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Mexico memories

by Litro Magazine • June 9, 2024June 9, 2024

A sprawling campsite consisting of beach huts, cabaňas, as far as the eye could see; palm trees; a bright turquoise ocean lapping; it was Playa del Carmen, Mexico, 1996.

I looked it up on Google, it’s nothing like that now. Though I don’t know why I expected that it would be.
I’d not long finished my degree and had my first proper paying job lined up, editing a London magazine; so the idea of a six-month backpacking South American adventure had to be cut down to three weeks in Mexico before starting the new job. While I was away in Mexico, I began to realise that the long-term relationship I’d been in was not going to last forever, though I let it limp on for another four years once I returned to the UK.

My friend from school, R, who now lived around the corner from me in London, had planned the trip with me. We bought a Lonely Planet guide because this was before everyone had access to the internet. Red crosses indicated places that R wanted to go to and a circle around that meant that I wanted to go there too.

I just spent about half an hour on the web looking for the place we stayed on the beach. I couldn’t find it. The five and four-star hotels dominate my search, and I can’t find any rough hewn, palm roofed huts, with space to hang my brand new (never used since) hammock, bought for $15 from a guy wandering the beach.

Tripadvisor reviews say it’s a horrible, crowded place now, that there are more exclusive, quiet places to go. But exclusive and quiet was how it felt, almost twenty-five years ago.

There is no evidence I was ever there.

Everything now is “bonita”, luxury kingsize beds looking out onto the idyllic sunsets, infinity pools and white sand.

One day when we were staying in our hut in Playa del Carmen, we witnessed a wedding on the beach. We were slightly out of season, the weather had become more windy and wet as our three weeks on the traditional backpacking route, visiting pyramids and cities, played out. A bare-footed, dark-haired Mexican couple were getting married on the beach with only a couple of other people. From that moment the romantic vision of getting married on a Mexican beach floated in my mind, though years later, an ill grandmother, meant that I ended up tying the knot in a Bath registry office.

Cabaňas don’t seem to exist now – except at inflated prices, with imitation bare bones facilities – the sand floors, shared showers, do it yourself toilets, and padlock to secure the door, all gone. Replaced with cutesy built on outdoor showers and proper beds for tourists no longer seeking the last dregs of the Hippy Trail. Years ago the open beach bars and beach camping, often run by Europeans who had moved to Mexico’s Riviera Maya, got tarted up, developed, gentrified, so the Ibiza-loving party-goers could dance and drink all night.

I remember sitting in an open bar, rattan blinds blowing in the breeze of the Caribbean, drinking a beer, as backpackers played acoustic guitars late into the night.

The Mexico of my memory from a quarter century ago no longer exists, but I keep the essence of it in my mind, in my heart.

There is a photo of me, standing amidst the clifftop ruin of Tulum; I don’t have the photo but I remember it as if I did, I’m wearing an ex-army jacket that I thought would be lightweight and waterproof, and a long flowing skirt that I’d bought in a beachside store. I wore it on the plane home – and when I was on the tube on the last stage of my day-long journey to Islington from Mexico City, via Paris because the route was £100 cheaper, a woman asked me where I’d got it, because she wanted to buy one.
Twenty-five years is a life ago. Mexico has changed, I have changed, but the image of the happy young bride wearing a short white dress is something burned into my memory.
Mexico wasn’t cool or a common destination when I went, there were no chefs in Mexico City with Michelin stars. There were backpackers and casualties still looking for the Hippy Trail of the 1960s. Maybe there was still something of that easy-going vibe in beachside bars with their two-for-one cocktails with no air-con, and $3 a night rooms in dodgy no-star hotels, where we pretended not to speak Spanish, so we could find out what people really thought of us.
I loved the heat, the wide avenues of Mexico City, though not its pollution. I didn’t have asthma then, and the yellow haze permanently above the sprawling city didn’t concern me much. It was, in a way, almost beautiful.
I was enthralled by the tradition of the flying men of Papantla – the danza de los voladores is a Unesco protected intangible cultural heritage asset. If you’ve never heard of it – look it up on Youtube. Stumbling upon the display in the park next to Mexico City’s Museo Nacional de Antropología, it was a surreal experience, which more than two decades later I came back to in a short story.
Colour and joy; friendly people; absolute contrasts of poverty and riches; green Volkswagen Beetles swarming around the Zócalo main square, cross the road at your peril; chilli; churros; the noise from the jungle from the top of a pyramid; bright wooden carvings of el chupacabra – a mysterious, maybe supernatural monster; white beaches; Colonial cities; brightly coloured patterned cloth; men circling a pole, upside-down as haunting flute music plays… These images are never far from my memories.
Mexico did that. It impressed itself on my mind.

By Sam Hall

Petersen’s Ghosts

by Litro Magazine • June 9, 2024June 9, 2024

The Reeperbahn in the morning is the grass of Waterloo after the battle. Bodies and matter. Broken things. Mostly quiet. No simple task to avoid the glass and vomit and takeaway scraps. Here and there alertness, figures huddled together at benches whose wood is rotten, some with hands wrapped around half-litre beers, others pinching roll-ups. No romance, the bygone charm scoured from the streets.

I am in Hamburg to see the photographer Anders Petersen. There is a retrospective of his Café Lehmitz, analogue captures of one of the red-light district’s most notorious bars back in the 1970s. But that is for the evening. Now is daylight, and I am on the trail of Petersen’s ghosts. The brawlers, beggars, orphans and bastards venerated by Waits and immortalised in Petersen’s celluloid. They kiss, they cry, they dance, they drink. Suited and beautiful, cackling while in states of undress, chewed up and wrung out. Each photo offers a wonderfully tense dichotomy, and is likely the reason why the series remains in print fifty years later.

The actual Café Lehmitz itself is the place to start; I was surprised to find it still listed online. When I arrive, it is closed. A blackened dreadnought with standing tables like concrete crash barriers, the name spelled out in mirror tiles, a disco mosaic suggesting more glamorous times. Tethered to the door handles is a clapboard offering Jäger pitchers. My plan was to sit inside and try to reconcile the black-and-white bar with its present-day counterpart. No luck.

A bearded man wearing a corduroy jacket leans against one of the standing tables. I ask him if the place ever opens. He nods. At four. When I say it looks as like it has been closed for months, he shrugs. It isn’t the real Café Lehmitz, he tells me. That building was torn down in 1987. This one stole its name. I ask him if he used to go there. Sure, he says. All the time. And now? Another shrug. No such places anymore. He asks for some change. I give him five euros and he slips it into a pocket and shuffles away.

I have been duped by the internet and its half-truths. Not the first time.

This isn’t where a twenty-three-year-old kid from Sweden brought his Nikon F and began to shoot back in 1967. This isn’t where he fell in love over and over. This isn’t where he laid the groundwork for a career that would take him from prisons to mental hospitals and around the world. This place is nothing. Disappointed, I cup my hands and press my face up to the glass. No movement, no décor worth mentioning. Still, I came face to face with a ghost. Better than nothing.

I wander away from the squalor, to the harbour, to watch tourists in puffed jackets get battered by the wind coming in from the Norderelbe.

More panhandlers appear on the Reeperbahn as the shadows lengthen, punks in denim and metal with plastic cups that they thrust into the faces of passers-by. At the old Wirtstuben, hard-boiled locals drink Astra beers and smoke Pepe cigarettes. In the chain restaurants, tall Dutch girls order dayglo fishbowls and tacos. There is a McDonald’s that shares the same real estate as a three-storey sex club. The restaurant’s golden arches are sandwiched between windows whose glass is covered in naked blondes. Fresh meat as you like it, two-fifty or thirty-nine euros.

The imposter Café Lehmitz still isn’t open at four. My ghost in the corduroy jacket isn’t there either. A couple doors down, police officers in tactical vests interview a man whose rankness I can smell at ten paces. There is an open sore on his cheek, joining with the nose, and he has no shoes on. The officers wear gloves. A group of stylish French kids waiting at a traffic light make uncomfortable jokes about it.

On a quieter corner I find a bar that claims it has been running since 1911. Inside, smoke hangs like velvet drapes. Locals at four-seat wooden booths. Plants in the windows, boxes resting on stained doilies. Models of wooden ships held together with dust. Bronski Beat, Tina Turner and Talk Talk on the radio. When the barman takes my order, I ask him if they’ve really been open for more than a century. Yes, he says, but not in the same hands. The latest owners, a family, have had it since 1986. Did he ever go to Café Lehmitz? Before his time, he says. He was only a kid. But he knew a man who lived above the bar, his home a lumpy mattress that he shared with another, like Queequeg and Ishmael. What happened to him? Died of an overdose.

I sink into the place and for a few minutes I convince myself this is close. The history, the location, the out-of-time interior. But the characters aren’t right. Locals, yes, but comfortable ones. Hairdressers and HR managers and delivery drivers, not prostitutes or gamblers or drug addicts. These are my parents, lower middle class baby boomers, getting a buzz on before they head home.

When I pay, the barman hands me a belt bag embroidered with an Astra logo. A gift, he says. Sometimes we give them to newcomers. The locals say ciao on my way out.

I meet Anders Petersen in the evening. In the gallery there is a good view of cranes and ship cans. Tanned old men and younger women play dress up. Suits without ties, kitten heels, jasmine and ombre leather. The prints are three high on the walls, developed in a Stockholm darkroom in the mid-1970s. Petersen sits in the corner of the whitewashed box, a beer on the sill next to him. Slightly stooped, thinning grey hair, hands interlinked on his lap. When I greet him, he peers at me through round black spectacles and turns his head to hear me better.

He tells me the stories he tells everyone else. About Marlene, about Rose, about Lilly. He is put out by how many photos of Marlene are on the wall; he was in love with her, spent too much time photographing her when he could have been documenting other shadows of Lehmitz. There was another girl, he says, who he truly loved. Vanya. 1962. A Finnish prostitute who used her innocent eyes and body to earn all kinds of money. Five times in a night, sometimes. Then gone, disappeared from the scene forever, leaving his heart in two ragged pieces.

Wasn’t he afraid to put a lens in people’s faces? Oh yes, he says, but only in the beginning. Most liked the attention. And what drew him to the café in the first place? He was looking for his friends, he tells me, ones he made five years previously when he travelled to Hamburg at the age of seventeen. Saved money all summer and spent it on a ferry ticket. Of the group, only two were still around. The rest had faded away.

We talk about other things. Knausgård on the toilet. Bukowski’s need for rehabilitation. Architecture in Stockholm. The self-aware moments he has at events like these, when he tunes in to what he’s saying. But mainly we discuss his photos. The fatalism. The occasional horror. The sense of community above all. He blinks a lot as he speaks and he reaches over and clasps my hand or my leg when he makes a point. His voice goes up and it goes down. He looks tired. There is less of him here than in the interviews I’ve seen. Perhaps because he’s talking about Lehmitz again. His ghosts summoned once more for our viewing pleasure and dissection. Or perhaps time is simply catching up with the seventy-nine year old. Eventually, a woman interjects, asks him to sign a copy of his book, forever in print. He clasps her hand and asks for a pen. I slip away, but not before he assures me we’ll finish our conversation. Much later, when I look for him in his corner, he is gone. A Swedish exit.

I speak to the gallery owner about Anders Petersen. They have been friends for twenty years. How does he appear tonight? Well, says the owner. A little tired of being in the spotlight, but they have sold many photos to the tanned old men in their starched shirts. Not the vintage prints on the walls; those aren’t for sale. The edition of a morose Rose and a laughing Lilly that Tom Waits used for the cover of Rain Dogs is sold out. Ten thousand euros per print. A world away from where it was taken. I bet some of those barflies never earned even ten thousand D-Marks, let alone euros, in their lifetimes. The ones who died young, at least.

It feels incongruous.

On the Reeperbahn at half past midnight and it is a snake eating its own tail. Lights and bodies and taxis and sex. The Pink Palace, relatively unassuming during the day, is the loudest building on the block. It hurts to look at. Police everywhere. Kids spill out of a Burger King and into the road and a driver slams his horn. Kebab men sling döner to hungry stag boys who find seats at trestle tables or else right on the ground. Raised voices, a fight that is quickly broken up. Short stories happening everywhere. I linger, but I get no satisfaction from this street. It is too charmless, too plastic.

My hotel is adjacent to the Pink Palace. In my room, I can hear it all. Wild souls and sirens, a white-hot fire slowly burning itself out. It is a while before I can sleep.

III

The morning after. In the hotel room, sunlight evades red curtains and lays in bars on the carpet. Someone vacuums next to my door. Sirens in the street outside. I have a heavy head. I wonder where Anders Petersen disappeared to the previous night. A stroll along memory lane, perhaps. More likely his bed. He is giving a talk about his work later today. Lilly, Rose, Scar, Sara, Sigrid, Marlene, Mona, Elfie and the rest will be looking down on him. His family, his angels, his cross.

The same scene on the Reeperbahn as the previous day. Fresh casualties in a war that doesn’t want to end. A man lies buried in a sleeping bag that rests on a cardboard mattress. Another is passed out in the doorway of a cinema. I stare at the derelicts and the forgotten who have burrowed deep into the seams of this road. Here are Petersen’s ghosts, hiding in plain sight. The difference is they have nowhere to go. In his photos, the hopeless came together, swathed in shirts and ties, dresses and heels, in search of camaraderie. If you squint, they could be movie stars. Today is pure chaos. The hopeless are strewn across the city, homelessness rising, tent cities under bridges and overpasses. There is no togetherness. No community. No safe space. Yes, Petersen’s characters had their own problems, and to romanticise the era without acknowledging its dark side is disingenuous. But the fact is it has been more than half a century since the book Café Lehmitz was published, and in that time we haven’t created nearly enough safety nets to catch those who need catching. All we’ve done is push them further to the fringes than ever before—and price them out of the addresses where they might have found a sympathetic ear or another chance.

The original Lehmitz had a sign over the bar that said: “In heaven there is no beer, which is why we drink here.” Wherever it is they—the lost, the seekers, the indigent—drink now, it isn’t in a place like Café Lehmitz. The concept no longer exists.

Writing: Grant Price // Photos: Daniel Montenegro

Uncategorised

Deaf Grandma

by Litro Magazine • May 31, 2024May 31, 2024

She was there when I was born. She’d come to the maternity clinic along with my father, her son, and together they endured the thrill and anxiety that the process of birth always involves. My grandma was solid as a rock and always by the side of her loved ones at times of need, a loving shoulder to lean on when everything had gone pear-shaped. She had a tough life. She survived the vicious decade of the 1940s in Greece when the country suffered the atrocities of the civil war right after the Nazi occupation, which lasted for three years, ended. She lost her elder brother in the war and the trauma never ceased to haunt her even when she began to exhibit mild signs of dementia.

Her name was Helen. A beautiful name. My father hoped that my brother’s firstborn girl, who saw the light of the world only 2 years before my grandma passed away, would be named after her, a sign of profound respect for the woman who raised him. However, the tiny lady was eventually named Olivia, subverting everyone’s expectations. Helen had 4 children and a husband who saw his role as the provider for the family and nothing more than that. She carried the burden while also working as a seamstress to make ends meet. In my eyes, she was a true heroine for all the hardships she faced throughout her life. I looked up to her since I was a little boy.

Even though nobody could accuse my grandma of being frigid, she wasn’t the type of individual to become embroiled in meaningless chit-chat with others. She loved us all profoundly, but always kept a certain distance. It always vexed me that we couldn’t establish the rapport I desired. Perhaps her aloofness had its roots in her upbringing and lost childhood which was marked by her beloved brother’s untimely death. Her mother was a strict despot who firmly believed that austerity is the quintessence of pedagogy. Thus, she never learned how to embrace human contact.

During her last years, Helen’s health was progressively deteriorating, and she’d come to live with our family in order to receive the necessary care. Dementia was added to her chronic hearing impairment that put a barrier to communicating with us. When I talked to her, I literally had to shout to be heard. I caught her many times trying to read my lips and always failing. I used to perceive her semi-deafness as a symbol and metaphor for her detached manner. Her condition saddened me as I was sure that she had such a rich inner world. Even though we didn’t have the opportunity to share our thoughts, I was convinced that she would it would be delightful to sit down and have a long talk with her.

Since she came home, I made several attempts to approach her. I thought that what would work best in terms of effectiveness in communication would be to ask her direct questions about her life and offer her the chance to share her reminisces of past joys and sorrows with her grandson who was a little boy no more. What was her relationship with her five sisters? How stringent her own mother really had been? But what I wanted most deep down was to learn about her ways of coping with personal disasters. I never saw her lose her cool regardless of the predicaments she had to face.

At the time, I was traversing a rough period of depression mixed with addiction issues and chaos reigned in my life and mind. Helen’s stoic presence felt like a divine gift if it wasn’t for her hearing problem that limited her impact on me. I craved for words, wise words by an elderly woman of immense experience. So, one night, I knocked on the door of her tiny room and sat at the edge of the bed. I was feeling so low for such a long time. My parents were loving and caring but the communication between us was broken, mostly due of my persistent lies and precarious lifestyle. I told her in a loud, but soft voice:

“Grandma, I wanted to ask you something and I want you to be honest with me. Is it possible to return? Can I ever be the person, the good person, I was before? I feel dirty, ugly and old. I’m lost.”

She took a long stare at me and said nothing. This startling confession was the bravest act I made in my entire life. I got up from the bed and I was ready to exit her room, sure that she hadn’t heard a single thing. As I was putting my hands on the door’s handle, I heard her articulating: “Dear boy, a man is more than his worst deed.” Since then, this aphorism became my beaconing light.

I was there when she died. One sizzling, hot night in July, right after dinner she complained of stomach pain and went to lie down early. Half an hour later she was dead. The doctors said that the cause was a massive heart attack. Her loss felt like a stab in the heart. I had never cried as much as I did the days after the event. The funeral was austere and attended by friends and relatives who felt obligated to pay farewell to a good woman. My beloved, deaf Grandma.

By Dimitris Passas

Essays, Travel&Lifestyle

Immigration: a Beautiful Environment Versus a Cruel Reality

by Xie Hong • May 23, 2024May 23, 2024

By Xie Hong

Supposedly I should be keen on immigration, for I am from a Hakka family whose tradition is traveling around. In fact, I didn’t plan to immigrate anywhere at first, because along with my growing older, I have gradually lost my curiosity and taste for practical adventures in an unfamiliar environment. Basically, my personality involves impulsion and perseverance and patience, but I am far from an adventurous man.

Of course, I am still curious about the foreign world, which seems contradictory to what I said above, but is very common for the middle-aged. Being curious, I mean, is from my own imagination, which has been developed from my miscellaneous and extensive reading, and from my habit of consuming Hong Kong TV and radio programs for many years. It seems that my consciousness has been reshaped by many cultural shocks and I have been living in foreign worlds for many years.

On the other hand, I am not new to the outside world, at least in the sense of its spirit, which is familiar to me. This spiritual communication in my imagination has become very important in adjusting my attitude towards going abroad and opening up. When I landed at Auckland airport, seeing low houses nearby, I felt a little bit disappointed, but soon I began to cheer up when I found the beautiful scenery around them.

What I saw justified what I had imagined about “the West,” and I even came to realize that the fairy tales I had read must have happened in such an environment, while the art of the oil painting must have been created in this scenery.

Fresh feelings of being clean, comfortable, bright and excited were just like the feelings of the year when my family went back to their hometown, Shenzhen, from inland China. I didn’t know what I was going to do in my future, but I was very sure that I had hopes for it. The most enthusiastic time was the period when I hadn’t settled down, and kept moving around, taking part-time jobs after school. I came here not to my further study; rather, I came here to observe the student life compared to that of my wife and others with similar experiences.

At that time, my wife had great expectations for the future: at the age of 40, she had resigned her job to study in a new country. Such an approach was common among mainlanders who fled to Shenzhen to make a new and different life. In the beginning, my wife regarded her study abroad as a rest or a break, and planned to go back home in a year or two and settled down again in Shenzhen. But she decided to stay in New Zealand before she had completed her second semester.

My attitude was unclear because I was more hesitant to start the second phase of a different life. It meant we had to start from scratch in New Zealand! Accordingly, I really didn’t like to make that decision, and kept it vague and ambiguous. “If you want, you could withdraw to Shenzhen whenever you like,” I told her. This was my attitude; besides, I could not give her more help.

Before her leaving for New Zealand, our life in Shenzhen was satisfactory and comfortable; I had made a long-term plan for my writing career, and had already achieved some great progress, so I always declined any long trips. After I resigned from the bank, I had planned to go to Beijing for a better chance; however, after my first-hand investigation, I found that it was not suitable for me to restart a new life in a new place because I could not adjust myself to certain circles of friends. After that investigation, I stayed safe in Shenzhen to continue the development of my writing.

Again I was now facing the same choice to make. This time I felt I was going to be uprooted; what was worse, this time we would go to an unfamiliar place millions of miles away. Although New Zealand was beautiful and tempting, being a realistic idealist, I was still not in a position to make a decision after my investigation. With my wife’s encouragement, I kept on travelling between Shenzhen and New Zealand. She always comforted me by saying, “A lot of people in New Zealand are indies like you.”

This was not very rhetorical, but it hit it off with me. The reason that I didn’t want to come to New Zealand was that I didn’t want to start from scratch again, and my life goal is not working to make a living, but to be able to achieve something big in literary creation which enables me to mount the top of the pointed pyramid of literature. The reason that I quit a good job at the bank was also for the above-mentioned goal.

After my wife graduated and found a job, I arranged my family’s immigration, and finally settled down in New Zealand, gradually finding many problems in our daily life which had been overlooked before. For example, after gaining our identity cards, my wife considered resigning and starting a business. Do you want to change your job? To do what? All of this had been considered as a holistic plan: my wife would have thought her working experiences in gardening and greenhouses would help her rent some tents for planting lettuce. We also ran around looking for the ideal vegetable field, and wanted to work in fast food restaurants so we could later open a shop of our own. And so on and so forth.

Finally, all plans failed us because after 2008, the global economy entered recession, and New Zealand was no exception. In the evening newspaper, the recruitment advertisements were dwindling, so we had to seek a different approach: my wife was reminded of her past in part-time cleaning job, and heard that early Chinese in New Zealand had earned their first bucket of gold in it, which had inspired our entrepreneurial passion; then we chose cleaning as our business.

In the beginning, it was hard for us, but it brought quite a nice income which enabled us to make an ambitious plan, namely, to pay our home loan debt within five years. Yet it was not as simple as we imagined. Although we worked hard and our service was of good quality, we found that as franchisees it was difficult to control our own business contracts, because we lost some of our customers for some weird reasons; later, we found out that it was a common trick for cleaning franchisees to not be able to control their own businesses! We kept our bitterness in our hearts and comforted each other by asking why we were so tired. Relax！

Such a situation would easily make someone give up on himself. I often reflected in my mind whether it was worthwhile to live such a life here and give up our comfortable home in Shenzhen. My wife worked very hard, and she even did the work for two people; for me, I was also constantly busy trying to find a better job opportunity, but before you are successful, when your pace of life is slowing down or stopping somewhere, you will surely have confusion in your heart.

Based on these experiences, when I was consulted by friends about immigration, I advised them to think carefully about it because it would involve more of their family affairs than expected, and they would have to be cautious. Still, this topic of immigrantion remains so tempting to them.

Some people think that since they have done well at home, why go abroad? But others argued with me, saying, “You say it is bad to emigrate, so why do you want to do it?” These questions make me really speechless. All I can say is, “Firstly, you need to travel for real experiences, and let other things speak for themselves slowly.” I added, “The environment is good, but the reality is cruel.”

That sounds scary to some people, yet no one is willing to accept it. The latter part of the sentence is the most easily overlooked. At the beginning, when someone said he would go to Shenzhen, did your friends express the same opinion to you? When they did settle down in Shenzhen, they all brought their expectations into truth. It was the same thing here. You have emigrated to New Zealand, but you tell them that New Zealand is not good, so how could you expect them to believe you?

One of my friends was such a good example: when she planned her emigration, I gave her a stern warning like that above; however, it was useless to her. After she had studied in New Zealand, she realized that it was a wrong decision, and then she had to go back to China, having wasted much money and time. Drawing a person out of their comfortable nest is a difficult thing, especially for the middle-aged who feel so good in their domestic life and should act prudently.

Before making such a decision, you must understand the purpose of your emigration. Do you wish to give your children a good start in life? Or to give yourself a new starting point? Or if you have been wronged at work or have suffered a failure in your business, do you bet you can restart them in a new place?

Based on my experience, the middle-aged should avoid such a crazy challenge. In New Zealand, if you want to find a good job, you have to earn a local degree, and you should spend more time and passion in job hunting. Most people still feel it very difficult. When I recalled my early days after moving from the mainland to Shenzhen, I was proud to say that I had tasted what was bitter in life. Like others who were in Shenzhen for a better life, I really did not fear any hardship; now, however, I have been changed and become really afraid of any suffering. Nonetheless, I choose to stay in New Zealand because I believe that my wife can bear any challenge we face.

Reviewing my earlier days in Shenzhen, those who went there held to their dreams, and for these they were willing to endure any hardship. Likewise, we have similar expectations in New Zealand. If you are as common as stars, if you have no important relatives or high social position, if you just depend on your own industry for a stable life, then you can emigrate to New Zealand as the best choice.

On the other hand, if you have a certain successful business in China and you want to start a New Zealand business, you should be very careful with your decision. If you have already made enough money, you are welcome in New Zealand, which will be a heaven to you; otherwise, without enough money, and doing a job you dislike, you can comfort yourself by saying, “Here we have safe food and other safe stuff; people here follow the rules, and everyone plays fair.” But at the bottom of your heart, there is always a deep sigh: your life here is still inferior to the comfortable old homeland one.

To be a migrant or not? There is no standard answer, indeed. It depends on your own case, or your attitude. Concerning our family moving from northern Guangdong to Shenzhen, it was not good for my father, but it was lucky for us kids. At last, of course, my dad’s retired life is lucky, too.

fiction online fiction short fiction short stories

Mothers of Invention: The New Argentine Cinema and El Pampero Cine

by Litro Magazine • May 23, 2024May 23, 2024

By William Blick

Many great artistic movements have sprouted from the seeds of economic depression, and Argentina has had its share of economic hardships. Therefore, it can be surmised that from these difficulties, a new film movement sprouted from Argentina. At the core of the movement currently, is a production company known as “El Pampero Cine.” History has demonstrated that adversity has been the ally to innovation and this idea is central to El Pampero Cine.

Tamara Falicov, writing for MUBI notebook, traces New Argentine cinema to an upsurge all the way back to the 1990s which was related in part with a small grants program that was initiated by the National Film Institute (INCAA).[i] Film institute graduates, like those of new American indie cinema of the early 1970s such as Scorsese, Spielberg, and De Palma, made short films or (cortometrajes), and then went on to raise funds through co-production funding. “They have relied on their own networks of like-minded young people rather than depend on the traditional film sector structure (the film union, established director’s associations, and the few film studios still in existence).”[ii] It is not uncommon for like-minded artists to bind together to support a new aesthetic. This has occurred not only in film, but in literature, poetry, and visual arts.

Hamed Sarrafi writing for Senses of Cinema discussing Laura Citarella, a founding member of El Pampero Cine, and her latest film: “following in the footsteps of most El Pampero Cine movies, Trenque Lauquen reveals itself as an epic that eschews flashy aesthetics in favor of subtle, introspective storytelling, captivating viewers completely. Rather than appealing superficially to the senses, it chooses to delve deep into the human psyche and soul.” [iii]Flashy aesthetics indeed are not part of El Pampero Cine, but there appears to be an element that can be construed as gimmickry. I might feel this way if I were cynical. However, by viewing these films there is a sense of invigoration and excitement about cinema that hasn’t been felt, at least for this writer, in years. Not since the 1970s, arguably the best years for cinema ever, has there been this renewal of enigmatic storytelling.

New Argentine cinema according to Falicov is different from the previous auteurs of Argentine cinema as former directors had created gritty, realist dramas reminiscent of the political cinema of the New Latin American Cinema movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The New Cinema’s films created are not overly concerned with politics. Falicov says, “they are working to expand the notion of Argentine citizenship to include subjects and characters who have traditionally been invisible or excluded from Argentine screens.”[iv]

However, despite El Pampero Cine being an eminent, driving force in cinema, few Argentine citizens (or many, many people) actually watch these films, as Falicov notes. Filmmakers obviously want their films to be seen even if they do reject traditional aesthetics. According, to Falicov: Box office figures for these critically acclaimed films range on average from $100,000-$250,000, and producers claim that a medium budget film (to a tune of $1.5 million) film must make $500,000 to turn a profit, since ticket prices are so low.”[v] Like independent filmmakers all over the world, it takes effort and marketing promotion to get these films seen. However, as a result of low funding, the emphasis is on the art and not the marketing itself. Necessity is obviously the mother of invention in this case, as these filmmakers toil for their art on a shoestring.

El Pampero Cine literally translates to mean “cinema” of the Argentine region known as “Pampas.” It really is a group of indie filmmakers who created an artistic bond, and a purist, experimental form of cinema using minimal budgets, limited casting, an esprit de corps work ethic, and who star in and criticize each other’s films. Also, there are elements of magical realism similar to the writings of Borges or Bolano, and a combination of other aesthetics including genre-bending and experiments with diegetic sound and music. The central directors include within their ranks: Mariano Llinás, Laura Citarella, Agustín Mendilaharzu, and Alejo Moguilansky. The actual production company El Pampero was founded in 2002. The cinema movement still has not reached its peak and is not as well-known as it should be. However, this new wave has the potential to inspire countless generations to come just as the briefer French nouvelle vague and Italian neo-realism has done. El Pampero Cine is unprecedented in their bold, provocative films that break the fourth wall, and with that everything else that can be construed as traditional narrative filmmaking.

A prominent Pampero, Mariano Llinás, created La Flor, a staggering 13 hour film with a series of sinuous plots played by the same four women. I do not know if this is innovation or sheer indulgence, but it is a cinematic achievement any way you choose to look at it and it is like nothing I have ever seen before. An El Pampero Cine film is not like streaming an episodic series on Netflix, although La Flor is available for streaming in episodes and probably the only way you will be able to watch it is like I did, in small increments. I offer that it is an immersive and grueling experience. Sometimes that experience can prove to be painfully slow. Antonioni always made immersive, subtle, and challenging films that were quite introspective, and Tarkovsky’s sci-fi epics such as Stalker are difficult, but none of them are likely to challenge the viewers’ attention span like El Pampero Film. Take La Flor, wherein some of the plot lines are resolved and others are not, and there is not always a sense of closure. New Argentine filmmaking is unapologetically demanding. Beginning scenes lasting a large screen time evolve with no dialogue or in the case La Flor, the filmmaker lays out the blueprint of the film before the narratives start. The plots are bizarre, experimental, and provocative. A film like La Flor, covers so many genres including thrillers, spy flicks, and musicals. Many feel that this is what film should be, which is essentially a celebration of film itself.

The sheer ambition of La Flor including the genre mixing, the metanarratives, and the eschewing the traditional narrative as well as the bloated run time reminded me of David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006). However, El Pampero Cine opts to avoid out -and -out surrealism in the favor of less self-conscious narrative tasks.

Laura Citarella tells Samuel Brodsky in Filmmaker Magazine:

“On the one hand, it starts with the core belief that there is no ‘standard’ way of making a film. Films are not static and repeatable structures, and our job is to believe a lot in the possibility that each film reinvents not only its fictional universe and its internal logics, but also its own way of being produced, of being thought of, and ultimately getting made.”[vi]

If cinema is truth 24-frames-per second according to Godard, then Citarella and her cohorts have invented a new way to illuminate truth through stylized and innovative approaches to narrative such as Trenque Lauquen Part I, which is, at its core, a thriller, but by no means conventional. Again, run times of Pampero films appear ostentatious, but if the narratives earn it, then so be it! Pampero films may infuriate and fascinate simultaneously. However, it is a worthwhile journey for any film aficionado.

Citarella also said in Filmmaker Magazine that, “Nobody makes a film at Pampero without the rest seeing it and without the rest being able to give their opinion, so it is set up as a form of work, of constant exchange.”[vii] This is such an intriguing aesthetic concept. It is obviously not new. However, essentially what the filmmakers are doing is workshopping their films and continuously learning as if they were still in film school. They are actively producing films that are continuously being created and reworked.

El Pampero Cine’s Dossier proclaims:

More than just a simple production company, it is a group of people keen to bring experimentation and innovation to the procedures and practices involved in making cinema in Argentina. As part of the formidable rebirth known as Nuevo Cine Argentino, bringing with it films like Mundo Grúa by Pablo Trapero, La libertad and Los muertos by Lisandro Alonso, and Los guantes mágicos by Martín Rejtman, the output of El Pampero Cine has seen some of the most original and celebrated films of the last ten years. Films which have taken innovation to practically all areas of film activity.

If you have not heard of El Pampero Cine films, you are probably not alone. Although they have won hearts and minds all over the world and won numerous awards at Film Festivals they still are a fringe film surge, and the material and subjects are still marginalized. Many of these films can be found on streaming services and I am grateful for this. I had first encountered El Pampero Cine after reading the interview quoted in this article with Laura Citarella in Senses of Cinema.

New Argentine Cinema lends itself to comparison with numerous other movements for example Dogme ‘95, New American Cinema, and of course New Latin American cinema. El Pampero Cine is revolutionizing cinema as we know it and this revolution is not being shown enough. Slowly, but surely New Argentine films will take their place where they belong as some of the freshest and most innovative in the world.

Films

• Un Andantino (Alejo Moguillansky, 2023)

• Clorindo Testa (Mariano Llinás, 2022)

• Trenque Lauquen (Laura Citarella, 2022)

• Clementina (Constanza Feldman / Agustín Mendilaharzu, 2022)

• La Edad Media / The Middle Ages (Luciana Acuña / Alejo Moguillansky, 2022)

• Corsini interpreta a Blomberg y Maciel (Mariano Llinás, 2021)

• Concierto para la Batalla de El Tala / Concert for the Battle of El Tala (Mariano Llinás, 2021)

• La Noche Submarina / The Submarine Night (Diego H. Flores, Alejo Moguillansky, Fermín Villanueva, 2020)

• Un día de caza / A Hunting Day (Alejo Moguillansky, 2020)

• Lejano interior / Far Interior (Mariano Llinás, 2020)

• Las Poetas visitan a Juana Bignozzi (Laura Citarella / Mercedes Halfon, 2019)

• Por el Dinero / For the money (Alejo Moguillansky, 2019)

• La Flor / The Flower (Mariano Llinás, 2018)

• La vendedora de fósforos / The Little Match Girl (Alejo Moguillansky, 2017)

• La Mujer de los Perros / Dog Lady (Laura Citarella / Verónica Llinás, 2015)

• El Escarabajo de oro / The Golden Bug (Alejo Moguillansky / Fia-Stina Sandlund, 2014)

[i] “The Many Facets of New Argentine Cinema.” MUBI, 6 Sept. 2017,

[ii] Ibid

[iii] Sarrafi, Hamed. A Cinematic Sojourn to the Land of Awe and Astonishment: Interview with Laura Citarella about El Pampero Cine and Trenque Lauquen – Senses of Cinema. 7 Oct. 2011.

[iv] “The Many Facets of New Argentine Cinema.” MUBI, 6 Sept. 2017

[v] ibid

[vi] Brodsky, Samuel. “The Pampero Cinematic Universe: 20 Films in 20 Years – Filmmaker Magazine.” Filmmaker Magazine | Publication with a Focus on Independent Film, Offering Articles, Links, and Resources., 28 Apr. 2023

[vii] Sarrafi, Hamed. A Cinematic Sojourn to the Land of Awe and Astonishment: Interview with Laura Citarella about El Pampero Cine and Trenque Lauquen – Senses of Cinema. August 2023.

[1] “The Many Facets of New Argentine Cinema.” MUBI, 6 Sept. 2017,

[1] Ibid

[1] Sarrafi, Hamed. A Cinematic Sojourn to the Land of Awe and Astonishment: Interview with Laura Citarella about El Pampero Cine and Trenque Lauquen – Senses of Cinema. 7 Oct. 2011.

[1] “The Many Facets of New Argentine Cinema.” MUBI, 6 Sept. 2017

[1] ibid

[1] Brodsky, Samuel. “The Pampero Cinematic Universe: 20 Films in 20 Years – Filmmaker Magazine.” Filmmaker Magazine | Publication with a Focus on Independent Film, Offering Articles, Links, and Resources., 28 Apr. 2023

[1] Sarrafi, Hamed. A Cinematic Sojourn to the Land of Awe and Astonishment: Interview with Laura Citarella about El Pampero Cine and Trenque Lauquen – Senses of Cinema. August 2023.

Editor's Pick, Fiction, short story, Writing Fuel

Tomato

by sarahdavies • May 13, 2024May 13, 2024

Her plot really belonged to an old art college friend, but he had gallery representation now, didn’t have time to keep it up, he said, did she want it, and she said yes, nothing to lose, I’ll give it a go. There was a five-year waiting list so she kept it on the down low, didn’t talk to the other allotment-holders in case they busted her. He warned her about the weeds but how bad could it be, she thought. The time outside would be good for her. Fresh air, a bit of physical work. After so long off work, it was something constructive, unpretentious. She bought a second-hand fork and a spade, and a book with step-by-step advice about how to cultivate crops through the seasons. It was early Spring – a good time.

At first, everything there looked dead. Shit, she thought, what have I got myself into, I can’t do this. She was wrung out, a dry, ragged dishcloth of a person. There were six beds, a few straggly bushes. She began in March with the biggest bed. Gave it a good dig: turned over all the hard, downstomped earth, and it looked better right away, like it was ready to start growing something. That made her feel good. She didn’t really know what she was doing, but she liked the idea of making things grow strong and tall, so she thought she’d put in longstemmed, determined things, climbers. Things that would take. She decided she’d count the weeks, from the day she started planting.

From week one, she was pretty sure there was a man living there, a stone’s throw from her plot, in a bright yellow tent part-hidden by brambles. Every time she was there, he’d pop out of the undergrowth and make her jump. He’ll get kicked out by the council, she thought, but I’m not dobbing him in, I’m illegal too.

Things got going in week five, April. In that month last year, according to a cheerful app she used to have on her phone, it was the size of a sesame seed.

She went twice, three times a week if she felt strong enough – and every time, she didn’t want to leave, stayed as long as possible, weeding and digging, so absorbed she forgot the time. She felt safe there, away from her flat, the busy street, the honking traffic. There were just gentleswishing leaves and chirping birds, it was peaceful and still. She nestled there, at one remove from home, two removes from work, three removes from everything else, layers of protection. She thought about Edgar. He’d laugh if he could see her here, in nature. How wholesome, he might say, sardonic, and then his eyes would be drawn by the bit of skin between her tshirt and the sides of her dungarees.

The weeds didn’t seem too bad, there weren’t that many. She dug out two more beds and put in bulbs, sowed seeds. The ground was all stony, she found a lot of broken glass, but with great care she picked it out and wrapped it up in newspaper and took it away. There were snails because the ground was still damp from winter. She didn’t like to kill them, didn’t even like touching them, so she got gloves on, gathered them up in a shoebox and shook them out in the park on the way home, which seemed like the nicest thing.

Her energy levels were pretty good, her blood tests came back fine.

In May, everything was so green it hurt her eyes – shades of acid lime – the trees seemed fluorescent, unnatural. She decided the guy in the tent was definitely living there. She went down early one morning to cut the grass with a rented push mower and the noise must have woken him up. He came out and stood there looking at her for about five minutes, but she pretended not to notice him. She had on sunglasses and kept her head down, but through the dark lenses she uptrained her eyeballs to watch him turn his back and piss into a watering can.

By week seven, the weeds were coming up a bit – it must be the time of year, she thought – so she spent a whole day there hand-pulling them. She ached by evening, and got home too late and too tired to do anything except order takeaway and watch 24 Hours in A&E.

The next morning, she woke early from a dream about the studio. It had been months, and she missed it – it was the one job she’d had that she enjoyed. Edgar had said to take as long as she needed, told her to keep in touch, but she knew that after this long, he’d probably be onto someone else. Most likely the new girl, though the new girl seemed to have her wits about her, she thought as she grabbed a banana, threw it in a bag and left.

The weeds were an invasive kind that could regenerate from tiny fragments of leaf, stem or root, she’d read – so you had to get all of it out, take it away, ideally burn it. She pulled a couple of buckets from the shed, and filled them with the green fronds and black rope-like roots that she tugged up, so many that the buckets weren’t enough, she had to make evil-looking piles of the stuff on the grass. Lying there in small uniform heaps, they were like witchy offerings, like something from a gallery installation.

It was two, perhaps three hours before she straightened up to get her breath back, and started back with a yelp – a large fox was crouching on the roof of her shed, not ten feet away, watching her, steadily. At her cry, it bounded down, scrabbleclawing wood. It turned and met her eye again, as if checking that she wasn’t going to be the one to leave, before vanishing. She sat for a minute, jangled, before tuning in to the rattle of her stomach, ripcording like a petrol-powered lawnmower, and remembering her banana. She forced a few bites, and as she chewed, she thought about the fox, wondered where it made its den. Whether at night, the man in the tent heard the foxes mating. She’d heard foxes at it, once, and almost phoned the police – she’d thought a child was being murdered. To her it was the sound of chaos unleashed, reality tearing at the seams, the worst thing she could imagine. She wondered if it sent chills through the man as he lay awake under the thin nylon. Whether he ever woke up crying.

This time last year, illustrated by cartoon fruit in the app, with googly eyes and grin, it had been the size of a blueberry.

By June, she’d read up some more, and learned a series of strategies for tackling the weeds: the first was to cover them up for months at a time, starving them of light and oxygen – weakening, suppressing them. Alternatively, she could pull them up, just like she’d been doing, though she’d read that digging might make them worse – tools could chop roots and leave bits in the ground that would sprout back. The final way was to use chemicals; unwise, if she wanted to eat whatever she grew. And she might. So she covered some of the beds with old, flattened cardboard boxes, weighed them down with bricks. The rest she kept tending, plucking all the weeds from the surface, and she couldn’t help it, even if it wasn’t for the best, she went down with her spade, six inches, a foot, and wrenched out their snaking roots. As she worked she made a mental list of her enemies, the people whose lives she could infect with the weeds if she found some ingenious way to do it. She’d read that some were so invasive they’d grow through floorboards, devalue homes – that if they got under your house you might never sell it.

For the rest of that month she went almost every day, and it started flourishing – became viable, she thought. Her strawberry plants grew bushy and their swelling fruits ripened; her sweetpeas started to creep up the bamboo tripods she’d stuck in. She started getting angry enough with the snails that ate the red berries to start flinging the bastards into a bucket of water to drown, or squashing them underfoot with a shudder. She took home plastic bags full of the holey fruit, determined not to waste it. She washed the slime off, ate them in front of a show called Medical Mysteries. One night, it was about a man with testicles so huge they dangled to his knees so he couldn’t walk and had to have surgery. She dozed in the screen’s lurid light, breathing a strawberrysweet scent into the warm air of the room as she drifted among visions of monstrously appendaged men who trailed shimmering goo as they moved.

