Table of Contents Views and Mechanics Publisher's Note Editor's Note Review of African Psycho Review of The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid Film Review of "Judith Butler: Philosophical Encounters of the Third Kind" Writing Contest Results Creative Nonfiction Back Pain...Who Cares? By Michael D. Burg Knit Two Together By Jo L. Gerrard Skin Odyssey By Holly Leigh Jacobson Leaves in the Wind By Molly Molloy Hydroglyphics By Phaedra Greenwood Poetry Indiana Poem By Michael Lee Johnson Inspire Me, Ms. Muse By Tony Zurlo A Poem Forgot By Gabrielle Rabinowitz Yours By Sheila McLaughlin Sikorski Confetti By Alan Girling Correction: Drive Me Home Again By Anne Cammon Fiction Scaffold By Joseph Bathanti For the Taking By Anne Leigh Parrish The Artistic Impulse By Johanna Lipford Justifiable Brew Aside By Barbara Anton Stopping at the DQ By Susan White Cover Art Bright Red By Dee Rimbaud About the Contributors © 2007, 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 - Vacant 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 Senior Editor - Patti Kurtz Senior Editor - Neeldhara Misra Copyeditor - Kathy Skaggs Blog Contributing Editor - Maggie Koster Education Blog Contributing Editor - Jordan Wirfs-Brock Publicity Director (PA) - Geri Stock-Ross For information about submissions, visit http://www.riverwalkjournal.org/subs.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 VolunteerMatch.

The Artistic Impulse By Johanna Lipford 1st Place Short Story It was one of those villages that seems carved from its hill, as though the ruined castle at the crest were a great stone gush, and the tile-roofed grey and chocolate dwellings crowded wall to wall about it sculptures eroded by the rushing streams of stone street; one of those villages that leads one to fancy the Italians blessed by some native genius for creating beauty, for artistically completing natural landscapes with their architecture – leads to this fancy until one sees the self-centred apartment houses disfiguring Rome or Milan or Naples, when one decides that poverty and necessity, not genius, must have been the sources from which their artistic impulse most richly flowed. So at least George was brooding as he stood near a stone buttress of the castle wall, looking with an architect’s expert eye down at the antique-pink and old-gold tile roofs spread before him, from time to time for contrast lifting his eyes to the lush green-clad hills surrounding the village. His eye wandered past Rhoda; he absently noticed that a high-heeled foot was restively beginning to tap. He shrugged. Perhaps, he thought, returning to an argument he had been pondering, the beauty of a work of art owed as much, anyway, to its poverty of material as to its functionality meeting a need. The less the artist had to work with, the more he must value his imagination. This village now; surely its beauty owed only to poverty and function. The materials were certainly mean: clay, and stone, and some wood; and the village was of necessity built functionally. Yet the village fit the hill as though it had grown there, and in turn completed it, if in a way difficult to define: you only felt that no addition or subtraction were needed, or indeed were possible. He nodded his head. Perhaps this little village on its hill held the entire secret of beauty; if so, the artistic impulse had here flowed from its richest source: a need to be met functionally with the poverty of material, and something that, to be somehow complete, required the finished work of art. But works of pure - ? “How long are you going to dream here, George? Isn’t there anything to see in this stupid place?” He frowned. Forced to notice Rhoda, he turned on her an artist’s cool eye, thinking with a passionless aesthetic thrill that she was a stunningly beautiful woman. Her long hair was lustrous and blonde, if blonde by art; her eyebrows were perfectly arched, by inspired plucking, her patrician nose was finely chiseled – although, she had once confided, it had been somewhat aquiline till her sixteenth year, when a plastic surgeon had corrected it. He supposed her white even teeth owed as much to the orthodontist as to nature. Her lips were naturally full and well-shaped, but artfully rouged. Her figure was – and that she was thirty-five years old was an irrelevant qualification – perfect, kept shapely and supple by rigid dieting and otherwise-pointless exercize. Her fingernails were enameled, her eyes shadowed, her dress simple and expensive – and right. She was a miracle of art, a completion of nature’s