Synkroniciti is thrilled to welcome back writer and poet Rachel A. Levine, who first appeared in our Family issue in 2024. In Audacity, we feature her riotous short story “Darkness ’Til The First,” a comic plunge into the dark world of revolutionary posturing, anchored by an audacious, irrepressible antiheroine who refuses to be anything less than the engine of her own desire.
When Rafael strides into the dingy storefront where she and her nemesis, Sheila, run the office for a clandestine band of would‑be subversives, she spots an opportunity for leverage, mischief, and the satisfaction of certain physical needs. There are sparks.
“But Rafael was a lean machine, born to carry a gun and hear it sing in the mountains. His dreams raced along highways lined with chain saws and bones. He said he killed a man for a fancy car and became a revolutionary so he could have as many as he wanted. I became a revolutionary because those things didn’t matter to me. That’s when he sneered and called it my “middle-class birthright” to choose what I wanted.
And I wanted him.”
Rafael, of course, is not even half the bad‑ass he pretends to be. Beneath the swagger lies a surprising squeamishness and, after an initial rough tumble, not much enthusiasm for being her lover. When rumors surface that bodies may be disappearing at the local mortician’s establishment, she seizes the moment. His fear becomes her leverage, and she exerts a vengeful, gangster‑like control over him, even as she tumbles headlong into the gravitational pull of his dubious charms.
Not only does Rachel flip the chauvinistic atmosphere of traditional noir into a vehicle for female empowerment, she also populates this world with an unforgettable community of urban characters that emerge from the shadows and grow far beyond stereotype. A stand-out is Evelyn, living in poverty with a single bare lightbulb over her kitchen table, obsessed with a dead sister and an absent grave.
““Squids and leeches, squids and leeches,” she mumbled. And we couldn’t stop her insane rambling, and I didn’t like her skinny almost-nakedness while we were supposed to be talking strategy and tactics. “Where’s she at? He buried her didn’t he? Where’s she at?” Evelyn ranted.”
Dirty basements, cramped dwellings, and shadowed alleys form the backdrop for a gritty and highly entertaining story about people living by performance, crafting personas and passing themselves off as more dangerous than they really are. At its center stands a formidable woman who is both jealous predator and hopeless romantic, audacious to the bone.
Read “Darkness ’Til The First” in Synkroniciti’s Audacity issue, Vol. 8, No. 1, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
The year Rachel A. Levine was born Albert Einstein died and Disneyland opened. This might be coincidence or, it might explain why the silly and serious have always collided in her work.
Rachel began her creative writing career as a poet at age 11. Over the years she had some poems in various little and literary magazines. She attended the MFA program at Brooklyn College so that she could learn to write fiction. Studying with Jonathan Baumbach and Peter Spielberg (who created the original Fiction Collective, now “FC2.”) jump-started her writing and motivated her to continue to struggle with fiction. (As a poet, she did not think in terms of plot.) Creativity in general is a mystery which is why she often protests when anyone tries to assign rules to it.
For more information about Rachel and to read more of her work, visit her web site at http://www.RachelALevineWriter.com.