It got hotter, and there was less rain, so she needed to go more often to water everything and keep cutting the grass that grew and grew, and to deal with the weeds, which grew even faster, even without water. She stared at them, incredulous – why were they so much more alive than everything else? She dug a shallow trench for a row of bean seedlings, and as she exposed the cool depths of the soil, she went cold. The roots were everywhere. It was as though they knew they had to stay underground, but were multiplying there, covertly. Her skin prickled as she hacked at them, twisting and prising them out of the dark earth and casting them into a huge pail. For a split second, as she dumped in a freshdug batch, she saw them writhe like eels, and brought one ragebooted foot down inside the bucket – stamping – fuckers! She was stronger now, the empty feeling was filling in, and she was glad to have this project, this distraction. She was wresting control. She’d learned that leeks had to be blanched, peas trained, rhubarb forced. She used string, wire, canes. A different kind of art.

As everything grew, she began measuring it all. The tomato plants got to ninety centimetres; her beans only ten before the snails devoured them. The raspberries didn’t grow up so much as out – thirty, forty centimetres across, small flowers attracting bees, then magically transforming into little maroon velvet fruits. She ate them straight off the bush, staining her fingers with their crimson operating-theatre ooze.

At the end of the ninth week, she counted fifty ruined strawberries, saw the size of the pile they made, perfection spoiled, and the fury rose in her. She searched the culprits out, twenty-three of them, from their hiding places, lined them up on an old plank and waited until they peeped out, extended their tiny headnecks, antennae. She took a closeup photo of the biggest one, sent it to Edgar. She pictured him opening the message at the studio; knew he’d be fascinated by it, by the seeping grey membranes. He’d look at it again in private, she thought, it would probably turn him on. She knelt very still, watching as the creatures began to move, and felt a horrible thrill fizz through her body as a couple were swooped on by crows. With their beaks, the birds struck the molluscs against the wood, cracking their shells and downgulping the soft bodies. With a grim smile, she stood and clapped to scare the crows away, then took an old half brick and in a kind of controlled frenzy, smashed the rest of the snails one by one, crushing them to a terrible paste, not flinching, not even when slime flew into her face. When she was done, she sat back, satisfied, and saw the man from the tent, staring at her from across the way, with an uncertain look. She waved at him and wiped her spattered cheek with her sleeve.

This time last year, it was the size of a grape.

That night she watched two old episodes of Bodyshock: one about a woman so morbidly obese that a wall of her house had to be bulldozed to get her out to take her to hospital; and another about a little girl who cried tears of blood. As she drowsed on the sofa, she thought about the man in the tent, and what he might be doing at that moment. She began dreaming, and he was cooking escargot in a pot on a fire. She saw them inside his mouth, slurpsliding down his gullet, and then she was inside the half-ton woman, as the gastric bypass unfolded in ghastly technicolour. Slippery tubes pulsed fluid – mucous, liquid-secretions. The history of medicine that she’d studied at school was conjured up again in fragments: the four humours in all their bile-wet glory and dreadful imbalance. Surgical instruments danced through innards, probing, glinting, refracting imaginary light off the insides of her resting, twitching eyelids.

In week twelve, after a dry spell, she decided to take a look under the suppressing cardboard. She lifted the stones and peeled it back; it was starting to disintegrate, trying to become part of the soil. It didn’t come easily, because it was attached to the ground by weird pinkish tendrils that were piercing the card and growing through it. Starved of light, they were alien-coloured and weak, but they were alive. They grew horizontally – dragging themselves blindly across the flattened ground, groping for space where there was none: zombie shoots. She got near to the ground for a closer look. These mutants were worse than the green, healthy weeds. With a gloved hand she plucked at some and they snapped, rubbery – they were still strong, still well anchored deep underground. The underside of the cardboard, which she was holding up near her face as she peered beneath, was stuck with dozens of inch-long orange slugs. She lurched back and kicked the cardboard away. They sat, juicy and dumb, clustered in groups, doing what, having slug orgies?

As she composed herself, something neon-yellow caught her eye from fifty feet. It was the man’s tent. It looked bigger. She frowned. Surely it wasn’t a new tent. Maybe he’d cut back the brambles and she could just see more of it. Idiot, she thought – he’s making himself conspicuous. She fleetingly felt sorry for the man, who must be homeless. How sad, how awful. But then she bundled her compassion into a ball, threw it in the shed and padlocked it. We’re all discarded in the end, she thought. In this month last year, it was the size of a lime, and that reminded her to buy some limes, and also some more gin, on the way home.

That night she watched an episode called The girl with eight limbs, and afterward slept only fitfully, on the sofa, sweating through a nightmare about a many-tentacled, grasping creature, following her as she walked the white-walled rooms of an exhibition.

On the hottest day of the year, she worked the hardest she’d ever, and listened to music on her headphones, which brought her alive. Devo, Television, Depeche Mode, her favourites. She even caught herself singing along. Her skin had darkened in the sun and her flattened cardboard boxes had done the opposite, they were a bleached out dusty grey. She was thin now, but her freckled arms and legs were strong and supple. She harvested fruit, summer vegetables, admired the tendrilcurls of her peas, the winding stems now all the way up the tripods. She’d done this, without any help, with her own hands, her own body. And the best thing was the beefsteak tomato, perfectly ripe: an heirloom variety, skin ridged and puckered like scar tissue, deep orange and purple striped, six inches in diameter. An inch for every month of last year’s project. And yielding from its stem on this day in late August, a day that might mark a year since the day that may have been. She didn’t need to cut the tomato, it came easily away with the gentlest tug, into her ready cupped hands. She rubbed its leaves and inhaled the deep green scent that smelled to her like a warm sleeping body. She wasn’t sure what she was going to do with it, she couldn’t imagine eating it. So she sat down in the grass, which was growing long again, and cradled the fruit tenderly with interlaced fingers, careful not to puncture its taut belly. It was heavy. She’d take it home and weigh it, she thought. Maybe look up a way to preserve it – make this miraculous, fleeting thing last longer. She took a photo, which was another way of canning or bottling it, she reflected, capturing it forever like a specimen in a jar, and after only a moment’s hesitation, she sent the picture to Edgar.

Rialto Rendezvous

by Litro Magazine • May 2, 2024May 2, 2024

If we arrange to meet in Venice, where would you suggest? Outside St Mark’s Cathedral might seem the obvious place, but hectic and not very relaxing with crowds of tourists in constant motion. Outside the fascist front of the railway station? Convenient, perhaps, but once again, swarms of visitors arriving and leaving, and not very atmospheric. Which leaves the Rialto Bridge, heart of the city’s activity, where we can lean out and watch gondolas, motor launches, and barges pass beneath on the Grand Canal. Although a great many people are crossing the bridge, they aren’t all tourists, and a lot of those, like us, are standing still soaking in the ambience.

The Rialto Bridge, then. The Riva Alto, ‘high bank’, the oldest part of the city where refugees from the crumbling Roman empire hammered in poplar stakes to reclaim a marsh. Perhaps the most evocative symbol of Venice. So familiar we hardly question it as an icon. But let us stand back down beside the canal—on the Riva del Vin, say, near the church of San Silvestro—and assess the bridge in terms of design. How does it measure up?

The sloping rows of arches are what we notice first. They’re set back from the balustrade of the walkway and have an air of not belonging to the bridge structure itself. The balustrade, with its rows of stone balusters and small brackets, is heavily patterned. The plainness of the arches is a stylistic mismatch. The arches of the Ponte Vecchio in Florence are, to me, much more satisfying. The columns supporting the arches grow naturally out of the parapet edging the walkway, which in turn grows out of the bridge structure beneath, all in the same dark stone.

To further the comparison: at the springing points of the arches of the Ponte Vecchio there’s a change of material from stone to plaster, celebrated by modest column heads. The Rialto arches are bland cutouts from unexceptional stonework. They look like one of those printed lengths of pattern provided for collage, snipped to length and too long to be lacking punctuation. The Ponte Vecchio arches have a clear formal relationship with the curve of the span below. The Rialto Bridge arches have none. Also I long to see, in the areas of blank wall between the heads of the arches, glazed terra cotta medallions like those by Andrea della Robbia on the Ospedale degli Innocenti in Florence.

And the skyline? It would be unfair to compare the straight edge of the Rialto Bridge roof with the fishtailed Ghibbelline merlons and crenels of the Ponte Scaligero in Verona. The Ponte Scaligero is part of a large defensive structure. But I love the way those battlements reach up to embrace the clouds. The bland roof of the Rialto Bridge ignores the sky. One could say the roof of the Ponte Vecchio is bland, but that bridge, with its outgrowth of homes, is more domestic than civic despite its fame. The Rialto Bridge is nothing if not civic. It ought, if not to embrace the sky, at least shake hands with it.

If the long sloping roofs don’t do that, surely the central feature should. But its pitched roof also ignores the sky, and its eaves relate awkwardly to the curves of the long roofs. To me this feature is just another piece of collage which bears little relation to the rest, either in its style or its abrupt juxtaposition. In musical terms, its relation to the long rows of arches is like a key change without common-chord modulation. And a final comment on this part of the bridge: to me the stonework above the centre of the main span doesn’t look deep enough.

And yet—the Rialto Bridge is an icon. Seen lit at night against darkness it seems magical, like fairy lace. You think, Ah! How can this be, despite all my strictures?

I think when an image is seen over and over there’s a brainwashing effect. Familiarity trumps criticism. To be reproduced so often on brochures and souvenirs, to be a magnet for tourists, to somehow be Venice, the bridge must surely be something fine? There’s a parallel in the field of graphic design. Many corporate logos are excellent, but many are clunky and ill-balanced, yet the constant repetition of the latter can hypnotise our perception. (The clumsy logo for the 2012 London Olympics is a good example.)

So my censure is unwelcome. I’m like the fastidious diner who undermines the enjoyment of his companions by saying the sauce is a soupçon too rich or the green beans just a little too limp. Most visitors to Venice love the Rialto Bridge. Though I sympathise with one who said it was overcrowded with tourists, boats, and surrounding shops, and hence not romantic.

If I invite you to rendezvous there I’ll suggest the quiet of the night, when we see it lit up like fairy lace, insubstantial.

By AlexBarr

Hometown in Accent

by Xie Hong • May 2, 2024May 2, 2024

One morning as I was writing on the computer, I heard a sudden cry from outside my window. It was someone screaming for help.

“I want to see you, my grandson!”

My thoughts interrupted, I was shocked and my heart was beating at a quickened pace.

The cry was lasting, and annoying. It was an elderly Chinese woman’s voice, something very familiar to me. I moved out of my chair and walked close to the window, curious to find out what was happening.

An old Chinese woman was standing in front of my neighbor’s door. She was about sixty, with short gray hair, dressed in faded clothes and khaki trousers. She was crying and furiously knocking on the door. No one answered.

After a while, her cries ran out and she just squatted there. I decided to go out to give her a hand. She looked at me with a shocked expression as I approached.

“Chinese?!” She asked me. There was a gleam in her eyes. I nodded.

“What can I do for you?” I asked.

She quickly stood up and grabbed my hand. It made me feel uneasy, but I could say nothing.

She burst out crying again. There was a strange feeling that morning. I almost panicked, worrying about a misunderstanding with my neighbors. I tried to calm her down.

“Please, tell me what has happened!”

She only kept whining, “I want to see my grandson.”

I tried to get out from her hand, and then she noticed and released me.

She sobbed, “Comrade, you must help me!”

I seemed to be her only chance. She poured out her story. Maybe she spoke too quickly, or her story was too crazy, but I was still panicking and just couldn’t put together the pieces. I think got the key points, though: she wanted to speak to the house owner, and she wanted to visit her grandson.

I tried to calm myself down, and knocked on the door, asking if anyone was inside. But no one replied. So I invited her to my house to see if I could help her.

As she headed to my house, she kept repeating her story.

“Please, take a seat,” I said once we were inside my house, passing a cup of water to her.

“Cold!” she said to me.

Oh, I forgot Chinese people are used to drinking hot water. I filled the kettle and boiled the water. She continued her story while sitting in my sofa.

Soon, I passed her the cup of hot water.

“Too hot!” she snapped, as if stung by bees.

“Sorry!” I said, and suggested she put the cup on table. She did so, while still talking during the entire time. I listened but said nothing.

Because she repeated her story over and over, eventually I got the whole picture. The house’s owners were her daughter and son-in-law. She desired a visit with her lovely grandson. She hadn’t been seen him for several weeks, and missed him so much.

I had seen the couple on occasion, and thought about the nice boy in the mother’s arms.

Suddenly, the old lady asked me, “Are you listening?” I nodded. “Do you agree with me?” she asked.

What could I say? I just tried to comfort her with, “I think you will be able to see your grandson after they come back home.”

“But they didn’t let me in!”

The old lady complained more and more. What could I do? I lent my ears to her, encouraging her to think about the kindnesses that her daughter had done for her over the years.

I felt tired and yawned several times; I was used to taking a short nap at about noon.

“I’m sorry about that.”

She stopped talking to me and stood up from the sofa. I felt sorry for her then.

“You can phone me,” I told her, and wrote down my number.

She was excited and thanked me for my consideration.

“If they were you…,” she seemed ready to burst out crying again.

Dread appeared on my face. She noticed, toned down, and shook my hand.

“It will be better,” I said to her.

I lay in bed after she left, but couldn’t get to sleep. I thought about her story, putting it all together again. After I got up, I couldn’t concentrate on my writing any more. Time passed, and the evening came. My wife Sue returned home, and cooked dinner in the kitchen.

I didn’t tell her the old lady’s story, because I still felt very tired and confused. Sue was exhausted after work, and I didn’t want to annoy her. She didn’t pay attention to my yawning, and just focused on cooking.

Years ago, she used to kill time and loneliness by cooking, even sending emails to me from New Zealand to China saying, “Cooking cures my homesickness.”

One day while I was gardening, my neighbor the husband went to his mailbox. I decided to walk up to him and say hello.

He smiled and replied, “How are you?”

I told him that the Chinese woman had visited his house. His smile iced up, and a dour expression covered his face. I slowly realized what was happening, but I was still somewhat confused.

I thought perhaps my broken English was unable to clearly express what I was trying to say. I felt my face burn, and I couldn’t continue.

The man unceremoniously took his mail and returned to his house. In the meantime, his Chinese wife appeared to say hello to me. It seemed there was a chance for me to turn the situation around.

So I said hello back to her in Chinese, and she smiled. When I told her that an old Chinese lady had been here, her smile quickly disappeared and she didn’t say anything else, quietly returning to her house.

I couldn’t figure out what on earth could be wrong. Was it because of my broken English? But what about my Chinese? Maybe it was because I am a Cantonese from the south, and she’s a northern lady? But we both understood Mandarin, even if I had a different accent.

My own wife and I had moved to the neighborhood only one week before, so I wasn’t very familiar with the neighbors. There was still much to learn. I wanted to figure out what was happening, so on the weekend I questioned my wife about it. She had no idea. She said to leave it alone—it’s not our business.

I felt bored with it after a while, and continued my writing. Then, one day, the phone rang. Someone spoke to me in Chinese, saying, “They didn’t listen to me!”

I couldn’t recognize the speaker, so I asked, “Who are you?”

She replied, “I am your Chinese comrade.” I realized it was she, as she told me that she was the old Chinese lady I had met before. “I have been to your home,” she mentioned.

“Oh, I remember,” I said to her.

The woman kept on talking, just like last time. I felt faint, and tried to comfort her, but it was useless.

“You must help me. You are Chinese too—you are my countryman!” She raised her tone hysterically. “If you will not help me, who can help me?” she continued.

She talked too much. I was already tired of it, but she kept going. Suddenly, my cell phone rang loudly. I had to say sorry to her, and hung up the land line. It was my wife Sue on the cell. She asked me to bring a book to her school.

I drove there quickly, and passed the book to her.

“Who were you talking to when I called?” Sue complained.

“A lady,” I replied. Her face turned to another color. So I grinned, and added one more word: “Old!” Sue was a little embarrassed, and relaxed again.

I became upset over the following several days as the old lady constantly phoned me, reporting her new stories and interrupting my writing. I had lost my peaceful writer’s life.

Whenever the phone rang, I wondered if I should answer. If I didn’t answer, I might miss some important messages. If I did, and it was her, then damn!

She reported every conversation and argument she had with her daughter. She said to me, “If you’re my daughter, you should be on my side? Right?” I just listened, never answering. She continued:“Can you guess what she had said to me?”

“No,” I said.

“’Mum, I do really love you,’” she said, mimicking her daughter’s speech. “She loves me? Really? I want to see the proof!”

“Proof?” I was confused.

“She should stand by me!” she shouted over the phone.

“What did your daughter say?”

“She said that she really loves me, but…she loves her husband, too.”

I didn’t know what to say.

One day, I couldn’t help but complain about it to my wife.

“You’ve gotten in trouble?” Sue said, joking at first.

I was not happy. “I’m serious!” I insisted.

Sue simply expressed that I shouldn’t even have given our home phone number to the old lady.

I explained, “I have no experience with these things, I just wanted to help her….”

Sue smiled. “But you didn’t imagine what would happen next.”

She gave me the number to a community at-risk hotline.

“She can get some expert advice there.”

Sue had been a volunteer at the hotline for years—she thought that was good for her to adapt to the local culture.

“We are professionals,” she added.

After I gave the hotline number to the old lady, my home phone still rang sometimes, but we wouldn’t answer. Sue and I made a deal to only use cell phones for a period of time, until the old lady gave up. It worked. Peace returned to my life once more, and I was happy. But it seemed the opposite for Sue.

Every Sunday evening, she returned home from her community hotline work with grey clouds over her face.

“I want to kill them!” she would say while chopping vegetables in the kitchen.

This made me worry about what had happened, but she wasn’t willing to tell me. “Everything is fine,” she’d say, trying to comfort me. She talked about business, but gave no details. I did not believe everything was fine, as the shadows over her face were getting thicker than ever.

One evening, while she was chopping meat, she accidently cut herself. I helped her to wrap her wounded finger, asking what happened. But she kept silent. I had to try to persuade her:

“You need to get some help. You seem like a patient yourself nowadays.”

She did not respond, and only sighed softly. Then she continued to cook.

But she did say more before we went to sleep: “It is all up to you!”

I didn’t understand what she was talking about. I asked her to tell me more, and after several long seconds of silence, she finally told me what had happened.

The old lady had been phoning the hotline. Unfortunately, Sue was the one to answer. She praised Sue for her patience in listening, and from then on the old lady had locked Sue up, and constantly phoned according to Sue’s work schedule.

“In the beginning it was okay, but it’s always getting worse.”

Sue went on to summarize the whole story, which I had missed out on.

The old lady’s daughter came from northern China to study in New Zealand. After graduation she got a job, married a local Kiwi, and their first baby was born. She was very happy, and helped her parents to immigrate to New Zealand. Two generations of families had lived together to take care of a baby. It seemed to be a happy ending!

“But…things got complicated,” Sue said sadly. “Because of the difference between eastern and western cultures, they argued every day.”

For instance, the grandma wanted to dress the baby in bundles of thick coats, but her son-in-law did not agree and said that Kiwi kids should be a little wild and not afraid of cold weather.

Another time she complained about how her daughter went back to work so quickly after giving birth. But the daughter and her husband always ignored the old lady. They argued so much that the daughter had to rent another house for her parents to live in.

“The problem seemed be solved that way.”

“But then, the mother still wanted to visit her grandson.”

“It’s human nature.”

“She still thought she could go to their house all the time.”

The old lady acted like the daughter’s home was also hers. She came without warning—any time she wished. But her son-in-law didn’t even let her in. The old lady wouldn’t go away, and banged on the door, cried, and asked neighbors for help.

Finally, one day the old lady got to her son-in-law and dragged him away by the arm, and in the scuffle her hand was hurt. She burst out crying, claiming to the neighbors that she had been injured by her son-in-law. They suggested she that she go to the doctor for a checkup. Then the doctor wanted to report it to the police.

“He may be arrested,” she told Sue.

The old lady worried about more trouble, so she stopped the doctor from going further: “You can cure my body, but what about my heart?”

Other than prescribe some pain medication, the doctor could do nothing.

Suddenly, Sue stopped her story and yawned widely. I suppose she felt guilty. So I reminded her to go to sleep soon, because she had to get up at 5a.m. the next morning. She held me as she slipped into dreams.

One Sunday morning, I got up at 8a.m., wrote until noon and, feeling hungry, I realized Sue had not gotten up yet. Oh God, I thought. She forgot to go to the community hotline. So I went up to the bedroom to check on her.

“Get up!” I shouted, waking her. She held her pillow and stared at me sleepily. “It’s volunteer time,” I said.

Yawning, she answered, “I’ve quit.”

I was surprised. “Quit? Why?”

Sue patted the bed, pulling me to her: “I want to survive.”

She told me more about the story of the old lady.

The last time she was at the hotline, the old lady had continued phoning her.“My husband wants to divorce with me!” she said.

Sue was surprised, and tried to comfort her by saying maybe her husband was just joking.

The old lady explained, “I just want to see my grandson. He does not support me, and instead complains about how I’m annoying him!” She cried over phone, “I do everything for them, but in the end they all betrayed me!”

“Crying won’t help. Could you please talk to them?”

“I went to their house, but my son-in-law won’t open the door.”

“Maybe you can leave them be for a while? Wait until there’s a better time?”

“I just want to see my grandson, but they won’t ever let me in!”

The old lady repeated herself again and again. Sue gave her suggestions, like waiting and making appointments, and pointed out that adults must do what is best for children.

The old lady cried sadly, “I can’t give up on this. My heart was broken! I don’t even understand English. Could the staff talk to my husband and son-in-law?” Sue said it was impossible. “What can I do now?” The old lady’s cries increased.

“You can talk to the manager face-to-face.”

Sue could do nothing but turn to her manager.

After finishing the story, she sighed and took a deep breath. I joked with her, “You are a trained expert! It’s fine, you can stay home and spend more time with me.”

I kissed her, and tried to go back to my writing.

Suddenly, the phone rang loudly. Sue answered, and then quickly motioned to me and tilted the phone so that I could hear.

I leaned in and listened.

“They’re all unwilling to help me…Just tried to stop me…Oh, I want to talk to Sir Tang? Has he moved out? Oh, you are my comrade, your voice is so familiar, hotline consultant Miss Sue …Yes, you sound so similar… I miss her, such patience.”

“Sorry…I… I am not Miss Sue.”

“Oh…Well, I told her, ‘You are my daughter, forever, I love you.’ She told me that she loves me, too. So I said to her that she must make a choice between her husband and me. She said she can’t make that choice. I said she is my daughter, she should be on my side. We are Chinese!”

Sue couldn’t help replying, “This is New Zealand. Not China.”

The old lady went right on talking: “You are my daughter, this is a fact, no one can change it, even in a foreign country….”

“Keeping these cars working today is much easier than in my uncle’s time,” Tomás said. “The bloqueo stops spare parts coming to Cuba. Now it is easier for our relatives in America to visit Cuba. They can bring back the spare parts that we need. I remember this car was often in the street in front of my uncle’s house on blocks, covered to protect it from the weather, unable to run. When my uncle could not find spark plugs or could not repair something, the car had a rest until he could find the spark plug or do the repair. Today we do not have these problems so much.”

Havana’s Gas Guzzling American Classic Cars

by Litro • May 2, 2024May 2, 2024

Every Cuban guidebook has a gas guzzling American 1950s classic car on its cover. It is a symbol of Cuba.

These 60 to 70-year-old American classic cars, defying the passage of time, symbolize so much else as well.

That they have survived and are here at all symbolizes a time when Cuba and the United States were friends. That they are in their dilapidated state today symbolizes the end of that friendship.

They symbolize the end of Fulgencio Batista’s cruel tyranny and the beginning of the harsh leadership of Fidel Castro.

They symbolize the resilience and innovation of the Cuban people. The United States’ trade embargo preventing the export of spare parts to Cuba, the owners of these gas guzzlers have somehow managed to keep their cars running and on the road.

Centro – Central Havana boasts the largest concentration of these American gas guzzlers.

Scores of them are parked outside the Gran Teatro de La Habana – The Grand Theatre of Havana, and the Hotel Inglaterra. All convertibles. All restored. All brightly colored blues, reds, greens, and even pinks. Their lines and curves are striking. Their shiny chrome glints in the bright sunshine. These are tourist taxis. Their owners buff them and polish their chrome, waiting for a hirer to come along.

Parked outside El Capitolio – the Capital Building, are scores more. Their paintwork is dull. Their chrome does not sparkle. These are the unrestored cars used by Cubans. Some are colectivos – share taxis.

The models have familiar names: Buicks, Cadillacs, Chevrolets, Chryslers, Dodges, and Fords.

Some models like Packards and Plymouths are near-extinct.

These American relics on wheels evoke a romanticism of yesteryear.

I was photographing a bright fire engine red convertible Chevrolet. The sun shone down brightly on its polished panels, reflecting its high sheen. The bodywork was flawless. Made to be admired from every angle, I took a picture from every angle. Its fins were stunning. Whoever thought to put fins on a car? I wondered.

“You like my car,” a voice behind me asked.

“It’s a beautiful car,” I replied. “You look after it so well.”

“Thank you. Would you like to come for a ride in it?” The man asked.

This was a tourist taxi, amongst the best restored and most attractive of the American gas guzzlers. For a steep tourist price you can be driven around Havana in a classic 1950s convertible for a half-hour. The driver will tell you about his car, and the sights along the way.

“You work so hard on your car. You should relax. I will drive your car. You can sit in the front, or stretch out in the back, relaxed. Which do you prefer?”

He laughed. Perhaps my suggestion was not as original as I thought.

“You are the visitor, señor” he smiled. “It is my responsibility to help you experience my city. You must be the one relaxed. I will do the work.”

“How long have you had this beautiful car,” I asked.

“This car belonged to my uncle. My grandfather bought it new, in 1957. He gave it to my uncle. My uncle gave it to me 5 years ago when he died.”

“Did you restore it?” I wondered.

“Oh yes. For my uncle this car was practical. When it needed a new coat of paint, he painted it with a brush. The brushstrokes were ugly. I sanded the panels back to remove all the paint. Back to the bare metal. My friend is a spray-painter. He made a few repairs to the panels and spray-painted this new finish. A friend of his repaired the dashboard. Parts of the dashboard are new. This new white leather upholstery was made by a leatherworker here in Havana.”

“How is it possible to keep a car like this repaired for so many years,” I asked.

“It is very difficult. The American bloqueo stops the export of spare parts to Cuba,” he said.

The bloqueo – blockade is how Cubans refer to the American embargo.

“So, how are these cars kept running?”

“First, we use the parts of cars no longer on the road. If that is not possible, very clever mechanics will improvise. They will find a different solution. Or they will make the part themselves. If an engine has many problems, the whole engine is replaced. A long time ago they were replaced with diesel engines from Czechoslovakia. Now they are replaced with Japanese engines. It is much easier to obtain parts for Japanese engines.”

These American time machines are not admired for their authenticity. Under the hood of most there is not much of that left. Mostly they are admired for their attractiveness. They are also admired for the Frankensteinian passion and determined inventiveness of their owners and mechanics.

“Many of these cars have Japanese engines?” I repeated, unsure if that is what he had said.

“About one-half of our American cars have Japanese engines. My car still has its original engine,” he said as he went over to the hood and lifted it.

Sections of the engine looked elderly. Other sections looked very new – polished chrome in fact.

“Almost all the engine is original or has original parts from other cars. A few sections are new parts. My cousin in New York gets spare parts in America, some new, some used, and he brings them to me when he visits.”

“Stunning. Absolutely stunning. OK, let’s go for a ride,” I said as I walked to the driver’s side of the car, holding out my hand for the keys.

“You can get in on this side if you would like, but you must sit on the other side,” he laughed.

I laughed as I opened the driver’s side door and sat in the driver’s seat. “This is a big car,” I said, as I slid over to the passenger seat.

“My name is Philip,” I introduced myself.

“Tomás,” he said as he turned the ignition.

The engine did not purr. It throbbed and growled. A quietly purring Japanese engine would have emasculated this car.

We drove along the Malecon. The air was sweet and salty. Handsome fifties finned relics sped along in both directions.

“The restored cars are almost always tourist taxis, like this car,” Tomás explained.

“Would you like to pay a visit to my mechanic,” Tomás asked. “He lives in Vedado. His workshop is at his house.”

“Sure, let’s do that,” I replied.

We arrived at an apartment block in a residential street in Vedado. Opposite was a sprawling three level decaying mansion. Next to it was another, equally crying out desperately for restoration. They had known better days. The apartment block, once modern and attractive, was plain. A driveway sloped down under the apartment building. Tomás walked down the driveway and waved at me to follow.

“Tony,” he called. “Are you here?”

We turned towards the metallic sound of tools clanging on the concrete floor. Tony emerged from under a Buick.

“Hola Tomás,” Tony replied. “Good to see you.”

“Come, let me introduce you to my friend Philip. Philip, this is Antonio. We call him Tony. In Cuba we have very good mechanics. Tony is the best.”

“I’m pleased to meet you, Tony.” Mechanics don’t shake hands when they’re working. Judging by the grime on Tony’s hands, he had been hard at work.

“Welcome to my little shop,” Tony said.

The “little shop” was the huge basement of the apartment building. The not unpleasant smell of oil and gasoline permeated. Five giant American gas-guzzling cars were in varying stages of disassembly, and there was still plenty of room. Shelving lined two walls. They were full of car parts. Some large. Some tiny in small drawers. What looked like a whole engine was in a corner. Next to it rested what looked like a regularly cannibalized engine.

A sedan with its roof removed was transformed into a convertible. Tourists preferred to ride in a convertible so they could soak in the Havana sights from all angles.

“Tony is an improviser,” Tomás explained. “If he does not have a part, and cannot get one, he improvises. My carburetor is not a Chevrolet carburetor. It came from a Russian tractor. Tony made it fit. It has worked now for almost five years. It will probably work forever.

“We have to improvise,” Tony explained “It is best to get the proper part. But so often we cannot get the proper part. Then we must improvise.”

“Ofelia, we have guests,” Tony called out through a doorway. “Can you make three expressos please?”

“How do you get parts like brake pads, or gaskets and seals?” I asked.

“I make them when I need them,” Tony said.

“There must be hard to get parts, like a piston,” I said

“If I don’t have the right one, and I can’t get one, I’ll used whatever piston I do have or can get and I will machine it and grind it until it fits perfectly,” Tony said modestly.

Ofelia came down to the garage and left a tray.

“Gracias Ofelia,” Tony called. “Ofelia is my youngest daughter. She makes the best expresso.”

On the tray were three small expressos, three small glasses of water, and three shot glasses of ron – rum – what else?

The belching roar of another gas guzzler came from the street as it approached. It stopped in front of the driveway. All we could see were its tyres, their rim a striking white.

“Ofelia, we have another guest. Can you make one more expresso please?” Tony called out.

A large man walked down the driveway.

“Hola, Tony,” he called.

“Hola, Augustin,” Tony responded. Introductions followed.

Ofelia returned with another tray with another shot glass of rum, another expresso, and another water.

“Gracias, querida,” – thank you darling, said Tony.

“I have brought you an exhaust system for that Buick over there,” Augustin said. “My brother sourced one in Indiana. It was new about 5 years ago, so it is not very old.”

“That’s great. Thank you, Augustin,” Tony replied.

“And, look at this,” Augustin said, pulling out a half-liter bottle out of his pocket. “This is brake fluid,” he announced proudly.

Tony’s and Tomás’ reaction told me that brake fluid was a precious commodity.

“Now I can stop using shampoo and can use real brake fluid,” Augustin said. “It is just as well, as I was running out of shampoo.”

For these Cubans, their American gas-guzzling cars were an obsession. They loved them, and they would do anything to keep them on the road.

We sipped rum, sipped expresso, sipped water, and reflected on the survival of 1950s American classic cars.

By Philip Mendes

Arts & Culture, Essays, Travel&Lifestyle

Concordia Summit 2024: A Pivotal Moment for Climate Action and Regional Collaboration

by Eric Akoto • May 2, 2024May 2, 2024

Harnessing Regional Unity for Climate Resilience

The 2024 Concordia Summit in Miami emerged as a cornerstone event, significantly shaping discourse on climate change, particularly focusing on its impact on the Caribbean and the broader Western Hemisphere. The summit not only addressed key global challenges but also unveiled strategic partnerships aimed at fostering sustainable solutions, such as the notable Concordia Amazonas Initiative.

At the heart of the summit was an urgent dialogue on climate change, where the unique vulnerabilities of the Caribbean were spotlighted. The region, known for its picturesque landscapes, faces dire threats from rising sea levels and increasingly severe weather events due to global warming. The summit’s discussions emphasized the necessity for comprehensive strategies to enhance the resilience of these island nations.

A highlight of the summit was the announcement of a strategic partnership between Concordia and CrossBoundary Group’s Fund for Nature, centering around the Concordia Amazonas Initiative. This collaboration aims to channel financing into nature-based projects that are crucial for preserving the Amazon rainforest—a vital component of the global climate solution. Former Colombian President Iván Duque, a key figure in this initiative, remarked on the partnership’s potential to significantly contribute to biodiversity protection and sustainable regional development.

The summit’s focus extended to innovative solutions for climate action, including the promotion of green hydrogen and other renewable energy sources, positioning Latin America and the Caribbean as potential leaders in non-conventional energy. The discussions underscored the importance of integrating market-led approaches to ensure economic viability alongside environmental sustainability.

The newly formed alliance between Concordia and the Fund for Nature is particularly poised to address the funding gap in high-integrity carbon projects. Kate Wharton of CrossBoundary highlighted the critical need for investment in nature-based solutions, which currently receive a scant portion of global climate finance. This partnership is set to spearhead efforts to enhance access to capital for projects that not only mitigate climate impact but also bolster biodiversity and support local communities in the Amazon biome.

Furthering its commitment, the Concordia Amazonas Summit is scheduled to take place in Guyana, offering a platform for continued dialogue and action among leaders from various sectors. This summit aims to identify and implement scalable, sustainable solutions that could model effective climate action across the globe.

Given the unique nature and high stakes of the upcoming Amazonas Summit, Concordia has expressed that participation will be curated to ensure a focused and impactful gathering, with opportunities for partnerships and sponsorships to amplify support for the program.

A Call to Action for Collective Effort

The 2024 Concordia Summit served as a compelling call to action, reminding us of the urgent need for coordinated efforts to address climate change. The establishment of the Concordia Amazonas Initiative and its strategic partnerships exemplifies a proactive approach to tackling these global challenges, with a clear focus on creating measurable impacts.

To learn more visit www.concordia.net enquiries@concordia.net

Arts & Culture, Editor's Pick, Travel&Lifestyle

Road Trip in Serbia: Yes or No

by Tara Goldsmith • April 27, 2024April 27, 2024

Thelma and Louise sprang to mind while we were driving on the E763 towards Zlatibor. In our home movie, the roles were reversed. Instead of us being against the whole world, it seemed the whole world, in this case, Serbia, was against us.

My travel buddy, my Thelma, a friend who I wanted to show the secret places of the country, was Rachel, and she was sitting quietly next to me. She didn’t even DJ our pre-recorded stash of music which we had carefully chosen before setting off. That should have been an early warning sign but I was too engrossed in finding the right route to our chosen destination. The idea of being stuck between two long lorries on a narrow dual carriageway without any traffic signs, full of potholes, unexcepted bends and people, yes people, walking by the side of the busy road like they were on the Champs-Elysees, was a trifle tiresome. Well, terrifying actually.

The first sign that something was wrong was when after two very long hours of avoiding other vehicles we came back to the very same spot we had set off from. Considering there is no road ring around Belgrade, we could have viewed this as an achievement. I asked Rachel if she would like to drive so I could navigate. Her utter horror was reason enough to put me behind the wheel again. I put it down to her being English, with all that driving on the wrong side of the road thing.

For the record, we had been offered GPS but the proud Serbian streak in me refused, as I spoke the language, had a local driving licence and could read the Cyrillic Road signs. The reality was that I had left the country a long time ago, drove only around the city and there were no traffic signs on the roads. If there were any, they were shown just after you needed to decide to turn left or right which is too late without crashing the car. A useful map which was collecting dust showed the whole non-existent country, Yugoslavia, and was written in Cyrillic. It was the size of a table cloth, too big for the car and too full of painful memories to hold.

Google maps on a mobile wasn’t an option. Rachel’s phone would roam and mine was old, pre touch phone, borrowed from my mother in an attempt to give myself a break from social media. The only “GPS” available. apart from sporadic traffic signs, was my sister, from her office in Belgrade.

“Where are you?” She would every so often ask.

“In Kraljevo.”

“What are you doing in Kraljevo?”

Too scared to say that we got ridiculously lost not once but twice, I lied.

“We are having a coffee. A break. And we filled the tank with petrol.”

“How much did you pay for petrol?”

She, my sister, is very meticulous when it comes to paying bills and goes so far to check bar codes on items against the receipt. After reading the amount from the slip in my hand she half smiling, half worried, added:

“Did you go via Negotin?”

Negotin is a charming little town in the east of the country, on the border with Romania, whereas we had wanted to be on the border with Bosnia, in the west, which we were, after zig zagging the country. The petrol bill clearly didn’t lie.

Refreshed, we set off again, hoping for a less stressful drive, with fewer cars, quieter roads through the scenic national park.

Driving on the empty roads through the national park was rejuvenating, and we started to feel like teenagers again. This is how we imagined our road trip through Serbia, stress free, enjoyable, inspirational. Even Rachel managed to put some music on.

Then the road turned into endless bends marked with rough patches, and again with no signs. We stopped occasionally to ask for directions from some lonely man walking in the middle of the road. They answer was the same, “Just drive, you can’t get lost.” Was this the philosophy of the transport department – people can’t get lost, hence no traffic signs?

Running out of cigarettes we decided to stop at a village, its homes scattered across the valley. There were four houses, a decaying school, a bright new church and a shop covering all essentials. A nun in front of us, sensing foreigners, and probably feeling holy and desperate to show the country in a different light from the one covering front pages during the 1990s, nodded at us to go ahead and pay for our goodies. We met her again at the parking place, struck by the outlandish thought that here was a nun who drives. Aren’t they supposed to spend their time praying?

She again gave us priority at the road exit and we again said thank you. While crossing the valley she was following us, quite close, almost touching back of the car. If we had had to stop suddenly, she would have been sitting in our back seat.

The idea of Lewis Hamilton dressed like a nun, driving a country rally across Serbia seemed plausible. She had the attitude, skills, reflexes. The only thing was that road was a far cry from a F1 circuit. Worried that she may be in a hurry, we stopped at the side of the road, letting her pass, but she stopped too. So, we sped up so that we didn’t slow her path to holiness but then she sped up too, enough to be just behind us. We followed the sporadic speed limit, which wasn’t making sense at 20 km/h in the middle of nowhere, probably set for the sake of the local bears, not humans.

Did we acquire a stalker in the shape of a nun? Is this our road horror story? “Killed by a nun.” A movie tittle flashed in front of my eyes.

Somewhere above the valley a monastery appeared, then suddenly ahead a small unpaved road up to it. And then our stalker, our Lewis Hamilton in the shape of a nun, roared the disintegrating car to the limit, overtook, showed us a middle finger, and suddenly swerved into the side road, cutting us up so effectively that we had brake hard. We thought about following her, because she went to the monastery and we could find her and have a chat about dangerous driving. Or report her to the top nun. By the time we had made our decision, we were too far to turn back and make any complaints. We decided to put it down to experience.

Exhausted, without any plan, we stopped in a small place, Bajina Basta, for something to eat and to get a picture of the House on the River Drina which was first featured in National Geographic. When we visited, it looked lonely, surrounded with shallow water, ready to drift away. Far away from all the Insta displays which make you salivate, we felt cheated at not being impressed. As night was drawing in, we made the decision to stay overnight in Mokra Gora, Drvengrad, the private Disneyland made by the movie director Emir Kusturica. The whole movie “Life is a Miracle” is set among verdant hills and all the movie’s props are scattered between houses built in a traditional Serbian style. Walking around gives you a sense of being on the movie set rather than at a 4-star resort. If you are lucky, you may see the director himself, sitting at a table, like any customer, eating his meal, quietly observing his kingdom.

Next day, after a very healthy, homemade Serbian breakfast, we explored the rolling green hills of the south-western part of Serbia, and crossed the River Drina, a political border between Serbia and Bosnia Hercegovina. BiH is a country made of three entities and one of them, occupying the part just across the Drina, belongs to the Serbian people.

If we hadn’t been stopped at the kiosk, upgraded to an official border point, and asked for our passports, we wouldn’t have known that we were in a different country, the one belonging to the ‘Serbs across the Drina’, a term used to differentiate them from Serbs proper or ‘Serbs from Serbia’. In a world where borders are falling like ripe cherries, here in this small corner of Europe they are alive and kicking.

The colour of the River Drina is a pure translucent 50 shades of green. It looks serene and inviting, but later on, when we take the boat ride, we can sense the full force of the undercurrents and wonder how wise it was to take a cruise. The Bridge over the Drina, a monument to the Ottoman Empire and eternally immortalised in the eponymous book by Ivo Andric, a Nobel Laureate for Literature, was still standing, despite every single war, since it was built in 1577. Just looking at it gives you a sense of the heavy burden of turbulent history. Further from the bridge we come across Andricgrad, another Disneyland made by Emir Kusturica, dedicated to the writer Ivo Andric. A famous writer immortalised by a famous director. The idea seems well-intentioned, but the emptiness of the place makes you wonder, why build a ghost town? The offer to take a walking tour in the town itself was politely declined.

The following day we took advantage of our stay and went on a steam train, called Saraganska 8, descending 300 m with the route in the shape of number 8. The charm of the old train, 22 tunnels en-route and 365 water springs, makes the whole road trip worthwhile.

Like everything else in this part of world, if is older than 100 years, it lived through different countries. Saraganska 8 was first built during the Austro- Hungarian Empire, finished in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovens and re- discovered in the Republic of Serbia. Today it’s a tourist attraction often listed as one of the 10 best things to experience in Serbia. Be prepared for a long, winding journey sometimes filled with smog due to all the tunnels. Having said that, the scenery is breathtaking with the most stupendous views of this part of Serbia.

No visit would be complete without a trip out to the jagged natural wonders of Uvac and meeting its famous residents – griffon vultures. Each one is tagged and local rangers can follow their movements. One of them makes a daily trip to Split in Croatia and comes back in the evening. According to the rangers, very helpful and knowledgeable people, lovers of everything “Grifton vulture” some of them can fly as far as Poland. If they fly that far they tend not to fly back, hence the tagging and an operational nightmare to return them. Luckily when it comes to nature there are no borders and one Polish “escapee” was flown on airplane by the Serbian ambassador in Poland with a help of the Polish Government.

The views from the top of the meandering river are mind-blowing, albeit a bit of a health hazard. There is a clear need for sturdy walking boots and a stick, something not mentioned when booking the tour. You should be fit in order to get to the top, otherwise you will spend the whole day on the boat, which is rather unsatisfying.

Nature in this part of Serbia is raw but with an open invitation exuberantly decorated, enough to make you forget all about the hazards of driving. The country’s tangled history is all around and needs a deeper understanding than it is usually accorded, otherwise it just seems confusing, contradictory, alarming. Forget about potholes, narrow roads, mad drivers, lack of signs, just be open minded and a road trip in Serbia can be an incredible experience.

Arts & Culture, Editor's Pick, Fiction

Like Gold

by Amanda Tien • April 21, 2024April 21, 2024

She wakes up, jet-lagged, on a military-issue couch in an otherwise empty American base housing in Germany in 2004. She is alone, except for the television, which talks to her in case she is there to listen. It has one channel: Armed Forces Network News.

