll both agree that they must make this a habit.
Claudia finally reaches the edge of the rink. Using all of her strength, she grabs the railing and hoists herself up. Her skates splay out in each direction. For a horrific moment she’s stuck, plastered against the wall, legs spread, unable to stand and afraid to fall. Bodies fling by, graceful and hard-muscled and carefree, like slices of human-shaped light. Panting, tears forming, pouring sweat, she grips the rail and pulls, then pushes herself up a second time. The skates roll wildly around somewhere far behind her.
“Jesus Christ lady,” someone screams.
“Move out of the way!”
“Mooooooooovve!” A mooing noise roars up behind and fades again as the person swoops away into the crowd. Claudia doesn’t even look up, she’s heard variations of this so many times it’s like someone hiccupping.
“Ignore them. Listen to me,” Ben used to say, squeezing her hand and making goofy, ticklish kissing noises into her ear. And Claudia always did.
But, there’s also this: Claudia’s skates are beneath her, and she’s rolling. She’s actually rolling! She loosens her grip on the rail, she can’t release it yet, but she’s moving forward, pulling herself inch-by-inch, flat against the wall, but she’s skating. Claudia is a skater. Kool and the Gang’s “Celebration” thumps through the rink, vibrating into her feet and shins and hips, up to the breasts which will soon be medical waste in a dumpster behind the hospital. Harsh overhead fluorescents dim, a disco ball lowers and a kaleidoscope of blue, red, green and white light splashes the walls, the ceiling, the skaters. Effervescent light that floats like champagne bubbles. The skaters dance and whirl, plunging dark and light again and round and round. To Claudia it feels like a wedding in which all of the guests have fallen in love with each other at the exact same moment.
**
The newcomer sucked his thick fingers clean, his face still soft and drunk on memory. He was oblivious to Claudia, who sat speechless in the ticking-bomb silence that fell on the room when the newcomer finished talking. The first crystalline threads of hatred stitched through her.
“It wasn’t beautiful,” Claudia said. “It wasn’t loving. It was the most humiliating experience of my life.” She paused, her voice shaking, the Flabber-Gastrics staring at her now, instead. “It doesn’t have to be that way for you. For anyone. It doesn’t have to be for you the way it was for me.”
But the newcomer’s gauzy expression wasn’t hardening into anything close to understanding. It was perfect, he’d said, because that’s what he wanted and needed to believe. She’d noticed the way he ate––joylessly, as if stuffing himself with food were part of his larger plan, a means to an end.
Claudia wanted to ask, “And, did you see this on television? The part where nobody thought to tie the bed sheet to the stretcher?”
She shut her eyes then, and that day rushed back: Swaying gently on the humongous custom stretcher, 25 feet above the popping and hissing of camera phones and flashbulbs, the shouts and cheers and ohhhs and ahhhs. The sudden spit of wind, the sheet billowing off her legs and chest, bound to the bed only where she herself was strapped on, the blast of freezing cold on her skin, so startling on that ash bright summer day. By then, it had been a year since she fit into underwear, and she covered her pubic area with a hand towel only when the aides visited.
She groped for the sheet blindly, but her arms didn’t reach, and anyway, she couldn’t see over her own breasts and stomach. The paramedics didn’t notice her tears or hear her protests. Had anyone at all actually seen her that day? Or did they see only themselves, their own goodness, and what they could do for her? The wind died and gusted again. Claudia focused on the juicy white clouds bumping around overhead, and tried to ignore the freezing blasts of air like cold water, the reporters shouting, “Claudia! Claudia! What’s it feel like to be free? Claudia?”
But she didn’t say any of this to the newcomer, and nobody in the Flabber-Gastrics knew her well enough to guess what she was thinking.
It was the newcomer who finally said, “I’m so sorry you feel that way.” His eyes hooked hers and held them. A long, uncomfortable silence followed.
And then Al cleared his throat and asked Claudia, “What, exactly, did your plastic surgeon say to the insurance case manager?”
Startled, Claudia said, “Well, I’m not really sure. I guess I could ask, but. . . ”
“But what?”
“Well,” she hesitated. “What if they review my case and decide they made a mistake or something? What if they change their minds?”
Al’s shoulders drooped. He leaned his elbows on his knees and bitterly regarded the slabs of triceps skin, like a huge, grounded bird eyeing its useless wings.
Without looking at her, he said, “You’re right. Don’t give them an opportunity to rethink their decision.” Then he added hastily, “It’s great Claudia. I’m happy for you. We’re all. . . happy.”
**
A growing group of skaters has a new game. As Claudia inches along the railing, they hurl up behind her and at the last second bank away like starlings, to see who gets closest without plowing into her from behind. Part of her wants to laugh at their lack of imagination. The world has much more subtle, entrenched ways of letting its Claudias know that they hog more than their share of air and space––air and space that the glittering, sleek shards of people slinging around her believe they deserve more than Claudia. Just try fitting into a seatbelt, an airplane bathroom, a tanning bed, a turnstile, an employee uniform, or wiping yourself in a standard width stall when you can’t even reach your ass without hoisting your foot onto the toilet seat. No chair is safe. Plastic breaks, wood splinters, and picnic tables are like teeter-totters.
