MARY LEWIS
Red Knees
1 Dec. 12, 2030 age 63
When he opened the door, Mason couldn’t believe what he saw, people in his apartment, five or six of them, in his apartment. He made the door swing so hard it ricocheted back and banged him in the nose, which made him madder. “What in hell are you trying to do?”
None of them noticed.
He held onto the doorknob to steady himself. There was his brother Jeffers with his new boyfriend, Harold or something. After all those years with Gerty, kids and all. Well it was his choice. Also in the room a woman with long stringy hair, and really, a couple of kids bouncing from sofa to chair to pillows on the floor.
He shouted at them again, but this time he couldn’t make the sound come out. What was wrong with him? He grabbed his neck, swallowed, even spit into his hand and wiped it on his pants. All that was working.
But he gave up on speaking and marched into them.
Jeffers was pulling stuff off Mason’s shelf of pride, bowling trophies, his wrestling award from high school, third in the region in heavyweight, an award from 4H for his paper on how to build an outbuilding for garden tools on the cheap.
He grabbed Jeffers by the arm, the one that held the golden bowling pin with a star on it.
“What the fuck Jeffers, this is my stuff.”
But Jeffers didn’t budge an inch, which was strange because he was the runt of the family.
“What’ll we do with this junk?” Harold, lost in the cushions of the sofa, had found Mason’s stash of architecture magazines. Craftsman bungalows to airy coastal Neutras.
“Poor fuck thought he’d make it as an architect,” Jeffers said.
The fattest kid ran headlong into the shelves where Mason displayed his potted plants and his prize bronze replica of one of the first Smith and Wesson revolvers. The cannonball of a kid crashed so hard the Monstera launched into midair like it was trying to fly with those huge Swiss cheese leaves. When it hit the floor, the pot shattered and soil spilled all over the wheat carpet, but the wings kept working till they realized they weren’t in the air anymore.
Mason chased after the kid, who skittled out the door with surprising speed for a roller dog. He stood there at the doorway watching him flail down the stairs. At least that boy had seen him.
A woman yelled after the kid but it was too late, and she started picking up the pieces of the ruined planter, sighed, then dragged herself to the kitchen to fetch a pail, for washing the floor.
Well, that was nice, he’d help her out, so when she came back he squatted next to her to work on the dirt, which was gritty and moist in his hands, but slipped right through his fingers when he tried to grab a handful.
Her hair swung forward on either side of her face and brushed against the fallen leaves of the Monstera. Now he remembered, she was Iris, the wife of the super. She was the one who did most of the work while her husband sat in his office counting money. When she sat down on the front steps with Mason one day not long after Priscilla died, she’d given him a hug. At that time he thought he’d tell her about his daughter Candy, who did hair so beautifully, but women were touchy about things like that.
2 Sept. 25, 1980 age 13
Mason always raced out of algebra at the first ring of the bell, even when Priscilla Frampton in the next aisle twisted her long hair between her thumb and forefinger at him, because he had to get to the bus before Jeffers did. Once, the teacher, Mr. Bradshaw, called after him, “Warn me next time so I can hold down the papers.” But he didn’t need a heads up because it happened every day. Mason would get to the bus before Jeffers, his little bro the bullies loved to pick on for his skinny elbows, round glasses and razor-sharp brain.
Today he was late because Priscilla had actually spoken to him, “Hey Mason, wanna do math tomorrow?”
Really, of course. And they decided to check out of study hall to the library the next day. But that conversation didn’t take long, and he didn’t even stay to walk out of the room with her, because he knew what would be going on at the bus stop.
When he got there, Ronald and Donny were pushing Jeffers back and forth between them like he was a lightweight punching bag.
“No way, bilge warts.” Mason took the place of Jeffers who escaped up the bus stairs. “Wanna try it with me?”
They’d swagger off like that’s what they were going to do anyway, with lame insults like “Just wait till next time” or “You think you’re such big stuff.” The best they could come up with was, “Or we’ll wipe our asses with you tomorrow.”
Some days Mason found them at the school entrance, pushing Jeffers against the sharp edges of the concrete archway. He could never get Jeffers to stand up for himself.
3 April 7, 1990 age 23
Mason and Eddie raised the wall frame and braced it up while two other workers nailed it into the sill. This was the best part of framing, when a whole wall started to take shape. Someday maybe he could have his own business, but this was OK for now. Who says you have to have a college degree, or even a high school one to make it? He was earning money while Jeffers, at engineering school, was spending it.