The television is staticky; they yawn in sync. There is no place for sleepiness at the Olympics.

Her mind awakens, fascinated by intentional purpose. Each athlete is trying so very hard to represent their country, their family. Every single activity becomes grace, wisdom, chance, love, pain, loss. There is always someone to root for. Someone wins and someone loses. There are rules to each event. There is order. Control. Precision. It is summer here in the northern hemisphere, and the pools in Greece shimmer like gold.

She watches Michael Phelps perform in the sport that will go on to found his international fame as the most decorated Olympic athlete of all time. But for now, he is just one long, overstretched white man, diving into the blues over and over again, never drowning.

Her life is ordered, controlled. At one level by her father, then her mother who tells her to be a good girl so she doesn’t embarrass her father, then by kids at school who want her to be bad so that she’s interesting, then the American government that tells her family where to move and when. Her father will be ordered to go There, wherever There is, to fight, to die. It will be an unpopular war.

Days pass. She unpacks boxes she has packed and unpacked dozens of times. The only time that things make sense are when the Olympics are on. When they take the couch away, she sits on the floor in front of the television.

The Closing Ceremony comes too quickly.

Hundreds of traditional dancers enter the stage and create a larger-than-life swirl of stalks of wheat, combining together to create a resplendent visage, a shell twist in the cosmos of beautiful joyous people moving their bodies to create a new body, a school of fish, of people. The camera cuts to close-ups and these people are so, so happy. This will be one of the best moments of their lives. They will tell their children, their children’s children. Even when VHS tapes and DVDs don’t exist and whatever comes next like holograms or brain downloads or telekinetic imagery, for the rest of time, they will still find ways to replay this recording.

Justice System Prison writing

The Worst is Yet to Come

by pattyprewitt • April 21, 2024April 21, 2024

I looked up from my book to watch my new cellie lazily drag in a mesh laundry bag full of her allotted state issue. Young and dumb, sporting messy bed-head, dyed white blonde on the ends with dark greasy roots. Typical for girls who have spent months in county jail. I’ve lived with thousands of girls, and I could immediately tell that she didn’t look promising, but I always try to give them the benefit of the doubt. Everyone looks rough upon arrival, so I smiled, “Hi.”

“This paper says I’m in bed 3 bottom.”

“Right over there. The last girl was a one-twenty and filthy, so you will want to get some disinfectant from the rotunda.”

“No, it looks good to me. I’m a one-twenty, too, but I’m sooo tired.”

“Tired? It’s 8:30 in the morning.”

“Yeh, I’m pregnant.” While rubbing her round belly, she continued, “Katie. They call me Katie.” She smiled showing a mouth full of June bugs, as my old cellie Amy used to say. Meth mouth.

“I’m Patty. When’s the baby due?”

“In November. Do you have any coffee?”

“November? Did you get pregnant last week? Is this your first?”

“No, silly. This is my fourth. What about the coffee?”

“Fourth? Then you know that your baby is about the size of a lima bean… Oh, I don’t give out coffee.”

Why new girls think that we are happy to offer them free food and drink, I’ll never know. I turned back to my book. While pouting she angrily dumped the mesh bag on the thin plastic mat and crawled onto the wad of dingy sheets, old holey grey fleece blankets, and flat over-used pillow plus some stained and perma-wrinkled khaki uniforms. When I looked up, I saw that she was fully clothed still in her state boots and already snoring. Katie never did actually make her bed, shower, or change her clothes although she nested on that bunk for nearly a week.

We seem to be inundated with girls who have been sentenced to 120 day shock probation. Judges can give petty felons a chance to do just a little prison time, a taste of it, then return to their communities and do good. Sounds great, but the vast majority come right back to do their back-up. A girl up the hall initially came in with a one-twenty. Since she’s a drug addict, she came right back and is now serving a big ass 15-year back-up. The prison doesn’t help them. Their communities don’t help them. Addiction is a disease that no one with the state actually tries to cure. Many stay high while locked up. Drugs are easy to get. A guard was caught just last year selling Fentanyl, and the only reason he was busted is because four or five girls ODed and had to be Narcanned back to life. That kind of publicity looks bad. These addicts are victims of our apathetic society, while those of us serving decades consider ourselves victims of these stupid one-twenties who stop up the plumbing with sanitary napkins, overload and break the washers and dryers, never clean up behind themselves, won’t work, aren’t here long enough to take helpful classes, and don’t really give a damn about anything but themselves. And here I’m saddled with yet another one.

We take turns cleaning the common areas of our wing. Yesterday while I scrubbed the tile wall behind the toilets, a curly-headed one-twenty gasped, “Wow! I’ve never seen anyone do that before.” I straightened up, turned to her, and snapped, “I’d sure hate to see the bathroom in your home.”

Katie was a champion sleeper, but she rose up when chow was called, although she couldn’t possibly roust herself out for breakfast. I call the inmates who sleep in their uniforms fire fighters, because they are ready to jump up and exit at a moment’s notice. The rest of us pee, wash our hands and faces, brush our teeth and hair, and change clothes before we run out.

The stench coming from her and her bunk provoked me into offering her detergent to do a load of laundry. She refused, making her the first one in all these years to turn down such a generous offer. Detergent is so expensive that many inmates use a squeeze of shampoo or no soap at all in the washer. Katie was too tired to pretend to launder anything, not even her own ass.

A few days later, a rare wide-awake but chatty Katie asked how long I’d been in prison.

“Thirty-seven years.”

“Thirty-seven years! Wow! That’s longer than I’ve been alive—by a lot. My mom is 33, I think. She wasn’t born either when you came in. Wow. That’s a long time. Have you thought about an appeal? Really. You should file for a sentence reduction and go home.”

“Gosh, I never thought about trying to get out.”

The cellmates snickered, but Katie was serious. Does this triflin’ ho really believe that this white-haired old lady hung around in prison for all these years and never tried to go home?

The facts are that on February 18, 1984, an evil man broke into our rural home and murdered my sleeping husband. To this day, I don’t know why. This man also brutally raped me, but because I was in shock and no one asked me if I was attacked, I didn’t tell about the rape for months. My first priority was moving my children to safety while getting help for Bill. I didn’t realize he was already dead. Since I was the wife and wives always kill their spouses, or so the officer declared, I was charged with the killing, fingerprinted, and booked. The female deputy who strip searched me was shocked at the horrific bruises on my body from the attack. I was then sent back home on my own recognizance to await trial, which occurred in April of 1985. I’m innocent and naively believed in our justice system because I’d never had any dealings with it, so I rejected the plea bargains offered by the prosecution. When Bill and I lived separately years before his murder, we both took lovers. Because of rampant redneck sexism and the gender discrimination of the eighties, I was branded with a scarlet letter.

Before we went to trial, the prosecutor, who honestly didn’t think I killed Bill, ordered Bill’s body to be exhumed for a closer look. Because Bill’s front tooth was missing, the pathologist, decided that Bill had committed suicide, “eaten the rifle” is how he so delicately put it. He called my lawyer, who in turn called me. If I’d kept my mouth shut, I’d never have gone to prison, but I’m an idiot who believed that somehow the real murderer would be found. When asked about the missing tooth, I explained that Bill had a cap on that tooth that didn’t fit well. During a high school basketball game, it had been knocked out. Because of my dogged honesty, the prosecutor was forced to proceed.

During the four-day trial, no evidence was presented to deem me guilty. I hadn’t kept up on Bill’s life insurance payments, and a gun powder residue test of my hands and wrists proved that I had not fired a weapon, but the jury ignored those facts, judge me as a scandalous Jezebele, and returned after only a few hours of deliberation with a guilty verdict. Thirteen-year-old Sarah ran screaming out of the courthouse and down the street while the family followed. My family and friends learned the hard way that juries pretty much think defendants did the crime if the cops do.

I spent that night in jail then was freed on an appeal bond. I returned home to the farm with my kids to discover that a neighbor had observed a strange man in a light-colored sedan on the back road watching our house during the stormy night of Bill’s murder. She had told the Sheriff about the stranger the morning of the crime, but he hadn’t passed that information on because it didn’t fit the scenario they were creating. When she read about the trial in the paper, she wondered why that man hadn’t been mentioned.

We took this exculpatory evidence back to the trial judge who promptly decreed that witness information, that the sheriff hid from us, placing an unknown man near our house, stalking us, during a thunder storm on the very same night my husband was killed would not have changed the jury’s verdict. We were stunned. We had testimony placing the probable murderer at the scene, evidence that the cops withheld, and the judge refused to even consider it or chastise the sheriff for illegally concealing this important information. In those early days we still believed that finding the truth was the role of the justice system, comprising the police, prosecutor, and judge. A year later, I lost the direct appeal and had to abandon my five half-grown children and go away to prison. Over 37 years of missed graduations, weddings, funerals, births of thirteen grandchildren and two grandsons later, I’m elderly and still locked away with no end in sight.

As soon as I was locked up, my parents and siblings designed a petition and walked all around Jackson County getting signatures of citizens who agreed that Governor Ashcroft should commute my prison sentence of Life with no Parole for 50 Years. Bless their hearts. After months of hitting grocery stores, malls, parking lots, and every other place where humans are known to traverse, and buoyed by high hopes, they priority-mailed their petition to the Capitol. A local newspaper wrote the story of our family seeking justice. I don’t believe the governor’s office ever acknowledged receipt of their hard labor.

At the same time that the petition was circulating, my father hired a lawyer who took a lot of money and filed another appeal. That post-conviction relief was denied a few years later. We have appealed and appealed to no avail. Every single governor of this state has been petitioned. Some governors have flat out denied our petitions for clemency. Some just ignore us entirely. The one common denominator is that men who hold the power to free me never actually look into the facts of the case. Judges and governors can’t seem to be bothered, except for one. Governor Mel Carnahan, during the late 90s, actually met with my kids and with state legislators who were behind me. His chief counsel interviewed me in prison and investigated, which prompted the governor to promise to commute my sentence. That governor died in a plane crash not long after that declaration. Our high hopes died with him.

In 2010 my most recent clemency application was filed. Thus far we’ve heard not a whisper from the governor’s office, and he has refused to meet with my family. I’m in my mid-seventies. I won’t be eligible for parole until I’m 86, and I seriously don’t think I’ll make it that long. Medical care in prison is minimal at best. The food is far from nutritious. Sleep in a loud overcrowded prison is a catch as catch can situation. Unrelenting stress is always woven into the penal decor. These ingredients constitute a recipe for early demise.

About six or seven years ago, an NBC TV show called Final Appeal with Brian Banks aired a story on me, and their persistent investigators actually located the evidence box with my pajamas from the night of the murder. We had been trying to secure it for years, but the police always came up with one lame excuse after another as to why it was lost. We were ecstatic about this find until two separate courts refused us permission to test the DNA. There are thousands of wrongly convicted prisoners in our country, but the justice system loathes to admit that fact. Judges go out of their way to prevent DNA testing or any other avenue that might prove that the wrong person is locked up. These stories are in the news every day, but most citizens don’t pay attention to the fate of so-called criminals until they are directly involved. I admit that I didn’t give prisoners a thought before my husband was murdered. I never even knew anyone who had been arrested.

Although all her people are criminals, barely-pregnant teenage Katie doesn’t yet know the full truth about the sticky web of deceit spun by the judicial branch of the government.

One day I mentioned to her that she should sign up for the Story Link program so she can read a book on CD that will be mailed to her kids. My family and I love Story Link, and I have been sending books on CD home over 25 years. I now read to my great grandsons. I told her exactly what to write on the kite and that the deadline was this Thursday. A day or so later, when I asked if she had dropped the application, she confessed that she didn’t have contact with her kids. She didn’t even have addresses for them, because they were in the wind. My kids mean the world to me, so I was sad for her but also realized that maybe they are better off. I was afraid to ask what her plans were for her current lima bean.

Within the first day, the longtimers on the wing noticed that Katie took neither toilet paper nor soap to the toilet. Both are provided free by the state. When flushed, these industrial toilets spray urine from the previous user all over the seat, so we must wipe the seat before sitting, then wipe our own asses. Hand washing is an important priority in communal living.

As the senior member of the cell, I was elected to address the unhygienic and odorous situation, but I may not have been the best choice. I tend to be direct and asked her, “Hey, girl, why don’t you use toilet paper or soap?”

“THAT’S NUNYA FUCKIN’ BIZ-NIS!”

Undaunted, I calmly continued, “Katie, we live in close quarters, to put in mildly, and the toilet paper and soap are free. There’s no reason to stink like you do.”

“I don’t giva shit whatya fuckin’ think. I got two fuckin’ sugar daddies and a fuckin’ boyfriend. I got all da fuckin’ money I want!”

And she did. On canteen day, she returned triumphantly dragging a heavy bag containing two bags of high-dollar instant Folgers, two cases of assorted soda, two bags of drink mix, and an array of snack cakes, candy bars, and bag candy, but not one hygiene item. She spent the next two days in the dayroom as Princess Popular surrounded by poor kids who slurped down her “racks.” (For the uninitiated, racks are made with sugar, soda, loads of instant coffee, drink mix, more coffee plus more sugar. They think they are getting high on this mixture, but these are the same dummies who smoke dried green beans and potato peelings for a high.) When they had swigged through all the special recipe, Katie returned to crash in her filthy bed.

We have not just worked on the judicial and executive branches of government to find freedom, we have tried passing legislation. During last few years, we have found legislators who file geriatric bills that would make parole possible for elderly lifers. Statistics prove that inmates over 60 are incredibly less likely to re-offend. Like zero percent. Many states have passed these types of bills to allow expensive sick old inmates to exit prison and make room for much less expensive healthy young ones, but Missouri’s General Assembly has yet to see the economic value in this. Saving taxpayers’ dollars is not a priority.

Poor pregnant Katie also farts like a mule, but this is normal for prisoners. When a mammal’s diet is changed drastically, bad things happen. I used to teach exercise classes for R&Os (Receiving and Orientation, aka new girls), and the farts were nearly visible in density and strength. If the odor took over, I would take everyone down to the floor to do mat work in hopes that their hot farts would rise. There’s something about prison food that messes with digestive systems causing abdominal bloating, gut pain, and explosive burps and farts.

My daughter Jane is teaching herself how to make TikTok videos to advertise our plight. She’s becoming an expert at social media. We will do podcasts, radio and TV shows, newspaper stories, and anything to spread the word that I’m wrongly incarcerated. In fact, I have a website, pattyprewitt.com, that I’ve never seen. We don’t seem to know how to give up.

After dinner of the sixth day of Katie, I was brushing my teeth at the bathroom sink when she came in with empty hands and went straight to a toilet stall. When she emerged and headed back out with not so much as a glance at a sink faucet, I quietly observed, “I see you’re still not using toilet paper or soap.” My short security toothbrush was in my foam-framed mouth. I’m talented that way and can brush my teeth while being a smart ass.

Anyway, Katie exploded in a loud tirade of expletives, calling me all manner of bitches and hos, as she stomped to the door of the rotunda. While I rinsed and spit, I heard an officer attempting to calm her down. I work the evening shift in the chapel, so I had to leave. As I walked to the rotunda, one of my cellmates informed me that an officer had put Katie in the back hall for creating a disturbance. That officer stopped me at the door. I told him that I had to go set up the chapel for service, but that I’ll be back at eight.

I didn’t think a thing about Katie’s outburst until I returned to the house after church to discover that Katie had pc’d (pc stands for protective custody, which means she voluntarily went to the hole). She told the guards that I threatened to kill her baby, the lima bean. The guard who packed her out told me that the only hygiene item in her locker was an unused intake toothbrush, but he collected a whole trash bag full of wrappers and empty soda cans she was hoarding or simply too tired to discard. As he walked away, he correctly predicted that our cell should smell much better now.

Last year we did a Dr. Phil show to bring attention to my plight. My oldest daughter, her husband, and my friend Mary flew to LA to help present the evidence, or really lack of evidence. My longtime lawyer Brian, who took my case as homework when he was a Georgetown Law student and has never given up on me, and two advocate state legislators appeared via Zoom. I was impressed that Dr. Phil’s crew thoroughly investigated and came to the conclusion that I was not guilty and should never have gone to prison. He was strong on that point, and the PR helped get more signatures on our on-line petition, but if the governor or his people saw that episode, we may never know. What can we do now? How do we right this wrong? That’s the conundrum I go to bed with and wake up wondering.

About a week after Katie put herself in the hole, my one cellmate and I were called to sign “enemy waivers.” These are contract-like forms we sign indicating that we have no beef with the person we have a beef with. If you don’t sign the form, you are deposited in the hole, so everyone signs. These forms are used to cover the butts of the prison. If the “enemy” attacks, they are not liable. It only makes sense when you look at it from the point of view of the prison. They are only worried about legal ramifications. They are never concerned about inmate safety. If they were, they wouldn’t cram six women, with at least eight diverse personalities, in a tiny cell with little to no supervision.

Usually the problem child is brought right back to the bunk she left, so we cellmates dreaded her return. But she was assigned to another wing. Yeah! Now we await the arrival of the next one-twenty. When I think that the one we just had is the worst possible, I find out I’m wrong. The one who had Katie’s bed before her was semi-clean, paranoid, and strange. The morning after the first night with us, she asked me if the resident of that bed before her had been pregnant. I told her no, then asked why she’d asked. She said she felt like she woke up with amniotic fluid all over her. WTF!

The worst cellmate may not be born yet, but she’s coming. I can smell her.

Pastéis de nata

by Rafael Shimabukuro • April 21, 2024April 21, 2024

I first tried pastéis de nata in a chifa in the Calle Capón. I must have been five or six. I was with my father, who often took me to Capón, Lima’s Chinatown. He had grown up nearby. When he was young he would help out in the family restaurant, buying sacks of potatoes in the Mercado Central, right next to Capón, and carrying them to the restaurant to peel them. He loved telling me about this period of his life, perhaps to remind me how fortunate I was to have a sheltered upbringing, perhaps to remind himself how far he had come since his days of child labour.

That I first tried pastéis de nata in a chifa in the Calle Capón is surprising. Pastéis de nata are Portuguese egg custard tarts, small, round, yellow and rich. Given Peru was once a colony of Spain, one would expect them to have arrived from Iberia. However, in Peru pastéis de nata are exclusively sold in chifas, Chinese Peruvian restaurants. There is a similar Peruvian dessert, leche asada, but that is more a burnt flan, lacking the pastry base which holds pastéis de nata together. What I had that day was sold as Chinese leches asadas, but they were unmistakably pastéis de nata.

The journey of pastéis de nata to Peru was long and traumatic. From Portugal they went south and then east, and then even further east. During the age of colonialism wherever the Portuguese established trading outposts they took with them their food. One such outpost was Macau in the Pearl River delta. The Cantonese took a liking to pastéis de nata, incorporating them into their cuisine. Then, in the middle of the nineteenth century many Cantonese immigrated to Peru, recruited under false pretences to work as indentured servants in large haciendas. Like the Portuguese, the Cantonese brought with them their cuisine. When they eventually opened restaurants in Peru, they sold pastéis de nata.

My family also crossed the Pacific with their cuisine. In the early 20^th century Peruvian hacendados shifted their recruitment from China to Japan. Tens of thousands of Japanese came, initially labouring under terrible conditions. Once they fulfilled their contracts or fled the haciendas, they moved to Peru’s cities. Many invited family members to join them in Peru, since poverty and hunger were widespread in Japan. According to my grandmother, my obachan, her parents came then, as invitees.

When my obachan’s parents moved to Lima they opened a restaurant serving what they knew: Japanese food. Unfortunately, this was not popular in the working class neighbourhood where they settled. The family restaurant struggled until it Peruvianised its menu. After that the situation got more comfortable, but my father and his many siblings still had to work in the restaurant growing up.

To this day my family mostly eats traditionally Peruvian, perhaps even more traditional than most Peruvians. Regardless, our Japanese origins are obvious. There is sometimes sashimi or tempura. When we speak Spanish we use ochá for breakfast and tea, gohan for meal and rice. Unseasoned rice is ever-present. It usually makes sense, as my obachan frequently cooks stews, which need a side dish. Sometimes, however, my obachan makes spaghetti Bolognese and serves it with rice.

When my father was interned in the hospital for the final time I had to leave Cambridge at the last minute. My aunt, who is a doctor, insisted. Yet, arriving in Lima was frustrating. There was no way to see him; Covid meant no visits were allowed in the ICU. After a week he was moved to a ward. Only then could I see him, and only for limited amounts of time. I went every day. The first day he seemed like his old self.

He died after we took him home. He joked until the end. Sometimes I think ‘dad jokes’ are an Anglo-Saxon concept, but that was certainly his type of humour. I never found him that funny, but I must admit he had his moments. The day before he died, a priest came to perform the last rites. He was still conscious then. When he saw the priest, he joked: ‘What’s he doing here?’

I do not remember his last meal, but one of the last things he did was ‘have coffee’ with my great aunt, visiting from Japan. It was her birthday, since it was past midnight. He was barely conscious and could not speak nor move. He could not even drink. My great aunt had to get a gauze, soak it in coffee and put it on his lips. I hope he tasted coffee.

My family drinks too much coffee. There is always a bottle of coffee extract on the table, ready to be diluted with boiling water and drunk. Towards the end of his life my father drank coffee instead of water. He claimed it helped his kidneys; with coffee he had control over the amount of liquid he ingested. Apparently it is easy to drink too much water.

The last Christmas I spent with him he taught me how to brew coffee extract. I could not make very good coffee then but I am much better now. Unfortunately, his lessons did not contribute, since he taught me using a Peruvian cafetiere. Peruvians are not aware of this, but the cafetiere we use to make café pasado is only found in Peru, a slight adaptation of the Neapolitan cuccumella. The cuccumella is very rarely found in Italy today, let alone in the rest of the world. To get better at coffee-making I had to learn to use a French press in England.

The only time I remember telling my father I loved him was at the end of his life. I did not need to. He never told me he loved me and he did not need to. He once told me our family was not very expressive. We expressed love, he said, through food. I am not surprised, given how much my obachan cooks, loves to cook and loves going out to buy ingredients to cook.

I told my father I loved him in a letter I wrote him while he was interned in the hospital, before I managed to see him. At the end of the letter, I included a poem about a favourite restaurant of ours: Hawaii Tea Room, mid-century Peru’s response to American diners. In the poem I listed our usual order: lomo saltado with tacu tacu, and cebada to drink. I ended the poem with a plea, telling my father I longed to go back to Hawaii with him.

My father loved to cook. His friends, and mine, remember him for his cooking, by all accounts excellent. However, he rarely won the impromptu lomo saltado competitions which erupted whenever he and two of his siblings met. I love lomo saltado, a sirloin and fries stir-fry. To be honest I always preferred my aunt’s, consistently tender and flavourful, but my father’s was good too, definitely better than his brother’s, which was always too smoky. My father thought my aunt cheated, since her sirloin was tender because she cooked it separate from the onions, tomatoes and fries. From him I learnt about the importance of timing and sequence in stir-fries.

My father loved exploring places to eat. Every Sunday we would go to a new restaurant. I was not always happy to do so. I enjoyed fine dining and I insisted paying extra for the experience was worth it. Moreover, I already had places I liked, which, to be fair to me, were not always expensive. I would ask him what the point of finding new restaurants was; we already had enough.

The chifa in Capón which sold pastéis de nata was one such place. We sometimes sat down inside but more frequently we had food to go. We would usually get char siu, sweet, barbecued pork. Then we would get some dim sum, usually min pao, steamed buns, or siu mai, compact dumplings. I would sometimes ask for pastéis de nata, which I preferred cold, since cold custard is delightful, but which I usually had room-temperature. I have not been back in years, but I can still clearly picture the orange plastic bags we took away the food in.

I recently travelled to Portugal and had many pastéis de nata, always with coffee. They were exactly like the pastéis de nata in the chifa my father took me to. Also in Portugal I had dinner with a local friend. He ordered for us. I was surprised by the starter, some version of battered deep fried vegetables. My friend reminded me the Portuguese had introduced tempura to Japan. I told him the story of how pastéis de nata got to Peru.

Whenever I visit European countries I find I grew up eating one of the local dishes. Peruvian cuisine is like that, a baroque mixture of many influences. Peruvians like to flatter themselves and think they are the country of ‘todas las sangres’, where everyone is always already mestizo. This official discourse obscures much. Pastéis de nata got to Peru on the back of indentured servitude. My father never spoke Japanese, for Japanese was banned in the wake of World War II. During the war many Japanese Peruvians were rounded up and sent to concentration camps in the US. Peruvian mestizaje is sometimes a way to erase uncomfortable pasts.

When my father died I learnt of many distinctly Japanese Peruvian traditions I did not know before. He was cremated with seven needles, a chocolate for his ojiichan, a Uniqlo down jacket I gifted him, a doll, a stuffed cat my aunt bought him, and some other items which escape me now. In his room, where he spent so much of his later life, we set up a small shrine on the table he used for dialysis. There we put his picture, candles, a sandy bowl for senko sticks, and a replica of the cat that was cremated with him. In the days after his death every time we had food we would offer some to him. Like so many times before he died, I served him coffees throughout the day.

An interesting tradition involved the protocol after the burial. My obachan said that if we went straight home spirits might follow us. To avoid that we had to go somewhere public and have something to eat. Then, spirits would not know to leave with us. We ended up going to a restaurant inside a casino, where we had a mixture of Japanese and Peruvian food. Although we were in black you could hear loud conversation and laughter. My father’s portrait, the one we eventually placed in the shrine, was at the head of the table. I had chicken guts in soy sauce with fries, which I loved. It was sweet and salty with the right amount of chewiness. It was the sort of food my father loved.

I associate food with him. Food is intimate and political, local and transnational, brutally necessary yet also possibly sublime. In food there are a thousand traditions and ten thousand stories, but there is always space for originality. Food is how my father told me he loved me. It is now how I tell others I love them.

I have not gone back to Capón since my father died. I will, next time I am in Lima. I will go the chifa we always went to, and order what we usually had. Char siu, min pao, siu mai and pastéis de nata. I may also try some other chifa, knowing full well I may be disappointed. Regardless, that is something my father would have done. I miss him, but he lives on, in me, in my sisters, in my memories, in my tastebuds. To many he was Jaime, to the family he was Kensho, but to me he will always be the father who taught me to love food — and introduced me to pastéis de nata.

Arts & Culture, Poetry

Olympiad

by stephen.james.moore.uk • April 21, 2024April 21, 2024

We are building the city of Paris, we shall call it Lutetia & we will call the 70,000 arms to be our carriers & the 80,000 as the stone cutters, we shall light the seven lamps & bring them forward. We will hear each of us & you, in our native tongues. His division numbers 57,400 & we will sing with instruments of ten strings. A sound like the blowing of a violent wind. The LORD is his name.

ii.

We shall count the years

in quadrennia, we shall

let all the world stand

Oral interpretations

The LORD is his name

I want to test you

Comparing the earnestness

Of all others against you

Oral interpretations

The LORD is his name

I want to test you

Comparing the speed & skill

Of all others against you

Oral interpretations

The LORD is his name

iii.

Extemporaneous, Dramatic Interpretation,

Original Oratory, Informative Speaking,

Duo Interpretation, Impromptu

iv.

Send me the trees of Cedar,

Send me Juniper

Send me a tree of Algum.

Exalt, the right hand of god

Where Are All the Ladies At?

by Sarai Seekamp • April 19, 2024April 19, 2024

On a Monday afternoon in July of 2023, I was fired from my position as head coach of Jefferson High School’s track and field program.

The virtual meeting with the principal and the assistant district athletic director took less than five minutes and while I knew it was coming, it was impossible to shrug off the unsettling feeling of shock that was burrowing into my chest. It was just the latest in a series of meetings and interactions that confirmed to me what I had always known was true: the men that ran our district athletic office and school athletic programs did not want a woman as head coach, and they’d do what they could to get rid of me.

A month before “my position was not renewed” as they put it, I was told to “cheer up” and “see the glass half full” by another male supervisor from the district office in a zoom call with other head coaches. I had asked for a protocol for ordering equipment. Two years before that, the same supervisor told me not to “feed into the negativity of other women” when I asked what the district was doing to remedy inequities between program facilities. By summer of 2023, I had lost count of the misogynistic comments thrown my way by peers and supervisors alike. And all I had accomplished, all that I had been so proud to put my name to, was suddenly stained by a termination that I knew was wrong but felt powerless to fight.

Twenty-six years old, and fresh out of my teacher licensing program, I became the first female head track and field coach at Jefferson, a Northeast Portland public school that had historically served the Black community. I’m certain I was also the youngest head coach in both school history and Oregon’s largest school district at the time, regardless of sport. I’d spent my early twenties as an assistant coach for two other schools, knowing that ultimately, I wanted to take on the role of head coach when I’d amassed the knowledge and experience necessary. The chance came earlier than I had anticipated. At the time, my excitement at finally having that opportunity was fueled by the naivety that all I needed was to be surrounded by coaches and mentors that cared about our sport and even more about the kids we worked with. How silly of me.

This hopefulness was slowly eroded by the reality of working alongside male dominated staffs, almost exclusively reporting to male superiors in district and building administrations, and being one of very few female sprint and hurdle coaches. It was a stark contrast to see me standing at an intimidating 5’4” at the start lines for races between my colleagues, all male and dwarfing me at no less than 6’0,” not to mention the years of experience and knowledge they had on me. There was a running joke that I could be passed off as one of the athletes in case of injury, and no one would notice. Workshops and coaching seminars found me in rooms that were overwhelmingly male, the free t-shirts they gave out in sizes and cuts that obviously didn’t consider that women may be in attendance.

At the beginning of my tenure as head coach, I watched as my program was pitted against the other eight in the district for resources and equipment, often being told not to “tell [insert school name here] that you got [insert required piece of equipment] because then we’ll have to get them one too.” And while I watched the power that came with opening more consistent lines of communication not only with the one other female head coach, but all eight head coaches, it also meant forcing the glaring inequities into the light. The district office, almost exclusively staffed by men with football and basketball backgrounds (save the woman who acted as office manager), made a habit of routinely responding to my male peers while leaving my calls and emails unanswered. One thread asking for pole vault equipment that met safety standards and wasn’t nested in by rats went on for multiple years with little to no response or action taken; I made a point of emailing every week just to “see what the status of the request was.” At five years in, I had become a pro at the game of “following up,” “circling back,” and “find a creative solution” that the athletics office required me to play.

As the seasons came and went, it was nearly impossible to believe that what I was experiencing was anything but a direct result of being a woman. In addition to working at a historically underserved school, it not only felt personal but systemic and intentional. As I was attempting to rebuild a program that had long been neglected, I began to look more widely not only at track and field, but at data around women in coaching and sport overall. I wanted to know why there weren’t more of us in the head coach meetings, the athletic director retreats, on the track. Unfortunately, I wasn’t surprised by what I found.

For the 2022-23 season, I was effectively on my own as my athletic director left her job to work in another school district. She was one of two female athletic directors to leave mid-year (both have since been replaced by men). The other male head coaches had athletic directors who acted as interference between them and the district office, administrators who were paid to meet the needs of the head coaches and programs they oversaw so that coaches could do exactly that: coach. I was alone to run my program, my staff, coach hurdles, and do the duties of an athletic director with little to no direction and certainly no pay. It became untenable.

By April, just two months into the season, I had filed a formal complaint against the district office and the assistant athletic director for the district for discrimination based on gender and the creation of a toxic, hostile work environment. The figurative straw that broke the camel’s back was their insistence that I “must be missing information” when I reported that our boys had broken a twenty-year-old school record. Coming after me and invalidating my work was one thing, diminishing the accomplishments of the kids we were charged with serving was another. And I was tired of staying silent, feeling complacent in an athletic department that was inequitable and harmful. This move, my decision to go to Human Resources, wasn’t allowed in their game, my pushback was not accounted for in the Boy’s Club rulebook so I had to go. Simple as that.

***

On paper, the Paris 2024 Olympic Games is set to become the first to see true gender parity for athletes competing, according to The International Olympic Committee. There will be 5,250 men and 5,250 women competing. One-hundred and twenty years after women were first invited to participate in the most celebrated international sporting event, Tokyo 2020 boasted 48.7% of its competing athletes were women. Just four years later, it’s nearly poetic that Paris will once again host this sort of historical moment in women’s athletic; the 1900 Paris games was the first to invite women to compete, 20 to be exact.

But I’m more interested in what’s happening behind the scenes. As exciting as the Tokyo Olympics proved to be, less than 13% of all athletes, regardless of gender, were coached by women. I don’t need to see the exact numbers to know that the number of female coaches of male athletes is even lower. It would be negligent to stop my investigation here. The Olympic Games are international events that highlight the literal best of the best in each sport. What about the more foundational levels of athletics, the years between seven and seventeen where individuals learn and develop the skills they need to become that top 1%?

Looking at these numbers is imperative in qualifying and solidifying my own experience in the world of sport, and that of so many other women, and unfortunately statistics and data is often the only way to get people to acknowledge a problem. As we know, historically the word of women alone is not enough. When I was fired at the end of the 2023 season, a peer and my former boss asked if “there was anything I had done to precipitate the decision.” An athletic director at another school asked over drinks “why I felt I needed to defend myself” and that “I wasn’t always being attacked.” I had just finished explaining that none of my meet fees had been paid — his were — and my uniforms were chewed through by rats — his team had new t-shirts for every team member designed and printed at the school. Women must provide evidence; we are guilty until proven innocent.

Even though I am an English teacher and writer by trade, when it comes to my work as a coach, I am obsessive when it comes to data and research. I dig into the numbers. I initially earned some acclaim in our school district (before they realized my attention to detail would become a problem) for my three-page argument for why my program needed more stipends for coaches. Thinking about the United States as one case study, one would assume that there would be more female coaches than ever before thanks to the passage of Title IX in 1972. Title IX is federal legislation that makes it illegal to discriminate based on sex in any educational program that receives federal funding, including athletics. That was just 52 years ago. And while Title IX accomplished a lot, in sport it had two major, noticeable impacts: 1) participation of female athletes rose from 15,000 to 200,000 across all levels of collegiate sport, and 2) women coaching collegiate women’s teams dropped from 90% prior to 1972 to 58%, and then below 50% by the 80’s. There were more women competing, but women had lost control of the programs they had built and pioneered for years. As soon as money entered the picture, leadership roles went to the men.

Fast forward to 2019, only 2% of the nearly 2,000 athletes at the IAAF World Championships for Track and Field were coached by women. That’s less than 50 individual athletes. But it isn’t just professional sports where the lack of female coaches is evident. According to The Institute of Diversity and Equity in Sport (TIDES) and the Tucker Center in Minneapolis, who conduct research focusing on NCAA programs, only 4.8% of men’s teams had a woman as the head coach, while 55% of women’s sports across all divisions had a man as the head coach. Track and Field, like other combined practice sports (who often do not split staffs between genders), is one that scores the worst on the Tucker Center’s Report Card for having women as head coaches for women’s teams. It’s an even smaller number for women coaching men’s teams.

The data is indisputable.

And that isn’t even all of it. There are not nearly as many women in leadership positions, like program directors or athletic directors, as there are men; the number is even lower for women of color. Women’s basketball is one of the few collegiate and professional sports that has more female head coaches than the standard. Muffett McGraw, the head coach for Notre Dame’s women’s team is known for declaring that she will never hire a male assistant coach. I’ve said the same thing, or rather I’ve “joked” that one day I’ll have a fully female track and field staff. While it’s not really a joke, it is incredibly difficult to find women to coach with me, and this isn’t because they don’t exist.

In conversation with the Female Coaching Network about how few female coaches there are in elite track and field, Olympic Hurdler Joanna Hayes and Coach/FCN founder Vicky Huyton, pointed to lack of opportunities for women not just in coaching but at conferences and workshops. They explain that within athletic departments women often feel undervalued, that there are no advancement opportunities (the stats for female athletic directors is even worse than for coaches), and when they do coach elite athletes many of them are coaxed away to work with male coaches.

I’ve experienced the latter myself: a male hurdle coach who had refused to join my staff as an assistant coach approached my best male hurdler (who I’d coached for nearly three years) about working with him as soon as he broke top three in the district and was on the verge of qualifying for the state championship meet.

Most notable though is the lack of female coaches at the youth level; young girls need to see that women can be coaches, can be head coaches and athletic directors, so that they know it’s possible for them too.In my nearly 17 years in the sport of track and field, I was only coached by a woman twice. Both were sprint coaches at my high school, and both were only part-time and did not coach me for the full four years I ran. Neither of them was the head coach. My collegiate team had zero women on the coaching staff. The idea that I could become a head coach was not inspired by some powerhouse female coach I wanted to emulate, though I wish I could say that was the case. I just loved the sport.

And it’s not just track and field. One of my best friends, a current professional soccer player, had a female head coach at her Division III college, but since then has had only one female strength coach across three countries, four different soccer clubs, and seven seasons. I field phone calls from her constantly and are unfortunately validated when I hear that my experiences in the United States are also impacting female athletes overseas, that it’s not just in the U.S. that we see a lack of female coaches. There is a remarkable lack of data on women in youth sports coaching, so I can’t share those numbers. And over the past few years, I have seen the organizations like the Women Sports Foundation, WeCoach, and others implementing programs to recruit, train, and support female coaches across sports, but I have to wonder if this is enough.

Where are all the women who could or should be coaching our Olympic athletes?

***

After accepting the role of head coach, I spent five years recruiting female coaches across events, and specifically coaches of color. There was no support from the district or school to post job openings, so I did it myself on LinkedIn, Indeed, and any other platform I could find. There also wasn’t a protocol for interviewing and hiring assistant coaches. So, I created one. I scoured the hallways of the school selling my sport to every kid I could find. “There goes Ms. Seekamp talking about track and field again.”

By spring of 2023, five out of my eleven coaches were women, six were coaches of color, and three out of the five female coaches were women of color. At a school that historically served the Black community in Portland, and a team that was primarily Black girls the first two years under my leadership, it was important to me that our staff reflected the demographics of the team, especially since I was a white woman brand new to the school. I recognized the limitations of my experience, and dedicated my energy to hiring and paying women and coaches of color who our athletes could see themselves in. Everyone knew that having women on my staff was not only important but non-negotiable. It wasn’t easy getting to that point. I was pressured to hire football coaches who had no experience in my sport (my response was always “as soon as you put me on the football staff as the speed coach, I’ll add a football coach to my staff.” I was laughed at).

As a result, my coaching staff was successful. Our team, over five seasons (including those interrupted by a global pandemic), saw the best performances across events, breaking over twenty school records and setting all-time highs for team points than had been seen in recent school history. We started winning against some of the teams in our district who had more than twice as many kids, more coaches, helmed by men, and unwaveringly supported by athletic directors (remember, my last season I didn’t have one). On paper, we shouldn’t have been able to compete, but we did. Hiring women worked. Hiring coaches of color, coaches that looked like and had the same experiences a our kids worked. More girls participated in organized sport, many of whom had never done athletics in their life, and kids felt seen and heard as members of our team. They felt safe. We often had to force them to leave the track and field at night when practice ended; they began to ask for post-season opportunities to work out and compete. Our data reflected what I had hoped would be true.

***

The summer after I was fired, as I began working with the teacher’s union to appeal the decision, I began watching Amazon Prime’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. The series follows the titular character, a 1950’s Jewish housewife, as she establishes her career as a standup comedian. Over the course of five seasons and a total of forty-three episodes, the audience watches Midge (a fictional character heavily based on Joan Rivers) work through the collapse of her marriage (her husband, Joel, tells her that he’s leaving her for his secretary) and the aftermath of one drunken rant in her nightgown at a New York dive bar. It is immediately apparent to the audience and Susie Meyerson, her future manager, that Midge is going to be a phenomenal comedian. But she’s a woman.

And as I’m watching episode after episode of Midge navigating a male saturated industry, I’m thinking about my five years of coaching, my lifetime in sport. I’m thinking about the questions I was asked in my interview for head coach while Susie, Midge’s manager, argues with a booker that she is better than the other male comics, yelling at this gatekeeper who is the latest in a long line of men who stands in the way of Midge’s big break. I’m thinking about being asked if I’d be able to bring out male athletes or if I’d be willing to be “assistant to the head coach” (a position that did not come with head coach pay or the title of head coach) and oversee the girls team “if” they hired a male head coach. In typical snarky fashion, I pointed out that if they couldn’t hire a man to coach both the girls and boys teams then it sounded like they should just hire a woman. Thank god they did.

Every time Midge gets arrested for her language, every time it is implied that what she is doing is unladylike, the comments from my male supervisors and district athletic staff come back to me. Every time she loses an opportunity to a man, I remember how quick the hiring team was to assume that the new head coach would be a man.

And in retrospect, it wasn’t a risk for them to hire me. At the historically Black school that had always been neglected by the district, for an athletic program that was for all intents and purposes failing and not one of the “important sports” (i.e. football, basketball, baseball, etc.), it was not a high stakes hiring situation. If I failed, they could say they tried out the whole female coach thing and pat themselves on the back before hiring a man to replace me. If I was successful, then it was assumed that they’d take credit for the revolutionary idea of hiring me.

After I was fired, it took them three days to fabricate reasons for my dismissal despite an exemplary teaching and coaching record. It was another six months before they found a replacement. They hired a man and did not interview any women. Only one of my female assistant coaches was asked to return for the 2024 season and she quit after two days; they didn’t have payroll paperwork for her to sign (which meant there was no guarantee she’d be paid for her work), and she felt discouraged as the only woman on staff with no throwers to coach.

At the end of the day my success, the creation of the largest track and field team in school history that accomplished more in five seasons than the past twenty years combined including qualifying for Junior Olympics, was not enough to overcome the problem at hand. I was a woman. I was a vocal woman, with glitter on my face, long manicured nails (à la FloJo), with a knack for asking questions and not taking no for an answer. I was a woman who refused to smile or cheer up and roll over in the face of adversity and roadblocks. And the data showing what my staff and I accomplished was not enough to grant me full membership to the boy’s club or even the respect to pretend they weren’t firing me for complaining and attempting to hold them accountable.

My athletes and assistants offered to petition the district and leadership; I had to beg my male peers and those in power at other schools to fight for me. At the end of the day, my female colleagues and assistants advocating for me wasn’t enough and as I read about the work that the IOC and other non-profits are doing to address the notably minuscule number of female coaches of high-level and youth athletes alike, I couldn’t help but wonder what I was supposed to feel or do next. I still don’t know what to do next. As the woman who always has a plan, a solution, a set of data and carefully laid out arguments, it’s an uncomfortable place to be.

***

Spoiler alert: in the last episode, after being utterly screwed over by Gordon Ford (a Johnny Carson-esque character), who gives her less than five minutes of screentime and as a writer for his show and not a comic, Midge does what she does best: she takes what she wants with style and no apology. She co-opts the show and does her act. Her last words to Ford before the broadcast returns are “I’ve never been good at following rules.”

I may not know what comes next in my career as a coach or where I’ll end up, though the idea of coaching Olympic hurdlers some day is a seed already beginning to germinate. Coaching collegiate and master’s athletes on a volunteer basis in another country is scratching that itch in the meantime. My dismissal from Jefferson has not prevented me from combing through data and asking the important questions: why aren’t there more women in leadership positions in athletics? What are we doing at foundational levels, beyond posts on social media and other performative gestures, to address the gap between female athletes and female coaches, especially in leadership positions (because as my student-athletes will say “the math ain’t mathing”)? Where are all the men who are in positions of power, who have seats at the table and the Big Bosses on speed-dial, who have much less to lose when they argue on the track or field or court? Because I already know where the ladies are.

