Dear Readers,

When we launched Waterwheel Review, we were keen to explain why we were so moved and motivated by the image of the waterwheel. Water stands for language, an ever flowing, renewable source; the waterwheel, an engine of labor, circles through, lifting words and then dropping them back into the running stream. Our magazine is a mill, we said, where the waterwheel powers writing and publishing. “We want—and need—to make things.”

For a couple of years, now, we have known that we can’t make enough of our own things while we give so much energy to the work of others. We have had to cut substantially the time and attention devoted to our own writing, and mostly we have been glad to do it, determined to find a way to repay our own work in the end. We never did find that way.

If we could quit our jobs and earn that income publishing this magazine, we would take that deal in an instant. But that’s not the world we live in. For many, many months we have known this, but we couldn’t accept it until now. And thank goodness for that.

Every single issue of this magazine has been a wonder that transported and enchanted us. We can’t say we gloried in every moment. We read or edited or built the site at times while sick, exhausted, grieving—that’s the nature of any publication. But we damn well gloried in every word, every paired image and sound.

Four years and thirty-six issues: What an honor to publish our contributors. What a privilege to offer stunning work to our readers. We must use the word pleasure, too, always rolled out to accompany “honor and privilege,” but pleasure isn’t strong enough, nor is gratitude nor joy nor blessing. For once we find ourselves at a loss for words to express precisely what it has meant to keep this waterwheel turning.

Maybe this will do it: How many times does anyone ever fully achieve the glittering, half-glimpsed vision floating above; that winking, flirting piece of art we ache to manifest? For the three of us, precisely this once.

We will keep making things and so will you. We started this magazine with the image of the waterwheel and a Jean Rhys quote, and we will end in the same way, as we thank you for reading and submitting, and wish you and yours all the very best:

Listen to me. All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. And there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don’t matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.

—Claire, Suzanne, Cheryl

September 1, 2024: Waterwheel Review will stay online for the foreseeable future. It remains as it looked for the final June 2024 issue.

Waterwheel Review

Literature Without Labels

Rosemary Jones

The Cat in the Window

by Rosemary Jones

September 2022

1.

An address to the cat in the window

Don’t go into the garden at this time of night, Mafdet, Sekhmet, Bastet, Bes, whichever one of the ancients you are. God of protection, small maker of mischief. The snow has raked out a new world. You won’t know where you are. The patterned bricks in the back yard strike seductive diagonal poses, but you might follow their raised edges into a silent snow hole. White and arty. Beware the painterly designs you’d rather like to get your claws into.

You stare into the garden looking for the creature responsible for making the three-clawed drags in the snow you saw this morning. Heraldings, quickenings from the fence to the dying dogwood, a night breath revealed! A drumbeat of form forged in snow. This is significant, you cat of uncertain wisdom. You know life eludes you out there. You feel it lurking. You dash from window to window, on the chase. You’re dying to play, to flirt, to bat something, especially a mouse, a big one. You know too well how life is denied you, while yet it is granted. Slanted. Because you’re an ancient. Your lineage sits on show in the window: your love of the world, your embrace of motif. Black cat in a window. Ancient black cat in a window. Ancient Egyptian tuxedoed cat in a tomb. The night looks in at you, jealous of your black skim of spine and sleek head and canny moonstone eye. Knowing this world, and the world past, you own the window. Just so.

2.

An address to self

Beware the cat in the window, which got there before you. She’ll enter your dreams like a hieroglyph escaped from an ancient narrative and carve— given the right instrument—a seat in your window, an etching on your wall.

Bedroom wall. Wall wherein you wall off. Wall, behind the wall. Your implacable wall. Your caterwaul. Your work in progress.

She’ll tear down your wall. Standing on her hind legs (surely she’s too old for this caper), pawing at the door latch, bashing until it releases and in she strolls, asking for an early breakfast. Unabashed. A sweep of cat registered in minimal black, sketched lines. Like the sweep of a writer’s signature embellishing the front page of her newly published book. A vine of a line. Such a writerly motion will never enter your own vocabulary. You don’t really want to float across the flyleaf of a book in the window on display. All you want is to sit in the window, looking out. Like a cat. Observant. Stable. Unerring.

3.

Reprise

Little black cat. Roll over. A belly splash of white. And there, a ridge of gray, scattering like aging eyebrows. A new occurrence. You too? Age on the march?

What did those Egyptians want from their cats? Protection from mice and household nuisances and bad vapors. Who wouldn’t? More to the point, their owners hoped to embrace their cats as lifelong partners who’d sail along with you, whoever you were, across an infinite night of white enduring stars. A world of love, eternally whispered despite a cat’s marvelous indifference.

Your lovely hoist and arc swings through the room. I’m alone. Except for you, in one of your variations—Mafdet, Sekhmet, Bastet, Bes. Ancient. We’ll close out the night together.

No bad feelings if I take my bed? You take the window, little hieroglyph. That is, before you execute your pre-dawn trick of smacking the latch again, springing in as though you’re chasing a mouse or a toy squirrel and pouncing, on the rug, on the sill, before you settle at the end of the bed, a figurine chiseled into relief on a wall of rock.

Please, not another ancient Egyptian peep out of you.

Rosemary Jones is an Australian whose nonfiction has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Cimarron Review, Sweet, and elsewhere, and was awarded Alligator Juniper’s first prize in nonfiction. Her fiction has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Sonora Review, Gargoyle, Corium Magazine, and Brilliant Flash. In 2019, she received a merit scholarship in the Summer Literary Seminars fiction competition. She currently teaches and tutors writing at Yale.