Still sunny when they stowed away their tools in Eddie’s truck. Mason loved these lengthening days even with the western sun through the windshield nearly blinding him on the way home. He rubbed his neck to get the kinks out and settle his mind. This life of his, he and Priscilla in their little apartment, Priscilla, his wife! Sometimes he still didn’t believe it was real.
Their decision to elope after the junior prom, Eddie offering him a job if he could take it right away, her deciding to stick it out till graduation while he made money. He’d go back and finish up some day, but now it didn’t seem like he needed it at all.
When he started up the stairs to their third-floor apartment on Winslow Street, he realized he was whistling, if you could call it that, sort of breathy and not really a tune, just something that came out of him sometimes.
But when he opened the door to get his hug, instead he found Priscilla at the kitchen table with her head in her hands, weeping. She was still gorgeous, even with her short hair, which she thought looked more business-like when she went to legal assistant class.
“What’s up babe?”
She didn’t say a word, but picked up this plastic strip with two stripes on it.
“My period was late, and this is the reason.”
His hand found the back of a chair, and it kept him from falling down. She wouldn’t notice. Everything depended on what he would say next, and it had to be right away. But he found something better to do. He took her into his arms and held her, hoping she couldn’t feel his heart churning away inside his chest.
4 Feb. 22, 2010 age 43
“You ready yet?” Priscilla called up the stairs, her voice scratchy from a cold.
To celebrate their twentieth they’d planned another night at Bowling Sally, might as well go through the motions.
Mason tucked his shirt over a fold in his belly he ignored most of the time, and came down.
“You look great, sweetheart.” Priscilla at the bottom of the stairs gave him a smile, but no kiss.
He’d gained 20 in 20. “I would if I joined your aerobics class.”
She laughed, and it surprised him so much he stopped before going out the door. Maybe that was all it took. He couldn’t explain how they’d plunged down their lonely paths. A crowd of small hurts that had no right to do this to them.
Jeffers and Gerty met them at the Sally, all rosy cheeks and roses to match.
“Here’s to my best bro.” Jeffers patted him on the back. The old joke, his only bro. “…and Priscilla.” He brought her in with his other arm.
“And to another twenty!” Gerty said, as they claimed their lane.
While they put on their bowling shoes Gerty and Prisc chatted about kids and the weather and Gerty’s landscaping classes. All those cows, what was the point?
Jeffers bowled a spare, and Gerty jumped up with a high-five. “Way to go sweetie!” The two of them sauntered back to the bench arm in arm.
“Like a couple of teenagers,” Priscilla lifted an eyebrow at them. Mason could never lift just one.
Gerty gave Priscilla a long look and then, so everyone could hear, “You guys could recapture that.”
Mason jumped up for his turn, passing the happy couple to get his ball, and Jeffers let go of Gerty to stand by him. “Don’t get mad man, she’s only trying to help.”
“Hey man, give me some air.”
That should have been the end of it, but later Jeffers cornered him at the snack bar like he’d do every time they got together, and went on about how Mason should join his new solar business.
“Pretty soon you won’t be able to see roofs anymore, just panels. We might as well be the ones to put them in.”
Mason used Priscilla’s cold as an excuse for them to duck out of the third game.
In the dark car the silence cut into him, until Priscilla reached her hand over to rest on his thigh. He took his hand off the steering wheel to cover it with his own, as though it needed shelter, as though he could provide it.
5 Dec. 11, 2030 age 63
All he wanted was to drag himself back to the apartment for a good long rest. This job on the 30 plus degree roof was just barely walkable. Jeffers was smart, he’d gotten out of solar last year, sold out to a big company and had enough to retire at sixty. But Mason had to keep on working, what with all the nursing care for Priscilla who the doctors couldn’t save, much less her aerobics class chanting prayers at her window. He’d had to sell the house because insurance wasn’t enough, and he moved into a small apartment downtown, too close to the bars.
He’d gone to work for a guy just starting out. With all Mason’s solar experience at Jeffers’s company, he was hired right away. But this new guy cut corners, even on roof harnesses. Once a strap broke on another worker’s harness, and he nearly tumbled right over the edge of the roof. Mason had his own harness, though, and one day it was still on him when work was done, which was odd; he usually took it off first thing before getting into his car to go home. Another strange thing, he was lying on the lawn. He tried to get up off the ground, to take off his harness, to find his car. None of it worked.
