​The Constructivist
 
Drifting through the gallery of European avante-guard statues, Wassily thought how, in another life, he might have been an artist instead of a surgeon. It was a matter of degree as much as discipline. He slowed to observe Naum Gabo’s 1917 Model for Constructed Torso. 

The figure was constructed of flat cardboard pieces slotted one into the other to approximate the twisted figure of – yes, that appeared to be a breast suggested by a small triangle of cardboard poking out from the chest area above the tapered waist and jutting pubic bone - a woman, armless and strangely bent from mid-chest over to the side, as if she were doing a stretch, her bald head tilted to rest on the nub of shoulder there.

Tucking his hands carefully behind his back to protect them, Wassily leaned in to read the caption at the foot of statue:
 
At the heart of Naum Gabo’s art was the attempt to depict space without having to simultaneously depict mass. To this end, he experimented with Constructivist ideas, using industrial materials to depict dense structures such as the human body. Gabo was also deeply influenced by Cubism. In the stereometric “Model of ‘Constructed Torso,’” we see that influence in the geometric abstraction and angularity of the torso. (1917, reassembled 1981)
 
Seeing the word reassembled there on the explanatory plaque, Wassily nodded in satisfied recognition. That was exactly his job. Though his mission was in some ways the opposite of these radical men from earlier in the century who wanted to dissect objects into their composite planes and surfaces, he considered himself an artist of sorts. 

Wassily walked on.
 
*
 
Surgery 1 – The car had left Victim A a mass of undifferentiated flesh. To an untutored observer, the normal curves of her body had in places been compressed into singles planes of broken bone and flesh. Limbs weren’t where they were supposed to be. Pieces of her face were missing. Jagged bone poked through skin, and in numerous places skin was scraped completely off where she had been dragged over rough concrete. She was, to use layman’s terminology, a mess. 

As the reconstructive surgeon on call, Wassily was part of the team of people to work on Victim A when she was brought in. This initial surgery was only about saving her life, and for Wassily, saving the arm that had been half-torn from her shoulder. Under the glare of the operating lights, Wassily calmly reattached tendon, nerve, and blood vessel. Time would tell, he knew, but even as he called for a suturing needle from the surgical nurse, he itemized the other injuries and calculated what other surgeries would ultimately need to be performed on Victim A. There would be many.
 
*

Michel was beating Wassily at golf, and not very graciously. In fact, he’d appeared rather smug as he sunk his putt into the 16th hole. Just like an orthopedist, Wassily observed, as Michel cracked his neck to hide his pleased smile. 

Wassily lined up his ball and stood for a moment, golf club poised. He was aware that his ungenerous thought about Michel probably stemmed from his crankiness about the upcoming surgery on Victim A. He’d learned to stop thinking of the jitteriness that came before procedures as a sign that he was a bad surgeon. Over the years, with all the successful procedures, he’d come to think of it as the nerves before a battle. Indeed, with all the hours spent with surgical teams drawing up the choreography of detailed surgical plans, it was somewhat like a battle plan.

This would be the fourth surgery Wassily had performed on Victim A so far. He and Michel had already realigned and stabilized the pelvic bones with plates, put screws in both her tibiae and right femoral shaft. Wassily had performed a separate procedure to stabilize her broken cheek bone and wire her mandible back into place. Tomorrow would be the fourth of the immediate procedures. Afterwards, they would put Victim A into a coma and see if she survived to have further procedures.
Wassily exhaled smoothly and putted.

 
*
 
Surgery 6 – It was time to re-contain the inside of Victim A as God intended. Backing through the O.R. door, gloved hands held high and palms inward so as not to contaminate them, Wassily went over the complicated techniques he would be using as he stood over the unconscious patient. He knew his compulsive cataloguing was part of being able to re-enter the world afterwards with the satisfaction of having made his way successfully through the consecutive items on that list, and for the next hours, he would solely focus on recruiting both muscle and skin from Victim A’s lower back to reposition over her wounds, and when there was no more to recruit, grafting skin products over missing areas of skin. 

Wassily assessed the placement of the surgical drapes around the incision site on Victim A’s back. The white rectangle of her skin was particularly jarring within the dark blue fabric of the surgical towels. The lower drape was pulled up over the rise of Victim A’s buttocks. The square of bare flesh illuminated by the light appeared flat and featureless. A surgical nurse began to swab the area with povidone-iodine until all the white became brown, a plane without dimension there for Wassily to redefine it with his scalpel. Wassily pressed his eyes to the microscope to look for the blood vessels. He held his hand out for the curved tip forceps and dissecting scissors. 

“Let’s begin,” he said.
 