Praxis Axis (Walking the Beam)

by Litro Magazine • April 12, 2024April 12, 2024

By DJ Grant

On Simone Biles

Walking the beam

as water flows

Essence of team

She flips, she spins

Praxis axis

Walking the beam

balances her shine

World’s highest esteem

Gold medal gleam

Conquered the twist

walking the beam

Vaulting forward

Spectacular

Olympic dream

Watch her in awe

walking the beam

Arts & Culture, Essays, EssaySaturday

The Whyte House Fish

by Louise Phillips • April 11, 2024April 11, 2024

Louise Phillips

The clown triggerfish was mature in coloration, with a yellow mouth, white spots on its black stomach and a yellow lattice pattern covering its back. A canary strip above its mouth looked like a pair of headband sunglasses. The fish was likely harvested in 1970 or early ‘71, at the very latest. The word ‘harvest’ originally meant autumn. It became a verb in the 15th century, and wasn’t used in relation to harvesting wild animals until 1946, the first year of the mid-20th century baby boom.

The fish was probably harvested in a coral reef off the coast of the Indonesian archipelago. Three-quarters of the world’s species of coral live in Indonesia’s tropical water ecosystem. The islands act as a hydraulic brake on the current carrying water from the warm pools of the Pacific to the Indian Ocean. Clown triggerfish are usually spotted 10 to 250 feet down on the inner and outer portions of their reefs. They’re loners. The males maintain large territories and the females smaller ones within them, vassal states in 45-foot coral colonies.

In 1974 the philosopher Thomas Nagel published a thought experiment about consciousness called ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ Nagel had the idea to use bats after trying to evict some from his house. ‘Even without the benefit of philosophical reflection,’ he wrote, ‘Anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life.’ His thesis was that there is something that it is like to be a bat, but we can’t know what it is. Bats perceive the external world by sonar, a form of perception completely dissimilar to human senses. It will not help to try and imagine, Nagel wrote:

‘That one has webbing on one’s arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one’s mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one’s feet in an attic. In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves.’

We are bound by the limits of our own memories and senses in attempting to imagine what it would be like to be a clown triggerfish, scanning its reef for predators and food. Clown triggers have eyes set high on their heads which move independently. Researchers at the Sensory Neurobiology Lab at the Queensland Brain Institute were half a century away from establishing that reef fish see all the colours humans do and some we can’t. Reefs are noisy places. A soundscape of snorts, snores, and the crackle of snapping shrimps, which sounds like a tap-dancer moving across a surface lined with bubble wrap. But fish don’t have ears, they have ear parts inside their heads, so we can’t know what it sounds like for them.

We can’t know if the fish was female or male; if the fish had arrived at the breeding grounds to prepare nests or establish a territory, or to choose a mate and lay eggs. A male clown triggerfish breeds with a harem of two to five females. We can’t know if this clown trigger was a member of a harem, or kept one, or what it feels like to direct a jet of water from our mouths to uncover buried prey or crush mollusks with vampiresque teeth, or what the crushed mollusk would taste like, because fish have more taste buds than any other animal—extraoral buds can be located in their lips, gill rakers, and oesophagus.

The particulars of its territory are unknown. We don’t know if this fish patrolled a psychedelic landscape of giant red cabbages and stalks lined with iridescent beads, tiers of mossy pagodas, a moonscape, or bubble-tip anemones. If the clown trigger was blowing on a nest to oxygenate eggs or wedged in between pieces of coral, paused in suspended animation. Fish don’t sleep, but they do rest. We can’t know if the reef was crowded and the clown triggerfish was distracted by a shoal of thousands moving like a murmuration of birds. If it spotted the diver with an independently moving eye or heard with the ear parts inside its head. Clown triggers are at risk of being preyed on by sharks, groupers and jack fish. They engage the spines of their dorsal fins when they feel threatened. It’s used for defence, or to lock themselves into crevices. The second spine has to be pulled back to engage it, like a trigger, but we can’t know if the fish had time to, in this instance.

The harvesting might have been preceded by a number of scenarios. Clown triggers are territorial, and grunt like pigs when they spot a predator. They can put up a fight and attack the eels and hammerheads who patrol the cliff faces of their coral reefs. A video of a clown triggerfish defending its nest from a diver has been posted online. The fish head-butts an underwater camera, grunting and trying to bite the lens, indefatigable. But they also hide.

Only the collector would know if the fish tried to wedge itself in a cave, or fought back and tried to bite, maybe succeeding. It was likely an unimportant memory existing briefly in the prefrontal cortex of the diver’s brain. The collector would have been pleased—clown triggers have always been a high-value target species in the global aquarium trade—but beyond that, there was probably no reason the memory was stored for long-term purposes in his hippocampus.

Cyanide wasn’t involved in the capture. Collectors in the Philippines had already begun shooting cyanide into cracks of coral to stun fish but this method wasn’t used in Indonesia until the 1980s. It’s taxing, dangerous work in isolated locations, far from the shore. The diver was probably wearing a scuba mask and wooden flippers, and carrying a net and a bag. He might have used a snorkel or breathed through a long plastic tube. Most divers have a styrofoam boat with containers of sea water attached to their waists, bobbing above them and casting underwater shadows on sunny days.

The clown triggerfish’s passage to a form of immortality began at the moment of capture, but the details remain unknown. The diver might have driven the fish into his net, or grabbed it by the tail with his hand. Fish dislike being handled, and respond to stress like mammals, with elevated heart and breathing rates. Adrenaline and noradrenaline were released into the clown triggerfish’s circulation; hunger levels dropped. Many ornamental fish don’t survive the pressure of capture and transportation, but this one did.

Above water, the world had international air travel and landlines and long-distance phone calls and radio and television, which began broadcasting in Jakarta in 1962 with the opening ceremonies of the Asian Games. Indonesia’s transition to the New Order was underway. The country’s longest-serving president had begun his 31-year dictatorship. His predecessor Sukarno died of kidney failure on 21 June, 1970. Documents declassified in 2021 have revealed the involvement of British security services in carrying out covert operations to undermine Sukarno’s regime and eliminate the Communist Party of Indonesia. Between 500,000 and one million citizens had been massacred in Suharto’s 1965-1966 anti-communist purge.

The political instability was bad for the currency. Inflation of the Indonesian rupiah had jumped to 600% by the mid-sixties and a ‘new rupiah’ was introduced at a rate of 1000 of the old unit. Five thousand and 10,000 rupiah banknotes were added by 1970 and coinage was reintroduced. How much the fisherman was paid for the clown triggerfish is a matter of conjecture. In the 1970s a collector in the neighbouring Philippines could sell a reef fish for between 10 to 50 centavos for a reef. Adjusted for inflation, the clown triggerfish was worth $51.59 on the American market in 1970.

The collector who’d caught the fish probably lived in a stilt house over the water and kept catches hanging in net pens until the middleman arrived. His family’s life had many challenges. The average life expectancy in Indonesia in 1970 was 51. Hurricanes hit the islands approximately seven times a year. In 1970 collectors faced tropical cyclones Carmen, Janet, and Loris, and severe tropical cyclones Andrea-Claudine, Beverly-Eva, Dominique-Hillary, and Myrtle-Ginette.

There is no scientific consensus on the levels of the clown triggerfish’s distress. When a human is injured, it stimulates receptors called nociceptors. Electrical signals travel through nerves and the spinal cord to the cerebral cortex, which is processed as a sensation of pain. It was believed that fish didn’t feel pain because they don’t have a neocortex until 2003, when biologists at the Roslin Institute published ‘significant evidence of nociception in teleost fishes and furthermore [demonstrated] that behaviour and physiology are affected over a prolonged period of time, suggesting discomfort.’ In other words, fish do feel pain.

The Roslin team’s findings had implications for fish farming, industrial fishing industries, and sports like angling. A revised animal protection act in Germany stated fish were sentient vertebrates who must be protected against cruel acts but the dispute continued in scientific publications.‘Fish do not feel pain and its implications for understanding phenomenal consciousness,’ (Biology & Philosophy, 2015). ‘Can fish really feel pain?’ (Fish Fish, 2014). In 2013 a team of neurobiologists, behavioral ecologists and fishery scientists published a rebuke in Fish and Fisheries:

‘We review(ed) studies claiming that fish feel pain and find deficiencies in the methods used for pain identification, particularly for distinguishing unconscious detection of injurious stimuli (nociception) from conscious pain. Results were also frequently misinterpreted and not replicable, so claims that fish feel pain remain unsubstantiated.’

‘God put these animals on earth for us to survive on,’ a commercial fisherman from Florida told The Washington Post. ‘Whoever’s coming out with “fish are tortured” or “fish feel pain,” they’re not playing with a full deck. I don’t want to be rude.’ Put otherwise: ‘It is very difficult to deduct underlying emotional states based on behavioural responses.’

Marco Evaristti—an artist whose previous works included a dinner party where he served agnolotti pasta with meatballs made with his own liposuctioned fat and works painted with human blood ‘and other materials’ acquired from car accidents in Bangkok—used live goldfish in an exhibition at Denmark’s Trapholt Museum he called ‘Helena & El Pescador.’ Ten blenders filled with water and a single goldfish in each one. Evaristti said it was an invitation to the gallery’s visitors to do ‘battle with their conscience…. A protest against what is going on in the world, against this cynicism, this brutality that impregnates the world in which we live.’

Someone pressed the button and killed at least one of the little orange goldfish. The button-pusher is unknown. No details survive in articles; if this individual was alone, with friends, a date, or even children. If they’d gone for the specific purpose of pressing the button or it had been an impulsive decision—something they’d done because they felt like it, because they could, for fun. If it ever troubled their conscience, or it became a story they loved telling, something they told strangers, no opportunity to tell it wasted.

People complained about ‘Helena & El Pscador.’ until the police ordered the museum to unplug the blenders. Evaristti refused to alter the exhibition or pay the fine for animal cruelty and was ultimately acquitted in a Danish courtroom, where Judge Preben Bagger ruled that the fish had been killed ‘instantly’ and ‘humanely.’ ‘It’s a question of principle,’ Evarsetti had told the court. ‘An artist has the right to create works which defy our concept of what is right and what is wrong.’

Back to the clown triggerfish, who had probably been stored in a net below the collector’s house. There are differences between the surface and the deep ocean currents; the density of the water is affected by salinity, temperature, and depth. The clown triggerfish would have been aware of the differences and the lack of anywhere to rest or look for food. A fish’s memories can last up to five months. The goldfish in Evaristti’s blenders had had the ability to escape nets, navigate mazes, correlate actions with rewards, and remember other individual goldfish after periods of separation.

The middlemen of the aquarium trade travel for up to six hours to reach their collectors, navigating the trade winds and currents, squinting at the shards of sunlight reflecting off the waves, alert to gradations in the clouds and shark fins camouflaged in the ripples of the water. The current carrying water from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean is one of the largest movements of water on the planet. People say that days would only last 23 hours if the Indonesian Throughflow wasn’t slowing down the rotation of the Earth.

If the middleman has a good relationship with their collectors they often spent the night. The eponymous fish was scooped up with a net and placed in a plastic bag filled with 2 galloons of water. The middleman squeezed out the excess air, inserted a tube into the water and filled the bag with pure oxygen from a canister. In a YouTube video of the process the goldfish are opening and closing their mouths rapidly, indicating low oxygen levels in their environment. The clown triggerfish’s yellow mouth was lined with thin black and white rings, like circles painted by Joan Miró. It gaped open every few hours when the middleman re-oxygenated the bag, showing off pointy teeth.

The bag was packed in a styrofoam cooler with other bags of ornamental fish. The water had to stay cool because reduced temperatures affect a fish’s metabolic rates and decrease oxygen consumption. It was dark. The noise of confused fish packed in bags and the purr of the boat’s motor was very different from the sound of a reef. The fish didn’t have room to swim or corals to hide in. The clown triggerfish had no eggs to blow on, no food to catch, no harem, no territory to patrol. The middleman’s boat shot across large blue stretches of the map, past dolphin pods and tankers and cargo ships and a hot pink and lavender sunset, or rain.

No records are kept—even today, ‘detailed evidence on trade with marine resources in Indonesia is lacking or it is hardly accessible. Moreover, the exploitation of ornamental species seems to be mostly uncontrolled.’ The provenances of captive clown triggerfish remain elusive. Saltwater aquariums were an expensive, niche hobby in the 1970s—found in restaurants, hotels, and the bachelor pads of millionaires. A tank of undulating damselfish and yellow tangs was a signifier of prosperous glamour, like Jacuzzis and sable fur coats. It was a time of rapid expansion in Indonesia’s marine ornamental fish trade, which was centralized in Jakarta and Denpasar, Bali, where over 280 species of marine fish are traded. Firms still in operation were established fifty years ago— Jaya Aquarium has been exporting live fish from Jakarta since 1962.

Fish were originally transported by ship in large heavy-metal transport cans wrapped in insulating material. The fatality rates were excessive. Fish produce carbon dioxide when they respire, which reacts with water to form a weak acid—high levels will interfere with oxygen uptake in their blood. Ammonia build up which occurs as a result of fish metabolism can become toxic. The easiest way to reduce ammonia buildup is to stop feeding for up to 72 hours before transport.

The clown triggerfish was transferred to the custody of a regional middleman, who shipped catches to Jakarta or Denpasar, Bali. Transported by local dealers by bike or motorcycle, the fish spent weeks or even months being passed down the supply chain, held in tanks in holding facilities and enormous piles of plastic bags on storehouse floors, where they were sorted by species and graded by size. The fish was packed and re-packed on multiple occasions before it reached its final destination, a hardy, resilient fish who survived a dangerous capture and transport from a reef to the busiest airport in the world.

The people at every stage of the clown triggerfish’s passage to London are unknown. The collector, the first middleman and the regional middlemen, the forklift operators and supervisors in warehouses, the pilots, and the border inspection post officers supervising the entry of wildlife into Heathrow. The person who signed for custody of the boxes marked ‘Live Tropical Fish,’ and the UK dealers. About 117 billion people have existed on the planet, almost all of them anonymous—we have no idea who was responsible for selecting and transporting the clown triggerfish to Pinewood Studies in Buckinghamshire in the summer of 1971. The only people we know about in this story are the ones with IMDb pages and the stars, because a celebrity is their own species, as classifiable as an animal in a nature guide: Description. Feeding and Other Habits. Habitat and Range.

The movie star Sean Connery appeared in at least 69 movies and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2000 for services to film drama. His first job was the local milkman and he joined the navy at the age of 16 and and worked as an artist’s model, a lifeguard, a cement mixer, a steel bender, and a coffin polisher. He had two tattoos: ‘Mum & Dad’ in a bird’s mouth, and ‘Scotland Forever’ in a heart pierced by a knife. Connery placed third in the Mr. Universe contest in 1953, was People magazine’s oldest Sexiest Man Alive in 1989, and ten years later he beat Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise in an Internet poll for the sexiest man of the century.

Connery was born in August 25, 1930 in Edinburgh and died in the Bahamas on October 31, 2020. He owned homes in the South of France, Marbella, Florida, the Bahamas, London, and the upper half of a landmark-declared townhouse in Manhattan, where he spent a decade in litigation with the eye doctor who lived downstairs. The GQ article ‘A breakdown of every James Bond actor’s favourite car’ says he drove a second-hand Jenson C-V8 in the 1960s and later owned an Alpine White shark-nosed 1986 BMW 635CSi and a 1964 Aston Martin DB5 he never had the opportunity to drive.

Connery was protected by two Great Danes, he always ordered the green curry at Nahm-Jim restaurant in St. Andrew’s, and his favourite Bond film was From Russia With Love. He started smoking cigarettes when he was nine. ’I try not to drink too much because when I do drink I drink too much and too easily,’ he told The Guardian in December of 1971. ‘I gave up smoking three years ago a complete cut-off; when I smoked pot I found that I didn’t like it because, although it turned me on all right, it was too much like smoking cigarettes. I dehydrate very easily in high temperatures. I didn’t know this until I was in Japan and found that I was slowing down without realising it. They had to pump a pint of saline into me.’

He wasn’t the first choice to play the spy in the film versions of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books. Cary Grant was offered the part but he refused to do sequels. The Daily Express launched a ‘Find James Bond’ contest. Fleming wanted David Niven as Bond and Noel Coward to play the villain in Dr. No, but Coward sent a telegram to the producers: ‘DR NO? NO! NO! NO!’ Connery nailed it after a lunch when the producers Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli and Harry Saltzman watched him walk back to his car—Saltzman said he moved like a jungle cat. The memory was stored in his hippocampus and reinforced whenever he talked about it, and eventually the story of Sean Connery getting the part after Broccoli and Saltzman watched him walk back to his car would outlive them all.

Between 1962 and 1967 Connery made five Bond movies and dropped out in 1969 when George Lazenby took over for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Lazenby took some bad advice from his agent and Connery was convinced to come back for $1.25 million dollars and a 10% cut of the gross. ‘Lazenby couldn’t do a good job because you have to have technique to get the character right,’ Connery told The Guardian. ‘I know he behaved like a prize shit, alienating people from what they tell me – I’ve never met him – but it wasn’t all his fault.’ The relationship between Saltzman and Connery had become so poor it was in his contract that Saltzman was barred from the set when Diamonds are Forever began production in the Nevada Desert in April of 1971.

Jill St. John played the diamond smuggler Tiffany Case. The main romantic interest, the woman Bond is kissing before the end credits. ‘She’s a very smart lady,’ St. John said when she discussed her character with The Miami News,‘She’s a survivor. In some ways she’s a lot like me.’ Half a century later typing ‘Did Sean Connery and Jill St John get along?’ into Google elicits:

People also ask:
Did Sean Connery sleep with Jill St John?
Did Jill St John date Tom Selleck?

and

Did Jill St John date Henry Kissinger?

(Yes. ‘A friend for life,’ St. John told the News).

The production spent eight weeks in America, filming neon cityscapes and a dusty pursuit through the desert. The International Hotel on Paradise Road stood in for the fictional Whyte House hotel. The Ford Motor Company provided eight cars and Freemont Street was closed for three nights so stunt performers could rehearse and shoot a car chase. They shot on the floors of real casinos. The carnival midway where Tiffany Case retrieved smuggled diamonds and a woman named Zambora, ‘captured near Nairobi’ turned into a gorilla for an audience of children looked mostly unchanged in a 2017 blog post revisiting the Circus Circus.

By June production had moved to Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire. ‘I never liked designing those kitschy Las Vegas sets,’ the production designer Ken Adam told Christopher Fraying. He designed the reclusive billionaire Willard Whyte’s penthouse and the Whyte House bridal suite where James Bond and Tiffany Case checked in as Mr and Mrs Jones. Their suite was furnished with rococo furniture, chandeliers, heavy drapes, and baroque vases filled with sheafs of wheat. Everything was white or gold. The pièce de résistance was an aquarium shaped like a circular bed at the top of a white carpeted staircase, flanked by two blackamoor statues holding feathers: the clown triggerfish’s new home.

‘I think it was Cubby’s idea,’ Adams said. ‘We had the waterbed sent over from the United States but there was no way I could get tropical fish inside it, so I designed a series of circular perspex tanks around the bed. We had Sean Connery and Jill St. John fornicating on the bed with the fish swimming in the foreground. The first problem was that the waterbed leaked onto my very expensive new carpet, so that leak had to be stopped.’

The fish bed. Clearly uncomfortable, along with Shirley Bassey’s theme song it would go on to become one of the less-terrible things people remember about Diamonds Are Forever.The tanks had been decorated with artificial pink corals and plants. The clown trigger’s new tank mates appeared to number indigo damselfish and black-and-white striped convict tang, dwarf crayfish, and glassy shrimp—the smaller fish would be difficult to identify as they jerked across the screen like crowds in a Charlie Chaplin film. The animals all generated a lot of waste; their tanks required a good filtration system and their water needed frequent changes.

Ornamental fish run an obstacle course to reach their final tanks. The fish at Pinewood had all endured weeks in cramped tanks and plastic bags. Their new aquarium, as packed as rush hour on a crowded reef, was stuffed with plastic flora and the studio lights were much brighter than any sunlight filtering through to their ocean habitats. It must have been quite an adjustment. The starfish and invertebrates had gathered in the bottom tank, the mattress part, where Sean Connery would lie on top of Jill St. John going numb on the hard perspex surface, their modesty protected by strapless adhesive thongs.

The collector and the middlemen would have known to keep the clown triggerfish isolated, but there was no Internet to warn the production team that it’s inadvisable to put a captive clown trigger in a tank with its prey. Aquarium hobbyists have stories about small juveniles who exist peacefully for years, right up until the day the clown triggerfish decides they’re big enough to kill their tank mates. The other fish should be chosen carefully—no small slow-movers or invertebrates. They can co-exist in large tanks with dog-faced puffers or white-spotted groupers who can hold their ground.

The two-story Whyte House bridal suite was a finely calibrated and extremely high maintenance set for what would result in 1 minute and 50 seconds of screen time. Saltwater aquariums require an air pump, a filtration system, and heaters. The construction crewmust have been relieved to have built the bed, salvaged the carpet, and plugged up the leak. The production was pressed for time—Connery’s contract had a clause which paid him $10,000 a week if shooting ran over 18 weeks. Ken Adam didn’t remember whether a security guard or the prop master was the last person on set the night they’d fixed the leak. The days were long and they were probably exhausted and running on automatic pilot. Checking to make sure everything was packed away correctly, every room empty, every light and switch turned off. This was not like the person who deliberately flicked on the blender in the Trapholt Musuem—the person who turned off the aquarium’s heating unit had simply made a mistake—but the consequences were the same.

If the water in a tank gets too cold it becomes stressful environment. Fish who are extremely sensitive don’t survive. They can’t regulate their internal body temperatures and the fish in the tank who were intolerably cold couldn’t swim away to a warmer patch of water. So the fish started dying. Biologists still cannot agree whether these fish would have felt any pain, or if the sudden deaths were stressful or confusing for the others. At call time on the day production was scheduled to shoot James Bond and Miss Tiffany Case post-fornication in the bridal suite at the Whyte House, the crew discovered that half of the fish in the bed were dead.

No one admitted to having switched off the heating but the person responsible must have known it was their fault, a lump of desperate, panicked shame forming in their throat or chest. Nobody wants to kill half an aquarium full of fish, and no one wants to lose their job. An assistant got out a telephone book and started making calls to fish dealers and pet stores. ‘We couldn’t get replacements,’ Adam remembered. ‘It was impossible.’ Someone suggested putting the dead fish on ice and putting them back in the tank for the shoot. Ice was ordered from the commissary, or a freezer was purchased or commandeered, and crew members scooped the dead fish out of the tanks for freezing.

‘There were deceased fish floating in the tanks?’ an incredulous Christopher Frayling asked 37 years later.

‘Not all of them,’ Adam said.

The assumption is that every fish died because the heating had been switched off. But those tanks had been full of prey. When Sean Connery rolled onto Jill St. John for some sexy repartee, she was lying on what appears to be a dwarf crayfish which was in turn lying on its own back, very obviously dead. It is difficult not to wonder, given the inadvisability of keeping a clown triggerfish in a tank with invertebrates—especially a discombobulated predator who’d spent weeks or months in isolated transit— if the clown trigger had acted according to instinct, making that dead crayfish under Jill St. John the victim of an actual deliberate killing on a James Bond set.

Crew members re-arranged the dead fish in the bed-shaped Perspex aquarium. Second unit shot close ups of the tank, focusing on the clown trigger, the largest and most beautiful fish in the bed, who appeared to be treading water; magisterial, tail steady, fins rippling like gossamer scarves in a breeze. The clown triggerfish would be a continuity nightmare for the film’s editors. They did the best they could with the footage but the clown trigger was always facing in the wrong direction.

Connery and St. John arrived on set. Basil Newall or Allan Snyder applied their makeup. A hairstylist brushed, sprayed, and tousled St. John’s red hair. The wardrobe master Ray Beck handed them their adhesive thongs. Connery, an amusing man, probably made a crack about the dead fish to Adam. They got along and would mark the last day of shooting with a game of golf. The principals dropped their robes and arranged themselves on the fish bed to wait until the clown triggerfish swam into the shot. Connery and St. John were filmed through the aquarium. Director Guy Hamilton called: ’Action.’

These are the things we know for sure about the clown triggerfish—the rock solid, unabridged facts: Our clown triggerfish swam in a small ‘u’ shape, inches from the head of the sexiest man of the 20th century as he recited the lines: ‘In order to form a more perfect union, sweetheart,’ in response to St. John’s question: ‘Darling, why are we suddenly staying at the bridal suite in the Whyte House?’ St. John’s line would be layered over footage of the clown trigger, the fish alone, who was granted 6 seconds of solo screen time and the honour of opening the scene.

The clown triggerfish was first seen by audiences when the film premiered in Munich, West Germany on December 14, 1971. Diamonds Are Forever opened at London’s Odeon Leicester Square on Friday, December 30, 1971. Fans were held back by bobbies and barriers at the premier, where 700 people had waited for hours in the cold to watch other people walk into a theatre. When they spotted someone they recognised, the crowd screamed in excitement.

‘We step back to find that the whole system of justification and criticism, which controls our choices and supports our claims to rationality, rests on responses and habits that we never question,’ Thomas Nagel wrote in his 1971 essay The Absurd. ‘We see ourselves from outside, and all the contingency and specificity of our aims and pursuits become clear. Yet when we take this view and recognize what we do as arbitrary, it does not disengage us from life, and there lies our absurdity: not in the fact that such an external view can be taken of us, but in the fact that we ourselves can take it, without ceasing to be the persons whose ultimate concerns are so coolly regarded.”

The clown triggerfish swam across the screen in Leicester Square five times a day, from 10:45 AM, with late night shows on Friday and Saturday. After thirteen weeks the clown triggerfish began swimming across the screen of the London Pavilion on Piccadilly Circus before it began swimming across screens all over the United Kingdom in March of 1972. Sean Connery saw the clown triggerfish again at the Gala Scottish Premiere. He’d brought his brother as his date and the proceeds from the evening were donated to the Scottish International Education Trust, the charity Connery founded with his million dollar fee.

A lot of people ended up seeing that fish:

‘United Artists announces the greatest 7 day gross in the history of motion pictures—with holiday playing time yet to come!’ an ad in the trade papers boasted. ‘$10,438, 536 first 7 days in 23 countries.’ It took in $7, 599,686 in the United States, where it opened in 530 theatres and $64, 156 over the first four days it showed in five theatres in the Philippines.

It’s unknown what happened to the clown triggerfish after the shoot. It was a valuable animal; there is every reason to be hopeful that the clown triggerfish made it back to the dealer and went on to live out the rest of its existence in a restaurant, or a hotel, or a millionaire’s penthouse. A captive clown triggerfish can live for up to 20 years. The fish might very well have lived until Diamonds Are Forever was released for VHS rental in 1983, or even until ‘87, when people could watch it swim across their set’s bulging, fishbowl screens at will when it was made available for purchase by Warner Home Video.

The first time the clown trigger was captured it was harvested from its reef. The second time was by the cinematographer Ted Moore, who used 35-millimetre Eastman colour negative film stock and a Panavision lens to preserve the clown triggerfish like a contemporary arthropod in amber. A process called telecine transferred the film stock to television, videocassette recorders, DVD, Blu-ray Disc, and computers. The clown triggerfish in the Whyte House bridal suite would remain gloriously alive for decades after its death, as long as people watched the movie, as long as it kept swimming across our screens, a Minoan octopus of the Jet Age; Tutankhamen’s jackal; Leo the Lion roaring for MGM.

Arts & Culture, Editor's Pick, Essays, EssaySaturday

Love by the Tracks

by Sarah Harley • April 11, 2024April 11, 2024

A green field, purple hills in the distance, a vegetable garden, a place for hay. This was the view from the farmhouse where we were going to live.

“I want a dapple grey horse!” I said. We were sitting in the car making plans for our life together.

A train flew past. Paul liked to sit next to the railway tracks. I counted each one of the clattering freight cars. 23.

I met him when I started working at a new school. I was setting up my classroom when he strolled in to say hello, tall and handsome. I was a 38 year old teacher with long red hair.

“What’s your name?” he asked. He was distracted, his gaze traced the corners of the ceiling. I watched his eyes behind dark-framed glasses fall on a patch of cobwebs.

“Sarah,” I replied, nervous.

“Paul and Sarah. Sarah and Paul.”

I stared at him. Butterflies inside me. Were we going to get married? The thought came fast, without warning. I wanted to run.

__________

“Better to have loved and lost than never loved at all.”

My mother recited the mantra to comfort herself about marrying my father on the rebound from her one true love. She kept his old crumpled love letters hidden inside a black shiny handbag in the kitchen cupboard.

The mantra established the coexistence of love and loss. You can’t have one without the other. Love is quantified through loss.

I lost my mother to breast cancer when I was thirteen. I never had the chance to grow up and individuate myself from her. Instead, she lives inside me, as a ghost. It’s not really fair on her. She deserves to be a ghost who is free.

Navigating my path in romantic relationships is difficult. From the start, I am afraid of losing myself in the other person. I rig up barricades and make-shift walls, erect scaffolding. When I hide myself, I am hard to read and fully know.

In time, the fear of losing myself merges with the fear of losing the other person. I dismantle the scaffolding. But I grow mistrustful and watchful. I keep a terrible score.

__________

With Paul, I threw caution to the wind.

On Sundays, we went to the marsh. Purple and yellow wildflowers stretched out of view, cattails cut into the sky. Bird calls filled the air, herons and cranes took flight overhead. We walked along the wooden boardwalk holding hands. The sun transformed into a deep orange orb.

We stopped for drinks in dark velvet bars; I was deep inside a fairy tale.

We started going steady. Fate was tempted. We fell madly in love. We’d lie on my futon sofa for hours, peacefully entwined. My heartbeat entrained with his.

“We’re arguably the poster children for tantric sex!” Paul said. We almost died laughing.

Time flowed unbroken when we were together.

“You’re my person,” he’d say, enfolding me. I’d stand on tiptoes at the back door to kiss him goodbye.

While apart, we emailed back and forth throughout the day, texted late into night.

Paul’s house was in the shade of a hill next to a railway line. He kept bird feeders of different sizes in his garden, hanging from the tall pines with soft bluish-green needles. He knew the names of the birds and their songs, their migratory behaviors. So many black-capped chickadees!

“First one to find the new feeder every time.”

In bed one morning, he decided I had a pretty bird mouth. We laughed.

“I love you Sarah.”

__________

Toward the end of the relationship, he fed me from his plate. Crusts of sandwiches, a french fry, into the pretty bird mouth. I was restricting food to remain the tiny size I believed he had prescribed for me. It wasn’t his fault; I wanted to disappear. It was an illusion of control. My insecurities and self-doubt were taking over.

Falling in love was following a well-worn path: an abdication of self. I handed over the most scared and vulnerable parts of me for him to look after.

The woman he had fallen in love with, filled with wanderlust, up and left.

In every relationship, I summon my mother’s spirit when the unraveling begins. She’s skilled in the art of sabotage. Just like her with my father, I’d storm out on Paul after a few drinks, walking home with my small shoes in one hand, a cigarette in the other.

“Get in the car!” he’d yell, pulling up the car next to me.

One day, walking along a pier, he let my hand go.

At the five year mark, we broke up.

We spent the following seven years as best friends, always saying goodbye with a silent tender embrace. One day, we would get back together.

__________

I saved the remnants and mementos of us in a bright green cardboard shoebox.

“This is for the “Paul & Sarah Box,” he’d say, early on, handing me a handwritten love note.

Even as just friends, I couldn’t imagine my life without him at the center of it. He was the first person I instinctively turned to. He was the arbiter of my reality. We were quagmired. Unable to let go; unable to hold on.

One night, we sat huddled over a small round table, grabbing a drink. It was November, the days were growing shorter. Inside there was a warm glow.

“I met someone.”

When I heard the words out loud, the room spun. I felt still and empty, as if I was standing on a desolate platform. I had been dreaming. No more songs for the playlist. 36 songs. Two Hours. 46 minutes.

We continued as friends for another few months. Doing so slowly killed me. I no longer recognized him, eyes blank and distant, the love diminished to charity. I didn’t recognize myself: thin and enervated, black under-eye circles. The soft yellow light that used to surround us darkened to nothing.

I couldn’t see him anymore. I would not call. I promised to stop playing the song “Love for Granted” by Phoenix.

I stopped hanging on a small chance.

__________

One night, about a year after I last saw him, I decided to burn the Paul & Sarah Box.

I rehearsed everything in my mind, imagining a solemn ritual of carefully taking out each item, waking up the memory, and then releasing its hold on my heart.

I considered the emotions I might feel. Regret? Remorse? An engulfing cathartic sadness.

I built a beautiful fire: dry wood stacked perfectly, burning slowly with little trails and tendrils of smoke. I tended the fire with love, feeding it small twigs and branches to keep it going.

I went inside to get the green box. I had hidden it on a high shelf in a closet.

Instead of the performance I had imagined, I just placed the box upon the fire. It marked the end with an irrevocable decision. I watched as it all went up in flames. Pages rustled, pictures curled. Within a few minutes, the fire had consumed the box in its entirety, its contents reduced to a fluttering heap of silent ashes.

I didn’t really want to burn the past, I wanted to burn the future. I wanted to burn any bridge that would lead me to the aching yearning for our shared past because every time I went back, I could not picture a future without him. I wanted to black out the pain, give in to the intrusive thoughts of wanting to hurt myself. My failure to be honest with myself had come at a high price.

I burned the way back and the way forward.

I burned all the cards he ever gave me signed as “Your love, Paul” then “Your dear friend, Paul.”

Gone were the scribbled plans of all our trips. Nova Scotia, Cape Breton. Quebec City. The summer drives to Trempealeau on the eastern banks of the Mississippi River. A place called Harmony Beach.

My sketches of the marsh birds.

Tickets and maps. The tattered pieces of time I had once treasured.

A bright green St. Patrick’s Day beaded necklace and ATM receipt from our first drink together.

Tiny bits of paper promising he loved me most of all. “My dear woman. Love you always and forever.”

I tried to burn my own sentimentality and belief that a man who loved me would be there forever. I wanted to immolate my inner hopeless romantic, the one who had led me into this mess in the first place. But she was indestructible.

But even after the fire, I could not destroy the love, even though it had almost destroyed me. Love is a quantifiable force of the universe; it cannot be destroyed. You can try to burn it in a fire but it will get stronger, like iron refined to steel.

__________

I can still picture the two of us together. Paul and Sarah. There’s me, running into a coffee shop early in the morning to get cherry Danish pastries and coffee when we left on a summer road-trip to Canada. I was happy. Our love was easy.

There we are! Standing in the wide expanse of a river, milk blossoms falling all around us in the water. We can’t stop laughing!

I could still catalog all the things small and large that might bring me to his mind. I never come up empty. Song of a chickadee. Trill of a robin. Snowfall.

At the tin ceiling bar, where we once sat, he pulled me in close, wrapping his arms around me. I wonder if we knew the future would drag us apart.

Our time together, now gone, can still evoke a bittersweet longing. But the deeper love is for the exiled parts of me who loved and lost him. I took back wanderlust, the woman with long red hair, the pretty bird mouth.

I opened a door in my mind for my mother to come and go.

Love is the vestige in which the sweetness of all things lost remains.

Arts & Culture, Essays, EssaySaturday

Letter to Hannie Schaft

by Barth Landor • March 17, 2024March 17, 2024

Two Fridays ago I read the news of your death. It was early in the day and I was sitting on my patio sipping coffee as a strong breeze disturbed the morning paper spread out before me, the broadsheet pages flapping as if intent on telling me something. I turned to the obituaries, and there was yours below the fold. I tend to merely skim the obits, which feels rather irreverent, like speeding past a hearse in the street with barely a glance, but yours took hold of me and I read it avidly. There were two photos of you, striking ones although they were black-and-white and so didn’t portray the vivid red of your hair—a feature, I learned, that was central to your story. I’m a redhead, too, or I used to be until the decades added up and the bright color began to fade and gray started creeping in. Is that why I am writing to you, Hannie Schaft—to acknowledge that I have lived long enough to lose the copper sheen in my hair, while you died long before your brilliant hues could be touched by age? One may regret the loss of lustrous hair as it grays or thins, but really these are signs that one has avoided a too-early demise, which you did not.

If we read a report of a death in today’s newspaper, that means it’s news, right? But you died 78 years ago. Your death was news to me – you were news to me – but your obituary was written to right an old wrong; it was an entry in a series about the “overlooked”, those significant people whose deaths went unreported at the time, largely due to cultural biases. The article I read about you was an oxymoron—it was old news.

You were 24 years old when you died, in 1945, at the hands of the Nazis. That was a very long time ago—so long that your generation is barely visible from today’s vantage point, as if your era and ours were stranded on opposite sides of a wide unbridgeable gorge. Yet just the other day I read of a person who had somehow made the crossing from your distant cliff to ours. On that recent morning when I read your very belated obituary, in the year 2023, a contemporary of yours was still living. She was a Dutch woman like you, and just your age – actually she was six months older – and like you she had been a target of the Nazis. She had managed to escape while you did not. Marga Minco also walked the streets of Amsterdam during the war; perhaps you passed each other in disguise, you with your red hair dyed black, she with her dark hair bleached blond. After the war she became a writer and wrote a famous book about the Holocaust, and she lived 78 years longer than you. Your obituary appeared on the first Friday in July and Marga Minco died three days later at the age of 103. Strange: you died almost eight decades apart and the notices appeared in the New York Times within ten days of each other.

When the Nazis invaded Holland in May 1940, it would have been highly unlikely that Marga Minco would outlive you by even a single day. She was Jewish and you were not. She belonged to a people chosen for destruction – she alone in her immediate family escaped the death camps – while you were of “respectable” stock, and had only to tolerate your homeland being under occupation. Lots of Dutch did that. Marga Minco wore a yellow star on her sleeve, while the sleeves of your black dress, visible in the newspaper photo of you on a city street in winter, draw attention only to their fashion—the padded shoulders, the tailored look. In your country under Nazi control, you still had freedom to move about unhunted.

You rejected that stunted freedom, Hannie Schaft. You chose to become hunted. You chose – it seems incredible to write these words – to become a hunter yourself, to hunt Nazis and their collaborators, and to kill them. That was why you had to dye your hair black: because the Nazis wanted to find the girl with red hair who was killing them. Your obituary says you took part in shooting six German occupiers and Dutch traitors. You thought it likely that you would die as a result of these attacks on the enemy.

Why am I addressing this letter to you when it cannot reach you? Throughout my adult life my way of responding to feelings inside me has been to put words on paper. Sometimes I’ve tried to make art out of those words, sometimes write letters. You are familiar to me—it isn’t just that we shared hair color. In your obituary you are described as a bookworm and rather shy, a university student goaded by your conscience. I was those things in my early twenties. When the Nazis demanded that you sign a pledge of loyalty to them to remain a student, you refused and dropped out. I know I would have wanted to find the courage to do the same. You seem to have been inwardly-oriented while pulled by circumstances toward action. I recognize your tribe for I belong to it as well.

When I was 24, though, I had no thoughts of being willing to die for a cause. I wasn’t tested by such crises as you were—or I didn’t put myself in their way. A long life lay before me. I was in love and we were going to be married, and already dreaming of children. I wanted to be a writer, and my creative present was a fertile field that would lead to future harvests of poems and plays, stories and novels. At 24 I thought a lot about how to live truly and fully, and it didn’t occur to me that among my choices might be renouncing my life. I had the luxury of imagining a future and even planning for one.

A fierce resolve is not the most natural quality of a rather shy bookworm. But you resolved to leave university although you had wanted to be a human-rights lawyer. You resolved to join the Resistance. You resolved to kill Nazis. You could have had a perfectly honorable war, volunteering for the Red Cross (which you did), refusing to pledge your support to the Third Reich (you did refuse), and even helping Jews to avoid deportation to Auschwitz—a very risky undertaking but surely less of a suicide mission than shooting Nazis and their quislings. (You did help to hide Jews and to get them fake IDs.) You could have done all those things – you did do them – and when the war was over and for the rest of your life looked back with pride at your valiant contributions to defeating the enemy. That wasn’t enough for you. You resolved to make the killing of Nazis more important than your own survival.

Many people showed righteous resolve during the war. All those millions of soldiers, your fellow-citizens who hid Jews, your fellow Resistance fighters. Resolve and sacrifice were essential qualities for anyone who was fighting the Nazis, right? But there is no need to see how well you stack up with other brave souls in your generation, Hannie Schaft. I look across eight decades and an ocean and I see you, an individual, a young vulnerable woman steeling herself to pursue brutal killers. You stir in me feelings of familiarity mingled with awe and reverence. The example you set raises difficult questions for me about how one should live—about how I have lived. Am I worthy of those like you who bore the gravest responsibilities that life can ask? Does the voice inside me demand that I stoke the fires of life (that’s what I want!) or to extinguish them for a purpose indifferent to one’s personal survival (that’s what your conscience led you to do)? Is it really enough just to strive to do good? You might have had a long life filled with the doing of good actions, and you rejected it.

Here is the most difficult question I ask myself: in light of a sacrifice like yours, does a poem I write, or perhaps a novel, really matter at all? I do not mean that if we want to make our lives worthwhile we must put down our pens and paintbrushes and die for a cause. I ask myself if art is less important than acts of sacrifice like yours, a question I should contemplate the next time I am writing a poem.

As I compose this letter to you, Hannie Schaft, I keep thinking of a writer I discovered a few years ago, a very good one, who lived during the war as you did. The two of you would not have met for he spent his war years largely in comfort in Paris. Here is what I scribbled in my journal after reading some of his diary entries: “Ernst Junger is a remarkable writer and thinker. In some of his best passages he brings to my mind Pascal; he is insightful and clever in describing the human condition.”

Ernst Junger was a German officer. He wore the uniform of the Third Reich. He served on the side of the Nazis you killed. He knew about the Holocaust as early as 1942. It is not to praise him that I say he deplored what he found out, writing of the horrific news from the east, “Such reports extinguish the colors of the day….Its infamy is unremitting.” Junger had a long productive life, publishing dozens of books and winning awards, his literary stature earning him accolades even from heads of state. Good fortune and strong self-preservation instincts kept him alive for more than a century—he lived to be 102 years old. Leave out the Nazi years and one could say he had a distinguished and even honorable life. (During the First World War he had been a brave and highly decorated soldier.) In the uniform of the Third Reich, he calculated his risks, made his choices, and survived the war.

You made your choices, too, Hannie Schaft. Is the art that Ernst Junger produced in his century-plus of living more important than the sacrifice you made of your life? Maybe the question is simplistic. Here is something I feel certain of: the war against tyranny – against evil autocrats and their lackeys and butchers – is won not by the private anguish of an Ernst Junger, but by the moral courage of a Hannie Schaft.