6 Nov. 5, 1980 age 13
Algebra never made sense to him, using letters when math was supposed to be numbers? He kept looking at the clock, and snuck a peak at Priscilla’s knees just below her plaid pleated skirt. How could he ask her to the sock hop and still get to the bus in time? Ah, a note. “Would you please go with me to Hawaii Hop?” It made him look studious writing so carefully in his wire bound notebook. And when he tore off the page, she looked up. He folded it again and again, and put a little heart on it. Girls like that. She watched as he put the note on her desk, and he glanced again at her knees. They were turning red.
He made it to the bus before Jeffers’s tormenters did, but he snapped his head around to hear Jeffers’s voice from the school entrance, “This ends here, with or without my bro. I’m not afraid of you goons.” He threw so many punches in the air they backed off. Way to go Jeffers, but he’d still need Mason, who raced up as Donny grabbed Jeffers’s arms behind his back and Ronald got his fists ready.
Mason was so mad he bloodied both their noses, and they sulked away without even an attempt at throwing their usual threats. But on the way to the school bus Jeffers shrugged away when Mason tried to put his arm around him.
7 May 15, 2019 age 52
Jeffers pulled him out of sleep like he thought it was fine to call him at 7 AM on a Saturday. “Just got word Valley State Bank wants 100 panels. Let’s put in a bid.”
Mason rubbed his eyes, but it didn’t make his thinking clearer. “Put some eggs into that stomach of yours first, and maybe a cup of coffee.”
“We could make fifty thou clear, wake up.”
He hung up. Jeffers kept prodding him these days for projects too big for their little company, and it was wearing them out, and getting harder to underbid the new bigger solar companies that were coming on. Even regular electricians were getting into the game.
Priscilla took off her sleep blinders. “Did I hear Jeffers’s voice?”
The chemo had taken something out of her, and she seemed a grey ghost of her old self. But with any luck it would work. Either that or the crystals she was beginning to wear around her neck. He reached over and placed the sleep mask back over her eyes. “He’s spouting off as usual, go back to sleep.”
He lay back down and snuggled close to her, to feel her heat, the curves he knew so well.
8 2030 Dec. 12, later in the day age 63
He stood up from the broken pot where the super’s wife Iris was still picking up the shards. She didn’t seem to notice he was there, nor did anyone else. He’d try one more time with his little brother. “Jeffers, I’m not having a party, and if I did I wouldn’t be giving away my things, so why are you here?”
Squatting in front of him, he looked old the way he never had, something about not holding up his face the way people do when others are looking at them. There were shadows under his eyes, his soft chin.
“I’m pissed at you, can’t you hear me?” Mason wanted to shake him by the shoulders but by now he knew it wouldn’t work. “I love you dammit.”
Jeffers’s eyes looked moist, and he rubbed the back of his hand over them, the way he did in grade school when he didn’t want the bullies to see him cry.
Mason stood up, not feeling his arthritic knees. He walked to the bedroom and lay down on the bed and didn’t even mind when the kids came in to play trampoline on it. It was like the old vibrator beds they used to have in motels only much bigger vibrations, so that he felt a breeze passing back and forth over his ears. But, no, it was just one ear, like someone breathing into it. He closed his eyes to listen better, because when Priscilla did that she always had something important to say.
“Mason, dear, have you turned off the lights in the living room?”
He tried to speak, but nothing came out of his throat. In his mind he said, “Of course, I think I did.”
“I’ll go check.”
“No stay here.”
“Ok, I won’t worry about that tonight.”
The bouncing bed sank with the weight of her laying next to him, but on the inside of his lids he she sat at the desk across the aisle in her plaid skirt.
The shouts and whispers of those young voices withdrew above him to a fine point of nothing and the bed quieted to let him sink right through it.
On the way down his fingers grazed the scratchy wool and then the smooth bony curve of her beautiful red knees.
When he opened the door, Mason couldn’t believe what he saw, people in his apartment, five or six of them, in his apartment. He made the door swing so hard it ricocheted back and banged him in the nose, which made him madder. “What in hell are you trying to do?”
None of them noticed.
He held onto the doorknob to steady himself. There was his brother Jeffers with his new boyfriend, Harold or something. After all those years with Gerty, kids and all. Well it was his choice. Also in the room a woman with long stringy hair, and really, a couple of kids bouncing from sofa to chair to pillows on the floor.
