Brandi Spering is the Assistant CNF Editor at Schuylkill Valley Journal Online. Her first book, This I Can Tell You (Perennial Press, 2021), is a poetic memoir that examines the fragility of memory. Other works can be found in super/natural: art and fiction for the future, Forum Magazine, Superfroot Magazine, Artblog, and more.
In this episode of Cover to Cover with . . ., Editor-in-Chief Jordan Blum chats with Sperling about the creation and publication of her book, reconciling trauma, finding catharsis through creativity, and much more!
All the girls in Symor village reduced at least once a year.
Some reduced on their faces, others on their arms, and the braver ones on their legs.
They came to school with white scars running down sunken cheeks, bones visible beneath their diaphanous skin that bloomed with purples and yellows and greens. When school started, most of the girls were newly arm-reduced and flaunted colorful leather pouch-bags to hold the smooth stump where the once wrinkly, crusted elbow was now round and flawless as a baby’s skull.
The most popular girl was Jilia. Everyone in Symor agreed that she was jaw-droppingly beautiful—that is, if you had a jaw. When you saw her you couldn’t help but stare and wonder how she was so delightfully small.…
Two boys walked slowly down the middle of a fish pond beside a one-lane jungle highway, pausing now and then to chop their bolos at the mudfish who’d grown lethargic in the heat of mid-day. The sun burned like a big white diamond in the sky directly above them, making iridescent whorls in the chemical slicks left by the kerosene they applied to the surface in the mornings to kill the mosquito larvae. Every hour or so, the roadside ferns and Tangan-tangan leaves shifted in the breeze caused by a passing Jeepney, or by a passenger bus bound for Midsayap or Davao. The only movement beside the occasional traffic was the gradual forward movement of the boys and the sudden lifting and falling of their bolos, which flashed in the sun when they chopped at the fish in the murky water.…
No matter how many times they played the video, I always wanted to yell: The other way! Run the other way, Tyrone! I thought he might get away but never did. I still believed one of the five .40 caliber bullets wouldn’t land in his back, but one always did. Just one.
The forensic pathologist explained how the slug entered, how it ricocheted inside Tyrone Fields’ body and pierced his spine and lung, causing blood to enter his airway before exiting his throat. That’s why the bodycam footage showed him lying paralyzed on the sidewalk, blood trickling from his nostrils and neck, a crimson pool encircling his torso. The pathologist told us that entry wounds are circular because a flying bullet spins so fast it practically burns away the skin, while exit wounds look like tiny incisions, harmless slices where the slug comes out having done its worst.…
“Mijo,” she said in her tremulous voice. “Please don’t go there. Everyone who goes there never comes back or they come back not quite right.”
“What do you mean by that?” I asked her. I was merely entertaining her. I knew she was telling me one of her leyendas. The stories she’d told her own children when they were little so they wouldn’t go outside at night. She held these stories close to her heart and always shared them with me when I visited her. I didn’t mind. I loved hearing her stories and adding my own twists to them in my head.
La llorona transformed into my next-door neighbor who liked to water her garden at night while wearing a pale nightgown, completely unaware of how much she frightened the kids who saw her.…