You were human like us. Even in those black-and-white photos I can see how lovely your red hair was–luxuriant, wavy, feminine. In the portrait taken on the street in winter, your dress is quite becoming, a belt cinched around your slender waist, a brooch attached below the neck. A purse is tucked tightly under your arm. You look poised and rather self-conscious, and perhaps you are a little vain. (In the other photo of you in the newspaper, a portrait, I see a trace of defiance in your eyes.) You were proud of your red hair and even put on makeup before you went out to shoot Nazis, a gesture suggesting that you were aware of your attractiveness. Maybe the decision to start killing the enemy had its origins not only in noble principles but also in earthy emotions. The romance you may have had with a fellow Resistance fighter, the excitement of daring underground adventures, a sense of self-importance when otherwise you would have been another faceless Dutch citizen under bleak occupation. Maybe depression sapped some of your will to live; maybe boredom made you take ever greater risks, just to feel more of yourself; maybe you thought about posthumous glory. Many ordinary human feelings might have contributed to your resolve. You were like us, like me, except for this: in my six decades I have never been willing and likely to die for my beliefs, or encountered such a person. You, Hannie Schaft, willed yourself to face death and not back down. Your resolve is the sharp tip of a sword that punctures any inflated sense of myself as a model citizen.

When you were stopped on a street in Haarlem during a random check, the gun in your bicycle bag was suspicious, but you couldn’t have been the woman they were searching for, since you had black hair. Later, when they looked more closely at the roots of your hair, they knew they had found their nemesis. I never understood why they call our hair red. Natural hair is not like the primary color red. Red is never more than an admixture in our hair, which is closer to rust-colored, copper, orange, auburn, tawny, sienna. What is more naturally red than hair? Blood is. Your head was truly red only once, on a sand dune near the Dutch coast when you were shot twice from behind. Your Nazi captors killed you just a few weeks before the end of the war.

After I read your obituary early on that breezy summer morning, I turned to the opinion pieces in the Times—the editorials and op-eds and letters from readers. It was a democratic parliament of fowls on those windswept pages, a cageless, free-range pastureland on which to hatch ideas about politics, race, justice. No one was arrested for saying what was on their mind; no one lost their job. Do you know who made that freedom of expression possible, Hannie Schaft? You did. You and so many others who resolved to fight absolute power even at the cost of your own lives. We owe our freedom to you and to other souls like you throughout history whose sacrifices made possible our freedom and comfort and peace. Your resolve, courage, and moral clarity are precious today—more precious than my words can ever express.

Arts & Culture, Editor's Pick, Essays, EssaySaturday

An American Consumer Remembers

by Harvey Lieberman • March 6, 2024March 17, 2024

*Inside view of Ford Thunderbird 1962 parked at Retro & Electro Parade Ploiesti. Black and white image by Gabriel Vasiliu*

I bought a home washing machine the other day and, to paraphrase Harry Chapin’s Cat’s in The Cradle song, it was delivered and installed in the usual way. I didn’t find that possession of this fine-looking streamlined device left me flushed with joy over owning something high tech and new, rather it joined one of those increasingly common moments when I became mindful of caring about things that I never knew had any significant personal meaning for me. Perhaps, this awareness, is a function of age, as now in my late 70s I experience moments when the inanimate becomes animate by being infused with poignant memories and flashbacks of the emotionally meaningful moments that I never knew existed, or I did not fully appreciate when I first experienced them.

Even before the delivery of the new machine, the effect that hearing the news that I needed to replace my family’s more than 20-year-old household washer surprised me. Aside from a few repairs of a relatively minor nature, it went on and on doing about 10 loads of wash a week—delicates, bulky items, slacks, shirts, and underwear and all those pieces of clothes, linens, and other necessities and amenities that any home takes for granted. And, then, when it recently started leaking, I called a reliable repair man, who respectfully gave me his diagnosis with the tact of an interpersonally gifted physician. “I’m sorry to say that this needs an awful lot of expensive work. Without that, maybe, it has a few months left. It’s not worth the investment and stores are having sales now. Go get a new one.”

It was unfair of me, but I was unsurprised, because I do have moments of unfairness, to find that my first thought was that the machine let me down, despite its many years of service. Putting matters into perspective, I patted the white top-loading washer on the lid and mentally thanked it for its loyal efforts. I told it that despite some chips in and discoloration of its finish, due to years of exposure to laundry detergents and chemicals, it still had its looks, even though its internal condition was poor. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, I broke the news to it that its ashes would not be joining those of my beloved English Cocker on the mantelpiece. Now, it was time to force myself to go shopping for something I did not enjoy shopping for, spend money I prefer to use for other purposes, and waste time in my older age, when time is more precious and can be better utilized in doctors’ waiting rooms than for my turn in the six-hour delivery and installation window provided by the appliance store.

I am trying to warm up to the new machine. I admit that it has a nice array of features, but it is more touch screen than knobs and for some reason it does not have an end of cycle buzzer, a particularly annoying deficiency since the duration of its refined computerized fabric selection cycles are somewhat unpredictable. I realize that I like knobs. I judge them to be more reliable and enjoy the tactile relationship that I have with them more than that with an electronic keyboard. I have enough touchscreen action in my life with my phone and computer to be satisfied in that domain. I suppose that this preference of mine is a product of being raised during the end period of the mechanical age and spending my whole life bearing witness to its transition into the computer age.

As I do my first series of washes on the new machine, I reminisce about other washes, from many machines during times past. These were the times when I would wash the grass stains out of my son’s soccer uniforms after pre-soaking them; when I would launder a shirt with hollandaise sauce on it from a fine New York City French restaurant, where my wife and I shared a meal with dear friends, some who are no longer living or have drifted out of contact for other reasons; and when I cleaned the tablecloth stain created by my brother, who spilled some red wine on it during an important celebratory occasion. I even thought of the variety of detergents and stain removers I utilized, made available by my wife who always keeps current with the best of consumer household chemistry available in our society. Some of these were effective and some not.

Then, my thoughts wander to memories of the other machines that I have long known were important in my life. Not surprisingly, several cars come to mind. And, while I gained a certain pleasure from having a new 1964 Thunderbird, gifted upon me by my father as my first car, driving it awakened me to the cold reality that the experience of owning it fell far short of fulfilling my erotic fantasies, and that fault lay more in me than the machine. As a result, I came to love the more dependable Japanese autos such as the Toyota Camry and Toyota Avalon, which served me reliably for long years and comfortably accommodated many an enjoyable family auto trip, as well as my lengthy daily commutes to work.

It turns out that my admiration for practicality, derived from forcing myself to confront everyday reality, is a long-held theme in my life. My wife and son still tease me about the pictures I took more than 30 years ago of the large plastic green trash disposal bags that lined the canals of Venice during our, otherwise, romantic gondola ride, a condition so contrary to general images of the city. I, also, give praise to the vacuum cleaners, garbage disposals, steam irons, lawn mowers, and snow blowers that have enhanced my life by assisting with tasks I dislike doing. And, while I can recall many a moment when a new computer or cell phone was worthy of a formal commendation in recognition of impressive increases in their capability and capacity over previous models, I have, inevitably, found their touted star performance turns to be followed by disappointment, I realize that they still fall far short of delivering promised seamless and carefree user experience. Here, I call out, “Siri, Alexa, and Cortana. you know who you really are!”

I am also ambivalently grateful for machines that directly supplement or replace the functioning of not quite right family body parts. My wife, who has both hips and knees replaced to good effect is a model for gratitude and good adjustment in this domain. As for my pacemaker, it doesn’t bother me and I would ignore it, except that I can’t because of the monthly emailed and texted reports on its performance that I receive from my cardiologist, who is automatically sent data about its functioning by the pacemaker’s external wi-fi modem that sits on the night table by my bedside.

Please don’t take the above meanderings to mean that I feel deep attachments to or expectations for all the appliances and machines in my possession. I attribute my affection to some very personal and not fully understood calculus. Recently, my five-year-old smart toaster was acting a bit quirky. It was not adjusting its browning to bagel thickness or multi-grain breads in the way it should. It is a relatively inexpensive item and I doubt that I will miss it much should I choose to discipline it for untrustworthy performance by junking it. At this point, I have decided to put the most negative and menacing of my thoughts aside, as I am a firm believer in the power of positive reinforcement in the form of praise to enhance performance in the most difficult situations. I merely whisper to the toaster that we have a shared problem and it’s my fault more than its and that we can figure it out together. I place the burden on myself for my dissatisfied state by telling the chrome boxy-looking device, “I realize that I might not fully appreciate you, because I am not a breakfast person.” I hear no mental whispers from the toaster in return, it just quietly sits on the kitchen counter, its outer shiny metal surface cool to the touch, while its heating elements glow a blazing orange-red.

Story Sunday, StorySunday

Jeff’s Binge

by uzomah Ugwu • February 25, 2024February 25, 2024

Jeff sits before his computer, a simmering pot of emotions on the verge of boiling over. The weight of his world threatens to spill out, mirroring the turmoil within. On his last leg, Jeff finds himself emotionally and physically gone from the present moment. Losing his job meant everything. It made him who he was; now, it is something he can’t claim. Providing both help for his medicine and medical care, which is so serious he cannot function without them. He finds he may not be able to live a full life without them. All these thoughts run through his head full-on like a head-on train wreck and crash. Beside the window, an older man, his beard and hair flecked with grey, watches from his wheelchair. He looks at Jeff, hoping to provide relief. Jeff looks over at the man and gives him a pause and a nod to show he is somewhat there. A pleasant-looking woman is looking concernedly and comes onto the screen, gazing at Jeff on the computer. Claire is Jeff’s social worker; she works past the duties of her job in many ways, more than one. Jeff’s case would be no different. She notices Jeff and how he is distant, more far off than he has ever been

Claire asks in an alert way, “Are you paying attention?”

She pauses and looks deeply into Jeff’s situation hoping he is too far gone.

Jeff!

Jeff comes back to the moment if only for a little bit.

“We are going to do something about this?”

Jeff is off somewhere, and it is far from the conversation, even the place where he is physically sitting.

“JEFF!”

Claire’s scream is so loud that Jeff’s roommate takes notice. Jeff checks back into the space he is not in, but his body is there. Jeff makes a bold stride and finds an answer he might not be able to ask but he carries on with it any way.

“What can there be done?”

Claire takes a breath, unsure if she has a solution, but gives an answer anyway and says,

“Just wait; we will get more samples. Just have hope.”

Jeff secures the weight of his mind from spending between reality and the realm of his aching insanity.

Jeff bellies out, “HOPE? I have been out for weeks. There are no more samples! You heard the doctor. I cannot keep thinking the stimulus check is coming. Unemployment barely covers the rent. I don’t want to be in the ward again. I can’t, I won’t. I’m not going back there.”

Jeff’s explanation explores what is known and cannot find a solution as soon as he or Claire wants it.

“I promise you we will get your medication.”

“How?”

“We have to start thinking about getting you on SSDI, “Claire replies with support Jeff is still unable to find.

“Then that means I can only work but so much, or not at all. It is all a catch-22 with the government. I lose it all or not gain the little they are offering,” Jeff states this in a way that Claire finds it harder and harder to convince him or herself that everything will or will be all right.

Claire pleas, “But you have your medications without a worry. You can focus on getting better.”

“I need my medications NOW! Why are they doing this to me? Once I start taking them and feeling good, I go back to what is worse than I was when I was off them; I mean, I am there. I have nowhere to go without them.”

Jeff softly ends his announcement of his need. Jeff looks out the window, which hides his outlook and his hope. Claire looks at not just a client but a friend she more than cares for.

“I have another meeting, but we will keep talking weekly. Keep your head up. You have support. We will work on filing the paperwork ASAP,” Claire explains.

“WAIT!! What am I supposed to do until then? “, Jeff shouts so loud that his roommate turns his wheelchair in his direction with a puzzled face.

Jeff closes the laptop. He stares out the window; he rushes to get his jacket. Claire withdraws from the same hope she had when she started working on behalf of Jeff’s situation, “There is not much we can do but have patience.”

Jack says, “Do you want anything? I am going out?”

“I am fine. Be safe, Jeffrey,” the roommate says with a worried look, truly intense look like he does not think he is going to see Jeff again. Jeff notices this, wondering how can his roommate’s eyes say the words before they come out of his mouth?

“I will be; I will be right back,” Jeff says.

Jeff goes out with the last steps; he turns around and looks back at his roommate, who still has the same concern in his eyes so much his body is now speaking the same message of caution.

Jeff walks past a crowd of activists and supporters surrounding a statue; police are circling, waiting for the subsequent riot. Jeff sees a familiar face amid the political and cultural storm.

The man starts to smile with a wild grin.

Jeff, with excitement, says, “Ole Chris.” Chris gets up with a slow draw but is fast mentally.

” Youngblood and I’m not your grandpa, so I am not old,” Chris says.

Jeff comes closer to what is like a bomb shelter of things collected, things left behind, and things forever lost in Chris’s life. Chris was not just homeless. His mind had nowhere to go where there would be enough space to contain it, maybe his things, but not his brilliant burnt-out mind.

Jeff asks, “How are things, Chris?”

Ole Chris declares, “Fine, You’re going to walk by change and in the process of a transition of powers?”

Jeff loses his footing; he cannot find his moral compass, but he knows he is wrong but does not know how to be suitable to join the fight for change.

“No, I am going to.. the store,” Jeff proclaims.

“To buy a new world order, it is right here. I was signed up and shipped off before I knew what Ali said was true; I knew it, but seeing the truth is another thing. I am fighting another man’s war, not ever and not after this, and you shouldn’t either. We are all still fighting even now. But it’s our war; we have the power.”

“What you are doing is the truth, Chris,” says Jeff. Chris looks at his stuff like they represent each war he has fought, and each object is a medal of honor, stating he won the battle but was still at war.

“I was living and fought for your truth; I just found out it could speak with all this, all around us. It has a voice. We have a voice.” Ole Chris says.

Ole Chris looks at Jeff and finds something in his eyes: a terror, a simple plan, and how he lost his peace long before Ole Chris ever met him.

Jeff turns and looks at the crowds getting bigger and cops not leaving but multiplying. “I have to go,” Jeff makes his exit and is brought back by the concern of Ole Chris.

“Are you ok?” Ole Chris asks with deep care, much more than of anyone who is just a friend.

“Trapped. I can’t get my ….,” Jeff says, words that are not enough to describe the pain he has gone through for so long.

Ole Chris urges his words to come up from through his throat and out his mouth. Ole Chris has a strong reply but holds it a little bit. Ole Chris looks around at the chaos with it on mute, focusing only on Jeff’s words of bondage.

Ole Chris says, “I served, but now I finally feel like I am serving, and my servings are coming up short. The government has us where they want us, Jeff.”

“What about change? You are always talking about change, change this, change that,” Jeff says with a scold but maybe not for Chris but the edge he is on for needing his medications.

“Has anything changed a young man like you walking by? Making that change. What would be an opportunity to make a difference? Look around you; this is CHANGE.”

Ole Chris has not lost his cool, but maybe any more ways to get through to Jeff.

Jeff looks around with fear and understanding, for it is what he is feeling.

“I have to get my medicine,” Jeff calmly tells Ole Chris.

“I am sorry, are you ok,? Ole Chris asks with empathy.

“I do not…. I am trying to get the pharmacy to get me some pills to get by,” Jeff states, something that alerts Ole Chris and triggers him into a reaction awkward to anyone in Jeff’s situation.

Ole Chris is laughing. “I do not mean to laugh; it is finally catching up to you and all of us. That is why you see this right here, all over the country,” Ole Chris says.

See what? Jeff asks.

“They do not even care about you guys or the future or that you are sick. I served, and they already had their back to me when I came home if I wanted any help,” Ole Chris replies.

Jeff states, like a jab from a seasoned boxer in the ring with his justification, “I am out of a job; I cannot pay my copay.”

“You are also out of place in their system. Come get a sign.” Ole Chris reaches for a sign that reads, “Stop medical tyranny.”

Jeff fumbles over his thoughts and says, “And that will change everything, even that I need medicine?”

Ole Chris says, “I never saw an instant solution, but this future seems bright. I feel a change. Look at this all around you.”

Jeff looks at all the people protesting. He is not impressed, but he feels something stirring in him. That boiling has come back.

“I have to go.”

“What store are you going to?”

Before Jeff can answer, a protestor whispers in ole Chris’s ear, and they gather their stuff.

Ole Chris turns around to Jeff, “Be safe out there. It has not even begun.” Jeff watches as Ole Chris and the protest disappear into the crowd. Jeff absorbs the tension and the fight for various freedoms, with people expressing and protesting for their rights while realizing he should be fighting for his own. After a while, the crowd’s roar fell into the wind, and Jeff found his destination. He looks up at the sign, worried but ready for maybe what he already knows what the outcome will be. Jeff’s unattended illnesses stalk the items on the shelves as he moves to the back to talk to the pharmacy.

A young woman, aged by the stress of her job and other factors, is busy at the computer. She notices Jeff but keeps at what she is doing. She then motions her hands like she is coming.

“Can I help you? The pharmacist tech asks.

“Yeah, I need to speak with the Pharmacist,” Jeff adds.

The pharmacist tech looks at the Pharmacist and looks back at Jeff, “They are busy at the moment. How can I help you?”

“I need to speak to the Pharmacist like right now,” Jeff explains with force in his voice now.

The Pharmacist looks at Jeff, but Jeff is focused on what he wants, what he needs, and what is in front of him, preventing him from getting just that.

“I can help you; just tell me what you need,” the pharmacist tech politely asks.

“Listen, it’s an emergency. I am not the first case where someone cannot get their medications due to money issues but have a prescription. I just need enough to get me through. You can even talk to my doctor. My information is on file,” Jeff has said such a plea that it takes the wind out of him to alert him his efforts are insufficient. The pharmacist tech looks at Jeff feeling very sorry; maybe more sorry she cannot help him and his situation, but not enough to lose her job.

I am sorry I cannot give them to you,” the Pharmacist tech explains with care. Jeff is now giving off heat from his disappointment that he may become uncontrollable, and he has no problem not hiding. He goes back into a space where he can calmly address his plea. He leans into the pharmacist Tech and says, “Please, I just need some until I get paid.”

The Pharmacist tech reveals that all he did was ask a question even though it was the same one, and she could not give the answer he wanted. The Pharmacist Tech gives Jeff a reply he will never become used to, “I cannot help you, sir.”

Jeff finds a footing in his stance that is off, but he is standing anyway, and he ROARS, “But I have the prescriptions!! Let me talk to the Pharmacist!!!?

“Do you have them with you?” the Pharmacist tech says meekly.

Jeff appears to cool off but not down and replies,” Yes, here.” Jeff pulls out crinkled pieces of paper and says, “I just need my medications.”

The Pharmacist looks at Jeff, and what appears like his life or mind is all over the counter or both, and goes to the counter. “Is there a problem?” the pharmacist asks pleasantly.

Jeff looks up in confused relief, “Are you the pharmacist?”

The Pharmacist declares, “I am.”

“Thank God, can you please let me have about two weeks of my medication? You can look at my last refill to see what I take, and I will be back to pay in two weeks. They match up with these prescriptions,” Jeff sounds off with another plea.

The Pharmacist draws back from the weight Jeff has given her in his plea, maybe more of a demand with no end. The pharmacist Tech is slightly behind the Pharmacist, taking both breaks and looking at the situation’s tension.

“That is not the problem. We simply can’t do that; we need a payment today if you are to get it today.”

The Pharmacist brings attention to an answer that Jeff does not need or want to hear, like the ones he has been hearing all day.

Jeff snaps back at the both of them but targets the Pharmacist, “You cannot help someone who is sick?”

“If you are that sick, go to a hospital; they can help you better than we can.”

Jeff starts to charge the counter like a bull, and his words are his horns, “When I am right here right now, where you can help. I am right in front of you?!!!!” Jeff proclaims

The Pharmacist is now on edge, maybe the same one as Jeff. Everyone in the store has stopped and taken more than a glance at the scene that has developed.

“You need the copay. You know that if you have been here before.”

Jeff is still charging. All he can see is red, “What if something happens? This is what you do to people in need.”

“There is also a need for rules and how we tend to them.”

Jeff puts his hand over his mouth, then he puts his hands on top of his head, “A rule to deny care?” Jeff asks in a way he knows nothing else is working and nothing else will.

“Just calm down.”

Jeff blows off some steam, but the midst of this heated conversation is still seen from his head; it is almost like smoke.

“I am talking to you and have been at a level voice.”

The way Jeff’s voice has carried with such a heavyweight, it is hard to believe there are no hard feelings or paths to cross a bridge to where there can be an understanding. The Pharmacist is both afraid and looking for control of the situation. With a reserved tone, the Pharmacist says, “I am going to have to ask you to leave.”

Jeff looks down, then smiles, “Gone, me and my unattended illness are gone,” Jeff declares.

Jeff walks out with his tail high rather than show the defeat of the dog with a tail between its legs. He is walking past the park full of rioting and police officers. They have decided to take down a Southern leader’s statue in the park. Jeff sees a man struggling with the cops. It’s Ole Chris he saw earlier getting into with cops. One cop punches Ole Chris with a blow that almost knocks him down. Jeff runs over and jumps on the cop. They struggle. Ole Chris grabs the officer, who seizes him. The officer has his gun now out. The sound is loud; everyone gets down. Ole Chris looks down at his stomach; blood is gushing like water from a broken faucet. Another cop starts beating Jeff, each fist thrusting like a hammer to a nail. Ole Chris falls to the ground. A young woman is shooting everything with her phone when she notices the reality for both men and the end of one.

The Young woman yells,” They shot him!! They killed a veteran!!!”

The cops start guarding their own and their actions no matter how wrong they are. One cop ushers everyone with his baton, screaming, “Everyone back up!!” The young woman is showing the whole end through her camera on her phone. While Jeff is still fighting with the cop, the cop puts him to the ground. Jeff is at eye level with Ole Chris. They lock eyes until the Vet closes his eyes. Jeff’s eyes are wide awake to the fact he is witnessing death. The cop pulls Jeff up. Looks at the Veteran, then looks at Jeff. Jeff is now sitting in the back of the cop car, watching the mayhem. He locks eyes with the spot where he and Ole Chris were as more feet cover it.

Jeff walks to a table and sits down. He is wearing a jumpsuit with writing on the back stating who he is now and where he was. He is now an inmate. Claire tries to smile but cannot crack any emotion out of Jeff.

Claire asks, “How are you”?

Jeff cannot bring himself to say, but his soul aches out, “They killed him.”

“Jeff, the system failed him and you. You did not fail the system. Understand that,” Claire speaks a truth that does not resolve anything for Jeff.

Jeff starts to shake; his hands begin to curl in sudden disbelief at what he has seen about himself and society.

“I don’t get medicine in here or out there, but really, the truth is they killed him; what kind of medicine is there for that the things you cannot unsee,” Jeff lowers his voice and head. He gets up from the table and leaves.

Sole Searching: I Walk Miles in Another Man’s Shoes

by Harvey Lieberman • February 24, 2024March 17, 2024

My wife has long told me that I should have been a foot model. She now suggests that it wouldn’t hurt for me to consider it as a late-onset career choice. At the very thought, I conjure up images of my bare feet appearing in issues of the AARP Magazine. I might even go international and find an agent who can gain me access to the Irish Senior Times. Detracting from my enjoyment of my wife’s compliment is that she may be somewhat of a fetishist, as her standards deviate from those established by orthopedic and podiatric experts.

While I am not banking on a career showcasing my feet, I don’t reject her appreciation for what she finds to be an attractive part of my body. Only an ingrate would reject well-meant kind words, even if derived from an idiosyncratic source. The fact that my feet are somewhat bigger than average offers a conclusive answer to the query, “Does size matter?”

Ironically, despite her finding beauty in my feet, I struggle to find shoes that treat my feet right. I am at the age where 95% of the time I’m sporting athletic shoes, or as we called them back in my youth, sneakers. I’ve joined many of my contemporaries who have found a specific brand to be the holy grail for a good-fitting shoe. Generally, over the years, their size 11.5 2E is most comfortable for me. Sadly, for all the company’s emphasis on a good fit, I have discovered that there are subtleties in shoe comfort that the dimensions they proffer just don’t capture.

The problem is that despite the supposed aesthetic allure of my feet, the more discerning eye would identify me as a pronator. I discovered this nugget of wisdom as a child, when my family doctor first diagnosed me with flat feet, now more commonly labeled in polite shoe-fitting circles as overpronation. This foot affliction has made it difficult to fit me. Once I find a shoe that works for me, I don’t just buy one—I order a few backup pairs. This is because it is common in the profit-hungry world of apparel companies, even those that used to flaunt a made-in-the-USA logo as a badge of honor, to frequently shuffle sources of production around the globe seeking ever-lower manufacturing costs. While this approach to manufacturing may yield more profit, my experience suggests, it introduces inconsistencies in the way shoes fit. Manufacturers respond to these variations by proclaiming them to be enhancements to their original successful models, simply adding a new “version” (“V”) number to the old model number and tossing the original out the window.

So, when Version 2 of my very favorite sneakers disappeared without warning, I immediately took action to ensure an unbroken supply of good-fitting shoes. I ordered a Version 3 pair from an online store to test out the feel of this new version, despite having two unworn backup pairs of Version 2s in my closet. I complimented myself on my rapid response to the moment that I hoped would never come. As soon as Version 3 arrived, after a brief prayer to the shoe gods, wherever they may reside, I tried them on. While there was a general fit, sadly, it fell far short of the Version 2 standard. My first thought was to attribute the poor fit to their just needing to be broken in and then stored them away, paying no more attention to the matter for quite a while.

Two years passed before I exhausted my backup supply of Version 2’s, soles worn low by the wear and tear of the long stretches of sidewalk pavement walked outside the gym since the advent of COVID. Withdrawing the Version 3’s from my closet, I tried them on for two hours until I just couldn’t ignore the pain they caused. I began a search for substitute models from the many manufacturers who offer a return guarantee so that I could put them through their paces within the confines of my home. Armed with my top candidates, I consulted with my podiatrist hoping for sage advice. He offered little more than an empathic “sorry” accompanied by a headshake. A gesture equivalent to, “If the shoe fits, wear it.” His bill, of course, was unaffected by his lack of shoe solution.

Not giving up, I went to the internet, hoping to find a new pair of Version 2’s on eBay. No such luck! The best I could do was find a seller who offered a relatively high-priced, used pair in black and gray, not my preferred color combination. His extensive set of pictures for the item showed little wear and he provided authentication from an expert (whatever qualifications that required). Overcoming my repulsion at the thought that I ever could be so desperate as to buy and wear someone else’s used shoes, I took the plunge.

Despite the pictures, I expected smelly shoes and composed an extensive, advanced decontamination plan. To my delight, upon delivery, I found them to be almost pristine and bearing the odor of new shoes. A fancy authentication tag dangled from the fresh laces, adding a touch of officialdom.

After dousing the shoes thoroughly with a disinfectant and letting them dry out for a few days, I cautiously slipped my feet into them. They did not possess the cozy embrace of my old Version 2’s, but I sensed potential after a few hours of breaking them in. That turned out to be true. The only hitch is that, even after the break-in period, sporadic thoughts about the shoe’s past life with its previous owners (who knows how many there were) sneak into my mind.

I can’t help but ask myself, “Why were these fine shoes put up for sale?” Grim answers come quickly: the previous owners met their maker, or they were financially desperate, or suffered from incurable edema, or required a foot amputation. Or, perhaps, these shoes were a thief’s closet bounty. Worst of all echoes of an old and spooky “Twilight Zone” episode (#83) called “Dead Man’s Shoes” dart through my mind. Let’s just say that the shoe haunting depicted in this episode does not end well for the person wearing them.

Although the sense of eeriness doesn’t go away, these thoughts are my problem, not a problem with the shoes. I find myself frequently scanning websites that offer refurbished products, hoping, no praying, that other such pairs of shoes appear, so that I can, once again, store backup pairs in my closet, preferably in different colors. It’s been weeks of searching so far and no luck. There are many 9 D’s available and even an 11.5 4E, but no 11.5 2E’s. My quest continues.

fetish foot

Say Hello to My Little Friend by Jennine Capó Crucet: An exclusive extract

by Jennine Capó Crucet • February 2, 2024February 2, 2024

What else.

What else?

Yes, what else.

Well, during the reception, the wedding boat’s DJ knows from experience to play the song Suavemente by Elvis Crespo because if not, the event will be deemed a complete failure of a celebration.

The DJ also knows to play the song La Negra Tiene Tumbao by Celia Cruz because if not, see above.

Yes, good, but what else?

What else? Okay, once the cake’s been cut, no woman on the dance floor should be wearing shoes. Ultimately the reception should feel more like a club than a wedding. Strobe lights, lasers, fog machines if possible, et cetera.

But what about maybe including an actual club, like on South Beach, the Miami people already know. More mentions of palm trees and neon lights. Some Art Deco stuff. Oh, dominoes! Those old Cuban guys at that park playing them! Have them smoking cigars. Bring the cigars back that way.

Dominoes? Art Deco stuff? Is this still just about weddings?

What about more direct nostalgia-laced talk of Cuba. Maybe a nod to the Buena Vista Social Club, since people like seeing things they recognize.

What about a splash or two more of Santeria. People have come to expect that. Seriously: Cigars! Maybe make it so a cigar lector is telling the whole thing to a bunch of poor cigar rollers in a really hot factory a long time ago in Cuba. Make the telling work like smoke.

But it’s Miami. The telling works like water.

Yes! About that: what about Lolita, where did she go.

She never left. She’s trapped in this city. She’s everywhere and nowhere, like a wave crashing.

A scene at the beach! Thongs! More thongs and more butts, excessive and superfluous descriptions of tanned butt-cheeks for sure. Make it sexy!

Speaking of skin: descriptions of a grandmother’s hands and what they smell like (cigar smoke, the sea, etc.). Include some letters from her, have her call everyone m’ijo. Kill her off but have her come back as a ghost and add a whole thread of that ancestor stuff. Set that stuff in Cuba. Sorry, Coo-ba. Make it come down from the mountains (in the form of cigar smoke!). Make it spooky but keep it approachable. Again, think smoke. Lean into the magical realism. Again, ancestor stuff.

Ancestors are not magical realism.

Think too about making it quirkier. Maybe some mermaids. Swamp stuff, you know. This is Florida, after all.

Miami is not Florida.

And actually, what happened to that early promise of baseball players. Actually, Fidel Castro was a pitcher; it’s a pretty well-known fact, actually. Consider actually having a struggling baseball player named Fidel sacrifice a goat or a chicken during some Santeria ritual in the first thirty pages, if possible. Also and actually, consider providing the cultural and historical significance of baseball to all Cubans, just so that’s clear to everyone.

Who counts as everyone?

Just regular old everyone, ha ha! Make it LOUDER. More music, more food smells. More colors—Miami is colorful, describe the colors more. The flooding stuff is depressing. Also, Wynwood! That place is all over everyone’s Miami vacations on social media. Get the Wynwood Walls in here.

Hardly any of those murals are by Miami artists anymore.

Have you read Joan Didion’s book about Miami. She spent several months or weeks down there at some point. Evoke more of Didion’s seedy Miami underbelly.

The preference here has been for Lolita’s underbelly.

People want to see real, devastating pain and experience empathy but while also smelling the ocean, feeling its breeze, hearing its waves crash, etc. They want to escape, but also to really feel like they know the people and the place by the time they finish.

But how can anyone claim to know a place or a community from a single work of art? And when you say people, who exactly do you mean? That’s a hard question to answer!

Is it? Doesn’t seem hard to answer from here.

One possible solution is to add more flavor! Really spice it up!

Think: fiery! Think: Pitbull’s Miami, or maybe the Miami from Miami Vice!

Think: Lolita’s performance, the familiarity of it, how well it works. Think about making a splash by doing the same thing you’ve seen done already, over and over again.

But it’s boring and it’s killing her.

So what if she’s obsessively peeling the paint off the walls between shows. So what if her literal brain is being rewired to have less agency and imagination with every repetitive turn in her tank. Stereotypes exist for a reason!

It’s stereotypies. That’s what those behaviors are called. The word is stereotypy.

Yes! The Spanish so far is great, really lends an authentic taste. Definitely add even more Spanish, but maybe consider italicizing it, for clarity.

Clarity for who? What if it’s already perfectly clear?

It’s whom. And one last note: give people even more. More terror, more violence, more trauma. Open those veins!

What the actual fuck.

Yes! Give even more fucks!

Shut the fuck up because that’s literally impossible right now.

Well, then just more fucks in general. More fucks, more palm trees, more Pitbull, more Scarface. Much, much more Scarface.

Extract from ‘Moby Dick Meets Scarface Satire: SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FRIEND’ by Jennine Capó Crucet, published on 5th March 2024.

adoption biological mother essay mothers music Russia

Daughters of Magic Mothers

by Jennifer Kircher Herman • January 6, 2024January 6, 2024

Photo by Kateryna Hliznitsova on Unsplash

Long, long ago, when phones were attached to walls, and milk did not have options, there lived a poor Russian girl who had magic fingers. Her family lived in a one-room log cabin tucked in the corner of rolling green field at the edge of a birch grove in an old village where townspeople fed the house fairies and touched the charmed bark of birch trees for protection. The cabin of the magic girl was dark wood with a steep-angled roof and two small windows flanking the central door. Morning glories vined through cracked shutters, and the wood stairs leading to the front door were smoothed by the feet of a hundred years. You could smell the cabin before you entered it, the thick musk of ancient wood.

Inside, the round table in front of the hearth was pocked with old script, indentations from generations of letters. The house held at its core an upright piano, positioned in what the girl thought the best place for acoustics, under the peak of the wood ceiling. Each morning, as the sun crested the hills beyond the valley, her fingers danced along the keys. The notes vibrated the chords, circled the timbre of the instrument’s chamber, then spooled out into the air with a passion the girl didn’t otherwise know. The notes touched lightly off the log walls and tin mugs of the little house, and filled the ears of her mother and her father as they carried water and kneaded bread. She was a conduit to another world.

In church each week, she wove melodies from the organ which twirled up to the gemstone light of stained glass, lacing the air like a tapestry of sun-slanted fields, the melancholy dawn. Oh how the villagers loved her. Each felt a little pierce of the heart when the girl played. It reminded them of the sorrow when their granddad died, or their childhood horse. Other times, the notes bounded and buoyed, made the hearts of the villagers surge with unfettered bliss.

Some wanted to keep this magic child in their midst forever, but others thought she belonged to the world, or at least a decent college. Her mother and father decided for her to move to America to learn from a master. They secured a large grant from a small school and the villagers pooled their money for a plane ticket. The day she was to leave (this, before you had to take off your shoes and walk in socks through body scanners) for many long moments she sat on the piano bench, her packed bag by her side. The piano was more than her friend. Through its keys she could tap into emotion of the ages—all the secrets that had ever been whispered, the pain and passion ever felt.

Actually, I’m making all this up. I have no idea was she thinks. I am the baby she gave up for adoption more than five decades ago. All I know is that she was a Russian pianist. My aunt told me that one night, by accident.

Forgive me while I dream.

At the small but famous school on the southern shore of a Great Lake, the Russian pianist’s new instructor had splays of wrinkles that shaped his eyes and graying hair swooped in tufts over his ears. When he played Rachmaninoff for her, she learned something new about yearning, how it could be contained in a pause. When he put No. 5 on the stand, it was like speaking a dialect few understood, and she tasted the pleasure of sharing what she didn’t before realize was a native tongue. Under his tutelage her mind and music flourished. Music was the one true tongue, the great composers the only gods—Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Cui. Why confine yourself to language when you can communicate more precisely with notes, convey emotion rather than words? All was released to the air when her fingertips touched the ivory. Mysteries were revealed with each piece she learned.

While others had smiled at her music, or closed their eyes as she played, her instructor opened his mouth like he was tasting the sound. Fingers trilled the air like he was conducting an unseen orchestra, or tapped his knee, keeping time like as if his chest held a metronome instead of a heart.

This girl awoke something inside him that had been rocked to sleep by the predictable movements of hours in days in a life. She watered the dormant bud that had once been his passion. Her music was amethyst memories a grandmother carried in a cup made of bone, the gold leaf from ancient paintings, husk from the meadow where he walked barefoot as a boy. The predictable pattern his life had become dissolved in her music and he was again a youth of vim and promise loose in eternity.

Everything he taught her she absorbed with assertion and a quiet nod of the chin. He could almost see his instruction move from her ears down her neck to her heart, where it took residence and shone through her cable knit sweater. Then it swam like tiny silverfish in her blood and flowed out her limbs.

He wanted to possess her. He wanted to fuse his soul with hers, become newly alive with friction and light, speak in tongues only they could share. And so he seduced his young student. She did not agree or object but acquiesced. What did bodies have to do with anything after all? What mattered—the only thing that mattered—were the silverfish swimming through the chambers of her heart and back to the universe where they had spawned.

The affair did not last. Physical sensations were no match for the imagination—not for his hunched and creaking body— and he did not find the same thrill of fusion he experienced when his words traveled through her body and came out the tips of her fingers. Instead, his delight seeped away like snow in the rain. Her music, now merely lovely, hung like dust motes in the air. Plus, he was already married and had his own soft wife at home, baking bread.

It took months for the baby to grow. The other students suspected the maestro was the father, but no one said it out loud. He did not admit or deny it, but ensured she had health care and contacted a Big Name charity and convinced her to put the baby up for adoption.

She grew tired. Her expanding mid-section became a mountain separating her from the keys. She could no longer coax music from her hands, but only run her fingertips along the beetle black lacquer and ivory, sense the ghost of cadence and time.

She grew weepy. She tried to tell the maestro, it is not natural to give the baby away. But again and again he told her, look at all the mothers who have done so because they had to or wanted to. It is the ultimate gesture of love, he claimed. It was a mercy. She could only come down to this point: it is not natural for me. But without notes in the air, she felt grounded like a bruise on fruit.

It happens sometimes in life that you meet a lover who convinces you to turn against your nature. And so the young Russian girl with the magic fingers agreed to give up her baby to the Big Name charity. But in her angst, she left the famous school and the inspired instructor and took a rickety plane home to the Russian countryside. When she reached her house and went inside, the keys on her piano were coated in dust, and stuck when she touched them. As they
yielded, a small silvery fish fluttered, then stilled.

Years went by. There grew a hole in her chest where the child should be. Though she married a nice bricklayer, and he built her a house and stairs leading up to that house, and even though everything the bricklayer touched he made solid, and with him she had three more children, still the hole grew more cavernous with each passing year. She learned to be careful of exposure in bathing suits and sundresses. After a while, she learned how to knit. The thin cold needles were a poor substitute for lush ivory keys, but as she built row after row of knots, an object grew on which she could train her yearning. She knit a shawl to cover the hole.

Her three babies grew. To her, they were dull with regular skills. Which is to say: They were each unique individuals. One could calculate numbers. One studied currents in the world’s oceans and predicted future trends. One could make any dog walk at a heel. But our girl, a woman now, was looking for magic she could recognize. She was looking for hands.

Miles away, an ocean, a continent away, a girl grew up who could not hold things properly. Parents slipped away. Childhood loves. Plates and glasses crashed to the floor.

She knew she was adopted from the time she could talk, when her adoptive parents told her a charming story of how they had picked her out at the baby store. They chose her because of her chubby cheeks and dark eyes—they were a family of blue. As she grew, she realized that some lady gave her away. “Shush shush shush!” her adoptive parents chimed. “We chose you,” they cheered. “Adopted = Chosen Child!”

“But—” she tried to complain. “Some lady gave me away.”

Blood doesn’t matter, they told her on repeat. Love creates a family.

It was hard to pretend she looked like them, with her pecan skin, her chestnut eyes, but they would tell anyone who asked that she was tall like her German father. In this way she learned that truth is a slippery thing. She knew she wasn’t German like they claimed, but that left open a world of possibilities of where, in fact, her blood was from.

For a long time as a child, she enjoyed her bond to nowhere. It left open the canvas of possibilities, the country that could be hers: Czechoslovakia, Romania, Columbia, Greece. In the days before the internet charted every answer, the world beyond the small Western New York town existed only in maps, on the globe that spun with actual touch. Countries of various size arranged by color. The blue swath of sea. But sometimes when alone she would look in the mirror and wonder who was the person with the same dark eyes, a smile like her own? At sixteen, she wrote this birth mother—this stranger, this abandoner—angry poems that persistently rhymed. But she hid them away, so as not to hurt the short German woman who raised her.

As the young woman grew up, she believed in magic. She wished on candles, fountains, the first evening star. Every penny found was a message from the dead. She believed in her birthday, November 21, though the date was recorded by an unnamed person in an undisclosed hospital on a sealed birth record.

One night when she was twenty, the mystery of her blood was solved. She was lounging on the phone with her aunt and she somehow framed a question about her heritage.

Her aunt, not meaning to unintentionally resolve the secret of the girl’s existence, said simply, “You’re Russian. Your mother was a Russian pianist.”

Of course, the girl thought absently. Of course she is an artist.

Though this knowledge thieved away the countries that might be her own, it gave her something else: a person. A Russian pianist. Staring at a map, the galloping expanse of Russia, she didn’t know where to anchor the image. Instead, she fixated on a date: November 21, the day she was told she was born. It was a day of birth for both of them. The one thing they shared.

Years stretched on. The yearning inside the Russian pianist was rocked to sleep by the predictable movements of days in a life. Birds arrived with the melting snow, left with the falling leaves. Snow. Drifting, piling, shoveling, and then the thaw, the mud. The return of milkweed and mild breeze. Her children grew and left home. The milkweed returns, the breeze, the birds. One day she looked in the mirror, the lined and loose face, and realized with a sigh that she was old.

Sometimes on November 21, she looked out over the field behind her house, the light of the birch reflecting in the afternoon sun, and remembered those nine months of gestation. The months when the baby was hers.

During those months, she was young herself, and didn’t yet know the lessons to teach. Still in the midst of her own story, the moral was not entirely clear. So, she repeated tales from her childhood—The Snow Princess, Baba Yaga. She wished she had kept the child, for a bit at least. To rock her from a cradle made of birch, so that the magic of the wood could soak to her bones.

In her imagination, the memory she dreams is hers, she leans over the sleeping baby, and tells her: There is a lie repeated in the world—Time heals all wounds. But no, my darling, no.

Days and weeks and years may callous it over, but some wounds become part of your skin. You’re left with a raised edge, a hardened bubble of flesh. If you brush your fingers over it, you can trace the grief. And sometimes heartbreak doesn’t heal enough to scar. Instead, it scabs lightly, barely covers the wound. You can brush it off by accident, like moss from a stone.

If the woman reflects too long, the hole in her chest ruptures again. So she tightens the scarf around her, tamps down her sorrow, heats a cup of tea. Picks up her needles and yarn.

As the daughter grew, she found her own magic. She could talk to horses and dogs and ghosts. She could pluck words from the air or conjure them from the sea if she sat patiently on a rocky shore, and compose them on a page to paint images in another’s mind.

The young woman grew up, had daughters of her own. The Russian pianist became like the memory of a dream that faded to the thinnest veneer on the background of life, which unfolded with the usual ups, downs, work, love, chores, Brussels sprouts on Thanksgiving, baby’s first teeth, the line at the post office, onions to chop, dishes and clothes and floors and sinks and faces to wash. Her own tired bones.

The daughter’s life had, as do most, seasons of sadness. After her divorce, alone with her children, she had to be careful and cry when they were at school, or while she was in the shower with the water running. She wept for all the cobblestone avenues at sunset she would not see, the clever and poignant off-Broadway shows. (She didn’t yet know she could do these things by herself or with another, learn other minds, travel new worlds. Sometimes when dreams leave, they strip the walls bare, take the curtains with them, leave you with a hollow that used to be a home.)

She realized after a time, that while words could be gathered from the river, they were just as likely to slip down the drain with her tears. She stopped crying and started moving. She found a little house for herself and her children, just big enough to hold a piano. Sometimes she wondered, what did the pianist do when the ache burned, when sleep eluded, when the yearning wouldn’t be named or tamed but just followed you around the house, biting at your heel, pulling at your sleeve?