*
 
The postcard of Otto Gutfreund’s bust of Don Quixote lay on top of the other mail on Wassily’s hospital desk. Michel and his wife were in Prague on a beer tour, and the postcard was a dark joke between the friends, the bust being an elongated and flattened face, one eye drooping, and mouth bunched up on one side of the face. The bronze looked as if two separate faces had been crushed into each other, but Wassily understood that Michel had mailed the image to him in anticipation of Victim A’s upcoming facial reconstruction surgery. Wassily flipped the postcard over to note Michel’s Good luck, buddy!

It was something of a minor miracle that Victim A had survived everything so far. Sometimes it was like that. Some gave up: the pain and possibility of life-long disability or deformity too much for them. Others seemed determined to survive no matter the cost. So far, Victim A had been one of the latter, and Wassily had seen that stubborn determination only grow in the years she had been his patient. Later this week, Wassily would perform a fourteenth surgery on the remarkable woman he’d come to know. He would coax a scapha, a delicate curved helix, even a dangling lobe from Victim A’s skull to give her back the ear that the concrete had ground from her head. 
​
Wassily flipped the postcard over to look at the bust of the deformed Don Quixote. He propped it against the photo of his family that sat in one corner of the desk. It would take more years and dozens more surgeries, but Wassily felt confident that - if she survived the numerous procedures and possible infections - he would be able to return the flattened woman, as he thought of her in his mind, to a three-dimensional form again. He thought that - if he did, if she did ­- he might one day give her her own copy of the postcard.

Elizabeth Rosen

This story was inspired by Constructed Torso, by Naum Gabo (Russia) 1917:
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/gabo-model-for-constructed-torso-t06972
and by the Otto Gutfruend sculpture depicted below.
​
Elizabeth Rosen (she/her) is a native New Orleanian and a transplant to small-town Pennsylvania. She misses gulf oysters and Southern ghost stories, but has become appreciative of snow and colorful scarves. Her stories have been nominated for the Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions. Colourwise, she’s an autumn. She still wants her MTV. Learn more at www.thewritelifeliz.com.

Death Blows Bubbles
​ 
Death’s miracle of bubbles float
Around the air you’re breathing.
 
Close calls, poor decisions, actions
Not sufficiently thought through,
 
Each a memento mori a personal
Preview, potential coming attractions.
 
Death seems to find this amusing, unlike 
Ingmar Bergman, he has a sense of humour.
 
Of course it doesn’t stop him from doing
His job when your time finally arrives.
 
Fetid breath escapes, a soft burst as
Each bubble pops near your face.

M.J. Arcangelini

​

​Absent Presence

after Akira Kusaka’s artwork of the same name

Somewhere in the world people will eat
a single grape with each of the twelve
strokes of the clock. Elsewhere families
cut cake to find the good-luck coin or
they smash pomegranates, hoping
the seeds scatter far and wide
to bring about luck, prosperity, good
health and good times. But here,
on the couch, on the eve of a new year,
we press into each other
like a geological wall and whisper
of our history together. Of our mesas
and craters, our buttes and our spires.
Of color bands, entrenched with
the artifacts of our lives. Of the music
we made with the wind in the grasslands,
Time, feverishly conducting the finale. 

Jo Taylor

Jo Taylor is a retired, 35-year English teacher from Georgia who now enjoys being on the other side of the desk in the role of the poetry student. Jo also loves houring at the baseball field with her two grands and perusing a cookbook now and then. She has been nominated for the Pushcart and Best of the Net, and you can find her at jotaylorwrites.com

Flying Pigeons and Forever Bicycles 
 
To count the wheels
is to be lost in circles
of chrome, dark steel,
and rubber, is to see
where feet and hands
once braced the missing
bars and pedals, is to wonder
what it was like to ride
the crowded streets of all
the cities in China, to hear
only the whir of sprockets,
the hum of tires on pavement,
the one-speed motion
of legs that push, always,
around and around, to see
how each machine,
when welded together,
forms one continuous circle,
to realize how
this simple invention
could hold promises
for those willing and able
to balance themselves and lean
forward, to feel the wind
of possibilities on their faces,
the tears bleeding from their eyes,
not just from the cold air,
but from the sheer illusion
                                       of flying.
 
**

Entering Ai Weiwei’s F.U.C.K. 2000 at the SAM, 2025
 
“Art should be a nail in the eye….”
Ai Weiwei
 
The first thing you see
when you step inside
is the artist giving
you the finger--
 
take a few steps deeper
and you are surrounded
by duplicate statues
in various poses
all flipping you off
 
and the walls are covered
in photographs
of various people
with the artist
 
in Tianamen Square
or Times Square
in Beijing
or New York City
 
all giving the finger
to whoever has paid
their way to see this
 
and you wonder
if it matters
where you sit or stand
or walk or breathe
 
whether the desire
to say fuck you
to what the world
has done to us all
 
is as universal
as a handshake
or a wave--
 
you have to ask yourself
if the person on the other side
feels the same way you do.