He shouted at them again, but this time he couldn’t make the sound come out. What was wrong with him? He grabbed his neck, swallowed, even spit into his hand and wiped it on his pants. All that was working.
But he gave up on speaking and marched into them.
Jeffers was pulling stuff off Mason’s shelf of pride, bowling trophies, his wrestling award from high school, third in the region in heavyweight, an award from 4H for his paper on how to build an outbuilding for garden tools on the cheap.
He grabbed Jeffers by the arm, the one that held the golden bowling pin with a star on it.
“What the fuck Jeffers, this is my stuff.”
But Jeffers didn’t budge an inch, which was strange because he was the runt of the family.
“What’ll we do with this junk?” Harold, lost in the cushions of the sofa, had found Mason’s stash of architecture magazines. Craftsman bungalows to airy coastal Neutras.
“Poor fuck thought he’d make it as an architect,” Jeffers said.
The fattest kid ran headlong into the shelves where Mason displayed his potted plants and his prize bronze replica of one of the first Smith and Wesson revolvers. The cannonball of a kid crashed so hard the Monstera launched into midair like it was trying to fly with those huge Swiss cheese leaves. When it hit the floor, the pot shattered and soil spilled all over the wheat carpet, but the wings kept working till they realized they weren’t in the air anymore.
Mason chased after the kid, who skittled out the door with surprising speed for a roller dog. He stood there at the doorway watching him flail down the stairs. At least that boy had seen him.
A woman yelled after the kid but it was too late, and she started picking up the pieces of the ruined planter, sighed, then dragged herself to the kitchen to fetch a pail, for washing the floor.
Well, that was nice, he’d help her out, so when she came back he squatted next to her to work on the dirt, which was gritty and moist in his hands, but slipped right through his fingers when he tried to grab a handful.
Her hair swung forward on either side of her face and brushed against the fallen leaves of the Monstera. Now he remembered, she was Iris, the wife of the super. She was the one who did most of the work while her husband sat in his office counting money. When she sat down on the front steps with Mason one day not long after Priscilla died, she’d given him a hug. At that time he thought he’d tell her about his daughter Candy, who did hair so beautifully, but women were touchy about things like that.
2 Sept. 25, 1980 age 13
Mason always raced out of algebra at the first ring of the bell, even when Priscilla Frampton in the next aisle twisted her long hair between her thumb and forefinger at him, because he had to get to the bus before Jeffers did. Once, the teacher, Mr. Bradshaw, called after him, “Warn me next time so I can hold down the papers.” But he didn’t need a heads up because it happened every day. Mason would get to the bus before Jeffers, his little bro the bullies loved to pick on for his skinny elbows, round glasses and razor-sharp brain.
Today he was late because Priscilla had actually spoken to him, “Hey Mason, wanna do math tomorrow?”
Really, of course. And they decided to check out of study hall to the library the next day. But that conversation didn’t take long, and he didn’t even stay to walk out of the room with her, because he knew what would be going on at the bus stop.
When he got there, Ronald and Donny were pushing Jeffers back and forth between them like he was a lightweight punching bag.
“No way, bilge warts.” Mason took the place of Jeffers who escaped up the bus stairs. “Wanna try it with me?”
They’d swagger off like that’s what they were going to do anyway, with lame insults like “Just wait till next time” or “You think you’re such big stuff.” The best they could come up with was, “Or we’ll wipe our asses with you tomorrow.”
Some days Mason found them at the school entrance, pushing Jeffers against the sharp edges of the concrete archway. He could never get Jeffers to stand up for himself.
3 April 7, 1990 age 23
Mason and Eddie raised the wall frame and braced it up while two other workers nailed it into the sill. This was the best part of framing, when a whole wall started to take shape. Someday maybe he could have his own business, but this was OK for now. Who says you have to have a college degree, or even a high school one to make it? He was earning money while Jeffers, at engineering school, was spending it.
Still sunny when they stowed away their tools in Eddie’s truck. Mason loved these lengthening days even with the western sun through the windshield nearly blinding him on the way home. He rubbed his neck to get the kinks out and settle his mind. This life of his, he and Priscilla in their little apartment, Priscilla, his wife! Sometimes he still didn’t believe it was real.
Their decision to elope after the junior prom, Eddie offering him a job if he could take it right away, her deciding to stick it out till graduation while he made money. He’d go back and finish up some day, but now it didn’t seem like he needed it at all.