Of course for some things there are no answers. The birth mother is not all-knowing, even if she were sitting across the table (and possibly she would advise yarn as remedy for hollows.) And why want this extra person, anyway? The daughter already has a mother! A perfectly good one—the short German who taught her how to iron shirts and drive a stick shift and write thank you notes in a timely manner.

Still, the daughter harbored a secret belief that keeping a walnut upright in the living room might magically summons her birth mother.

Sometimes when the Russian sky is weighted with gray and the leafless trees reach their spindly fingers to the clouds, swaying like tired dancers in the breeze, the old woman thinks: Today is the day I will tell my secret, the story of the baby I gave away. Or someday is the day. Maybe someday or tomorrow is the day I will tell.

Now it is the day in age when phones are kept in pockets, and secrets are spilled on social media for anyone to see. Somewhere in Russia in the house at the edge of town, a small light shines over a stove, and an old woman sits alone at a wooden table in a shawl she knit herself. The hole in her chest is nearly gone. It is just a meek hollow, a curve of moon, the tiniest arc of half of a heart. All her efforts have paid off.

Her own life has played out, its heartbreak and joy. But always in the back of her mind was the unspeakable thing, a story only she knows. Her husband, kind as he was to her before he passed, and despite that she loved him, despite that each year she meant to tell him, never knew. There was a time when she thought she would tell her own children—her other children, her new children (even though they themselves are now in middle age) that somewhere in the world in a different country across a vast ocean and time and culture and language, some other person is connected to you. But as the years pass, the years pass. One day she picks up her basket but her gnarled fingers can no longer weave.

The daughter has a theory that the ability to play piano skips a generation, like twins. She sets her own children in front of the instrument from an early age and pays for lessons more expensive than she can afford, trying to foster some magic. But the piano doesn’t take.

The children do have their own magic. They can spit fire into your hair. Or hand-over-hand, they are able to thread out of you every bit of patience, then roll it up tightly, drop it like a ball, and kick it into the next yard.

As they grow, some days they cling to her, whisper their fear. If she tries to tell them how to fix it, they spit fire again. But if she just remains still and braids their hair, she can pass her hope to them through her fingertips. Your heart will break, but you must take the chance. She twines her fingers in their locks. It is the only way to find love. She cannot say the words out loud; they will not listen. They are as she once was, when Madonna was cool, when she waved with lace gloves and blinked doe eyes with lids in purple shadow. Sometimes in the morning before school, her daughters sit at the kitchen table and she twists longing into their hair as she laces it into a braid. Yearn to see the secrets of this old world, she weaves. Search for something you can’t yet name. She tucks in a strand of hope and one of faith. Create your own thing of beauty. And give it back to the world. As she braids down the plait she pulls the strands together tightly with a tug. Resilience. They will need that, too.

There was a day here, she knows; it was a day to know. Days pass. Years pass. Her hand now is bent with jutted knuckles—a hand she can barely recognize, traced with lazuline veins that map translucent skin. If she listens closely, she can almost hear the wind describing musty attics of memory and star-hewn evenings speckled with dawns still hours away while lovers sauntered arm-in-arm, drunk in their own eternity.

The child: yes. There was a child she gave up. But she—something more.

Notes. They belonged to her hands. No, she remembers now—they belonged to the world—her fingers, she was only the conduit. She reaches in front of the window, the blue net of veins against the gray autumn sky. She can still hear the music in the recesses of her mind, like a dream she once had. But if she tries too hard to see the notes in her mind’s eye on fading paper, the tinkle of keys lingering the air, they recede to the frayed edges of the landscape of time.

Light seeps out the bottom of the day. Leaf-stripped trees like shadows sway on the horizon. She watches from the window as another day cedes to night.

Years go by. The daughter practiced and trained until she found she could hold a pen, a child, a chest full of love.

She found that the magic of the piano did not work. It conjured nothing. It serves now only as an extravagant reminder of a dormant wish.

Does one need a birth mother? Does one need to know one’s heritage? The questions from the mirror have been answered—one daughter has the same dark eyes, and the other has a smile like her own.

The daughters want their mother to take a DNA test. She knows it is science that you can spit on a cotton swab, send it in the mail, and later learn your ethnic identity. But it feels like magic.

We’re made of atoms of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen. Water, fats, proteins, carbs. DNA. But really, we’re made up of stories.

Though the piano conjured nothing, the daughter learns that, if you are open to it, magic is everywhere. If she buys clay and leaves it on the kitchen table, it morphs over days and weeks into vases and cups and plates that spread around the house. And sometimes when she’s making dinner, she hears a quiet clear soprano ring from the other room, and if she glances up, she can see the notes shimmer in the air. Over time, a new love emerges from the rabble of char, wraps her in language and dreams, and paints the landscape of love and life on the canvas as well as in the mind.

This is an all-true story of a dream that belongs to me. Sometimes I try and hinge it to reality—I look up the music school in the city where I was born, trying to find old images, a photo I might mistake for myself at twenty. The DNA swab and envelope still sit on top of my piano.

But if I take the test, what becomes of the wood cabin with the upright piano at the edge of the Russian field? Would it fade like the last chords the old woman can no longer play, the hum from the distance that could be music or the rustling of trees?

And what of the Russian pianist? I mean, my birth mother? The translucent hand against the twilight sky, the swooped gray hair of the maestro, the fluttering silverfish… all the words I’ve lined up to try and understand the storyless story of my origin. This story that has become mine in the absence of one. Will an answer—any answer—make my story disappear?

Fiction, short story

Nothing Our Parents Told Us Turned Out To Be True

by Danila Botha • January 3, 2024January 3, 2024

It all started one day when my mom picked me up from school. Being there to pick us up was the ultimate declaration of love, as far as she was concerned. Her own mother had worked full time, and sent her everywhere with a driver, which had as much to do with my grandmother never bothering to get her driver’s license as it did with her making the kind of money to be able do that. According to our mom, our grandmother missed every occasion, from awful bowl cut haircuts to parent-teacher interviews, and our mom was determined to show up, despite being an emergency room doctor.

She often spent our drives either on the phone, listening to the radio, or criticizing something I wasn’t doing, like not saying hi to a teacher or not holding the door open for a kid I didn’t know or had never talked to who was leaving behind me. Apparently being shy was the same as being antisocial, which was how all good criminals got started. I guess she wanted more for me than a life of crime, which is too bad, because when you discover your talents young, I think it’s best to run with them.

She picked me up in front of the playground.

“What are you eating?” She asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

I didn’t take bites and chew and swallow openly. I broke it into small pieces and let it sit on my tongue and dissolve. Sometimes I chewed but only a little.

“I can see that you’re eating something, Lindi.” she pressed.

“It’s meringue,” I said, and mentally high fiving myself on my fast thinking. The color was similar, but this was dustier and drier in the most delicious way.

I wasn’t sure why but chalk tasted amazing.

I didn’t know if my mom would want to take me to the hospital to have one of her new colleagues x ray my stomach, or if she’d decide I was deficient in some nutrient and make me take awful tasting pills, but I knew I didn’t want to tell her.

It was the first time I’d gotten with something that she really didn’t know about. It felt like such a victory.

When we lived in South Africa, I occasionally did it, but since we’d moved here I wanted to eat chalk all the time. I’d do it at lunchtime, stroll over to the box on my teacher’s desk when no one else was there. The piece that the teacher had been using, which lay on a metal ledge just below the blackboard was always the softest. It had its cold edges rubbed away, and it was smooth, as if it was just waiting to be digested. If I couldn’t get that piece, I’d go for what was in the dust covered corners of the box, or right in the middle, where she took her pieces. I’d hold a piece in my palm and rub it back and forth, until it felt powdery and tasted velvety. Sometimes at night I also chewed the ends of my hair.

My teacher was South African too. She had long, dark hair like mine, and freckles, and she also loved reading. She’d lived in Canada for eight years, and she’d reassure me at least once a week that things would get easier. She also liked recommending books.

I had a little brown leather purse that my mom bought me when I first got my period. She discreetly put two tampons and a pad in a hidden front pocket, and I hid them in my backpack. I hated tampons, hated the feeling of something so sharp and obvious, so I took them out and replaced them with pieces of chalk. It was reassuring just knowing that they were there.

If anyone had asked me, a kid who grew up with a banana tree outside my window, competing on my school’s swim team, whose favorite season was the summer, and favorite place was the beach if I ever would have chosen Toronto, the answer would obviously be no. But no one asked.

It’s usually hard for South Africans to immigrate to Canada, because immigration worked on a point system that was impossible for most people to achieve, but my mom’s job made her in demand. She’d worked with AIDS and HIV patients, people with TB and malaria, people who’d been shot, or stabbed, and that was just a normal day. At her new job, at a hospital whose surfaces were gleaming shades of beige, another doctor told her it was going to feel like a vacation. If it did, she never told us. She complained as much as she always did about being tired. And on top of that, she told us every day how lucky we were to be here. It was important to act like we appreciated it.

At first kids in Toronto treated me like a curiosity. I had an accent, so they’d ask me to say certain words over and over, like what, or water or air, which made them laugh and laugh, to hear me pronounce it like “eh.” Then one day I picked my nose in class, and it was completely over. It’s not like anyone wanted to be my friend before that, but then it was firmly established that no one was ever going to try.

No one would lend me their notes because “you’ll get your boogers all over them.”

I still managed to be a good enough student to not really need their notes. It was fairly obvious that academic success was also bad for popularity, but not in the way I expected. Everyone at this new school was smart, and competitive about grades. I stopped answering when people asked me how I did on tests, or I lied.

My sister, Taryn, as always sailed through. She had the gift, from the time she was born, of making everyone fall in love with her. On her first day, she tap danced for her class, and sang them a song from back home and they all thought she was amazing. She had a new best friend within a week, girls following her around like they did when we were younger, boys wanting to hold her hand or kiss her. She instinctively always knew just how to play every situation to her benefit. I never knew anything, but it didn’t use to matter.

Our parents had been divorced since Taryn was three and I was eight. Our dad was a dentist, and when I was in grade one, he left us for his secretary. Actually, to be more accurate, he’d been having an affair with Kate since before Taryn was born, and when I was six, he finally got her pregnant. My mom was working nights and to make things worse, Kate was a good friend of my mom’s younger sister. My mom had known her for years and had even gotten her the job. It took them two years to settle things, and then my dad and Kate got married and moved to Australia, and we moved here. We haven’t seen our dad in four years.

My mom chose Toronto because her sister, my aunt Sue-Ellen and her family had moved years before.

My aunt is the polar opposite of my mom. She dropped out of university three times before she decided to go to art school. Now she’s a sculptor who makes bronze nudes that sell for thousands of dollars.

Her husband, Jordan, is black, which shouldn’t be a big a deal to my mom’s family, or to other people in the Jewish community we grew up in, but it was. It was at the tail end of Apartheid, which everyone was ideologically opposed to, of course, but it was different when Sue-Ellen wanted to bring the guy to her school’s formal dance.

My mom always acts like she thinks whatever Sue-Ellen does is cool, but then she lectures my sister and I about how we have to marry Jewish guys, and get practical jobs.

“Jewish guys like dad?” I asked her once. “Because that turned out so well.”

She slapped me on the cheek so hard that she left a mark, but then she cried and apologized later.

“You’re right,” she said quietly, before I went to bed. “Nothing our parents taught us turned out to be true.”

I’d never heard my mom doubt herself so openly, and the effect was unnerving.

Taryn and I were always excited to see our cousin Casey. She was three years older than me, which meant she could babysit when my mom worked nights. Casey was beautiful, tall and thin, with delicate features and wild golden-brown curls that made her look like Beyonce. When we were little, we weren’t allowed to wear makeup, and when Casey and her family visited, she helped us make some from things we found around the house. She mixed red chalk with Vaseline to make us lipstick, and blue and green with sparkles and coconut oil to make us eyeshadow. It didn’t look like real make-up but we felt beautiful. She took some photos that day and when I look at them now, they make me laugh but they also make me sad.

When Casey came over that night, she was as beautiful as always, and much more worldly. She stood outside on our wooden, smoking, leaning over as far as she could so she ashed into our neighbor’s backyard. My sister stood in the doorway, watching her with awe in her eyes until Casey told her to put her coat on and join her outside. Soon she was teaching her how to smoke.

I stood in the kitchen, staring into our almost empty fridge, thinking about how long it would be before my mom came home, wondering when she’d have time to grocery shop. It was easier when we lived in Johannesburg, with my grandparents down the street, and my grandmother making us Black Cat peanut butter sandwiches with the crusts cut off and serving them with sliced Golden Delicious apples and raisins. My sister was happier the way things were now.

I felt like a fundamental part of me had died and I had no idea how to get it back.

I walked upstairs and went into her bedroom. She still had her toy chalkboard, with a pack of Crayola brand chalk in a small box underneath. I took out a piece and held it up to my mouth, puffed on it, then stared at myself in the mirror.

I knew when my mom asked me how school was going tomorrow afternoon, I’d tell her that everything was great. She had enough to worry about without me adding anxieties that even I didn’t fully understand.

I was more comfortable pretending than I ever should have been.

Canada childhood coping mechanisms immigration short fiction South Africa

Winter

by Diana Radovan • December 28, 2023December 28, 2023

In winter, my mother would take me sledding. She would be my horse.

In winter, everything was white and calm, until it wasn’t.

In winter, my grandmother would cook and roast

And prepare a separate meal for each of us: my aunt, my cousin, my uncle, and me.

In winter, my grandmother would die.

In winter, my mother would turn her back to us and sleep, sleep, sleep.

In winter, I would celebrate Christmas alone with my father.

My mother though, she was supposedly still alive.

We would sometimes still gather around the kitchen table—my father, my mother, and I.

In winter, I would be alone sometimes.

In winter, I would forget what home tastes like.

In winter, the German cabbage leaves would not bend like the Romanian ones.

In Germany, we would complain and long for the sarmale of our childhood.

In winter, I would forget my name.

I would reinvent myself.

I would get abandoned by the man I once followed.

I would move, again and again.

I would find silence, and peace, in the village that was never really mine.

In the surrounding hills that echoed my name,

Day after day, voice after voice, one tree after another.

In winter, I would sometimes turn and unturn into my mother.

christmas family flash grandmother grief winter

A Child’s Australian Christmas

by Antonia Hildebrand • December 27, 2023December 27, 2023

It’s Christmas. That time of year when everyone goes slightly insane. Everyone spends money they don’t have and relatives you can’t stand and never see for the rest of the year come and sleep the night. We have a large family; all our friends and relatives do too.

The plum pudding is made and is sitting fragrant and plump in a tin dish wrapped in a tea towel. We have a cooked ham and two chickens. My mother has been hiding nuts and lollies in the top of the linen press. We know they’re there but even standing on a chair on a table doesn’t give the necessary height. (We’ve tested at least six times!) The presents are on top of Mum’s wardrobe. There are dolls with blue eyes and cars with sirens and books. No one knows what belongs to who but we know we have a bumper crop to harvest this year.

On Christmas day the first aunties and uncles arrive. The aunties are fat and smell of face powder. The uncles are thin and smell of Brylcreem. Aunties crush you to their bosoms. Uncles pat you on the head. The aunties have red mouths and wobbly necks with beads around them and say “How are you?” and laugh in a way that makes you know they don’t mean it. The whole house smells like Christmas trees and wine and the heat shimmers and the flies buzz. The smell of the roast cooking in its juice fills the air. The children of the uncles and aunties hang back or push forward so aggressively we feel forced to pinch them when no one’s looking.

We have our presents but when you have them they lose the charm they had hidden on top of the cupboard. Now we only want to get into the kitchen and eat the lollies and watch the adults drink sherry and beer. At last the table’s set, everything is ready. The adults move forward slowly but we surge in cuffing each other with excitement. What a sight! Coloured lollies, white table cloth, silver cutlery all set out in the middle of a banquet. A feast for Kings and Queens! The plum pudding is on the sideboard. In a silver dish beside it, I know there’s a hot custard sprinkled with cinnamon even though it’s covered with a tea towel. There’s red and green jelly and whipped cream like snow. My mother takes the roast out of the oven and my father carves it and the chickens and slices the ham. Little baked potatoes and tiny golden carrots in butter spill out on to the plates. And the gravy! Ambrosia. The big silver pot is full of steaming tea.

Some of us have plates with edges so we can’t spill the food but we do anyway. The hot kitchen is packed. The windows are open to let air in and we hear birds on the fence singing and smell the red roses on the bush near the back stairs. At last, we’ve eaten everything we can eat. The adults groan in their chairs. They sigh and the men light cigarettes, then they talk and talk. We go outside and play with the balloons we’ve stolen off the walls. We drop them on the grass and watch them burst. We feel ill and deliriously happy.

Uncle T. has a wrinkly suit. He’s not a working man. He wanders with his family from town to town. Farm to farm. Buys on credit and when it’s too much to pay he moves on. He has a gentle, wastrel’s face. Weak chin. Uncertain mouth. Uncle S. is a boozer. He’s always sad unless he’s drunk. He has gold teeth. My mother plays the piano and sings in the afternoon and some aunties and uncles who know the songs join in. The wine has mellowed all of them. At bed time we each have to have a strange child in our beds. The adults sleep on chairs, couches and the floor. Next morning they set off early: ‘It’s a long way’ they say. ‘We have to leave early to beat the heat.’ After breakfast they get in their cars and move off, waving, blowing kisses. Like a caravan they wind down the street. An annual caravan. Only seen suddenly arriving every Christmas and leaving chaos in its wake. Streamers dropping off the walls, leftover cakes and lollies, left over roast. Crumbs on the table, empty wine and beer bottles and the wilting Christmas tree and a feeling of sadness that Christmas is over.

Some small measure of anticipated joy still reaches out and touches me each Christmas.

Chinese Food on Christmas

by B Michael Rubin • December 24, 2023December 24, 2023

No matter your opinion of Chinese global politics or who created the pandemic, I’ll wager you won’t be giving up Chinese food anytime soon.

As we all know, the fare originated in one of the world’s oldest civilizations, which means Chinese cuisine has been around for 4,000 years, give or take a millennium.

Christmas dinner at a Chinese restaurant is a time-tested ritual for us folks of the Jewish persuasion. Besides the bliss of celebrating our holiday uniqueness — no tree, no caroling — there’s the sight of mothers set free from the kitchen, away from vats of chicken soup with floating matzoh balls, not to mention the mountains of dirty dishes.

No one looked happier than my mother on December 25, reveling in what the gentiles couldn’t imagine — a restaurant meal on Christmas. She loved the idea the rest of the country’s mothers were slaving away at their hams, roasts, and fresh cranberry sauce from the freezer from Thanksgiving. “Today, I am a free woman,” she would say.

Surprisingly, my mother wasn’t a fan of Chinese food per se. I never saw her eat chop suey any other time of the year. She strongly disapproved of their shrimp with lobster sauce, a double dose of shellfish. “They couldn’t find another sauce?”

I am less discriminating and hoover in anything set in front of me. I pay no attention to kosher dictates and devour pork and bacon, especially if it’s undercooked, a delicacy Jews forbid. “Pork must be overcooked. I’m not letting you get sick on forbidden food. Why do you think it’s forbidden?” she declared.

When I was four or five years old, before I had the good fortune of my first Chinese meal, two reproductions of Chinese women magically appeared, and the framed prints became the centerpiece of our living room. Each large portrait was a likeness of a Chinese female from the waist up dressed in traditional attire. Both oil paintings were by the same artist, Tretchikoff.

Sixty years later, with the two women perched on my living room wall, I google the painter’s name and discover these two prints are the most reproduced works in art history. I’m not sure how the numbers are calculated, but I can see my practical parents going to a shop for their first purchase of art and asking for a popular item. Why risk upsetting neighbors with abstract expressionism nobody understands anyway?

I harbor a recovered memory of my mother spicing up our blank living room wall with exotic faces. What enticed my father to invite two beautiful women into his home I can’t say. Was he a Jewish husband surrounded by strong women and seduced by the stereotype of docile Asian women?

Tretchikoff was Russian but apparently spent a lot of time in China. One painting is entitled the Chinese Girl. Today the over-popular painting is cynically referred to as the Green Lady, and the artist is called the king of kitsch. When my parents retired and sold my childhood home and all the furnishings, I made off with the two ladies.

After college, I dated a lovely Chinese woman. She brought me to Chinatown to order from menus that lacked English. I craved it all – dim sum, Peking duck, cold noodles with peanut sauce, chow fun, and dishes I was afraid to name.

Chinese restaurants are the hardest working people I’d ever seen, producing their delicacies for Americans seven days a week while simultaneously inventing food delivery before the CEO of Uber Eats was born. Living on my own, not a week went by when I didn’t order Chinese take-out. My friends were no different. We would quiz each other, “What number on your speed dial is Chinese?” If it was number one, you were knighted the connoisseur of egg rolls, in the days before they were called spring rolls.

Chinese restaurants in Brooklyn had their delivery system so well-oiled it was smoother than a wok. After speed dialing an order, I would take cash from my wallet, walk down the long hallway, and by the time I reached my front door, the delivery guy would be parking his bicycle in front of my porch. One friend claimed he’d received a delivery at the same time he’d hung up the phone.

How could every dish on their 20-page menu be ready instantly, allowing for the three-minute delivery time? I haven’t eaten Brooklyn spare ribs in a decade, but I can still recall their spices and picture the red delivery bag with the aluminum foil interior that kept the sizzling ribs warm. I don’t know what made the pork look so red or smell so good, but on my salary it was a poor man’s feast.

Despite her disinterest in Chinese food, my mother had one delight on the menu — the lack of desserts. For Jews, at least my family, dessert is the highlight of the meal. When I open a restaurant menu, any menu, I turn to the dessert page first for a preview of what’s ahead. I calculate how much belt-room I’ll need for the coming delights.

Although Chinese menus are the size of phonebooks when phonebooks still existed, they have little more than lychee nuts for dessert, which I don’t order because I don’t know what they are. They don’t look like nuts, and nuts aren’t supposed to be sweet. When I sat down with my family and first cousins for our Christmas dinner in the late afternoon, I packed in the egg foo young, house special fried rice, and moo shu pork because dessert wasn’t happening. One of my cousins carried Bazooka bubble gum in his pocket for dessert.

My mother, who was on a diet every day of her life, appreciated that she couldn’t be tempted by tiramisu or peach cobbler, that everyone was forced to be satisfied with one fortune cookie as dessert. A family we knew exchanged fortunes if they thought the wisdom was more appropriate for someone else. We were only permitted to choose our cookie before they were opened, but that choice sealed our fate; the fortune was meant for you and established your destiny incontrovertibly. As the cookies were being opened, one of my cousins would inevitably ask, “Who comes up with these sayings?” When we got older and he was studying Marxism in college, the question became, “Who stuffs these inside the cookies?”

I have a box of hundreds of fortunes that I’ve saved over the years, a collection of favorites accumulated over a lifetime of roast pork chow mein and crispy noodles dipped in sweet & sour sauce, a pre-appetizer that puts breadsticks to shame. I believe the Chinese invented finger-food and rectangular take-out boxes, not to mention the 20-page menu, chopsticks, and the 7-day workweek. Even the Puritans took a day off for church, but the Chinese prefer to worship saving money, along with the sighs of satisfied customers who loosen their pants and waddle to their cars.

I was often so full after Christmas dinner I couldn’t squeeze out a smile for our hosts as I hugged the white container boxes with red Chinese lettering that wouldn’t survive to the next day. I would sneak in a dip three hours after I arrived home, wondering how I was hungry. I settled into the evening’s slumber knowing Christmas had been a success, satiated with tiny chopstick bites that made no sense to a child but fill a wondrous space in my memories.

I recall waking up one December 26, and I could smell my mother preparing breakfast. My father was having his usual black coffee with two poached eggs on unbuttered, whole wheat toast. He insisted poached eggs were the healthiest way to eat eggs, and my mother let him forget the cholesterol contained in 14 eggs a week.

After breakfast, my mother demanded I take out the garbage. Tying up the plastic bag, I spied half a dozen empty Chinese containers with their thin metal handles, which transported the precious cargo like food luggage. I asked if there were any leftovers from yesterday, to which my mother scoffed, “Can you imagine they eat that stuff for breakfast, lunch, and dinner?”

The week I received my first Social Security check, my fortune cookie read: “You will never need to worry about a steady income.” I taped the fortune to my desk where it resides now in nostalgic prescience below Tretchikoff’s Chinese women.

Mean Streak

by Kathy Miller • December 17, 2023December 17, 2023

The Plain German subset of the Pennsylvania Dutch . . .. wore distinctive, plain clothes and adhered to a rural life-style guided by their interpretation of the Bible, which stressed nonviolence in human affairs and simplicity in material things. Diane Turner

Mr. Martin

In seventh grade I was assigned to algebra class at Spring Grove Junior High school. Math was not my favorite subject, but I seemed to be good at it. In those days we sat at individual wooden desks, the surfaces often scarred with carved initials, ink stains, and gouges from pencils. I had been warned about the algebra teacher, Mr. Martin, by friends in the grades above me. “Pay attention,” they said. “Don’t look him directly in the eye but don’t look away. Pretend that you are thinking.”

Mr. Martin dressed differently from the other male teachers, all of whom wore suits with white shirts and sedate neckties. Mr. Martin was also a minister in a strict Brethren congregation nearby. They prohibited men from wearing neckties and lapels on their shirts, so he wore white shirts with a sort of mandarin collar with his dress slacks and sharply polished black shoes. Mr. Martin was a wanderer, never content to stay at his desk or the podium in front of the classroom. Instead, he strolled through the aisles and around the perimeter of the room, always carrying a yardstick in his hand. He only smiled when making humiliating remarks to some hapless student who had not observed the caution to appear interested.

The first few weeks were okay, although I was aware of a hazy sense of relief at the end of each algebra class. I was getting good grades, answering correctly when called on, keeping my face in neutral at other times. But one day the air in his classroom seemed to shudder as we entered, Mr. Martin’s face a stormy façade. As he traversed the room with his ever-present yardstick, Tommy in the second row seemed to slump in his seat. Suddenly we heard a crack like a backfire from a faulty muffler. Mr. Martin had hit the end of his yardstick on that recalcitrant boy’s desk, and we all flinched. At the front of the room, Mr. Martin drew three tiny circles on the chalkboard, just high enough so that Tommy could reach them only on tiptoe. For the remainder of the class, Tommy stood with his nose in the middle circle and the tips of his pointer fingers in the other two. We couldn’t see the tears streaming down his face, but we could see them dripping onto his shoes and could hear the snot collecting in his throat.

Years later I heard Mr. Martin was fired for using corporal punishment on a student after it had finally been outlawed in Pennsylvania. I felt a fleeting sense of vindication and release. What I still don’t understand is why algebra was my favorite math class.

Girls are educated by their mothers in the arts of the housewife: making and mending clothes, doing housework, gardening, and cooking.

Grandma Mazie

Growing up, I told people I had a nice grandma and a mean grandma. Grandma Mazie, my mother’s mother was the mean one who lived by herself in a half-house up a hill in Glen Rock. Always scowling in photos, Mazie wore rubber galoshes over her shoes whenever there was the slightest dew on the grass and a kerchief on her head to protect her ears from any stray breeze that might pop up. After all, the weather was the enemy as were her four daughters who all lived in the same county. Often, I heard my mother and aunts say that “Grandma is on the warpath again” to explain her foul mood and their sense that nothing they did for her was ever enough. No trip to the grocery store with the sons-in-law carrying in the bags. No visit on a beautiful Sunday afternoon when we’d all rather be outside playing. No gift of chocolates at Christmas, boxes which she never opened and shared with others.

When we went to visit her, she often was watching a religious show like Billy Graham. Copies of Guidepost magazine occupied the end table along with her weathered Bible. Her small living room was overheated by the wood stove in the adjoining kitchen. The only houseplants were tall, spiny succulents with variegated leaves and feathery ferns. Not a flower in sight except for those on the well-worn slipcovers. She offered us saltines and glasses of room-temperature water as a snack.

After my sister and her husband married in another state, we held a little party for them before their honeymoon to Norway. Relatives and friends brought gifts for their apartment. Grandma Mazie gave them an unwrapped roll of paper towels. As she handed them to Peggy, she said, “I hope your plane doesn’t crash into the Atlantic.”

A few years before her death, two of my grandmother’s daughters were severely injured in a terrible car crash in which one of their husbands was killed. For weeks my aunts remained in the hospital and then in rehab centers before they could return to their respective homes. One aunt spent the rest of her life in a wheelchair with a colostomy bag. My other aunt had lost not only her husband but the use of one eye. As my aunts recuperated, my grandmother called my mother constantly with vague complaints of ill health. Grandma eventually moved in with my parents, and after that, to a nursing home. Frantic over the many losses in our family and frustrated with Grandma Mazie, my mother theorized, “It’s as if she can’t stand that someone else is getting all the attention.”

Since my mother’s death, my father speaks fondly of Grandma Mazie. If anyone says negative things about her, he vehemently defends her, saying he “never had any trouble with her.” He cites her harsh childhood in which her father died a violent death when she was a toddler and her divorce from the philandering alcoholic man she married as reasons why she could be difficult. He talks of the understanding they seemed to have between then. I am so glad my mother is not here to witness his remarks.

The father is the central figure in the family, making important decisions concerning the finances and education.

My Father

What is funny about being 95? These days when I speak to my father on the phone, he often laughs as he tells a story, even if the story is about someone dying or his aches and pains or a patch of stormy weather. On Father’s Day I make the obligatory phone call. Twice he tells me he won the award for the oldest father in church. Fifteen dollars. He plans to use it to buy Hershey’s ice cream for his wife, the one he married a year after my mother died, my sister and I still dull with grief.

After I moved across the country as a young adult, I went to visit my parents once a year in the house where I grew up in rural Pennsylvania, near the Maryland border. I tried to go in

summertime when the fields were tall with corn; the pink and blue hydrangeas towered over the

entrance to the front porch where I sat every day on one of the wicker rocking chairs. As I rocked, I pored over my parents’ photo albums, especially the ones from the days before their marriage. What a handsome couple: my mother beautiful with jet black hair and red, red lipstick; my father’s pompadour and colorful, short-sleeved shirts. I searched the expressions on their faces for proof they had once been in love. How else could I explain why she waited for him to come back from the Pacific, the years they lived with my Grandma Mazie, the four years of marriage before my sister was born, the crying I sometimes heard behind her closed bedroom door.

When I still lived at home, I could see that friends and relatives thought of my father as a good-natured guy, affable, slow to show anger. Of course, they did not live in our house, so they did not see the way he kept my sister, Peggy, under his thumb as she became a teenager, the way she made sure to never give him any excuse to call her out – no drinking or skimpy outfits or hair teased too high, no trashy makeup. No boys who picked her up in loud cars or rolled cigarette packs into their shirtsleeves. And from my father to her, no tender words, no playful jokes or gentle touches.

They did not see how my mother learned to voice her opinions to my sister and me only when he was at work. Our house became so quiet when he was around. He worked so hard; he deserved peace and the only air conditioner in the house, which cooled their bedroom when he worked the night shift and slept during the day. The rest of us sweltered in the humid air that never moved; my mother hung damp sheets on the line in the yard where no breeze blew them dry. He said she did not need a clothes dryer when air was free.

Our house was his castle, we, his subjects. All the rooms belonged to him. None had locks, not even the bathroom. We rushed through our toileting as children and rushed while primping as teenagers. He never knocked on the door, just barged in. The tub had no shower rod despite our mother’s frequent request for one. Always worried that the well would go dry, his rule was that tub baths saved water.

Every third week he worked the day shift at the paper mill. He expected dinner on the table at 4:30 sharp, even though my sister, Peggy, and I were in the middle of homework. Mealtime was for eating, not talking. After Peggy left for college, I was the only one left at the table. That year my mother started serving salad with every meal, pieces of lettuce, carrots, and celery diced so small I could barely lift them with my fork. The raw chunks stuck in my throat, making me nauseous.

What is funny about being 95? About no longer sending even a card to his daughters and grandchildren on their birthdays. About the promises to honor my mother’s wishes for their estate, then broken with the marriage to the new wife. The way he could remarry but we could never have another mother.

I am not laughing.

Arts & Culture, Editor's Pick

Seeing at the Speed of Light

by Alethea Black • December 16, 2023December 16, 2023

Sometimes I feel I am more than myself. Sometimes I feel I am connected to everyone and everything. Sometimes it feels as if this life is like a movie I’m watching, in real time, from the inside—a movie entitled: “What it was like to be Alethea Black.” And I am watching it through her eyes, but I’m not really Alethea.

In physics, our understanding of the universe hinges on the idea of an observer. We haven’t applied this principle to our practice of medicine. But what if we did?

When we see infectious microbes, or a tumor, we are observing reality. But what is the fabric of reality—the tapestry against which our observations take place—made of? Could it be made of light?

A tapestry made of light is another way of saying a holographic universe. At first glance, “holographic universe” has the whiff of science fiction, but it’s a serious idea—and one that has lately been gathering steam. The holographic principle was first proposed by Nobel laureate Gerard ‘t Hooft in the 1990s. In 2017, a UK, Canadian, and Italian study provided substantial evidence that the world is, indeed, holographic. But what would that mean?

What if, rather than treating the baseline as zero, we were to treat the baseline as the speed of light. Let’s say this is less like a vacuum, and more like a speeding train. Does the speeding train have any constraints—is the accelerating, expanding universe accelerating toward some limit?

“[O]ur observable universe is at the threshold of expanding faster than the speed of light.” ―physicist Lawrence M. Krauss

Could the speed of light be the dome of Genesis that separates the light above light’s speed from the light below it?

Fig.1 The Flammarion engraving (1888) “A medieval missionary tells that he has found the point where heaven and Earth meet…” Image: Wikipedia

Perhaps, in a holographic universe, we need to re-frame the way we think about light’s speed. Beneath the speed of light, light has speed. At the speed of light, light has no speed. Above the speed of light, light has “reverse speed.”

Could we be reading the cosmos all wrong? We treat the planets as if they were balls of matter in a sea of air. But it’s possible the universe—as predicted by physicist David Bohm, and nearly every spiritual leader throughout history—is all one thing, one fabric. Light.

If what we perceive with our senses is emerging from light, we need to re-calibrate our equations.

Paradigm Shift

Our brains create the images we see. What would ice looking at water see? “Water that is more diffuse than self.” Does ice know itself as ice—or does it see itself simply as water? It is possible that ice looks at water and sees (hallucinates) steam.

What would steam looking at water see? “Water that is denser than self.” Does steam know itself as steam—or does it see itself simply as water? It is possible that steam looks at water and sees (hallucinates) ice.

This same principle could be applied to the perception of light. Perhaps only light can see light as light. Matter looks at light and sees (hallucinates) energy. Energy looks at light and sees (hallucinates) matter.

But neither is seeing reality. It is as if light is a 2D plane that bisects a cone; neither end of the cone can see beyond it. The point looks at the plane from below and calls it sun. The mouth looks at the plane from above and calls it moon.

The observer effect—the way that which is observed can be altered by who is doing the observing—is famously evinced in the double-slit experiment. But I am interested in a very narrow application of it. The powers of hydrogen, or pH, is a hugely important variable in human health.

Are we able to perceive the powers of hydrogen accurately? Perhaps a slightly acidic observer will read water (pH7) as more alkaline than it truly is. And a slightly alkaline observer will read water as falsely acidic. Could misunderstanding pH play a role in disease?

Time’s Pendulum

The point I am making draws upon an idea that has been discussed by Plato and Descartes in the ancient age, and Nick Bostrom and Donald Hoffman in the modern one. It is the world as image.

What if, with cancer, my light is split. It’s like a pendulum that is no longer in the upright position. To one side of time, it thinks light has speed it does not truly have. To the other side, it thinks light has density. Perhaps the cancerous cell is both denser—and faster—than it needs to be.

In other words, does light have speed? Or does light have density? It depends whom you ask. To an observer who is denser than light, it will appear to have speed. To an observer who is more diffuse than light, it will appear to have density. And to an observer with the same frame of reference, it has neither. Ice thinks water has speed. Vapor thinks water has density. Water knows water has neither.

Instead of being “flat,” the basal cell carcinoma on my shoulder now exists on both sides of the speed of light lens. To one side, it’s so cold, it’s burning up. To the other side, it’s so hot, it’s freezing—precipitating out of solution. In lieu of “earth,” it has become … sun and moon. Jupiter and Venus. Saturn and Mercury.

In 2021, I published a paper that applies the idea of a light-based (holographic) universe to human health in the peer-review journal Science & Philosophy. This year, a second peer-review paper was published, “Am I Too Pixelated?” A third peer-review piece, “What We Call the Moon,” is forthcoming, and an article was picked up by InformationWeek.

Before these ideas were accepted by two peer-review journals, they were rejected by every newspaper and every physicist in town. I was roundly ignored and occasionally mocked. I took this as a good sign. I knew I wasn’t just taking a 4000-ton tanker and trying to make it go in the opposite direction. I was taking a 4000-ton tanker and trying to teach it to fly.

My father, Fischer Black, co-authored an equation for pricing options that helped to birth modern finance. After I found a couple of articles that linked my father’s work to Erwin Schrödinger’s, my intuition was that the old dead-cat conundrum had something to do with the perception of time. Is our perception of time accurate?

My friend Cynthia is having a Bat Mitzvah for her daughter in Arizona on Saturday. It’s Thursday, and I still don’t know which dress I’ll wear (red or blue), which route I’ll drive (direct or scenic) and where I’ll stay (her house or La Quinta). When observed from the past, time is myriad. Both outcomes exist: the red and the blue.

Fig.2 Achiral images are superimposable; chiral images (above) are oriented left and right

But, come Saturday, time will not be myriad. On Saturday, what was many outcomes will have collapsed to one.

What about the future? How does Saturday look from Monday’s perspective?

Here’s where things get interesting.

Starting Saturday, and ever after, unless I have far too many mimosas with breakfast, I will have worn only one dress.

… in this one universe. But might time encompass more than one universe? Many physicists, including Sean Carroll, support the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics, first proposed by Hugh Everett in 1957.

Perhaps some of the quantum world’s weirdness stems from the observer’s relationship with time. Unless we are observing the present from the present, there seems to be a lack of parity. It’s as if the past narrows and the future widens. But is this effect an illusion?

What if, when observed at anything other than its own speed, light appears distorted? When observing the 2D plane from beneath (concave mirror), we see red and blue, superimposed. When observing the 2D plane from above (convex mirror), we see red and blue, splitting.

Fig.3 Concave and Convex Mirrors (Image: John Lunt)

But the truth is neither. The truth is red or blue. “Red and blue, splitting” and “red and blue, superimposed” are reciprocal illusions—noise.

There was never a purple dress. And there never will be (for this one universe) both a red dress and a blue dress.

Schrödinger’s Dress: Below Alpha (“past”), both outcomes exist. It is the red dress and the blue dress, in a state of quantum superposition. Between Alpha and Omega (“present”), there is one outcome per observer, and the two outcomes are parallel. Above Omega (“future”), both the red and the blue outcomes exist, as separate—divergent—arrows of time.

Our perception is perfectly inverted. Observing the present from the past, we see red and blue, but the truth will be red or blue. Observing the present from the future, we see red or blue, but the truth was red and blue.

The Perception of Light

This essay is called “Seeing at the Speed of Light.” Do we see as light sees? Perhaps the crystal at the center of the brain, the pineal gland, is not fundamentally crystal. Perhaps—unless it is under too much or too little pressure—it is light. The pH of my pineal gland will affect how I perceive the pH of my body.

pH7 is essential for life. pH7 is like a 75-degree room. But is my pH7 a passive pH7, or is it one I am creating with a lot of work? Is my body a true 75-degree room, or is it a room made of ice, with the heat on full blast? Or a room made of steam, with the A/C on full blast?

Once I alter my core metabolic rate, I can turn on the heat or the air conditioning (so to speak), by altering my pH. But is a brain that is slightly too hot or slightly too cold—slightly too acidic or slightly too alkaline—able to read the world objectively? I have seen a patent application for LSD “acid” to treat Alzheimer’s.

Dubbed “the seat of the soul” by René Descartes, the pineal gland contributes to our understanding of circadian rhythm and is the font of the neuroendocrine cascade. If time is critical to human health, the pineal gland is critical. But what if my pineal gland itself is “too dense” or “too diffuse”?

Recently there has been exciting research into the evolution of life as a function of proton gradients. A proton gradient is a measure of density. Let’s say there are three varieties of apple: dense apple, regular apple, and diffuse apple. Dense apple wants to expand; diffuse apple wants to condense. However, if my individual understanding of density is skewed, for me, it might be “double-dense” apple, dense apple, and regular apple. But there’s a problem in this scenario. “Double dense” apple is not one apple. It’s two.

If I make myself too dense—if my pineal gland is too dense, therefore my image is too dense—the baseline state is no longer homeostatic (stable). If my density is double the baseline, for me, the world is exploding (Parkinson’s?). If my density is half the baseline, for me, the world is condensing (ALS?).

To an observer who is “double dense,” the baseline state is exploding by a factor of two. To an observer who is “triple dense,” the baseline state is exploding by a factor of three. Do proton gradients—excess density—play a role in embryogenesis, where we sometimes produce twins (triplets, quadruplets, etc.)? Do proton gradients play a role in cancer?

Fig.4 Joshua Tree Star Trails (Photograph: Mike Ver Sprill/Shutterstock)

In conclusion, this essay asks a simple question. What if we are not in a vacuum—we are inside time. And time has a “proper” (consensus) speed. When time is too slow, light has to be too fast (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome?). When time is too fast, light has to be too slow (Autism?).

The functioning of my pineal gland is extremely important, but limited. My pineal gland cannot read the speed of light in an absolute sense; it can only read the speed of light vis-à-vis itself. If it is too dense, it will read light’s speed as too fast.

But light’s speed cannot be too fast. When light’s speed is too fast, it begins to precipitate out of solution—to “spin backward,” like a hot room with the A/C on full blast. When light’s speed is too slow, it begins to burn up—to “spin forward,” like a freezing room with the heat on full blast. In other words, we see backward. It’s an upside-down world. What are we really seeing when we look at the so-called sun? We don’t see light that goes to the moon. We see light that goes to the moon and back.

When my friend with ME/CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) told me that taking GABA, a calming neurotransmitter, paradoxically made her feel panicky and hyperactive, I was not surprised. Depending on the conditions of the terrain, my brain seems to be able to utilize the same substance (neurotransmitter, vitamin, mineral) to do either a thing, or its opposite. By “my brain,” I do not mean my physical brain. I mean my genes. My code.

Hope for the Future

We’ve all been through a great tragedy—a series of tragedies—and we’re in shock. And worse: we are polarized. Because the survival part of our brains, the amygdala, has been so relentlessly stimulated, we have perhaps failed to notice that beneath the tragedy, something is happening here.

After a lot of time indoors, the other day, I went to an old favorite spot—the organic coffee shop on Main Street. There, where the road flattens out and you can see for a long distance in both directions, I stood for a long while and listened. The air seemed somehow magical—the light so thick and golden, almost like something you could reach out and touch. After a while, I finally realized: it wasn’t spinning.

I didn’t understand, at first, the mighty power of consciousness. Of fiercely believing, in my body and my soul, that everything would be all right in the end. Of ceaselessly praying, with my heart and my mind, for the well-being of every person on Earth. Of fearlessly holding love within me like a flame.