Michael David Roberts

Learn more about Weiwei at the Seattle Art Museum exhibition:
https://www.seattleartmuseum.org/whats-on/exhibitions/ai-weiwei
​
As a boy, Michael David Roberts parents "forced" him to visit art shows whenever they could, and as a result, he grew to love walking through galleries, standing before the works of famous artists, leaving himself behind in their paintings. He would have loved to become an artist myself, but instead he found his calling in poetry.  His work has appeared in Chelsea, Versedaily, The Comstock Review, and many other literary journals. He currently lives and writes in Tumwater, Washington, where he retired as a community college English professor in 2025.

​Imprisonment 

I face the door, my fingers too fragile to turn the lock, my torso too swollen to bend to retrieve whatever has been dropped on the threshold. I want to pound the door open. My disease trails behind me, a scrim to veil life outside my house. I am captive to a condition I didn’t ask for, an inherited illness from ancestors I could not know. 

​Blue
 
Past and Present meet on a blue bedspread in my parents’ bedroom. We’ve already divvied up the nightstands, the artwork. I’ve taken my mother’s junior high autograph book out of her vanity table. The burglars took her jewelry. I used to find Past in my parents’ armoires. One drawer held my father’s collection of matchbook covers from vacation hotels and restaurants. In the bottom drawer there were once bundles of Kodak snapshots. The television where we watched Jerry Lewis movies with my father is gone, as is his AM radio. My mother’s lingerie, her carefully organized shoes, her hair clips and hair nets. The oak tree still stands outside the two front windows, the only witness to our family’s fifty-year life in this house. I sit on the blue bedspread and wish I negotiated more shrewdly with Past—deeded my father’s old pipe cleaners, his cuff links, monogrammed handkerchiefs never used—before leaving it all for the junk man.

The Outsider
 
I always stand outside the door. Open or closed, its lengthening shadows, along with my own, tell me: Whatever is inside and I are on separate paths. Someone has pushed a chair against the door to keep me apart. The moon rises and in the light I see shadows of everything: every decision I’ve made, every friendship I’ve kept or discarded, every family member who embraces me or keeps me at a distance. But, in the end, it is I who stands outside the door, not wanting to engage, not wanting to chance disappointment, not wanting yet another betrayal which is sure to come.

Two Halves, One Shadow
 
We are but one shadow against the wall, but we’ve always considered ourselves two halves of one whole. I’m language, filet mignon, libraries, and museums. She’s numbers, hamburger, and the gym. She had a heart attack, the “widow maker,” one hundred percent blockage, without knowing it. She was training a client at the gym. If she hadn’t been as fit as she is, death might have claimed her and left me with half a shadow. Now I have to go for cardiac testing. I reach out to her, as I once did in the womb, looking for reassurance that only wombmates can give. Neither of us wants to walk alone.

Clairvoyance

René decided to cook an omelet for lunch. He opened his icebox and noted that he had six eggs left. That would be enough for a meal and leftovers. He cracked five of the eggs against the side of his porcelain bowl. The yokes stared up at him, five perfect yellow eyes. They looked beautiful, and he regretted having to mix them with the whites. When he tried to crack the sixth egg, he found that he couldn’t no matter how many times he struck it against the side of the bowl. The shell was apparently stone-hard. Eventually, he became so frustrated with this uncrackable egg that overcoming the obstacle became more important than enlarging his omelet, so he threw the egg on the floor making it unusable. It didn’t break. He stomped on it which made no difference. The egg was unbreakable, so he picked it up and left it on the kitchen counter. Then he beat the whites and yokes of the other eggs already in the bowl and added fresh herbs from his kitchen garden to the mixture: Parsley, chives, tarragon and chervil for a perfect Omelette aux fines herbes. Once the concoction was in the pan, he stirred it to a perfect consistency, not too hard, not too runny and flopped it on a plate with flourish as if it were a crepe. 

No sooner had he sat down at his kitchen table to eat that he heard a loud stage whisper coming from the counter. It said, “Paint me.” At first, he thought he had imagined it, but the third time it spoke, the egg punctuated each word by jumping up and down, hitting the counter with a bang saying, “Paint me” repeatedly leaving no doubt as to where the sound was coming from.  The egg was so sturdy that it didn’t break with these antics any more than it had under René’s foot. It was getting loud and annoying so René, thinking of his masterpiece with misnamed objects called The Key to Dreams, said to himself, if a glass can be called a storm, why shouldn’t an egg speak and be obeyed, so he put the rest of his unfinished omelet back in the icebox, picked up the intact egg from the counter and placed it on the rickety wooden table near his easel in his central room that served as a sitting room, a dining room and a bedroom. Then he started to paint the egg on a fresh canvas. So as not to slavishly copy his model, he painted the white egg brown with a few spots here and there, those “freckles” eggs sometimes have. He thought it would show up more clearly that way against his ecru canvas. He added shading at the bottom of the egg to make it look as three-dimensional as possible and sat back to study the result.

