Table of Contents Views and Mechanics Publisher's Note Editor's Note Review of The Pittsburgh That Stays Within You Review of If Instead of Apes We Had Come from Grapes Review of Anson County Review of Dissolution of Ghosts Crossword (Solution Posted in July. Printable version in pdf format of journal.) Mar/Apr Crossword Solution Creative Nonfiction 1998 By Samuel Hazo Booing the Pope By Matthew D. Taylor Sgt. Robert Starbuck, USMC: Elegy and Essay By John Guthrie Shrink Wrap, Diet Cokes and a Kazoo By Sara J. Ford Poetry And the Time Is By Samuel Hazo In His Winter By Wanda D. Campbell Lester By Thomas Reynolds Generation Gap By Valerie Lauria Stanske Two Poets By Gary C. Wilkens Mongolia, 1930 By Gary C. Wilkens Fiction A Death in the Family By John Speeking Letters By Suzanne Abbot Among the Briars By Pat Tompkins Filling in the Angles By Jessica DelBalzo Miss Mary By Beth L. Block Cover Art Photography by Seth Brown About the Contributors © 2006, River Walk Journal and respective authors and artists. All rights reserved. Do not use or reproduce without permission. River Walk Journal, Inc. Board of Directors Chairman - Elizabeth Ross Vice Chairman - Joseph Koch Secretary/Treasurer - Geri Stock-Ross Editorial Director - Patti Kurtz, DA Literacy Director - Bill Mausteller Policy Director - PA State Rep. Jess Stairs Advisory Board Chairman - Patti Kurtz, DA Asst. Chairman - Dan Lachenman, PhD Samuel Hazo Christopher Leland Edwin Yoder Joseph Bathanti Journal Staff Publisher - Elizabeth Ross Editor-In-Chief - Joseph Koch Sen. Fiction Editor - Patti Kurtz Sen. Poetry Editor - Neeldhara Misra Sen. Creative Nonfiction Editor - Brenda Coxe Contributing Editor - Robert Dittman Publicity Director (PA) - Geri Stock-Ross For information about submissions, visit http://www.riverwalkjournal.org/submission.html. Questions about promotions, subscribers' services, and advertising should be sent to publisher@riverwalkjournal.org. River Walk Journal, Inc. is a non-profit corporation run entirely by volunteers. For information about volunteer opportunities and internships, visit http://www.riverwalkjournal.org/volunteer.html.

Letters By Suzanne Abbot She held her breath and opened the door, but even before her eyes adjusted to the darkened room, she knew they were in there. The room felt warm and moist and smelled of skin and Leah's perfume. Justine rolled her eyes as she tiptoed past the bed where her roommate slept, her arm draped across her boyfriend's bare chest. God, I hope Jen decides to graduate this semester so I can get my hands on that single. She took off her apron in the dim glow of her desk lamp and stashed the night's tips into her top dresser drawer. Careful not to rouse the two entwined bodies, she slipped out of her khaki skirt and oxford shirt and pulled a pair of wrinkled jeans over her tired legs. She grabbed a T-shirt from the floor of her closet and threw it over her head, then extracted the silver clip from her hair and scrubbed her hands over her scalp as if she were attempting to dislodge remnants of the day. After stealing one of her roommate's Diet Cokes from their tiny refrigerator, she grabbed her journal and slipped out of the room. Down the hall, a large opened window framed by swaying gauzy curtains let cooling October air into the house. Justine hoisted herself through the window and climbed out onto the mossy roof. It was deathly quiet...not unusual for this late at night, though sometimes you might hear a shriek of laughter erupt from a group of drunken freshmen walking home from the closing pubs, but that was mostly on weekends. Justine gazed past neighboring rooflines to the now deserted street at the mouth of the courtyard on which the sorority houses were situated. She could barely make out the pedestrian crosswalk; its bold yellow stripes painted authoritatively in an effort to guide students to campus on the other side of the street. She used this crosswalk every day. She'd used it today. But tonight, the downcast glow of the streetlight seemed to fade the crosswalk's yellow boundaries, making it seem foolish to trust such a benign thing to protect you from agitated cars flying down the street. Justine flipped to the last scrawled page in her journal and began to unfold the day on paper when she heard the floorboards squeak just inside the window. When she looked up, Kirsten, one of her housemates, was sitting on the window ledge. "Don't mind if I smoke, do you?" Kirsten asked, lighting her cigarette with a bent cardboard match before Justine could answer. "No, that's fine," Justine replied. No place to chill out in this house by yourself, not for two goddamn minutes. After lighting her cigarette, Kirsten got up and flung the burnt match off the roof. Then she turned toward Justine, swinging her hair from her shoulders to her back, and removed the cigarette from her mouth with her slender fingers. "I didn't see you at happy hour," Kirsten said as she exhaled. "I had to work," Justine replied and lowered her head as if she were a child on the verge of being scolded by her mother. "Justine, I don't know why you even bother. You hardly go to any sorority functions. You should probably give your spot to someone who