When he started up the stairs to their third-floor apartment on Winslow Street, he realized he was whistling, if you could call it that, sort of breathy and not really a tune, just something that came out of him sometimes.
But when he opened the door to get his hug, instead he found Priscilla at the kitchen table with her head in her hands, weeping. She was still gorgeous, even with her short hair, which she thought looked more business-like when she went to legal assistant class.
“What’s up babe?”
She didn’t say a word, but picked up this plastic strip with two stripes on it.
“My period was late, and this is the reason.”
His hand found the back of a chair, and it kept him from falling down. She wouldn’t notice. Everything depended on what he would say next, and it had to be right away. But he found something better to do. He took her into his arms and held her, hoping she couldn’t feel his heart churning away inside his chest.
4 Feb. 22, 2010 age 43
“You ready yet?” Priscilla called up the stairs, her voice scratchy from a cold.
To celebrate their twentieth they’d planned another night at Bowling Sally, might as well go through the motions.
Mason tucked his shirt over a fold in his belly he ignored most of the time, and came down.
“You look great, sweetheart.” Priscilla at the bottom of the stairs gave him a smile, but no kiss.
He’d gained 20 in 20. “I would if I joined your aerobics class.”
She laughed, and it surprised him so much he stopped before going out the door. Maybe that was all it took. He couldn’t explain how they’d plunged down their lonely paths. A crowd of small hurts that had no right to do this to them.
Jeffers and Gerty met them at the Sally, all rosy cheeks and roses to match.
“Here’s to my best bro.” Jeffers patted him on the back. The old joke, his only bro. “…and Priscilla.” He brought her in with his other arm.
“And to another twenty!” Gerty said, as they claimed their lane.
While they put on their bowling shoes Gerty and Prisc chatted about kids and the weather and Gerty’s landscaping classes. All those cows, what was the point?
Jeffers bowled a spare, and Gerty jumped up with a high-five. “Way to go sweetie!” The two of them sauntered back to the bench arm in arm.
“Like a couple of teenagers,” Priscilla lifted an eyebrow at them. Mason could never lift just one.
Gerty gave Priscilla a long look and then, so everyone could hear, “You guys could recapture that.”
Mason jumped up for his turn, passing the happy couple to get his ball, and Jeffers let go of Gerty to stand by him. “Don’t get mad man, she’s only trying to help.”
“Hey man, give me some air.”
That should have been the end of it, but later Jeffers cornered him at the snack bar like he’d do every time they got together, and went on about how Mason should join his new solar business.
“Pretty soon you won’t be able to see roofs anymore, just panels. We might as well be the ones to put them in.”
Mason used Priscilla’s cold as an excuse for them to duck out of the third game.
In the dark car the silence cut into him, until Priscilla reached her hand over to rest on his thigh. He took his hand off the steering wheel to cover it with his own, as though it needed shelter, as though he could provide it.
5 Dec. 11, 2030 age 63
All he wanted was to drag himself back to the apartment for a good long rest. This job on the 30 plus degree roof was just barely walkable. Jeffers was smart, he’d gotten out of solar last year, sold out to a big company and had enough to retire at sixty. But Mason had to keep on working, what with all the nursing care for Priscilla who the doctors couldn’t save, much less her aerobics class chanting prayers at her window. He’d had to sell the house because insurance wasn’t enough, and he moved into a small apartment downtown, too close to the bars.
He’d gone to work for a guy just starting out. With all Mason’s solar experience at Jeffers’s company, he was hired right away. But this new guy cut corners, even on roof harnesses. Once a strap broke on another worker’s harness, and he nearly tumbled right over the edge of the roof. Mason had his own harness, though, and one day it was still on him when work was done, which was odd; he usually took it off first thing before getting into his car to go home. Another strange thing, he was lying on the lawn. He tried to get up off the ground, to take off his harness, to find his car. None of it worked.
6 Nov. 5, 1980 age 13
Algebra never made sense to him, using letters when math was supposed to be numbers? He kept looking at the clock, and snuck a peak at Priscilla’s knees just below her plaid pleated skirt. How could he ask her to the sock hop and still get to the bus in time? Ah, a note. “Would you please go with me to Hawaii Hop?” It made him look studious writing so carefully in his wire bound notebook. And when he tore off the page, she looked up. He folded it again and again, and put a little heart on it. Girls like that. She watched as he put the note on her desk, and he glanced again at her knees. They were turning red.