potential. And, he sourly thought, his aesthetic thrill dissipating, she was also contrary, quarrelsome, obstinate, ill-tempered, and a hypochondriac. And perfectly useless. They had no children, and she had never cooked a meal nor mopped a floor nor washed a shirt in their married life. They had met after he was already established as an architect; he had fallen passionately in love with her and, he supposed, she with him. They had married on the strength of a physical attraction that, seven years later, was become emotional repulsion. The two months they had so far spent together in Europe had dispelled any illusion that they had learnt to bear one another more gracefully: their apparent mutual toleration owed only to his timely escapes to his offices. Here, there was no escape from Rhoda. “I don’t know; give me the guidebook.” He thought regretfully that he would have to ponder the sources of pure art some other time. “There’s a well-preserved tenth-century church just outside the village…” He pointed to a cobblestone road that wound from the village through grape-vineyards and olive groves in back of it. “We can walk it, from here.” “Walk?” She stared. “When it hurts me inside to, George? I can’t walk. We’ll have to drive.” He scowled. She was having bellyaches that she claimed incapacitated her, and had convinced herself that her womb sheltered a cancer. An American doctor in Rome had found her perfectly fit, though he had forfeited her confidence by his inability to explain the bellyaches. Pride would never let her admit it, George thought, but she seemed burdened by fear of death: for the first time in her life, Rhoda must have grasped that she was mortal, and she couldn’t bear it. Personal mortality was a conception, he dryly reflected, that needed some getting used to. He could abstractly sympathize: he vividly remembered when his own had first been thrust on his attention. During a vacation at a surgeon-friend’s mountain cabin he had ignored a deep cut, to be a few days later suddenly and reasonlessly seized by a terrible foreboding that he had contracted lockjaw. A country doctor, gloomily remarking that tetanus symptoms had not, as yet, appeared, had pessimistically given him an emergency injection, hastening to point out that it was too late to be certain that the serum would be effective. Each sparkling morning for the rest of his vacation he had awakened to the dread that that day his jaw would tighten with the first sinister stiffness. He had fallen prey to a hypochondriac terror that acquired a will of its own and at the least suggestion threw his mind into paroxysms of fear of death… Rhoda must be experiencing something like that. They were hardly out of sight of the village when they came upon an enclosure in the midst of an olive grove, surrounded by a blank stuccoed wall. A yellow and black tourist sign at the roadside was legended Chiesa di San Tanato (Sec. X). The entrance was blocked to cars and he parked. They walked down the entranceway between eight-foot-high walls comprising tiers of sealed rectangular cells, perhaps two feet broad, on whose vertical marble cover-plates a few words were chiseled; bolted to many of the plates were vases holding withered flowers, and small electric lamps, burning. “God George!” Rhoda hissed. “You’ve brought me into a cemetery!” “So it appears,” George cheerfully said. She stopped dead. “Well, I’m not moving another foot. Let’s get out of here.” He continued. “Go back to the car,” he called over his shoulder. “I left it open.” “I don’t want to stay anywhere near a place like this, alone,” she said, almost pleading. He took another step. “I’m going to see the church of San Tanato,” he announced. “You don’t often find a tenth-century church in good repair.” She irresolutely glanced back at the car, then walked forward. “God damn you!” she said as she reached him. Here and there among the tombs were gaps, marble plates missing or broken, as if the corpses there entombed had wearied of awaiting a too-long-postponed last trump and had taken things into their own hands. Though the gaps had been uniformly in the topmost tier, they came now to one in the second; Rhoda, standing on tip toes, peered into the open tomb. Its blackened interior was dusty and spiderwebbed, and she shuddered visibly. “Ugh! It’s awful. Why did they leave it open so people could see right into it? I was half expecting to see the…” She paused, and with, for Rhoda, unwonted delicacy of phrase, continued “…the deceased person. That would have been too dreadful to bear.” George did not ask why, then, she had