But now I do.

Am I my DNA? No. My consciousness is executing this DNA. But this DNA can be executed by any consciousness, and all consciousness, at base, is one. There is, ultimately, only one observer here, Lord. You.

A final word for the little girls who will grow up to be the physicians and physicists of tomorrow: When this essay was rejected a million times, when I was ignored and mocked, when friends and family looked at me as if I were crazy, and I felt cosmically alone, did I give up? I never did, and I never will, for no matter how many millennia some spark of life plays the role of Alethea. Don’t be fooled by social media. Life is not a popularity contest.

It is a chance to love, and to laugh so hard you cry, and to cry so hard you laugh, and to lift up the lowly, and bind together what is broken, and give yourself to the world. It is a golden day—one simultaneous day, although it feels like many—in which you may take your light and use it to blaze across the sky like a thousand roman candles. It is an invitation to not be swayed by public opinion nor cowed by power but to stand up, ask questions, and think for yourself. To remain, in spite of everything that will happen to you, your glorious, simple, self.

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by Litro Magazine • December 15, 2023December 15, 2023

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demolition essay essay saturday grandmother memory present

The Here, the Now

by Sai Pradhan • December 2, 2023December 2, 2023

3 minute read.

Photo by Nikola Johnny Mirkovic on Unsplash

The child revved herself up and sprinted full tilt down the corridor.

She sped past:

the macramé plant hanger with its resident money plant

one, two, three, four paces

the old black-and-white photograph of Madhubala with her lambent smile

one, two

the celery-green air cooler with its sides packed with vetiver mats, which made her voice sound funny if she stood in front of its rotator fan and talked to it, as she often did

one

the old glass bookcase through which peeked the carefully saved birthday cards the child had made over the years for her grandparents

one, two, three

the sunlight filtering in through the window that looked out on the Ashoka tree outside

Half way down the corridor’s cool terrazzo tiles, she leaped into the air. Suspended, just as this was in her memory. If only there was a photograph!

Her hand brushed lightly across her grandmother’s sari that was drying overhead. Giggling, she slowed down, her mission accomplished, and trotted more decorously the rest of the way towards the dining room.

What’s for tea, she asked peremptorily, though she knew the answer already.

Shrewsbury biscuits that would crumble into the weak tea she insisted on drinking with the grown-ups, and if she was lucky, nankhatai, her favorite shortbread biscuits flecked with chopped pistachios.

When the child was a woman, and there were no more saris drying in the corridor, a shudder would go through her like Proust whenever she encountered biscuit crumbs in tea. She was grateful for it, even if a tear or two crept down her cheek on occasion.

Today, the woman was about to board a plane to go to her own home. Boarding now. I’ll text you when I land, she messaged her mother, as was her habit.

I’m so relieved your travels went safely, her mother said each time she would text after landing. Her mother imagined the worst. Illness, death, bad luck, accidents. The woman imagined herself going through a life of near-misses. Perhaps that is what all lives are, but constantly imagining near-misses made her anxious; perhaps just as anxious as her mother. This too, a bequest, like biscuits.

She was glad she had landed in any case, because home is where her dog was.

The dog did not know his name.

There was no need to teach him anything as prosaic as his name. He followed her everywhere she went, lay at her feet as she worked, slept on her bed, pattered into the bathroom with her, and screamed bloody murder if she didn’t lift him up to sit next to her on the upholstered cream bench she sat on to work sometimes, so what was the point of trying to teach the creature something he didn’t need?

He was a breeder dog who had been rescued. The vet had told the woman he wasn’t sure how old he was, meaning that he wasn’t sure how much time the little creature had left.

For all that, now that safety finally cloaked him, he knew how to love. And love he did, furiously, with every fiber of his little body, as if to make up for all the time he had nobody to love.

She was especially glad to be home from her brief holiday, because she had just learned her grandmother’s home, the one without saris drying in it any more, was going to be demolished soon.

The woman had used that home as a method of loci for years, retaining large quantities of information for her work and life by visualizing it in that old beloved space. She didn’t have to be present at a deathly banquet like Simonides to put her memory palace into practice; instead of identifying corpses as he supposedly did, she used it for less morbid mundanities like remembering quotes, facts, numbers, and names. She also dreamt of it; everything from the pattern of the cushion covers to the smell of an old teak cupboard mixed with her grandmother’s perfume would be strung together and replayed by her neurons.

In doing so, she replenished her own store of memories of the home itself. Or did she embellish or misremember?

The low settee to the left (or had it been moved towards the windows that looked out over the jamun tree with the bat dangling off it whom she mentally referred to as Baudelaire?)

The loudly trilling blue rotary telephone in the living room (or was it in the third bedroom?)

The painting in the style of a Mughal miniature (or was it a tapestry?) on the center wall

The shells from the Andamans in a cabinet (or were they from the Nicobars?)

Her piggy bank which was actually a doggy bank in the shape of a Basset hound (or was it a beagle?)

The jewelry box that opened to play an unknown tune (or had the musical component never worked?) to its right

The blue Danish cookie tins with their second lives as containers for sewing supplies (or were there photographs in one of them?) tucked into the lowest cabinet shelves

She knew exactly where they were. What she thought they were. Where they used to be. Where she thought they used to be.

She did not plan to visit her grandmother’s home before the demolition.

The home was now simply a reliquary with nothing but remembrances inside its dusty carapace. Nothing is as it was. Nothing ever is. Memory might birth muses and lend itself to forming identity, but it might also be the reason for not paying full attention to the present, if one agrees with Alan Watts whose books stood in the old glass bookcase in the corridor.

The woman patted her dog’s silken head fondly. Despite his history and his unknown future, he was now simply present. She reveled in his being.

Arts & Culture, Editor's Pick, Essays, Literature, Reviews

Anguish, Agony, Babylon: On Safiya Sinclair’s How to Say Babylon

by AUDREY SHIPP • November 29, 2023November 29, 2023

8 minute read.

The vibrant green cover of Safiya Sinclair's memoir, "How to Say Babylon."

When a roots, rock, reggae artist shouts,“Jah,” my spontaneous response is “Rastafari”—a ritual I acquired after many years of attending reggae festivals, especially the Bob Marley Festival at the Long Beach Convention Center. Those annual Marley celebrations, now defunct, were held over the three days of President’s Weekend to commemorate the February birthday of the late reggae icon, and they included not just roots rock, but lovers rock, and dancehall as well.

I became such a festival diehard that one year I went beyond being a simple fan—I decided to sell Rasta-inspired Guatemalan handcrafts in the market area of the concert. Mind you, these were handcrafts that I personally brought back from Guatemala’s Central Market. Not surprisingly, celebrating the Marley Festival as a concertgoer was distinct from laboring as a merchant. As a concertgoer, some years I had tickets that restricted me to arena seats, and other years I had general admission tickets that granted me the freedom, during dancehall, to mingle among the crowd on the convention center floor and wait for the rude boys to run the riddim. As a merchant in the selling hall, the music was a distant beat, and my body was confined to the cavernous hall and small table where I was selling my wares. Years before the Long Beach concerts, my Chicago-born mother had introduced me to Marley’s music when she took me to see the world-renowned artist live at the Greek Theater in Hollywood.

No surprise then that when I came across Safiya Sinclair’s memoir, How to Say Babylon, I was down for the read. Yet I was not prepared for this tale about the confinement and strict limitations placed on the female body.

The Clash of Beliefs

In the U.S. our notions about the female body are a legacy of Western colonial traditions. The same binary logic inherent in Western thought that justified the imperialist domination of the globe and the marginalization of non-European bodies also viewed men as strong and rational and women as weak and emotional. In the imperial binary oppositions (that still permeate society today), Europeans were civilized, the Indigenous were savages. White people controlled the destiny of Black people, and Christianity was regarded as superior to Indigenous spiritual practices. Industry was king and nature was to be commandeered. These principles regarding inherent difference and superiority coupled with the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of Black people formed the basis of the industrial revolution on which Europeans reinforced their beliefs of supremacy.

Jamaica, the birthplace of Safiya Sinclair, was likewise subjected to the oppositional binaries of its British colonizers. In her memoir, How to Say Babylon, Safiya Sinclair discloses her entrapment within the binaries fashioned by her father’s interpretation of Rastafari. She relates how the Rastafari religion was developed in the 1930’s by Leonard Howell who was inspired by both Marcus Garvey and Karl Marx. Howell’s commune and its teachings served as one of the foundations on which Rastas expounded their belief that Ethiopian Emperor, Haile Selassie, was the Messiah. Honoring the fundamental guidelines of peace and harmony, Rastas interpret their basic tenets distinctly.

Sinclair describes how her father’s religious practice wasn’t performed inside a church. Instead, he attended meetings, and women were not invited. Of the three Rastafari groups—the Twelve Tribes of Israel (the most liberal grouping which also allows White members), the Bobo Shanti, and the Nyabinghi (the strictest grouping), Sinclair’s dad was most aligned to Nyabinghi beliefs. Yet he was never a member of any specific organization. The irony in the Sinclair household was that despite her father’s efforts to avoid the conventions of colonialism, he raised his children in a home in which his view of the world was based on an oppositional binary. His outlook on women, which resulted in his making almost all the decisions in the household, caused the writer the most distress. Sinclair, her sisters, and her mom were assigned domestic duties while her dad savored the freedoms found in greater society. In addition to assigning housework, her father demanded his daughters remain chaste. In her dad’s household, Safiya Sinclair could either be associated with Rastafari or lost to Babylon. There was no in between.

Despite the book’s title, the memoir doesn’t deliver a lucent depiction of Babylon. It is the dad’s interpretation of Rastafari that dominates the narrative because as females, Sinclair and her sisters are forced to exist within the religious strictures of their home when they are not in school. As a consequence, Rastafari becomes the string of households the three sisters and their brother inhabit as their parents move from home to home surviving on the dad’s earnings as a reggae musician. The dreadlocks everyone in the family dons and which the author wore for ten years are a symbol of their religious convictions. Based on her father’s interpretation, Babylon is everything outside his home and everything in opposition to Rastafari. Babylon is Western ideology, colonialism, and the brand of Christianity that led to enslavement. It is baldheads and heathens—the unprincipled men and women who populate degenerate society. And it is the Jamaican military and cops who on Bad Friday in 1963 cut the dreads of Rastas, destroyed their encampments, and proceeded to jail and torture them. Yet when the author arrives to the U.S., she realizes that the slavery, genocide, and violence of this country are Babylon too. At that point in the book, I wanted to ask Sinclair to hold her thought and dig deeper into her analysis. I would have liked for her to explore these analogies further.

Personal and Inherited Trauma

Sinclair uses a mostly linear narrative to express the anguish of her own upbringing and that of her dad. Born to a fourteen-year-old mom, he suffered feelings of abandonment as a young adult when his mom left to live with a new husband and told him he wasn’t welcome. His feelings of rejection were a catalyst for him to delve deeper into religion and eventually choose his version of Rastafari as the unnegotiable belief system in his own household. It isn’t until almost the end of her memoir that the writer begins using the words abuse, trauma, and inherited trauma. She confesses that she began writing this book in 2013 and was advised to hold off writing it in order to distance herself from her traumatic experiences. Thus, she perhaps didn’t use the word trauma in the beginning of the narrative because she hadn’t initially viewed her experience as such.

During the author’s early years, her mom acquiesced to the father’s domination of the household that eventually developed into physical beatings. Sinclair’s flight from her father’s abuse occurs as her education advances and she is able to visualize an existence beyond the false binary of Babylon vs. Rastafari.

Comparative Insights

As I was reading Sinclair’s book, I came across a short essay in Brevity by Zach Semel titled “Why I Wasn’t Ready to Go to AWP This Year.” Examining the topic of memoir writing and trauma, Zemel recalls attending the 2023 Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference and describes the challenges he is currently facing in writing a memoir about his “experiences living with PTSD in the wake of the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing.” His reference to the anthology by Melanie Brooks titled Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art from Trauma led to my purchasing her book in the hope that it would help me better understand Sinclair’s How to Say Babylon.

Brooks’ Introduction and her interviews with Edwidge Danticat, Kyoko Mori, and Jerald Walker left me with a better understanding of what these writers were attempting in their act of writing memoir. Danticat’s memoir focuses on the deaths of her father and his brother, both of which occurred within five months. Her dad died of cystic pulmonary fibrosis and her 81-year-old uncle died of acute pancreatitis in US immigration detention after fleeing political unrest in Haiti. Mori writes about her mother committing suicide when Mori was just twelve and the emotional and physical abuse she later suffered at the hands of her dad and stepmom. And Jerald Walker’s second memoir expounds on the decision of his blind African American parents to join a white supremacist doomsday cult and how that affected his development growing up a Black child. In Writing Hard Stories, these writers delineate how writing about trauma created a sense of cohesiveness, accomplishment, freedom, and healing. They speak about finding their voice while writing and leaving an authentic legacy for their families. Their explanations about content and writing process illuminated the agonizing details of How to Say Babylon.

Additionally, once I finished reading Sinclair’s memoir a virtual lecture surprisingly popped up titled “Women and Rastafari Politics, 1934-1960.” I eagerly attended with the goal of gaining a wider perspective on the role of women in the Rastafari movement. This was a University College London event in which professor Daive Dunkley, Chair of Black Studies at the University of Missouri, discussed his book Women and Resistance in the Early Rastafari Movement. (In accord with the admonitions to fight “against ism and skism” in Bob Marley’s song “One Drop,” Dr. Dunkley refers to Rastafari and not a closed system of Rastafarianism.)

In his talk, the scholar demonstrated how women in the Rastafari movement had leadership roles from its inception in the 1930’s. He gave the example of the Rastafari woman Delrosa Francis who was charged in 1934 with assaulting a police officer. During her trial, Rastafari women came to her defense and expressed the Black nationalist view of wanting the British colonizers out of Jamaica and demanding the island be turned over to the Ethiopian government. In much greater detail, Dunkley gave the example of Edna Fisher who established the African Reform Church in Christ (ARC) in 1959 in Kingston which replaced Leonard Howell’s Pinnacle organization as the most popular Rastafari organization of that time. The ARC, which was birthed in a prayer circle of Rastafari women, grew to 4000 members by 1966. Dunkley described how Fisher worked in conjunction with Claudius Henry whom she later married. The Jamaican government eventually charged Fisher and Henry with treason and sent both off to prison. Following their release, Edna Fisher was assassinated. Professor Dunkley believes that the patriarchal and systematic silencing of women in academic circles resulted in Claudius Henry being portrayed as the leader of the Rastafari organization the two ran together.

Tragic Legacies and Resilience

After reading Safiya Sinclair’s memoir How to Say Babylon, it became apparent that her dad tragically succumbed to the imperial binary systems he had hoped to resist. Tragic because, despite his esteem for Bob Marley and his friends’ high regard for Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X, her father’s worldview was based on a male/female binary that obscured and excluded the entirety of the legacy of freedom fighting by women. Fortunately, the research of Daive Dunkley highlights the historical contributions of women to both the Rastafari movement and Jamaican society. And fortunately, writer Safiya Sinclair was determined to have a voice in a world that was not built solely by men.

352 pages.

book review colonialism gender Jamaica patriarchy Rastafari Safiya Sinclair

Arts & Culture, Editor's Pick, Fiction, short story

Arduous Nights

by Lida Ghahremanlou Jones • November 27, 2023November 27, 2023 • 1 Comment

6 minute read

A sleepless runner at dawn, using running to escape the tossing and turning of insomnia. — Photo by Pablo García Saldaña on Unsplash

His eyes opened to the weak light of sunrise, which touched the glass of the bedroom window. In those lingering gold moments, his whole body screamed for an unawaken state, an unconscious dream. He watched as the light entered the room. A new day has arrived, he thought. Another long night is over. Slowly, he rose from his bed, preparing himself for his early morning run.

The track near the river was his favorite route, an idyllic pathway that belonged solely to him at 6:30 am. At this hour, solitude was his companion, granting him dominion over the tranquil surroundings. A brief warm-up of five minutes, followed by an intense twenty-minute sprint, and concluded with a soothing five-minute cooldown. The grip of summer had faded away, surrendering to the coolness that marked the early hints of autumn. Crispy, dried leaves adorned the ground beneath his swift feet. Only the melodic symphony of birdsong and the gentle murmur of flowing water accompanied him. By 7 am, fellow runners would start trickling in, dissipating his interest in the place. Yet these solitary runs endowed him with a renewed strength, allowing him to confront the world and temporarily forget the burden of his insomnia.

After the run, he would start his daily routine by reading news on his mobile on the way to work, getting a take-away coffee from the café near his office and greeting to his colleagues when he reached his desk. Only Frank, his buddy at work, knew about it.

“Hey, mate! Look at you! Those pills didn’t do the trick, did they?”

“Hmm, a little. I managed to sleep well until around 2.”

“Oh, man! You’ve been awake since 2 am? Damn! Those pills are just a waste of money! Didn’t I tell you?”

“Well, the pharmacist seemed quite confident about them. Let’s just say I have the resilience of an elephant.”

“That’s rough. What you really need is to get laid, tire yourself out before you sleep.”

He tried Frank’s solution a few times by seeking companionship from the local bar. Like the pills, it had a temporary effect. A few hours of blissful slumber were the most he could salvage from those encounters. However, each time he awoke beside a stranger, he felt even more adrift. These experiences often perpetuated his nights of restlessness, further entangling him in the web of insomnia.

“I wonder if it has something to do with your aging.” His mom said.

They talked across time zones. She called him on Skype after her morning gardening, a cup of fresh coffee in hand. She sat in front of the monitor with her gray hair, bright smile and blue eyes surrounded by wrinkles. She looked like a finished drawing, so perfect, so complete.

“Is that your way of saying I’m getting old?”

“Nonsense! You’re always a child in your mother’s eyes. I have been there, sleepless nights, tired in the morning, anxious, and angry… but it will pass eventually, and you’ll see your way through it. Your body is adjusting.”

“To what?” he asked rubbing his itching eyes from the monitor’s light.

She took another sip of the coffee, another genuine smile.

“You know, it’s not so bad after all. You’ve got plenty of time to read, listen to music or do the things that you like at nights, things that daily routine doesn’t let you do. Think of it that way.”

He closed his eyes and pictured her mother’s image in his mind. The night seemed less arduous.

As time went by, he got used to the fact of his insomnia and the consequent habits which were his escapes: short journeys to the kitchen, drinking water, then making multiple visits to the bathroom, and aimlessly flipping through TV channels. Occasionally, he managed to do something with the unwelcome gift of extra time. One sleepless night, he immersed himself in Kieslowski’s Three Colours Trilogy. The hues of his night transformed into shades of blue, white, and red. In a realm where tragedies, comedies, and romances lost their significance, he felt a peculiar sense of freedom, equality, and yet a profound loss. A moment etched in his memory when he paused on the face of the female protagonist in the film Blue. Her innocence, beauty, allure, and carefree demeanor reminded him of Rose.

It was almost dawn. After watching three movies, he was left with unbearable emotions. His solution was to go for a run, earlier than usual with swift strides, he began his journey along the footpath illuminated by streetlight poles. A slight chill greeted him during his warm-up, but he soon warmed up from the exertion. Occasionally, the stillness was interrupted by the passing of a car or the rumble of a heavy truck. The night possessed its unique melody, accompanied by the rhythm of his own breath. While passing a corner where a homeless person lay buried under a blanket, he unexpectedly encountered another individual running towards him. It was a woman.

“Hello.” he exclaimed, unsure of what else to say.

“Argh! Jesus!” she screamed, almost startled.

Spontaneously, they both halted their run, catching their breath, and locked eyes. In those fleeting moments of shock and indecision, he took the opportunity to observe her. Her long, sleek black ponytail cascaded over her wide shoulders, and her slender legs were clad in a black running outfit. Once again, she stirred memories of Rose within him, making his heartbeat faster.

“It’s unusual to see another person on the street at this hour. I don’t think it’s safe for you.” he expressed, concern lacing his words.

“Is it safe for you but not for me? Do you own these streets?” she said with an unfriendly expression.

“No, of course not. It’s not safe for me either. Usually, I run along the track near the river after sunrise, but today it was exceptionally early and quite dark down there.”

“Well, assume the same thing for me,” she responded.

“I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to bother you.” He stepped back, hearing the bitterness in her voice. A moment of silence passed.

“It’s okay. I was heading home anyway,” her voice softened.

She passed by him slowly, leaving him with a sense of rejection as he gazed at the black pavement, listening to the fading sound of her footsteps.

“Do you usually run after sunrise?” her voice reached his ears again, as if she had returned after a while or mere seconds had passed. Time had slipped from his grasp.

“Sort of,” he replied, “I struggle with sleep.”

“I do the same sometimes,” she echoed his words. Under the harsh glow of the streetlight, he examined her features—the dark circles around her eyes, the weariness etched into her skin, and the lines around her lips—all too familiar to him.

“Can I accompany you home, or at least part of the way?” he offered hesitantly.

“I live across the river, on the other side of the bridge.”

“That’s fine. I don’t mind walking,” he assured her.

She shrugged her shoulders. “If you’d like,” she agreed, “but only until we reach the bridge.”

“Sure.”

Side by side, they embarked on their walk, the sound of their footsteps reverberating through the silent space. Gradually, as daylight emerged, the street grew brighter, and the streetlights flickered off. The flow of passing cars increased. They veered off onto a side lane from the main street, heading towards the river.

“May I know how long you have had … it?” He avoided giving it a name.

“Not sure exactly. It’s been a while.” She replied.

“Same here. I never thought that somebody else would choose the same solution as mine.” He asked.

“I tried a lot of things,” she continued, “yoga before sleep, herbal teas at night, swimming, sleeping pills. None of them worked. My therapist suggested going for a run before work. It helps clear my mind.”

“True! When you can’t sleep the entire night, your head becomes a jumbled mess in the morning, right?” excitement tinged his voice.

“Yeah, I feel drained, trapped in an endless cycle of thoughts,” she responded calmly.

The street gradually transformed, bathed in daylight, as the pair made their way closer to the river. The sound of bustling cars and the cacophony of urban life were replaced by the symphony of birdsong and the gentle melody of flowing water. They inhaled the crisp fragrance of autumn foliage—a scent both calming and rejuvenating.

“May I ask what you usually think about at night?” he inquired, the apprehension unhidden in his voice.

“A lot of things, you know, stuff. It’s all here,” she pointed to her forehead, “but I just can’t figure it out.”

“I know!” he chuckled. “My mom thinks it’s a kind of middle-age crisis. I’m turning 40 this month.”

“You don’t look 40.”

“Well, lucky me! So, I should stop worrying and sleep like a bear, right?”

They both laughed, the tension dissipating, transforming their walk into a pleasant journey. They arrived at the riverside track as the sun neared its ascent. The clamor of cars and the bustle of the civilized world gave way to the symphony of birdsong and the gentle murmur of flowing water. Inhaling the crisp scent of autumn trees, they felt a sense of tranquility, an all-encompassing and healing atmosphere.

“Do you agree with your mom?” she asked thoughtfully, her voice blending with the melodic surroundings. He found solace in its sound.

“It might be a part of it, but not the complete picture… I know there are other reasons,” he sighed. After a pause, he inquired, “Do you know yours?”

“Can you tell?” she responded.

Silence hung in the air. How could a stranger be trusted enough to share secrets unless the secret itself could only be entrusted to a stranger?

“I feel like I’m missing something, like there’s a hole in a picture. I can see it, but I can’t make sense of it,” he whispered.

“Hmm, or perhaps you’re missing someone who can fill that void?” she suggested.

She knows, he thought. She knows the pain. There was no logical explanation for it. Either someone knows, or they don’t.

As they neared the path to the bridge, intersecting their walking track, she wordlessly pointed towards it. He nodded in agreement. They crossed the bridge and stood in the middle, with the river flowing below and the sun preparing to rise before their eyes.

“You take control of every aspect of your life—your studies, career, income, family, friends, basically everything… and then there’s just this one thing that’s out of your control,” she spoke in a serious tone.

He listened attentively as she continued, her voice tinged with sadness, “It’s either there or it’s not.”

“I had it once,” he confessed.

“What happened?” she asked.

“She left me,” his voice hardened, the pain evident.

“He stopped loving me too,” she whispered, her voice trembling. He fought the urge to embrace her, keeping himself in check.

“It becomes a monster at night, consuming my thoughts. I keep asking myself how to get it back, how to fix it,” she confided.

“Maybe there’s no fix. Maybe we must bear the pain until it fades away…” he suggested, his gaze fixed on the river below.

“Like this autumn that has just begun, leading to a cold winter,” she mused.

They lingered in that moment of intimate connection between two unknown souls, watching as the sunrise transformed the sky from fiery red to deep orange, welcoming the vibrant blue of a new day. The trees by the river displayed their autumnal hues, radiating shades of orange and crimson. They now saw themselves within the community of runners who would soon populate the track at the usual morning hour.

A few minutes passed in a still, silent state. Then, she checked her watch, both donning the masks of strangers, concealing any signs of what had just transpired.

“I should be on my way,” she said.

“Me too. It’s getting late,” he agreed.

“Thank you for the company,” she expressed her gratitude.

“No, thank you for the conversation,” he replied. “I didn’t catch your name.”

She hesitated for a few seconds, then beamed at him with inviting eyes.

“I could have any name or be anyone,” she said with a smile.

“Take care,” he returned the smile, and with a wave of her hand, she passed in front of him.

He turned his back and ran in the opposite direction. The autumn morning chill embraced him in the air.

dawn friendship insomnia Running short fiction sleep therapy

Editor's Pick, Essays, EssaySaturday, Travel&Lifestyle

Embracing Time

by Ping-Yi Yee • November 27, 2023November 27, 2023

2 minute read.

Fall trees, with golden leaves falling, leaving the branches bare. — Photo by Nguyen Thu Hoai on Unsplash

We don’t do seasons round these parts.

In these parts, Julian, Dick and Ann, plus George and Timmy the dog—Enid Blyton’s famous five—brought autumn to us, as they traversed rugged coastal terrain wearing warm woolen cardigans, infiltrated customs evaders’ workplaces while the sun set sooner, and sent clever Timothy through holes in caves to get adult supervisors to come save them, before it got too chilly. After that, we took a bus to the local public library, queued to return this famous quintet for our complement of four library cards, and queued to let the Bobbsey twins, Miss Drew and Masters Hardy in turn take us through sidewalks and forests in fall, as they tussled and tangoed with dastardly perpetrators and crooks. When color television arrived on the scene, imagination from text took a break—a permanent backseat for some—and new imagination from vivid moving pictures took off. Charlie Brown and friends (were they really called the Pumpkin Patch?), with Linus’ inscrutable The Great Pumpkin looming behind the scene, were a defining moment for fall appreciation, and some of us had urgent questions. What are pumpkins, why are they a thing, and what is the deal with fall and Halloween?

Fall. Autumn. Qiu Tian. For the record we never got answers. DARPA was still working on the internet. The teachable moment was a missed opportunity. With low to no disposable household cash, road trips to a neighboring country were the greatest adventure, never mind the identical climate. Air travel near or far was a human impossibility, a luxury beyond the reach of any except the stratospherically wealthy. Real fall, and real seasons, would have to wait until growth and incomes levelled up. Meanwhile Walden Pond, and the road not taken, welcomed us as repeat visitors.

In these parts, we do hot, or we do wet, and often we do hot and wet in the same day. The equatorial belt is also the belt of calm, meaning no winds while the sun air-fries this zone all year round. As our science and geography teachers would drill into us, hot air convects upwards along with evaporated moisture, the latter’s joyride ending all too soon when it returns as rain. Transition for us is daily, our hours chopped into micro-seasons, minutes into nano-seasons. Change is continuous, and you forget your umbrella at your peril. Yet day to day, change that is internalized may become imperceptible.

This perennial, diurnal cycle is overlayed and complicated by two monsoon seasons annually. Again hot air rises, this time from the northern Asian land mass in summer, followed by giant whooshing sound as cooler sea air over the Indian Ocean muscles in, abhorring any potential vacuum. This is the Southwest Monsoon from June to September. The reverse Northeast Monsoon, from December to March, is triggered by the Asian winter as more of the relatively warmer air over the Indian Ocean rises. Giant whooshing sound the opposite direction, the same wet. The “inter-monsoon periods” could thus be analogous to fall and spring, although such analogy is reasoned interpolation and not effectively experienced. Surplus in Monsoon Asia occurs when an agriculturally perfect monsoon has helped to deliver a good harvest.

In these parts then, we mark time without fall, without seasons. We mark time by hot, wet and wetter (rinse, repeat), and hot again. Often we lose track of the wetness because it simply does not matter, although proprietors of car wash establishments may beg to differ. With heat-exchange tech that has been the same for years, we inadvertently, nay, consciously blunt the impact of weather on body and psyche, sideline the cues of nature. On the horizon, large-scale district cooling tech promises greener, more planet-friendly infrastructure, centralizing and optimizing air-conditioning resources across multiple buildings. So we embrace time more intellectually, with festival dates, school terms and graduation rituals, while we do cool and sheltered from hot and wet.

As metaphors transport ideas, there too are seasons and tides to people. Having recently traversed half a century, and even assuming a generous denominator for longevity, I have undeniably crossed over to my personal autumn. I had indeed lucked out subsequently and lived two glorious years of my spring in Boston—New England abstracted into Thoreauland one dawn in Fall, green crowns of elegant trees turned flame-red and gold, solitary boat in the still of the lake.

Fall is the well-trodden path, sheltered by lush jade coats incandescent, arboreal phoenixes aflight. It is the arriving cars and trucks of excitable families, it is risking one last boat outing before the cold sets in for the year. Fall is the exhilarating drive across open country, navigated with startup du jour MapQuest printed on the back of recycled postgrad lecture notes. It is apples plucked in excess, baked into infinite pies.

Fall is also being in wistful denial after moving on from Boston, remembering autumnal experiences with a chuckle and never dipping into real withdrawal. And concurrently the private Fall within, my self-postponement of writing the past three decades for a guarantee of stabilizing family finances, this clash of humility and hope and arrogance and gratitude and hunger and raging against and whatitcouldhavebeen and whatitcanstillbe.

As a new Fall approaches, there is enjoyment and anticipation; there is respect and resolve. That we can, that we will in this season craft the winter that is to come, design a future of our own, and create every mark in our own time.

childhood fall monsoon nostalgia seasons Singapore

City heartbreak loss Love rainforest short fiction

What’s Known in November

by Heather Bartos • November 24, 2023November 24, 2023

1 minute read.

A flower covered in frost, representing the end of summer and fall, as winter's cold comes in, — Photo by Matt Palmer on Unsplash

I sit inside, watching the flicker of fewer apple and lime green maple leaves, the swing and sway of branches dangling more bronze and copper and scarlet and gold, swirls of confetti that drift before becoming silent cyclones on sidewalks. The turning of the seasons came very late this year, after eighty-degree days in October, its roundness full of warmth and abundance, the glow of its pumpkin harvest moon. The week before Halloween, the sun sunk into the clouds and chill gray rain fell with a drip and a droop but little drama. Our first frost arrived a few days later.

Growing up in California, I used to think that frost would be this amazing, silver-laced event, when delicate ferny patterns would cover windows and we would sip hot chocolate by the fire. It’s not like that. The frost is the hard no, a brutal and bruising butchering, the slaughtering of summer.

I linger inside. Just because the trees shimmer with golden, tawny warmth doesn’t mean it’s not cold. Eventually I haul myself out of the nest of blankets on the couch and fumble into my jacket and gardening gloves. Even at noon, the garden is in shade, the trees marble in a cold museum. The sunlight filters through like weak lemonade, watered-down and withered, seeping over the sleeping.

I start with the dahlias on the south side. They got up to five feet tall this year, pink as blush wine, on big, thick stalks. I can see them here, just a few weeks ago. Now they are bloated, blackened, browned. The little ones are mushy. I snip off the plant, leaving the bulbs tucked under the ground. It’s always a risk if they will come back or if the hollow, exposed stem will cause the bulb to rot. I move to the peach ones.

They were just here, these dahlias, the jewels of July, raspberry and merlot, and my favorite pink ones, striped with rose and apricot, standing tall.

I pull my salmon and coral zinnias from the ground, soil clinging to their roots, shaken free and separated. Their spines are stiffened in protest, an unhealthy shade of gray green. I clip back my marigold, planted in such a tough spot, surviving all summer even though I dug only a shallow hole in stony ground. Its little claws clutched what it could reach, and always a little more. I cut its baby-bird skeleton, pale and bloomless.

These were all just alive, all just here, a few short weeks ago. More frosts will come. For now, my blanket flowers and salvias are spared. Just the tender ones were taken.

Tucked into the soil, put in on the last warm afternoon, are my daffodils. And soon, I will scatter poppy seeds. They need the cold to stratify so they can bloom. I know these things, in November, just as I know the hard no of the frost. I know the story has a happy ending, that resurrection begins in the dark, that renewal returns.

But this afternoon, in the cold golden light, I wonder where my zinnias went. They brought me such joy. I remember my French marigold. I think of my beloved dahlias, the belles of the ball, full in their flouncing skirts, overflowing.

I don’t know where they went. They were all just here.

essay fall flowers frost gardener nature november winter

Fiction, short story

Days Like Television

by Molly Harris • November 22, 2023November 22, 2023

An image capturing the reflected cityscape at night with rain-slicked streets, and neon signs reflecting off wet pavement.

Katherine never got to tell Ginny what she was going to do if she’d lost her. It was, instead, a swift break. They weren’t the same people, Ginny had said. We need different things. You need to grow up. Katherine had sat on the floor of her childhood bedroom, looking down at the stained, cream-colored carpet. She observed the bruises on her arms, blue and scabbed, envisioning them as constellations. You’re not good for me, Ginny had said. This isn’t healthy.

Katherine left after that. She tried to call Ginny once before she went, but she only reached the machine. She told it she was going to hide in the black, steel beams of the city, that she was leaving her and the cornfields behind. Katherine never made it that far. She’d missed her bus transfer at Chicago. She ended up taking the next bus out of Union Station, heading west. She didn’t know exactly where she was going, but she knew that it would take two days.

Out of the bus’s fogged window, she glimpsed the scenery outside. As she neared her destination, the ground rose around her. Hills transformed into mountains, soaring into the sky, their tips hidden by clouds. Cornfields shifted into rainforests with overpowering canopies, emerald with sickly vines hanging low from trees, their bark darkened from the rain. The deep brown contrasted with the lush leaves that surrounded her. Mosses and lichens covered the ground, invading the shoulder of the highway, a neon green against the wet black of pavement.

Katherine, leaning her head back on the 90s-style fabric of the Grayhound, let her eyes lose focus in the verdancy. She watched the raindrops drip from the leaves of the trees and race each other on the window, watched how the drops of dew reflected the light.

It was twelve o’clock when Katherine signed a lease. She paid the deposit and first month’s rent in cash, most of it taken from her parents’ house or from what savings she had left, and her friends from back home pretending to be former bosses and landlords to act as references. She got a job at Washington’s parks and rec department. She became one of those people who sat alone in a booth and collected admission to the rainforest from the cars entering. It was an hour walk from her place, but she liked walking, and she didn’t mind the rain.

Cars never came during her shift since she worked the last one of the day, the one right before nightfall, and it was an off-season. Every shift, she stared at the clock and listened to the rain hit the tin ceiling of her booth. She let her eyes wander, seeing right into the heart of the Hoh Rainforest. How the moss grew over tree limbs. She only saw the faintest color of the deep brown bark, shining wet in the crevices of the different plants that covered it. If she stared for long enough, she could feel the forest breath in, shaking the ground and her booth and her.

The view from outside her apartment was different from her booth. A liquor store’s neon sign took up most of the skyline, reflecting off wet buildings and adding a pink haze to the street below. When she looked down from her third-story window, she could see people bustling across the sidewalk, holding umbrellas and wearing raincoats, sidestepping potholes that pooled with water.

She hoped to erase the thought of Ginny in the crowds, but each time she went out, Katherine saw her in every soul she passed. One time, she’d been looking at apples under the supermarket’s blinding, fluorescent lightning. Their ruby bodies glistened—she knew the red ones weren’t as good, but she couldn’t stop thinking about them. When she looked up, a red apple in hand, she saw Ginny walking through the aisles. She tried to call out to her, but the crowd with their small children and their shopping carts and their leisurely gaits swallowed Ginny up. The shoppers devoured her. Katherine saw limbs unique to Ginny every time the crowd opened its hungry maw: a finger with chipped, black nail polish; a tanned, thin leg attached to a pair of dirty white Keds.

She tried to stay inside after that, sitting in her unfurnished apartment with the sign’s artificial glare shining through her cheap, translucent curtains. She had herself and her pills. That was enough.

A month later, her coworker asked Katherine out on a date. She’d never dated a man before, so she’d yes.

She now stood on top of the rooftop bar they’d agreed on, looking at the mountains. Their tops crowned in a halo of stringy clouds, stretched thin like cotton candy, appeared pink from the setting sun. They looked so different than the fields of silos and corn and beans she’d left behind. The mountains looked more formidable. Less likely to fall.

She ordered a drink, aware that she couldn’t afford it, but also certain that he’d paid. She didn’t really know the man—the woman who worked the shift before her told her that she should try to make more friends in the city and kept going on and on about how nice he was and how sweet he was.

Katherine stood too close the edge of the roof. She clutched her glass, and the sweat from its condensation seeped into her palm. The man who brought her here looped an arm around her, but she didn’t turn towards him. She looked to the dimming sky. The city lights hid most of the stars, but she could see the faint outline of Orion’s Belt breaking through the twilight—three faint pinpricks on a velvet sky.

Sure hope it doesn’t rain, he said. Katherine doesn’t know his name.

I like the rain. It’s different than what I’m used to, she said.

He laughed at her. His body shook hers a tiny bit, and a couple drops of her cosmopolitan dripped on her fingers, leaving small pink pools. You’re just saying that because you’re new here, he said. I promise you won’t be thinking that in a couple of months.

Katherine watched a heavy cloud obscure the three stars of the belt, and slowly but steadily, the pinks and oranges of the sky turned blue. When she looked away, she turned to the man, to his eyes. She couldn’t tell where the pupil differed from the iris. They looked a bit like Ginny’s—such a deep, dark brown like bark. Katherine felt pulled into them, and she drowned. When she pushed her head above the water, she was back at the flumes in Indiana with Ginny. They were younger, about fifteen, and they were swimming, laughing. Katherine remembered her parents had told her to never go near the flumes because god knows what was in that water, but the mystery or the potential danger frightened her.

I can hold my breath longer than you can! Katherine screamed to Ginny, who sat at the top of the rock, overlooking the ravine as if it were her kingdom.

Like shit you can! Ginny jumped, landing in the water with a loud splash. When her head broke through the surface, Ginny laughed, snorting water from her nose. Do you know when your mom wanted you to get home, Kat? Katherine ducked her head underwater instead, holding her breath, and Ginny dove under and pushed her up by her armpits. Your mom’s gonna be all worked up about you, she said.

Katherine told Ginny that her mom didn’t give a shit anymore and that she hardly ever saw her mom much anyway and that she didn’t really give a shit about her mother and that all she wanted to do was to see who could hold their breath underwater for longer.

Ginny laughed at that, and they both went under. Her fair fanned from her face, tangled up her arms, coiled around her body like water snakes.

Hey! Hey, man, you okay?

Katherine blinked, and she felt pulled up from the water. The man she didn’t know the name of stared at her.

He started to ask her if she needed anything, but a clap of thunder interrupted him, and he flinched. Rain broke free from the clouds, sending down coldy, heavy droplets. She felt like a neonate as she let the rain pour over her. The people behind her shrieked, and their shoes squeaked on the now wet pavement of the rooftop bar. Droplets hung heavy off the star-shaped string lights above her. Katherine wiped water off her forehead.

The man sighed. Goddamn it, he said. Can I get your number? I would love to hit you up once this rain stops. If it ever does in this city. He laughed too hard at his own joke.

Katherine pressed her lips together. Water hung off her eyelashes, making it hard to see through the blur. Yeah, let me enter it in your phone. Her hands slipped on the hard plastic of his flip phone. Just text me or something.

When she handed it back to him, he grabbed her wrist, thumbing the pressure point. He drink overfilled with rainwater, and it flowed from the martini glass in small, pink rivers over her clenched fingers. The air smelled of petrichor, and she heard the rumble of thunder, felt the crackle of lightning before she saw it cut the sky.

Are you okay? he asked.

She pulled her hand back, but he tightened his grip on the soft, thin skin of her wrist. I’m fine, she said.

Are you sure you don’t wanna head to mine later?

She pulled her hand back, tipping over the rest of the drink in her other hand and letting it slide down her forearm, hitting the pavement in a darker shade than the rain.

I’m fine, she said. Maybe later.

She watched him head towards the door, most of the patrons already gone, and she followed a minute later.

The next day, Katherine stood in a laundromat when she saw her again. The woman was putting in her second load of laundry. Katherine saw her black hair first—longer than she’d remembered, stopping right before her waist. The woman stood by one of the high windows of the laundromat. The rain blurred the view outside, adding a Vaseline shine to the glass. She still looked like Ginny, and when she turned around, Katherine thought she looked like the sun breaking through. Her high cheekbones looked backlit with gold; her hair looked almost like gloss. The Ginny look-a-like leaned over the laundry basket, grabbing a handful of towels.

Katherine didn’t know how to approach her. The woman made eye contact with her, causing Katherine to flush and look away. She imagined talking to the woman, inviting her over, how there wouldn’t be enough time to turn on the lights before they touched each other, grasping fast and quick under the neon light of her apartment. She imagined the woman getting up and leaving, shutting the door too gently on her way out.

When she got home, she texted the man from the rooftop bar, and she found herself and his apartment. It was nicer than hers, on the ground floor, fully furnished and drenched in warm, yellow light. They went out for drinks, and she joked with him, lying to him, saying she used to be a dancer back home in New York, that she knew French from attending a private boarding school. When he questioned this, she just laughed and repeated, Je danse!

When he demanded that she speak more French to prove it, she had taken his hand instead, and they started on the long walk from the bar back to his apartment. The world looked bright. Saplings lining the road looked iridescent under the street lights. Cyan from Budweiser signs of corner bars looked so bright that Katherine felt they reflected the entire Pacific Ocean.

When they went to his bedroom, it was dark. She didn’t want to turn on the lights, so she fumbled them to bed. They grasped at each other, pulling hair and pulling off clothes. He laughed. She thought of the act like a ballet—she was rigid, keeping her back held tight and high. There were certain positions she needed to be in for the dance. Straddled on top of him, she looked down. His eyes still looked like Ginny’s, but the rest of him felt grotesque. Katherine felt like she was being poised by an instructor. A hand here, a leg there—show him how flexible you can, show him you’re the New York ballerina. She tried and thought she could try harder, but she hated contact with him. She hated his body moving under her. She was trapped in the ballet, untrained wand with her feet bleeding from her pointe shoes until the end. Her first and last dance.

Early in the morning, after he joked with her and made them both breakfast, she told me that she was leaving and never coming back.

The next day, after an hour walk through the rain to her job, the clock stared at Katherine, facing her as it hung on the other side of her wooden booth. She rubbed her arms, moving the fabric of her long-sleeved shirt back and forth in a vertical motion. The harsh fabric of it hurt the raw underbelly of her arms. She smelled the wet ground from outside, the natural musk of it. She felt as if the thick, heavy, moss-covered vines were going to break through her window and seize her from her post.