He made it to the bus before Jeffers’s tormenters did, but he snapped his head around to hear Jeffers’s voice from the school entrance, “This ends here, with or without my bro. I’m not afraid of you goons.” He threw so many punches in the air they backed off. Way to go Jeffers, but he’d still need Mason, who raced up as Donny grabbed Jeffers’s arms behind his back and Ronald got his fists ready.
Mason was so mad he bloodied both their noses, and they sulked away without even an attempt at throwing their usual threats. But on the way to the school bus Jeffers shrugged away when Mason tried to put his arm around him.
7 May 15, 2019 age 52
Jeffers pulled him out of sleep like he thought it was fine to call him at 7 AM on a Saturday. “Just got word Valley State Bank wants 100 panels. Let’s put in a bid.”
Mason rubbed his eyes, but it didn’t make his thinking clearer. “Put some eggs into that stomach of yours first, and maybe a cup of coffee.”
“We could make fifty thou clear, wake up.”
He hung up. Jeffers kept prodding him these days for projects too big for their little company, and it was wearing them out, and getting harder to underbid the new bigger solar companies that were coming on. Even regular electricians were getting into the game.
Priscilla took off her sleep blinders. “Did I hear Jeffers’s voice?”
The chemo had taken something out of her, and she seemed a grey ghost of her old self. But with any luck it would work. Either that or the crystals she was beginning to wear around her neck. He reached over and placed the sleep mask back over her eyes. “He’s spouting off as usual, go back to sleep.”
He lay back down and snuggled close to her, to feel her heat, the curves he knew so well.
8 2030 Dec. 12, later in the day age 63
He stood up from the broken pot where the super’s wife Iris was still picking up the shards. She didn’t seem to notice he was there, nor did anyone else. He’d try one more time with his little brother. “Jeffers, I’m not having a party, and if I did I wouldn’t be giving away my things, so why are you here?”
Squatting in front of him, he looked old the way he never had, something about not holding up his face the way people do when others are looking at them. There were shadows under his eyes, his soft chin.
“I’m pissed at you, can’t you hear me?” Mason wanted to shake him by the shoulders but by now he knew it wouldn’t work. “I love you dammit.”
Jeffers’s eyes looked moist, and he rubbed the back of his hand over them, the way he did in grade school when he didn’t want the bullies to see him cry.
Mason stood up, not feeling his arthritic knees. He walked to the bedroom and lay down on the bed and didn’t even mind when the kids came in to play trampoline on it. It was like the old vibrator beds they used to have in motels only much bigger vibrations, so that he felt a breeze passing back and forth over his ears. But, no, it was just one ear, like someone breathing into it. He closed his eyes to listen better, because when Priscilla did that she always had something important to say.
“Mason, dear, have you turned off the lights in the living room?”
He tried to speak, but nothing came out of his throat. In his mind he said, “Of course, I think I did.”
“I’ll go check.”
“No stay here.”
“Ok, I won’t worry about that tonight.”
The bouncing bed sank with the weight of her laying next to him, but on the inside of his lids he she sat at the desk across the aisle in her plaid skirt.
The shouts and whispers of those young voices withdrew above him to a fine point of nothing and the bed quieted to let him sink right through it.
On the way down his fingers grazed the scratchy wool and then the smooth bony curve of her beautiful red knees.
Copyright © November 2024 Mary Lewis
Mary Lewis has an MFA in creative writing from Augsburg University, an MS in Ecology from the University of Minnesota, and she taught in the Biology Department of Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. In 2023 two of her stories have been nominated, one for a Pushcart prize, another for both the 2023 Best of the Net Anthology and the Best American Series. A sampling of journals where her work appears: Allium, Antigonish Review, Blue Lake Review, Book of Matches, Boomer Lit, Cleaver Magazine, Evening Street Review, Feels Blind Literary, Inscape, Litbreak Magazine, North American Review, Persimmon Tree, Rivanna, RiverSedge, r.kv.r.y. quarterly, Rundelania, Sleet Magazine, Taj Mahal Review, The Spadina Literary Review, Superstition Review, Taj Mahal Review, Thieving Magpie, Toasted Cheese, Wordrunner and The Woven Tale Press. Forthcoming: Map Literary, Valley Voices, Wilderness House Literary Review. Her website is marylewiswriter.com