looked: he remembered, early in his own trial, having happened on a medical report of a death by tetanus. He had burst into a sweat and immediately shut the book and replaced it on his host’s library shelf. But he had finally drawn it back down and read it greedily, morbid relish savouring each spastic racking of the luckless sufferer’s body to the final frothing convulsions and death, in his exquisite agony of self-torture pathetically wishing that someone would save him from himself. When you realized that you really might die, he thought, death grew as obsessively fascinating as it did terrifyingly repulsive. The wall tombs ended and they were in a conventional graveyard; in one corner an overalled man was trimming shrubbery. Curiously, considering the age of church and village, the dates on few of the gravestones went back more than a decade. Before them rose the church, a tall building built of thin and eroded old brick, time-washed to a mellow pink; it was erected on a brick base and a broad flight of low uneven steps climbed to its entrance. Its unadorned façade – even the windows were mere slots – together with the eaveless gable roof made the church exterior plain to severity. Behind it was an outbuilding, and under the flight of steps a padlocked wood door, partly sunken. “I saw the caretaker,” he said. “Let’s…” But that person, evidently having noticed them too, was walking forward to greet them smilingly. “Buon giorno,” George said, and continuing in reasonably fluent Italian, “we should like to see the church inside. Could you show us to it?” He scanned the man, thinking something odd about him. In appearance he was not extraordinary. Short, thin, perhaps forty years old, hair jet-black and bushy, his lantern jaw shaven. His smile, George decided. A fixed grin, really. It hadn’t left his face. And his black eyes glittered strangely. Yet, he seemed a genial enough type: “Come no!” the caretaker affably replied, and withdrew a bunch of keys. Unlocking the door he pressed open one of its double leaves. He bowed and gestured with a flourish of the hand toward the interior, saying “Entrino, prego.” George and Rhoda entered, blinking in the gloom, for it was lighted only by three thin shafts of afternoon light that slanted through the slit windows. The sun threw the caretaker’s long shadow on the uneven brick floor, interrupted here and there by white marble tomb covers worn smooth. When George’s eyes had become accustomed to the gloom he saw the church of San Tanato. It was absolutely bare. There was no altar, no hangings, no pews, no icons, no candles, nothing but echoing bare stuccoed walls. The nave ended at a small blank apse; there was a single aisle to its left, set off from it by a brick partition wall, the only passage through it a single fine elliptical archway. Rhoda stood in the archway boredly tapping a foot, watching while he walked to the aisle’s blind end. In the gloom there he discerned the faced remnants of a fresco. He uncertainly stared at it, then walked past Rhoda to address a question to the caretaker, who was still idling in the portal. “Chi sa, Signore? Nessuno…” was the reply, and, while George strained to catch his words, the caretaker, now opened up, continued to gabble, finishing “…e papà e nonno prima di me.” “What was that all about?” Rhoda demanded. “Translate, damn it George, don’t leave me in the dark.” “I asked what an obliterated fresco represented, and he says experts have examined it, and they don’t know.” He paused. “He mentioned he’s been sexton of the church and graveyard for twenty years – the church’s been closed only a few years – and his father and grandfather were before him.” “No wonder he’s peculiar,” she muttered. “You think so too?” “Yes.” She cast a glance at him. “That damned leer. Let’s get out of here. He gives me the creeps.” George unwillingly nodded. Thinking that this church’s architectural purity was all very modern, but that its severity demanded more decorative relief than an illegible fresco, he disappointedly looked once more round the bare interior, professionally noting the effective asymmetric placement of the elliptical archway. Half-shrugging, he walked to the entrance, pausing to let Rhoda precede him. “Grazie,” George said, fumbling for a coin. The caretaker muttered a mysterious phrase, looking up at George out of the tops of his eyes. What did he say?” Rhoda demanded. “That there are other things to see.” “Well forget them. Let’s go. The faster I leave this place, the better.” The caretaker stood silently grinning up at him, and without