really wants to live in the house." "I like living in the house," Justine said. "And by the end of next month, all of the tourists will have gone home so I won't be working so late." "Whatever," Kirsten said and turned her head to continue sucking on the cigarette clenched between her two longest fingers. Justine was motionless, frozen almost, like an indecisive squirrel caught in the middle of the street. Should she run to the side of the road or stick it out where she is and hope for the best? "Well," she finally mustered, "I'd better get to bed." Justine forced herself to stand up, which took way more effort that it should have, and turned toward the window. "See you tomorrow," she said, trying her best to sound light and airy, but the effect was apparently lost on Kirsten who was still blowing smoke in the other direction. Justine threw her right leg into the window and pulled herself through. The house smelled of strawberry shampoo and cheap hair spray. She inhaled deeply, like an ex-smoker would upon entering a smoky bar, and then brushed the olive-colored chips of paint from her damp palms, compliments of the peeling window ledge, and watched them flutter to the floor. Justine ambled down the hall to her room. Like so many nights before, the thought of slipping into bed and attempting to fall asleep in a tiny room with two other people just feet away sickened her. It was almost as if the process of falling asleep, allowing your subconscious mind to take over your conscious body, was too personal to share, especially with two people that she only tolerated at best. As a result, Justine had taken to napping in the afternoon, when she knew her roommates were in class, to catch up on her lack of sleep at night. Some of her housemates thought she was depressed. Fuck it, she thought and decided to try her luck downstairs, hoping to find the t.v. room empty. She knew that she was taking a chance -- that a couple of her housemates, giddy from finishing a few beers at the pubs, might come home and try to strike up a conversation with her, or recount in their slurred mirth a hilarious tale or two. She hated being the only sober person in a conversation -- it reminded her of when her mother would come home late from having a few "social drinks" with her coworkers and was temporarily persuaded by the alcohol that she was, in fact, fond of young Justine. Her mother's sloppy hugs, heavy, wet breath and glossy eyes made Justine want to slap her, but before she could, if she ever would've, her father had begun to usher the stumbling woman to bed. Once downstairs, Justine surveyed the mess. Crusty dishes and empty Diet Coke cans littered the emerald green carpet in the t.v. room so she decided to try the dining room instead but first removed a single canvas tennis shoe, decorated with pink, magic-markered hearts, from a pot of faux ivy in the corner of the room, and set it neatly next to its mate on the floor. On the advice of their chapter advisor, they'd redecorated the common areas of their house, throwing out the heavy wood-framed, college-issued furniture - the kind you'd see in a furniture store for kids - and replaced it with more traditional, "feminine" pieces. The first floor was treated to fresh wallpaper and paint and bunches of faux ivy in brass pots were stashed in bookshelves and on top of the dining room buffet to give the house an air of "elegance". Because their budget was limited, they only had enough money to remodel the dining room and the t.v. room; the formal living room was bare (except for a few ivy pots hopefully arranged in the corners of the room). Justine settled into a chair at the head of the dining room table. At the other end of the table, there was an opened, satin-covered box of chocolates, probably given to one of her housemates by an overly clean, khakied, fraternity boy. The delicate, brown wrappers were disheveled and undone and it appeared as if someone had taken one bite out of each piece of chocolate and then tossed the rest back in the box. The half-eaten chocolates made Justine's stomach turn. Every Valentine's day, Justine's father would bound into the house with a huge smile and a just as huge heart-shaped box of chocolates for her mother. The woman used to poke holes in the bottom of the chocolates to see what was inside, and only eat the ones she found acceptable. Once her mother had left the room, and the unwanted chocolates lying in the box, Justine would quickly stuff the leftover pieces into her mouth and swallow them, hoping to save her father from finding the discards. The affection was mutual. When she turned five, Justine's father decided that the public schools in their rural town just weren't good enough for his little girl so he sent her to a small parochial school where there were no more than twelve or thirteen kids in each class. The principal would walk the halls during class changes and call out the name of every student he would see in a boisterous, inviting voice. When Justine was in the ninth grade, however, her mother came across one of her tuition bills, which her father kept stashed in his top dresser drawer, underneath his folded handkerchiefs. Up until that point, Justine's