Writing by Elly Graff

PRISM International 55:3/ Spring 2017

HOW TO CASTRATE A CAT

You will need one mid-sized tom. A kitten doesn’t count; you don’t want to be a freak here. Make sure you don’t pick up some crazy pussy by mistake because you’ll have one hell of a time with her and end up with scratched hands. Pick the cat—preferably a neighbour’s to contain the community’s feline population—and act smart. Hesitate, cut wrong, and he’s dead. A cat doesn’t have nine lives. If you tried to kill a cat nine times you’d be an idiot because you’d have killed it the first time. You’d just be this weird guy—or girl, because I don’t know what you will be yet—messing around with an already perfectly good dead cat.

The Fiddlehead No. 274 Winter 2018

MARSHALL FRIDAY

Evelyn Marshall: she was always Evelyn Marshall, never Eve or Ev or Miss Marshall. She hated the first without the last. She thought names should stick together, like people, not that they always did. We all whispered about her dehydrated figure. At times she appeared colourless. Her translucent hair was always tied into two tight braids against her scalp so that it appeared as if she had no hair at all. She had this deep river voice that we all loved and was lead in the senior girls’ choir where us youngers listened at assemblies. Bright eyes, blue eyes, my father said they were much too big for her head. I dreamed of scooping those beauties out with a large soupspoon; trade hers for my own dirty-rain browns.

She died in the winter of my ninth grade. Evelyn Marshall was three years older than me and expected to graduate come spring. I wish I had saved her. I should’ve dragged her by those white braids home to stay with me, but Evelyn Marshall never missed a family dance at the hall.

The New Quarterly Spring 2019

AS ANIMALS

I never told Finland—Fin—that I mistook him for an animal the night we met. I asked if he liked Elvis. Instead of his walk to town, he followed me to Gramps’ cabin and crouched through the doorframe due to his 6’7 height. With a .22 rifle slung across his chest, Fin carried plastic-wrapped raw meat in his hands. ELK was scrawled across the package in large loopy letters I would grow to learn wasn’t Fin’s own. After I played Elvis on Gramps’ record player, I bent over my oven and Fin came close behind me. He didn’t touch me, but I could feel him, a certain pressure of his presence. He placed the package in my sink, and ripped open a bread loaf.