wishing to show himself eager to see the “other things”, yet reluctant to leave without seeing them, George sought to prolong the conversation: “Tell me: why are some of those tombs” – he pointed to the wall tombs – “empty, as if the cadavers had been removed?” The answer was surprising: They had been removed. Further questioning brought out, as George explained to Rhoda, that if the relatives did not wish to buy a tomb, the dead were, at public expense, buried in the ground or, when space was not available, entombed in the cheapest (walkup) wall tombs, to be in either case exhumed after ten years. “My God,” Rhoda bleated. “What happens to them after that?” “I’m not sure I understood,” George confessed. “If no one claims the bones, they’re buried in a common grave. But I think he also said that sometimes they give the bones back to the rel -- ?” He broke off. The caretaker was beckoning to them, grinning as if to say “Would you like to see something?” He began walking rapidly toward the rear of the church. “You’re not going to follow him, George?” Rhoda said, holding his arm. “I won’t let you. He’s crazy. Let’s go.” He shook her off and descended the stair. Rounding the corner he saw the caretaker standing before a wooden door in the outbuilding behind the church, picking through his keyring. A marble plaque above the door bore the carved word OSSUARIO. Rhoda had followed as he had known she would. He reflected how he had known, and realized at once: loneliness. He had felt desolatingly alone before death, he recalled, bereft of resource against his dread of it. He had been counting on there being time, and there might be no time left: his only monument would be his work done, which, he had feared, was second-class. Only the emptiness of having done nothing at all, he thought, could have made death’s utter vacancy more terrible to behold. Under the goad of his lonely will to clutch onto life he had made a clumsy effort to draw near Rhoda, but he could not bring himself even to confide to her that he was mortally afraid and could not bear to be alone. Had he told her, he thought, it might have been one step toward comfort. Rhoda was standing quite near him; he could feel the living warmth of her soft breast crushed against his back, and it filled him with perverse resentment, as if she were trying to steal what she would not beg and could not earn. As the caretaker inserted a key in the lock she apprehensively asked “What does that word mean?” “Boneyard,” George succinctly said. “God! Don’t let him open it, George! I don’t want to see! I don’t - !” But the caretaker had opened the door and as George stepped forward so did she, again pressing close to him; they stared into a square pit filled with empty zinced coffins, broken open and greyly corroded; hanging from many of them, blackly caked with tarry products of decay, were mouldering shags and shreds of yellowish shroud. The caretaker muttered something and dragged aside several coffins, the other eldritchly clanking and groaning as they settled anew. When he finished a series of interstices had been connected, through which the pit floor could be glimpsed. “He says there are some bones down there awaiting burial, if you’d like to see them,” George said, stepping away from her. “Well I don’t want to,” Rhoda nervously stammered. “Have him close the door, George. I’ve seen enough.” For she too had peered down through the aperture forced between the coffins, at the white gleams on the black earth floor. She clutched his arm. “This is hideous!” The caretaker grinned. Perhaps misunderstanding her, he said “It is nothing, bella Signora. It is only death. There is no reason to fear it. When one lives with death, one must learn to despise it – and do we not all live with it?” Rhoda stared at him, comprehending nothing of the foreign language. He casually tore a piece of rotted cerement from a coffin and extended the blackened thing toward them. “Would it please them? – for a souvenir?” Rhoda screamed, backing away, and George too uneasily reatreated a step, shaking his head emphatically and stuttering “No-no, grazie, mille grazie, no!” The caretaker shrugged and threw the cerement back. He locked the door and turned toward George. “Interessante, eh?” He hesitated, as if taking George’s measure; then, grinning more broadly yet, beckoned. “Vengano, prego.” He walked rapidly back toward the front of the church. “Let’s leave, George,” Rhoda said. “Please!” she uncharacteristically added. But George shortly shook his head and, sensing the caretaker’s pièce de résistance, hastened to