A few seconds later, the egg, which had behaved perfectly during the sitting, began speaking again in its ominous stage whisper saying, “Paint me.”

“What?!” answered René, “I just did.”

“Paint me,” said the egg bouncing up and down on the table, the way it had on the kitchen counter, so René conceding that his painted egg did not look like the model covered it with ecru paint, the same colour of the canvas so as to erase it. Once the paint had dried, he painted a stark icy white one on the ecru canvas. He didn’t add shadowing this time. After all, he thought, since the painted egg was floating in isolation on the canvas, it wouldn’t have anything on which to cast a shadow. Keep it simple, he told himself. 

No sooner had he put his brush down that the egg repeated its strange command, “Paint me.” René leaned back in his chair sighing with disappointment. What do I do, he wondered. This egg is like a lash hair stuck on your eyeball. You can’t get rid of it. Of course, he could have disposed of the pesky thing by taking it down to the street and throwing it in one of the metal garbage bins on the sidewalk, but he didn’t want to. This was a mystery to be solved, not avoided. What could the egg want? A chicken lays an egg which, in turn, becomes a chicken which in turn lays eggs, he thought remembering the brown hen between two eggs in one of his other paintings, A Variation of Sadness. Maybe I should paint the chicken the egg would produce or, better yet, instead of a chicken, a crow in flight. Crows are much more beautiful than chickens. The black against the ecru canvas would be gorgeous.

So, he threw the painting of the egg to the side and put a fresh canvas on his easel. He painted a large black crow spreading its wings against the ivory sky that was now his canvas, adding specks of pure white to the bird’s wings as if they were shiny enough to reflect the light of an unseen sun. Then he waited about twenty minutes to see what the egg on the table would do. It did not repeat its command but just lay motionless on the table acting like an egg. 

René got up from his chair and walked to the table. He picked up the egg and cracked it against the wood. There, I did it. Let it make a mess, he thought proudly, as he watched the yoke drip down one of the legs of the table forming a slimy yellow pool on the carpet. However, when he took a good look inside the shell now broken in half, he noticed with horror that it contained a dead black chick, a chicken fetus with a small drop of blood hanging out of its beak. Disgusted, he picked up the shell halves and the chick with a turpentine cloth and took it down to the street to throw the mess in the metal bin on the sidewalk. 

When he returned to his apartment, he noticed a big hole in the shape of a bird in flight on the canvas. The crow, now a real bird, had flown out of the picture. It was perched on the arm of his couch which also served as a bed. 

“Do not be afraid,” cawed the crow, “You killed me when you stomped on my egg, but you resurrected me in your painting. All I had to do was crawl out of the canvas. Besides you upgraded me from a slaughter bound chicken to a crow. So, I have a good chance of surviving. Now, my friend, please open your window and set me free.”

René was moved to tears. He stretched his hand out, and the bird flew to him landing on his palm which it pecked affectionately. René smiled through his tears. He walked over to the window, still holding the bird, and opened it with his free hand. He held his arm out of the window and the bird took flight, disappearing into the now setting sun. René, who was exhausted by all the work he had just done, lay down on the couch for a nap. When he woke up, it was dark outside. He felt lonely without the bird. If nothing else, he wanted to have its picture, something to remember it by instead of the gaping hole that now filled his canvas.

He took the torn canvas off the easel and placed yet another fresh one on it and proceeded to paint the same black crow as best he could remember it from the original painting, but he added things to the tableau such as a brick red tablecloth over the wooden table by the easel. On the clad table lay a small white egg. René liked the contrast between the colours. More importantly he added himself painting a black bird on a canvas, within the real canvas, while looking at the egg as if he were painting that instead of a bird. He also added the easel under the canvas and an artist palette with paints attached to the easel. He was satisfied with the result because it could leave no doubt that the picture was a picture of a bird and not the bird itself. As such, it would stay put inside the painting and not fly out of the canvas to become real. It would not change in any way, but he would be able to hang on to the memory of his newfound feathered friend. He called the painting Clairvoyance because it depicted that frozen moment in time when the bird was in the future even though now, it was in the past, and in the past, or rather in infinity, it would remain.
 
Helaina Pisar McKibbin 
 
​Helaina Pisar Mckibbin lives with her husband in Los Angeles where she worked as an ESL and French teacher for many years. She is now focusing more on her writing which includes short stories and poems. Some of these have appeared in the following journals: The Storyteller, Rattle, The San Gabriel Querterly, Onthebus, Blood and Honey, and Twin Bird Review. She has also published some translations from French to English and vice a versa.