But then, there’s also this: Claudia is skating! Nobody can take that from her. It’s another activity off her bucket list. Maybe the next one shouldn’t tax her eroded joints so much, which by now feel like rusty jackknives screeching open and shut. And she’s sweating enough to mop the floor. But that’s good! There’s so much living to make up for, and this. . . this is living. She should have invited Al to come here with her. Yes––Al would put these pothead, hormonal thugs in place, just like Ben would have. And Al has such nice lips. Such a good smile. Kind. He’s kind, and he looked so sad today, because of her. God, they all looked so sad.
Such great people, the Flabber-Gastrics. It’s a “we” program, yet she hasn’t gotten to know them at all. Why not? She doesn’t have any obligations, no friendships to rekindle now that she can socialize. Food was always her best friend and the only company she’d ever had.
She’ll call Al and Sharon and apologize, and they’ll accept her apology and her invitations. Only now, she’s forgotten exactly why she’s apologizing. The mood of the meeting? For not reaching out to them, even once, in three years? They hadn’t reached out to Claudia either, but that’s no way to look at it. What has Claudia been doing since she stopped eating, except waiting to eat again? What does she even think about anymore? Her days are entirely free, but she’s filled them with nothing substantial. She feels like apologizing to Al and Sharon for that, too.
Yes, dammit. She’ll call Al and Sharon immediately upon leaving this rink, and she’ll cross skating off the bucket list and move on to the next thing, and she’ll invite Al and Sharon to share that experience with her. It might be awkward at first, but they’ll quickly become friends. Eventually, there will be holiday invitations, vacation plans, daily phone chats.
Or, maybe she should just invite Al? He has such a nice smile. Such kind eyes.
**
The last time they’d talked, Ben told Claudia, “I can’t watch you do this to yourself anymore.”
She’d begged him: “I’ll stop. I’ll get help. Please. I’ll do anything.”
He was sobbing when he left. They both knew that Claudia meant it, she would have done anything. Would have, but couldn’t.
**
Suddenly, Claudia urgently needs to reach out to Al, and to Sharon. Does she even have their phone numbers? Where’s her Flabber-Gastrics contact list? She’ll find it. She’ll get their numbers, she will––she’ll do it right now.
It’s time to go. The next egress is halfway around the rink––she can do this. The skaters hurtle by, the backwash of breeze touching Claudia as they swirl around her, all of the skaters here seem a little angry now, with their hard bodies and hard, merry laughter, sweaty hair plastered in spikes to their foreheads. What’s it like to move that way, with quadriceps that twitch so precisely, and long, slim biceps that wing side-to-side, bodies all hard bone, and flat muscle, and taut, heated skin? What’s it like to be in a body that always has another healthy, beautiful body waiting to love it? Claudia clings to the rail, drenched, watching, and the sparkling blue, red, green, and white bubbles from the disco ball float all around her, and the celebration continues.
Then a truck hits Claudia from behind.
She slams into the wall and then thuds to the floor as a child giggles and a man’s voice roars, “What are you doing out there?”
He’s not yelling at Claudia, is he? Claudia tries to protest. “But I was doing it. I was skating, didn’t you see?”
But nobody hears, and she closes her eyes for a second. Her head rocks to the side. A man leans over her and takes her chin in his fingers and gently, so gently, turns her face up, and his cool lips press onto hers. It’s Al. Sweet Al! What’s happening? Al’s found her here, somehow, and he’s kissing her and, and––What’s happening now?
Oh––wait. Nothing. Nothing’s happening.
Al is a nice man, a sad man, with nice lips and kind eyes. Claudia will eventually call Al, and Al will eventually kiss her and Claudia will kiss back, and then nothing else will happen, because even before they pull apart they’ll both realize they won’t kiss again. Claudia will cross “kissing Al” off the bucket list. She will move on to the next thing.
Claudia opens her eyes. A garland of concerned faces look down at her.
“Are you alright? Can you breathe?”
“Doesn’t look good.”
“Looks broken.”
“Don’t move. Help’s coming.”
“Get back. Give her some air.”
Soon, gentle, efficient hands clasp on a neck brace and load Claudia onto a stretcher. As they carry her out of the rink, Claudia stares at the ceiling. The bubbles of light fill her vision, bumping off each other, and she gazes past the ring of faces and up at the floating masses, like clouds in the sky, and she knows the newcomer was right.
It was perfect.
LAURA BAILEY divides her time between fiction writing, freelancing, and covering health and science news for the University of Michigan. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in the Horror Writer’s Association Poetry Showcase, Literati, and Current Magazine.