follow, leaving her to trail behind. Having unlocked the wooden door under the church steps, the caretaker descended a stone stairway into solid murk. George stood, doubtfully; but the other turned to grin and beckon, and George slowly descended the stair. “You’re not going down there, George?” Rhoda ejaculated. “You’re as crazy as he is!” She folded her arms. “Well, I’m not coming.” George turned to look up at her pale, set face. “Wait up there, then,” he said, and casually added “In fact, I would have told you to – I just didn’t want to suggest that you wait all alone in the graveyard.” She involuntarily glanced behind, then placed a foot on the first step. “Wait,” she commanded. George expressionlessly extended a hand to guide her safely down the slick stone steps. “You could break your neck on these,” she muttered. They found themselves in a dark stone-walled cellar, extending perhaps half the length of the church, the only illumination two small deeply-recessed windows. The caretaker had lighted a candle, and now held it aloft. George glanced around, almost relieved to see nothing but a few articles stored there when the church had been closed. Among them was, nailed to a wood cross, a flaking life-size polychrome Jesus Christ, lurking there, George whimsically thought, like a fugitive hiding out in the cellar of a house under attack. The caretaker now walked, shielding the candleflame, into the shadows at the rear of the cellar to a low door with a marble architrave, doubly padlocked. He withdrew his keys and, rattling them for, George supposed, dramatic effect, unlocked each squeaking padlock. Before opening the door he grinned back over his shoulder to ask “Ha fegato, la Signora?” George looked to Rhoda, who was standing rigidly near him, and freely translated: “He wants to know if you have guts?” She stared at him, but did not reply. She shivered in the damp chill. The caretaker now opened the door and, stepping inside, beckoned. “Don’t go in, George,” Rhoda intensely whispered, moving in front of him. “I – I’m afraid…I’m – “ “Of what?” he answered in a smiling voice, carelessly interrupting her. “Aren’t I here to protect you?” She did not reply to either question and he brushed past her to step down into a perfectly windowless crypt, a dank-smelling brick-walled grotto four paces broad and twice that deep, no more than seven feet separating the top of its vaulted ceiling from its earthen floor. George, reflexively stooping, peered about, in the flickering candlelight seeing nothing but the caretaker; he, back turned and candle held high, was gazing at something near the end wall. Rhoda now poked her head into the crypt, though she stayed warily in its entrance. Just beyond the caretaker, partly concealed by him, George now made out a structure gleaming dead white in the candlelight, and he approached to look over the caretaker’s shoulder. The structure was rectangular in plan, perhaps four feet long by two feet wide, at its highest point four feet from the floor. But what in God’s name, George asked himself, was it? A model of a wrecked Gothic cathedral? A ruined Grecian temple? Whatever it was, it was constructed of human bones, and at two corners of its ruined gable roof white skulls grinned. It had columns or scantlings of leg and arm bones, rafters and joists of ribs, interior workings of vertebrae and pelvic bones, and, evenly spaced along the ridge pole and pole plates, gruesome little ornamental Gothic spires of, George supposed, toe and finger bones. George gaped at it, speechless. The caretaker grinned at him. “Bella, eh?” He modestly shrugged. “Naturalmente, non è ancora finita…” George heard a gasping intake of breath behind him. He looked round to see that Rhoda had entered and, eyes popping, was staring speechless at the thing too. He attempted to laugh, but it issued a nervous snicker. “He says it’s not yet finished…” The caretaker had turned back to his construction, and was patting and caressing it. He rested a hand on a gleaming skull and crooned over his shoulder “Ecco nonno – e questa, questa è nonna…” pointing to the other skull. George shivered. “He says ‘This is grandpa, and this is grandma…’” There was a pause. “My God George,” Rhoda hissed, “you mean he’s built this thing out of his grandparents?” She began to laugh, low but near-hysterically. George did not reply, thinking only “But this can’t be! It’s grotesque, it’s obscene…” The caretaker mumbled something, and with a few drops of wax affixed the candle to grandpa’s skull. He scrabbled about in the shadows in a corner and drew forth