father had been pretty good about keeping most of the details of the family's finances from his wife, who had a low tolerance for "wasteful spending" and apparently her daughter's education fell into that category. To keep the peace, her father reluctantly agreed to pluck his daughter from private school and enroll her in the local high school. "You have a good solid base," he rationalized. "And you're way ahead of the kids in public school. You'll be at the top of your class and have your pick of colleges, maybe even get a scholarship." The transition was hard for Justine. Besides the fact that her new school was at least five times the size of her old one , most of her new classmates had known each other since kindergarten and only a handful of them were college-bound. As a result, Justine was academically ahead of her classmates by almost a full year and was placed in mostly sophomore classes. This, of course, started the rumor that Justine was "gifted" and because she came from a private school, her classmates assumed she was rich. While neither of these theories was true, Justine didn't actively seek to derail the rumors. It was like she had secured an identity on the first day of school and God knew she wasn't as interesting as they thought she was. For the next three and a half years, Justine's classmates maintained their distance as Justine buried herself in her journal, content with the fact that her new identity kept her from having to interact with people she didn't have the first clue how to interact with. "Don't worry," her Dad would say. "You aren't like these other kids. College will be your place to shine, Justine, just wait and see." Then, the summer before she started her freshman year in college, the pink brochure came in the mail. It was addressed to "Potential Rushee" and was teeming with photographs of freshly scrubbed, smiling girls, all with thick, shoulder-length hair, polished and shiny, and smiles that exposed the whitest, straightest teeth Justine had ever seen. But most notably, they all were wearing sweatshirts with Greek letters. Justine studied these photos until the pamphlet became limp and creased, soaking in every detail; their clothes, their hair, their jewelry, and then methodically made the appropriate adjustments to her own wardrobe and nondescript style. A blunt hair cut, single pearl earrings, and a pair of white Keds to be worn with her new khaki mini-skirt rounded out her new look. Her dad thought it was wonderful that his daughter, who had a tendency to be shy, was readying herself for college and repeated himself by saying, "College is going to be your place to shine." "I know," she would answer. "It's going to be great." Justine was startled by a thump, and then heard a muffled "Dammit" coming from upstairs. She immediately smiled at the prospect of Kirsten breaking one of her prized fingernails as her housemate tried to keep herself from falling from the window to the grubby floor when Justine noticed a pile of new sweatshirts, folded and stacked on the dining room sideboard. She lunged toward the pile, sifting through the sweatshirts, looking for her name on one of the tiny pieces of paper pinned to each one. "Ohh...," she breathed as she pulled an oversized gray sweatshirt from the pile, letting a couple of folded sweatshirts fall to the floor. She held it up by the shoulders and gazed at the satin burgundy letters carefully stitched onto its chest. Justine had spent hours laboring over the catalogue that her sorority used to order sportswear. She had purposefully chosen a classic style, one that the wealthier sorority girls in school wore, to replace the white sweatshirt with plaid blue letters that she ordered only days after joining. Justine removed the strip of paper with her name on it from the front of the sweatshirt. The only thing she had to do now was wash it several times -- for that broken-in look -- and maybe figure out a way to fray the neck or the bottom band on the sweatshirt, like the worn ivy-league sweatshirts that Kirsten always wore. She sprinted upstairs, taking two steps at a time, and grabbed a handful of quarters from her top dresser drawer and a box of soap from her closet. Then she hurried downstairs to the basement where a few coin-operated washers and dryers lined the dank walls. Justine threw open the lid of one washer, and then the other, sighing heavily as she viewed the mass of clean, damp clothing clinging to the insides of both machines. Normally, she would have given up and lugged her laundry to the coin-operated laundromat down the street, but tonight -- with a grimace -- she yanked the wet clothes out of the washer with both hands and heaved them onto the nearest dryer. When the washer was finally empty, she stuffed in her new sweatshirt, dumped in a cupful of soap, put two quarters into the coin slots and shoved the slot into the machine. Immediately, the surge of water filled the musty room. "Nothing worth having comes easily," Justine's father would say. "You'll understand when you’re older." Justine hoisted herself on top of the other washer, hugged her legs close to her chest and rested her chin on her knees. Then she waited for the churning to begin.