a small tin box, perhaps eight inches square and two feet long. One end bore an indented cross. Rhoda’s laughter ceased and George tore his eyes from the structure; both fixed fascinated eyes on the box as he set it down. He broadly winked to George, then slid open the lid, displaying its contents. Rhoda shrieked. She ran to the door, but paused half-way in it, babbling “Please George! I can’t bear it! Take me back! Please!” George ignored her. Conscious of the caretaker’s eyes on him, he forced down a rising gorge as he stared into the tin box. It enclosed a jumble of disarticulated bones, blackened and furry with bits of petrified flesh; the skull still bore a thick tufting of jet-black hair, creating a ghastly illusion of lingering life. “Ecco papà,” the caretaker said, seizing the filthy skull and almost thrusting it in George’s face. “L’ho appena dissepolto.” He fetched the skull a sharp box on its ear with his free hand, mumbling “Ahee papà, how many times you did that to me!” But George, fancying himself by now calloused to anything, however appalling, the caretaker might do or say, was once more staring at the bones. “Just think, Rhoda,” he observed, understanding now an allusion to a tin box that the caretaker had earlier made: “If one of us were to die here in Italy, the other could return in ten years and claim the little box full of bones!” He paused. “By the way, I suppose you’ve understood that’s his father? He says he’s just dug him up.” He glanced to Rhoda. She was crouched in the doorway, as if terrified to stay but dreading to remain alone; her face a naked plea as she looked imploringly to him – and yet, with horrified obsessiveness, she cast shuddering glances to the contents of the tin box. Remorselessly, George continued “…with papà he’ll go on building that thing.” He gestured to the structure. Under the spell of a pure artistic desire to realize a structure of his own that he had at first scarcely glimpsed, but now saw clearly in mind, George as casually as mendaciously concluded “Incidentally, he says his father died of cancer.” He paused. “Of the lower bowel,” he embellished. Rhoda convulsively stiffened; she glanced at him and her face closed. She uttered no sound. The caretaker now carried the skull to the structure and held it above a roof corner opposite the corners already ornamented by polished skulls, and by gestures and words explained how he would continue his work. George scanned the thing again and discerned inside it a partly-completed partition wall, holding an asymmetrically-placed elliptical arch of pelvic bones… He observed now that its dimensions were scaled to the church. Of course! he thought, satisfied. He looked again at the half-completed eaveless gable roof and its little decorative spires – the madman too had seen that some ornament was necessary. There were, it struck him, four corners, but only three skulls… George thought. “Is your…” His voice cracked and he cleared his throat. “Is your mother still alive?” The caretaker nodded. “Oh, si, si, mamma ancora vive.” He turned to gloat over his creation, above which he still held his father’s skull poised, and wistfully sighed. “But I can hardly wait…” He grinned back to George, who tensed, seized as he was by a wild urge to shout with ferocious laughter at what he knew was coming: “…to see her here.” They had left the crypt and the graveyard in silence, had silently entered the car, and had driven back to the state road in silence. But now as they turned toward Naples George broke it musingly. “You know, that thing really was a work of pure art – you could even call it, in its way, beautiful.” He paused. “I wouldn’t mine building something like that myself – less ambitious in scope, of course.” He glanced to her, and blandly smiled. As if he had just thought of it, he asked “By the way, how’s your belly ache?” She had been sitting close to the door, and she now pressed herself against it, as though physical revulsion made her will to stay as far from him as she could get. When she spoke, her voice was low and bitter. “I never realized before,” she said, “just what a bastard you are, George.” He shrugged and, feeling as satisfied as when he saw the last nail driven into a house he had designed and built, began to hum a tune. Perhaps, he was thinking, a need to be met functionally was the least important source of artistic beauty. Something that the artist perceived as potential to be completed – that was the main thing; and the artistic impulse itself was, of course, an overwhelming urge to, at all costs, see it complete.