When she looked at the clock again, the time hadn’t changed. She felt faint and claustrophobic in the confines of her booth. Her peripheries bloomed into a variety of neon flashes that took over her vision, slowly but steadily. She squeezed her eyes shut and put her hands on her temples, circling the skin there. She wanted everything to stop moving.

Despite her best efforts, she couldn’t stop the motion. Ginny was carved beneath her eyelids, and Katherine had forgotten the color of her eyes. She couldn’t tell if they were brown or blue or gray or green. Every pigment of her looked vacated, leaving behind only vague shapes so white and bright they stung. The impression of Ginny broke apart into different snowflakes at a slow diagonal, falling towards her. She grasped at them to hold them tight in her palms, but they melted on contact, and the cold burned her hands. She tried to look at what remained of her, but there was nothing left, not even her shape.

When she opened her eyes, a man was knocking at her window. The sound rocked her head. He looked annoyed.

Katherine indicated that she saw him, opened her window, and told him the price and how they close at sundown.

When his car drove into the forest, she swore she saw the vines closing in on it. Lichens grew over the paved road, covering the path back to her.

She opened up the door to her booth and breathed in the smell of the rainforest, the dampness of it, and she threw up on a patch of moss. Falling back into the booth, she rested her back on the side of it, sitting on the wooden floor. She closed her eyes until she felt she could work again. She wanted another car to come by so that she wouldn’t feel so alone, so that she would feel like she was alive and not already dead, but no one came by until the park closed. If the car had come back, Katherine didn’t notice. She stayed on the floor of the booth, her back pressed up against the wall, her feet stretched in front of her, her boot touching a medical kit, until she finally stood on shaky legs to begin her long walk home, aided by drugs that helped her feel numb and thin and cold.

That night, Katherine jolted awake in her sleep, eyes wide and full and frantic. She felt afraid, and she didn’t know why. She grabbed her phone to check the time, and the neon green light read midnight. A gust blew in from her open window, moving her hair, tickling her ears. The neon light from outside reflected across her floor. She clutched her damp pillow and stared into the darkness, watching the shadows climb from the corners of her eyes until they were all she could see.

She remembered sitting with Ginny on the floor of an out-of-season fish fry house. They’d snuck in—they were seventeen, but the magic of finding a treehouse was still felt. The moon and all of her surrounding stars shone through the open window. All the light landed on Ginny, who looked nervous and bit her lip.

Katherine leaned over to kiss her, and she felt Ginny melt into her. It felt right, so she said, I love you.

Ginny just smiled, but she didn’t say it back. When she spoke, she sounded like an older Ginny, a twenty-five-year-old Ginny. You can’t keep doing this, Kat.

Katherine started to cry. The gross kind of crying where she couldn’t stop, and the sound echoed around the room and in her head, and she couldn’t stop the tears from leaving trails on her cheeks, and every part of her felt and looked too hot to touch. She didn’t know if she was at the flumes or in the fish-fry house or in her apartment, 2000 miles away from where she grew up.

Katherine reached for her phone and dialed Ginny’s number. Her hands shook as she pressed down on the keypad.

The phone was answered quickly, but she gave them no chance to speak. Gin, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean it, I love you. Katherine clutched the phone with both hands, still shaking and crying and too hot to touch. I’m sorry, Gin, I fucked up. I don’t know what to do. I’m fucked up, I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean it at all. Please don’t say I didn’t love you. I loved you so much.

The voice on the other end wasn’t Ginny. It sounded almost elderly—deeper, like a mother. She misdialed, and the woman on the other end was asking where she lived. She read out her address, stuttering the words. The woman told her that someone was coming and to stay on the phone with her, but Katherine hung up. She curled her body on the floor, into a tight ball, and she fell asleep.

She became younger again, around thirteen or twelve. The days felt like television then. Everything looked so brightly lit and perfectly placed like a theater set. Ginny’s basement looked like an acrylic backdrop, painted too quickly, only made to look good under harsh lightning.

Katherine held a popsicle. The icy, sweet drops from it slowly dripped down her hands, leaving behind stripes of blue and red. Ginny sat across from her. They had a beer seated between them, one they’d snuck from Katherine’s mom. It was a Bud Light, and the blue from the can shone bright. She passed the popsicle to Ginny, all sticky and sweet.

Wanna try it? asked Ginny. She licked the popsicle before licking the drops off her hand.

Katherine responded by grabbing the can and popping it open. She took a sip and made a face. This tastes like shit.

Let me try, said Ginny before taking a sip. When she did, she squeezed up her face.

Katherine stared at Ginny for too long before leaning towards her, kissing the top of her head, laughing childlike and innocent.

Ginny wiped the blue popsicle spit left from her forehead. That was gross, she said.

They both laughed, and then the set started to break apart. The image Katherine had built began to crumble, and it toppled over, burying her underneath its weight.

When she woke up, there were sirens outside. They sounded distant and unreal. She didn’t think they were meant for her. Rain fell through the open window and hit her back. She noticed her hair was water laden, falling in tendrils around her face. Katherine closed her eyes and relaxed her tense muscles. She hated the rain. She couldn’t stand it at all.

Arts & Culture, Fiction, short story

Crack

by Michael Bird • November 21, 2023November 21, 2023

6 minute read.

A touch on my shoulder. Images. Flickering. A world vanished before I could fix it in memory. Grim, gray light poured in. Mamma stood in an anorak, her hair uncombed.

“Meet me at the tool shed,” she told me.

I put on a jeans-jacket, plain tee and boots, pulled back the mosquito curtain and went outside. A sharp, salty breeze chilled me. The trees hissed. It was too early for birdsong. Mamma handed me a garden fork and a pile of sacks, and we walked up the hill. Through a forest of corn, we followed a narrow path to a patch of open land.

“Dig up everything,” Mamma ordered.

I thrust the spikes parallel to a line of green shoots, and raised a large clump. Nuggets of orange appeared in the stringy, dry soil. I pulled these out, and piled them up. I lifted another chunk, and another, and tried the same method with the potatoes. Once I finished turning the earth, we shook dirt off the vegetables and bagged them. A glint appeared on the horizon, and I leaned on the handle of the fork.

“I’m tired and hungry,” I told Mamma.

“We’ll deal with that later,” she said.

After hauling the sacks to the pick-up, we went to the caterpillar tunnels to gather peppers and tomatoes. This was painless work, but long and boring, as the crates never seemed to fill up. At the back of the farmhouse stood a wall of maple logs that Dad chopped last year, and left to season. Mamma parked the pick-up close, so I could shift the logs into the cargo bed, next to the sacks and crates. She also loaded half a dozen ceramic vats, with round lids and thick handles. The sight of these always made me shiver, so I was relieved when she covered the goods in tarp, and strapped them in with nylon.

I belted up in the passenger seat, and tried to stay calm. This wasn’t easy. My neck ached, my fingertips stung, and soil rimmed my nails. We left our drive, and passed through woods to a clear road. Fields of corn and rape spread out. At their margins loitered fat hogs, clawing at the ground, snout-deep in roots.

Between us and the sea lay a steep ridge of hills, bare except for scattered, wind-blasted trees. The road followed the coast, where the tide flooded a shingle beach. In the sunlight glowed chimneys, cloud-gushing over the water. In the distance, container ships cruised so slowly, I couldn’t tell if they were leaving or coming to the port. Maybe they weren’t moving at all.

Once we joined an expressway, we were boxed in by cars, lorries and pick-ups. The scenery changed to truck parks patrolled by dogs, red-eyed and rib-lean, and empty homes bordered by limp fences. The road thinned to fewer lanes, and we slowed down, and stalled in traffic. Mamma’s hands fell from the wheel, and she nervously rubbed her wedding ring. A gap opened, and she let go of the brake. The pavement was crowded. A woman dragged her son away from a shop window, clinging to his wrist, the fingers taut. A couple in tight t-shirts, shorts and plimsolls pushed a cart filled with canteens of water. Outside a betting shop, a security guard argued with a pack of teenagers, all pleading arms and heads-in-hands. We moved under a railway bridge, and muddy ground stretched out from the curb. High-rises stood back from the street, rigged in air conditioners and satellite dishes. Towels, t-shirts and flags hung from their balconies.

Mamma’s hands fell from the wheel, and she nervously rubbed her wedding ring.

Again, we were in a queue. Ahead lay a beaten-up pylon sign that read “Cash or Exchange“ in blue and white. After ten minutes of waiting, Mamma turned into a gravel lot. While she tried to find a parking spot, the tires shook up the grit, which rattled against the chassis.

“I need your help,” she said, pulling on the hand-brake.

At the rear of the vehicle, she loosened the rope, unrolled the tarp and flipped down the tailgate. A skinny attendant in greasy dungarees wheeled over a box-cart capped with scales. We unloaded the logs into the box, where a gray screen flickered with kilograms. The guy nodded to us, and we took the logs away, and added the vegetables. Nodding again, he removed a battered wallet, crammed with bank-notes.

“I’ll give you twenty,” he said.

“Those are fresh peppers,” protested Mamma.

“Won’t make any difference when they’re in the broth.”

“Say twenty-five.”

“Twenty-two’s my final offer,” he showed us the cash.

“You’re robbing us,” said Mamma, seizing the notes, and clutching them hard.

At the yard exit, we followed the signs to the city center. In the street, fog clustered around parked cars and tree-stumps. Sweat was trickling down Mamma’s forehead and onto her cheeks. While staying at a light, she took off her jacket, and I did the same with mine. Under my arms, wet patches broke out. Mamma opened the windows. A grill-like odor drifted in, smokey and half-raw.

“Here we are,” she said.

The size of the building was difficult to see, so I leaned out for a better view. Marble arcades towered up, divided by columns, in a wall that moved in a smooth bend. Steam poured from an upper level, constant and dense. Between the arches, pipes burst out and snaked into the streets, rippling with heat.

As we drew closer, I saw how the stone at the base of the columns was crumbling, and its fragments collecting in bird spikes. I also noticed how the arches weren’t made of marble, but limestone and cement. In the hills behind our farmhouse, shepherds used the same materials in walls around their pastures.

Mamma indicated to turn into the building. A shadow tipped over us. Flashes leapt in the dark. My mouth felt chalky, and I wiped my brow against the sleeve of my tee. Once my eyes adjusted, I made out girders, blistered with rust and bent with strain, holding up the facade. Other pick-ups filled the parking spaces, but Mamma found a free place. Pulling to a stop, she unlocked the glove compartment, and eased off her wedding ring, which she put on a pile of unopened letters. We wound up the windows and left the car. At the rear, Mamma pushed one empty vat towards me, while she carried two others.

In the middle of the hall was an iron barrier, as vast as a dam, curving on both sides into a blur of mist. I walked nearer, up to a handrail and mesh fence. Something bright was caressing the metal. Looking over the handrail, I sensed pressure in my temples. Heat punched with such force, I was almost flung backwards. Below was a pit of fire.

“Hey,” Mamma called, “come here.”

I followed her to a turnstile with a red light and a thin slot. Into the gate, Mamma fed one of the notes from Cash or Exchange.

“Keep close,” she said.

The light turned green. I held up the pot and threw one arm around Mamma’s waist, half-hugging her, and we clicked through at the same time.

“Everything breaks eventually,” she said.

A steel staircase climbed towards a dome of steam, rolling towards an exit. Mamma set a fast pace, the steps jangled under my heels, and the vat knocked against the balustrades. The air swelled with a familiar scent of leather and paprika, which strengthened the higher we rose. We reached a gangway, where I saw the breadth of what we’d glimpsed below. Resembling a basin with a broad rim, it stretched as wide as a cornfield. On a dropped ceiling, bars of neon revealed a bubbling and seething stock. Strips of leek and onion, chopped carrot and potato, and chunks of organ and fat were turning in the stew, waiting to be rendered. A mixed feeling came back to me. It was the moment when Dad called out my name, asking me to come to the dinner table. This meant an end to stress, but it was paired with annoyance, because I’d be stuck with the same flavor again—always slightly different, but the same as well.

“When was this built?” I asked Mamma.

“Hundreds of years ago, or maybe more, maybe thousands.”

“Did the fire ever go out?”

“Not that we know.”

“And the broth?”

“It’s been cooking all that time.”

At the far edge of the cauldron, shadows slipped in and out of the neon, overturning plastic bowls of vegetables and offal.

“No one ever cleaned it?” I asked.

“I doubt anyone can.”

“But there could be stuff here from way back.”

“There is.”

Pulleys hung from the ceiling, holding chains that draped above the rim. Mamma attached a hook on one chain to the pot handle, and used another to hoist the links over the stew. The pot swung, before plunging and vanishing. A few seconds later, she yanked on the wire, bringing out the full container and resting it on the gangway. Taking an oily rag from her shirt pocket, she wiped off the muck from the outside, shook the cloth and tucked it into her belt. Holding up the second pot, she asked me to bring her a hook.

We fastened the vats with a lid and carried them down to the pick-up. Once we piled them in the cargo bed, my arms and shoulders felt numb, but Mamma didn’t let up. She presented me with another empty, while she grappled with two more, and we returned to the staircase, and climbed to the top.

“There’s a legend from the bad times,” she hoisted up a pot. “The rulers used to send their soldiers to the farms, where they knocked on every door, and asked how many people lived there. After making a list, they forced every family to give one of their sons to the city. This had to be the tallest and largest boy, who was closest to being an adult. The soldiers brought the children to the dome, stripped their clothes, shaved their heads and bodies, ordered them up the steps, and brought them here.”

“Did they put up a fight?” I asked.

“It would have made no difference.”

“So there’s a bit of them in what we eat?”

“Don’t worry,” said Mamma, letting the pot sink. “The heat boils away anything poisonous or rotten.”

Two figures marched towards us on the gangway, their faces hidden in the low light. Mamma thrust on the chain, the pulley creaked and the pot emerged. Grabbing its handles, she eased it down next to me.

“It’s thick today,” she said.

My belly stirred.

The figures moved closer. They were stout men, in newsboy hats and long aprons, stained in brown and green. Under their boots, the grating clattered and shook.

Mamma seized my arm. Nerves shot through me. With her other hand, she offered me a rag.

“Wipe it,” she said.

The two men passed by.

Breathing slower, I rubbed the side of the dirty pot, but this was useless, as the cloth was just as filthy.

The air swelled with a familiar scent of leather and paprika…

Once we’d collected enough soup in the pick-up, Mamma threw the tarp on our haul and secured the ropes.

“Let me show you something,” she said.

Near the handrail stood a group of men in yellow jackets and hard-hats, arguing over something. Looking up, they pointed to a fracture that began from the base of the cauldron and branched over its body.

“What’re they talking about?” I asked.

“How to stop the crack from spreading.”

“They could make the fire smaller.”

“Then the food wouldn’t cook.”

“They could sell more soup, to lighten the load.”

“That would delay the problem, not solve it.”

“So what’ll happen?” I asked.

“What always happens.”

There was a pause. I looked at Mamma, goading her to continue.

“Everything breaks eventually,” she said.

“You mean this place will burst, and we’ll see all the leftovers, such as the bones of those boys?”

“Maybe something worse.”

The heat was stifling, and my t-shirt and jeans were sodden, so I was glad to return to the pick-up. Mamma clicked open the glove compartment, scrambled for her ring and twisted it on her finger. Turning on the ignition, she glanced in the rear-view, maneuvered us out of the space and made for the exit.

When we reached the expressway, my body cooled, but my skin chafed from the moisture. Smells from the building lingered. I pushed my nose against the collar of my tee, and drew in traces of soot and onion. This reminded me of Saturday evening in the dining room, where the table was laid with three bowls. I waited silently on my chair, dizzy and tired, while Mamma sat upright, hands together, with every finger tight around its double. Dad ladled out the broth, and gave me an extra spoonful. “It’s fresh,“ he had said, grinning with that fake smile he wore. The one I could see through. The one he knew I could see through.

The country road was dark. Our headlights showed only dust. Mamma kept the speed low to avoid dogs and pigs.

“They should destroy the cauldron,” I said.

“People need to eat,” replied Mamma.

“They could build a new one.”

“It’s too expensive.”

“So they have to make something else.”

“That would be even more expensive.”

“If it costs too much to do this, what’s the point of money?”

Mamma laughed. This was manic and loud, and caused her to swerve into the shoulder. The pots rattled at the back. With a firm hand, she brought us into the mid-lane. Silent, we watched the weak light on the grit, hoping nothing would leap out, flash-eyed and stunned, trapping us into a kill.

ancient crack magical surrealism rust short fiction

Arts & Culture, Editor's Pick, Essays, EssaySaturday

Tell Me Something You’ve Learned in the Last Two Days

by Erin Murphy • November 19, 2023November 19, 2023

1 minute read.

#1 job interview question of the former VP of Human Resources at Microsoft

That the cherry blossoms have reached peak bloom.
That hand soap removes ketchup stains from clothing.
That a whole industry wants me to worry about the scent of my vagina.
That the word for cherry blossom, Sakura, comes from saku 咲, which also means “smile” and “laugh.”
That Heinz released a special edition condiment: Tomato Blood.
That Gwyneth Paltrow wants me to buy a vagina-scented candle.
That a Wisconsin school district banned a Dolly Parton song because it mentions rainbows.
That the 口 in 咲 indicates an open mouth.
That you can order a cherry blossom-scented douche from Amazon.com.
That one of my students slit his wrists in eighth grade, convinced there was no place in this world for a gay Black man.
That the gamers who designed Call of Duty met gun manufacturers at a shooting range in Nevada to record the precise sounds of AR-15s.
That soap doesn’t work on blood no matter how hard you scrub.
That according to Google AutoComplete, the most commonly-searched questions include “Why are AR-15s legal?” and “Why are AR-15s so expensive?”
That we should stop using the term “bullet points.”
That cherry blossoms symbolize the fleeting nature of life.
That Nevada isn’t pronounced with an “ah” but more nasally: “Nevada,” like the a in “ammunition” and “capitalism” and “casket.”

cherry blossom creative non fiction essay Gwyneth Paltrow Heinz Lists Microsoft short read

death heaven Online short stories short fiction

Patterns

by jocelynjanecox • November 18, 2023December 4, 2023 • 2 Comments

“That does nothing for you,” I say to my mother every time I enter a new hospital room. She chuckles if she can. It’s one of our jokes, a reference to trying on clothes in dressing rooms, pulling no punches, helping each other decide on size, fabric, fit.

I’m kidding with her, but it’s true: hospital gowns are an affront, stripping patients of whatever dignity they have left. When she’s not in the hospital, my mother has panache. She knows how to put an outfit together with items from different stores, possibly different eras, and different price points. She manages to look stylish without being matchy-matchy. She wears an abstract ring from a museum shop and a statement necklace she’s had since the 70s with a crisp little jacket she picked up from TJMaxx. “Your mother’s so elegant,” people often tell me. She can pull off tweeds or all-black and make it anything work with the perfect silk scarf. She irons a crease into her one pair of jeans.

She hates those hospital gowns. They’re demoralizing. Maybe that’s the point. I’ve noticed that demoralization makes a person — makes her — more compliant. To take the drug, accept the procedure, and, oh, whatever, just sign on the line promising her family won’t sue if she dies.

If I were to draw a map of the routes I’ve traveled toward Delaware, from Philadelphia, Denver, then Boston, and New York where I’ve gone to school or worked over the course of two decades, it would look like spokes of a wheel, with her, always, at the center. I get one degree, then another. After each breakup, I drive in her direction for a dose of Mom, perhaps some antiquing or to hit the sales racks, trying on piles of clothes and taking turns hanging them back up for each other. She helps me figure out what to wear, followed by lots of “gabbing” (her word), and homemade guacamole in the red bowl, with either Bach or Bob Marley in the CD player. These visits are like medicine for me, a way to re-group.

In between, the wheel turns, I always rush to her hospital bedsides. She recovers from one illness, at least partially — she he returns to work, donning exactly the right accessories — then something new crops up.

**

I’m not saying that if a person could wear their own clothes, they’d heal faster, or specifically that she would. And I do understand it’s a matter of access, so that nurses, god love them, can hook all different parts of a person’s diminished body to all different bags and bottles, with some liquids traveling in, others flowing out, punctuated by the incessant bleeping of the machines, though none of the staff pays attention to that sound anyway.

**

These sad, fabric sacks (sad sacks) come with either ties or snaps. However they close, they always slip off one of my mother’s shoulders. I feel compelled to adjust them for her. Sometimes, she adjusts them herself, but they immediately slip off the other shoulder. There must be a better design.

I bring a novel so I have something to read while she dozes. Mostly, though, I fixate on the patterns. In all those years, I only see four patterns, mostly in pastels, occasionally in primary colors, and muted by hundreds (thousands?) of washings between patients:

Interlocking Triangles.
Overlapping Squares.
Rows of Diminutive Diamonds, Usually in Blue.
And my personal favorite: Circles Comprised of Tiny Polka Dots.

No stripes, no checkers, no paisley, no plaid. Fortunately: no skulls, but no smiley faces or flowers, either. Maybe it’s different in the pediatric wing.

I wonder while I sit there: Has she ever been issued the same gown twice? Has anyone died in the one she’s wearing? Do they retire the gown in that instance or do they just toss it with the others into a gigantic hamper?

**

I learn a lot of things in my years of hospital visits. Like: hospitals are cold year-round so I often wear a scarf, mine or one of hers. Lipstick makes her feel better, especially if applied right before the doctors come in. Arteries can be unblocked with a tiny balloon. Blood contains thousands of tiny platelets that help with coagulation; without enough, a person could spontaneously bleed to death. I learn how the thyroid works and that people don’t necessarily need spleens. Metal rods can be inserted into arms, pins can be inserted into broken hips, and pneumonia sets in easily. A cocktail of medications, those “meds” she doesn’t want to take, addle the brain temporarily and permanently. Ribs can crack in the assisted journey from a stretcher to a bed, and the only creature anywhere near as fierce as a Mama Bear is a Daughter Bear. I learn that people can be unlucky (to get sick) and lucky (to improve) in equal measure. Likewise, doctors can know everything and nothing. I learn people who end up wearing a lot of hospital gowns gradually care less and less about them, even if they originally loathed them.

**

I don’t know which pattern she is sporting on the one night I can’t get to her in time. I can only assume the gown slips off her shoulder. Triangles, squares, diamonds, circles. There have been so many years of trying to get better, apologies and frustration, attempting to make the best of things with her lipstick right there in her purse, an arm’s length away. I think about all the mothers, fathers, grandmothers, aunts, and maybe even daughters wearing her gowns right at this moment. The fabric is even softer now, the shapes continually fading.

Arts & Culture, Fiction, short story

The Appointment

by Eugene Slaven • November 14, 2023November 14, 2023

“I have a noon appointment with Dr. Monteski,” Conrad said to the front desk receptionist.

“Yes, Mr. Murphy. You’re all set. Please take the escalator to the waiting room.”

“Escalator?” asked the surprised visitor.

“Yes.” The receptionist flashed a cryptic smile.

Conrad turned to his left and saw the newly built escalator with gold-plated steps, which he found a bit tacky. Once on, he instantly enjoyed the serene gliding sensation and decided to break his usual escalator routine and not walk.

The interior panels were extravagantly decorated with Renaissance-style artwork—complete with child angels floating through billowing clouds. Conrad felt mild resentment at this seemingly gratuitous expense.

The escalator gently delivered him to the waiting room, whose walls were adorned with similar Renaissance images. Once he sat down, he realized there were no tables or magazines—perhaps a cost cutting measure to fund the artwork. Looking around, he counted six other patients wearing strikingly similar impassive expressions. No one was looking at their phones, an anachronistic sight.

“Damn it,” he mumbled, as his hand reached into an empty pocket.

He heard a muted but decidedly mocking laugh. It was an elderly man seated across from him. “Don’t have your phone, do ya?” the man asked with a haughty grin.

Conrad forced a smile and didn’t respond.

“We all forgot our phones,” said the man. “What are the odds?”

“It is strange,” admitted Conrad.

“Why are you here?”

The presumptuous question irked Conrad. “To see a doctor,” he replied brusquely.

“Me too! I got hit by a car. What about you?”

“Hit by a car?” asked the bemused Conrad.

“Yes, why else do you think I am here?” The man’s supercilious grin was unnerving.

“Oh I don’t know,” Conrad dripped with sarcasm. “Maybe for a checkup; you know, like most people who go to the doctor instead of the ER.”

The old man laughed. “The ER, he says! A checkup, he says!”

With no phone or reading material, Conrad had no escape from this vexing character. But just then, he heard his name. A nurse in white scrubs was standing in the doorway. “Come with me,” she said, her mellifluous voice a welcome reprieve from the man’s cacophonous laughter.

Conrad stood up, feeling the man’s buffoonish stare tracking him as he followed the nurse out of the waiting room. He found her gait mysteriously soothing; she seemed to coddiwomple despite obviously knowing where they were headed. There was more Renaissance artwork lining the hallway walls, but here, tempestuous clouds were interspersed with their silken counterparts, fostering a mood that fluctuated between serene and slightly ominous.

“If I’ll always be happy, won’t happiness lose its value?”

Other nurses ambled around them, their bright white scrubs blending into the artwork. The nurse led him to room 721. “I’ll take your vitals now,” she told him, placing a flat metal disk against his chest. It was like a stethoscope but without the tube or headset.

“A wireless stethoscope, well past time,” quipped Conrad. “How do you hear the heartbeat?”

“I don’t have to. It’s all read by the computer.” She nodded towards a screen which was scrolling endless lines of data.

“Whoa!” Conrad was genuinely impressed. “You used to just take my blood pressure. Looks like you got every human body measurement on there. That little gadget did all that, no needles or anything!”

The nurse half-smiled perfunctorily. “Ok, everything is uploaded. He’ll be with you in a minute,” she said before sauntering out.

The screen was still scrolling indecipherable code, when fifteen minutes later, he heard a knock on the door.

“Come in,” Conrad chuckled, invariably amused by the incongruence of physicians knocking before entering their own offices.

The middle aged, clean shaven doctor entered the room and extended his hand. “Gus Monteski,” he introduced himself.

They shook hands. Curiously, the doctor was not wearing a white coat.

“Mr. Murphy, how are you feeling today?”

Conrad shrugged. “Fine, I guess.”

“Good. Let’s take a look at your vitals, shall we?”

The screen had stopped scrolling. Lines of data had been replaced with tables containing combinations of symbols and letters, but not, as far as Conrad could discern, intelligible phrases. The doctor studied the screen, nodding intermittently.

“Things are looking good for you—at least on paper,” he finally announced. “But before we make a final determination, I’d like to talk to you for a bit; you know, just to make sure you’re a good fit.”

Conrad imagined he was having an out-of-body experience. “Final determination? What are you talking about?”

“You don’t know?“

“Know what?“

“She didn’t tell you?“

“Didn’t tell me what?“ Conrad asked in carbonated annoyance.

Gus Monteski shook his head. “You don’t know what this is yet, do you?“

“Doc, I assure you, I am lost,” Conrad confessed in a rather stern voice that belied incipient fear.

Gus sighed. “Ugh, we need to do a better job of standardizing our process. Jenna should have told you. The problem is that some people know and some people don’t when they first get here. Some of our staff just assume everyone knows. We’ll work on that. But anyway, you’re dead.“

Conrad stared at Gus, the initial shock dissipating as the memory of having been shot in the chest by a panicked assailant during a botched Whole Foods robbery flooded his brain. He looked at his chest, but there was no hole.

“My God! I thought that was a dream. So this isn’t my doctor’s office? And you’re not a doctor?“

“That’s correct. I am the Vice President of Talent Acquisition for Heaven.”

Conrad scrunched his face. “You’re vetting applicants who want to get into Heaven?”

“Yes.”

“What happens if I don’t get in? Purgatory, right?”

“Haha! Purgatory,” the vice president shook his head in condescending amusement. “I must have heard that a million times, and it never ceases to make me laugh.”

“Why is that funny?” Conrad asked in restrained indignation.

“Because purgatory isn’t real; it’s just a fairy tale they tell you to make you think there’s a middle ground between heaven and… well, you know.”

“Hell,” Conrad guessed cautiously. “So the stuff on the screen, what is that like my life story?”

“That’s what it is,” confirmed Gus. “And there’s nothing really concerning here; minor transgressions here and there, but no disqualifiers. The thing is, my boss is clamping down on our vetting process.”

“God?”

“No, my direct supervisor, Heaven’s chief operating officer. The Big Guy is the Chairman of the Board. We also currently have a CEO vacancy that we need to fill ASAP.”

“Who’s the chief operating officer?”

“You ever study eighteenth-century Tunisian history?”

“Cannot say that I have,” admitted Conrad, hoping that this gap in scholarship did not disqualify him from going to heaven.

“Our COO for the last—let’s see, thirty years—is an eighteenth-century ruler of Tunisia called Al-Husayn I ibn Ali.”

“Of course, Al,” Conrad joked and immediately regretted it, fearing the VP would perceive his attempt at humor as impudent.

“Al-Husayn is shifting our corporate strategy,” Gus explained. “He’s prioritizing filling operational needs a little more than just being a good person—which had been the main criterion for most of Heaven’s existence.”

“I see.”

“Heaven is becoming increasingly specialized; we want to ensure we have people in the right roles. Over the last few years, we’ve had too many breakdowns in operations, hence the shift in strategy. Here’s the good news: you work in information technology as a cloud engineer. We need cloud engineers as we accelerate digital transformation. We’re starting to move data from hard drives and on prem servers to the cloud. But seeing as how cloud computing is a relatively new technology, we haven’t had too many cloud network specialists come through here yet, which is why your skill set is in high demand.”

“That is good news,” agreed Conrad. “Although…”

“Yes?”

“Recently, I’ve been considering a career change.”

“Oh?” Gus raised his eyebrows.

“I actually want to be a comic book writer. Would a career change be possible in Heaven?”

Gus narrowed his eyes. “We have George Pérez, Neal Adams, among other comic book icons. I am afraid it would be inefficient and contrary to the common good for you to pursue a comic book career. Perhaps if Mr. Perez were to experience some sort of mental breakdown… But in the absence of a comic book writer vacancy, I am afraid a career change wouldn’t be an option.”

“Hm, and I imagine Stan Lee is doing quite well?” asked Conrad, feeling somewhat morally deflated.

“Stan Lee is in hell.”

“I see.”

“Heaven is becoming increasingly specialized; we want to ensure we have people in the right roles.”

A brief silence ensued before Conrad mustered the courage to ask, “what if I don’t want to work as a cloud engineer?”

“Then you’ll be sent to school to learn why you must be a cloud engineer.”

“Out of curiosity, what is hell like?”

The vice president let out a boisterous laugh. “Why it’s pure anarchy! No order, a pointless existence!”

“Gotcha. Besides working on heaven’s IT infrastructure, what would my leisure time look like?”

“You can do practically anything! Ride a bike, go bungee jumping, take a pottery course, watch any movie you like in any language you choose.”

“Is there alcohol?” Conrad blurted out.

“Alcohol?” Gus was caught off guard by the question. “Well, sure, there’s alcohol. You can have a daiquiri or a scotch or whatever, but just for the taste and maybe the nostalgia.”

“You mean because you cannot get drunk in heaven?”

“It’s not that you cannot get drunk in the sense that there’s a rule against it or anything. It’s that everyone is always happy in heaven, so you don’t need terrestrial happiness boosters.”

“Always happy? But what if I want to get happier?”

“You will be at optimal happiness for eternity.”

“I see.” Conrad scratched his forehead. “Still though, if I’ll always be happy, won’t happiness lose its value? How do I know if I am happy if I am never not happy?”

An annoyed look washed over the vice president. “These are all good questions, and some questions don’t have easy answers. However, let me assure you that once you get into heaven, you will never want to leave. You will experience full, unadulterated happiness.”

“Will I be happy as a cloud engineer even though I am currently not happy as a cloud engineer?”

Gus quickly, almost imperceptibly pulled on his collar. “You will be happy as a cloud engineer because it’s what’s best for our community. You’ll know it’s your obligation to your fellow souls to be the best cloud engineer we’ve ever had.”

“I see,” Conrad said, struggling to feign satisfaction. “You’re saying I’ll be happy doing what’s right even though I find the job unfulfilling?”

“Yes! And doing what is right will make you fulfilled. You’ll love it, trust me.”

Conrad felt emboldened to press the issue. “But let’s say, hypothetically, that despite performing my duty and doing what’s best for everyone and so forth, I find that I’m still not fulfilled. What’s the recourse then? Because I gotta tell you doc, I mean sir, I mean, Vice President Monteski, I find it impossible to imagine that I will be happy working in IT for the rest of my life, er, for the rest of eternity.”

Gus shifted in his seat. “You cannot imagine it because you see existence through the terrestrial prism. Once you’re in heaven, your perception will be fundamentally different. If not immediately, then certainly after your reeducation. Our chief brand evangelist, Helen Lansdowne Resor, can explain it much better than I can, but trust me, trust me, you have absolutely nothing to worry about.”

Conrad slouched backwards, sliding his feet across the vinyl tile until his legs were fully stretched. “I guess. I don’t know though. Tell me more about hell. Besides the anarchy, what goes on down there?”

“To be frank,” replied Gus, blinking rapidly, “I don’t really have all the details. I don’t know anyone who’s been there. I just know it’s a terrible place; every soul for him and herself, a brutish, short existence. Heaven, that’s where you want to be!”

Grazing the top of his hand across his nose, Conrad asked, “How much time do I have to decide?”

“Take as much time as you need! I could step out and give you time to think alone. Do you want me to leave?”

Conrad thought about it for a moment. “Nah,” he waved his hand dismissively. “Hell sounds like a big gamble, too much of a risk.”

“Right you are!” exclaimed the relieved vice president.

“Better the devil you know, amirite?” Conrad winked.

“Yes, yes.”

“I’m in. Let’s go to heaven. Perhaps I could have a talk with the COO about eventually changing my career. You never know, maybe Neal Adams will fall out of favor with his fans or maybe there will be hunger for new ideas, a new creative stream as it were.”

“Yes, yes, you never know,” Gus agreed eagerly, quickly stood up, and hurried Conrad out of the room, the heavenly landscapes guiding his way.

Arts & Culture, Fiction, short story

Locker Room Love Story

by Danielle Epting • November 13, 2023November 13, 2023 • 1 Comment

I don’t know what kind of cancer she has. It is too soon to ask her. She wears pink tank tops and holiday-themed scarves around her head to hide the hair loss.

“I see your wife in the locker room,” I tell him while he squeezes a drop of honey on a banana then takes a bite.

“Really?” he asks. “She goes sometimes to stretch.”

He is 49, and I am 27.

He is my boyfriend. A sort of boyfriend. The kind whose wife has cancer and will be probably dead in one to two years according to the doctor. He comes to my apartment to sleep together and sometimes have a snack after. I like how his skin feels on mine, but I do not know him at all. It’s no real kind of thing.

After I bump into his wife the second time in the locker room, she tells me I have pretty hair. I want to say, I’ve seen photos of yours before this… cancer, and it was beautiful too. Instead, I stand still like an idiot and so I am an idiot. But she is patient and gracious, just like he had described her. She asks if it is natural, and jesus christ is it natural? Is it natural for someone so gentle to die of something you cannot even see at 40 years old? Is it natural for me to want it to happen soon?

It is natural. I have never dyed it.

Please do not assume I am a horrible person although I might be. I was a runner until I hurt my knee so then I was a weightlifter which of course is where I met him and now I am an adulterer.

I don’t do anything serious with my life and that’s okay. I work as a mixologist at the bar two blocks from my apartment and take my dog on long walks through the neighborhood early in the morning so she can poop on different lawns.

The third time I run for my life from the locker room, his wife asks if I like spinach. Then if I like artichokes. She throws scarves and gum and a water bottle from her purse before revealing a sheet of paper.

I remember that I brought a spinach drink into the gym once. Some ridiculous juice drink my girlfriend Alyssa wanted me to try. “It’s good for your alkaline levels,” she said. It was the second worst thing I’ve ever put in my mouth.

“I saw you with a green drink once,” his wife says, smiling.

I smile back with no teeth.

“I always make this recipe for my family. Simple and easy. Try it if you’d like.”

She hands me the paper and stands too close to me. I can smell her. She smells like him. Like someone squeezed a lemon in a new car. So that night I go to the grocery store and buy all the ingredients for the dip. I don’t like artichokes or spinach or dips, but I think I like him. And she is part of him.

I get all the way home and realize that my bag of spinach is moving. I flip it around to see a beetle crawling along the inside of the bag with a piece of spinach stuck on its back.

What does this beetle know? This beetle does not know suffering. It knows my spinach. I cut open the bag and fling the beetle and leaves out my apartment window.

“I think we should stop seeing each other,” I tell him over coffee, but he is texting back his son using his pointer finger. I try to tell him that I don’t like artichokes, that the spinach belongs to the beetle and not me. I try to tell him this telepathically, maybe through the letters pressed oh so freaking slowly on his keyboard. I want to tell him I am feeling something bad, something regretful, and do you think the beetle is still alive? He presses send and asks me how to make the keyboard letters bigger on his screen.

I like how his skin feels on mine, but I do not know him at all.

I am growing bored of myself. I do not long for this life, for this dip making. My mother wants me to go back to school to be a nurse or a dental hygienist. She has resorted to a passive aggressive approach with me. She sends photos of the newspaper, my two-star horoscope that tells me I need to take action in my own life, and mails affirmation cards to my apartment. I use them as coasters around my apartment, shielding my garage-sale-acquired furniture from being tarnished by my vodka sodas and early morning orange juice.

The sex with him is okay. It’s nothing great, nothing bad. Every now and then, when we’ve been going for a while, he’ll start to lose his erection, and we will both disperse into separate tasks as if on cue: I will check on my dog, locked in the kitchen behind her doggy gate, and he will clutch at a leg cramp, water bottle, passing thought of his wife, then disappear into the bathroom for several minutes.

“Today, I am flexible!” he reads aloud. “Today, I will adapt to changes in my life with an open mind and a positive outlook.” He has stolen a coaster from the bedside table and looks at me with raised eyebrows.

I narrow my eyes.

“Oh, you’re flexible alright.” He winks.

Perhaps I could move to Latvia. I read somewhere that the average height of Latvian women is taller than any other nation. I could blend in, watch as other women tower over me and simply float somewhere beneath the surface.

My dog has been staring at me inquisitively when we are alone. I think she knows who I really am. Her one ear gets stuck folded backwards after she has been moving about intensely or playing, rolling around on the carpet with a stolen sock. She barks at me accusingly when I sit in one place for too long. Outside, she lays in the grass in the hot sun and watches the birds walk by her, picking up insects from the ground.

I change the settings on his phone so he can read his texts without glasses. His son sends him memes and asks about school pick up time for Tuesdays and what level of hell does the person sleeping with a married man whose wife has cancer go to? I imagine the devil’s pawns whispering in each other’s ears, patting me on the back, then banishing me to live with other adulterers and coveters for the rest of time. I wonder if they allow pets in hell, although my sweet girl hasn’t done anything to deserve such a punishment. She deserves better.

The last time I see his wife in the locker room, she asks if I tried the dip.

“What kind of cancer do you have?” I horrify myself.

She sighs like my mother, shallow and genuine. “Breast,” she says and grabs her boobs. She stares at me, and I stare at her hands on her chest, and then we both burst with laughter like old friends.

“I am sleeping with your husband and have been for months,” I want to say. I feel intensely connected to her, as if she is the one I have been spending all this time with instead of him. Is it possible she is the one who has been eating all my bananas, peeling my hard-boiled eggs in the kitchen, and spending too much time in the bathroom? She waits patiently, maybe sensing that I have something else, something desperately important to say to her. But the moment passes, and we are once again two strangers in a locker room.

“The dip.” I nod, vigorously. “Delicious.”

adultery cancer infidelity marriage short fiction the other woman

Spain Spanish literature translated fiction translated literature

Dr. Putin’s Diet Revolution

by Daniel McKay • June 3, 2023June 3, 2023

All this Ukrainian nationalism bothers me – it seems outdated and irrelevant. Peasants in the fields, folk-songs at harvest, the motherland: what has all this got to do with me? I am a post-modern woman. I know about structuralism. I have a husband who cooks polenta. So why do I feel this unexpected emotional tug?

– Marina Lewycka, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (2005), p. 82.

Pity the protagonist of Marina Lewycka’s comedic novel, whose quiet life as a lecturer at Anglia Polytechnic University comes to a crashing halt when her émigré father embarks upon a series of misadventures. Nadezhda is regardful and loving, but struggles to see things from the old man’s point of view. Even the famine of 1932-1933, known as the Holodomor, holds little sway over her consciousness and yet, despite such closed-mindedness, her heart cannot slam the door to the past quite as readily. Rural and folkish though it may be, there remains something about Ukraine that touches this woman’s avowedly post-modern sensibility.
Nowadays, we’re all Nadezhda. At least, that is the impression conveyed by the news media, so prevalent is the disorientation that Ukrainian, Russian, and Belarusian exports should hold the influence that they do. Partly, this is born of a sense that the usual metrics by which national economies get ranked aren’t up to scratch. Notably, Russia’s economic heft is often said to be roughly on a par with Spain’s in GDP terms, a comparison that is not intended as flattering to the latter.
Unwilling to eat the usual polenta, if you will, security analysts Michael Kofman and Andrea Kendall-Taylor published a compelling article in the November/December 2021 issue of Foreign Affairs, arguing that GDP measurements were dangerously off. To properly measure Russia’s economic strength would require more than one yardstick, including a recognition of the vast surface area the federation encompasses. Of equal significance to the GDP issue, moreover, is the false supposition that the pre-war flow of commodities – manufactured goods, certainly, but also edible raw materials like fruit & veg, grain, corn, and meats – will not only continue uninterrupted but are uninterruptible.
Supercharged with neoliberal rhetoric, this idea went relatively unchallenged over the three decades after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, either because it suited emerging powers to go along with it or because they did not yet possess the means, motive, or opportunity to contest it. But now the war in Ukraine has done away with the conceit, leaving open the question of what sort of economic or trade reconfiguration should arise in response.
If he were among us, one wonders whether Nadezhda’s father would come up with something fit for purpose. His character is an earthy one, bestowing much faith in the awesome power of tractors to raise productivity. At first glance, therefore, he would probably shrug and say that if the Russians and Ukrainians have turned ploughshares into swords, there’s no reason why friendly countries can’t compensate. Simply place an order with the John Deere or Massey Ferguson corporation and ship the tractors where they’re needed most.
This ‘roll up your sleeves’ premise carries some appeal and, make no mistake, North American and Western European farmers will do their best to deliver. But the breadbasket of Europe earned its nickname for a reason. In a good year, it is the fifth largest wheat exporter in the world, providing almost all the wheat that gets sold, for instance, in Lebanon and Pakistan (not coincidentally, food prices in those two countries have reportedly risen eightfold). A deal for the resumption of grain exports from Odessa might or might not be honoured, but will be too late in either case for prices to come down far enough. For one thing, the eye-watering cost of freight and insurance premiums in a war zone will be passed on to the traders and, by extension, to the consumers in developing countries.
Then too, there is the fact that Ukrainian agriculture won’t return to pre-war production levels for a long time to come, partly because of manpower shortages but also because Ukrainian fields have been blasted and firebombed by the invading forces. Improved farming technology, in other words, requires preconditions in Ukraine that aren’t present yet. Coming to the same realisation, Nadezhda’s father would probably start writing a new book, less focused on production and more on consumption, less about Ukraine specifically and more about people’s expectations of natural resources.
It would be a story that, so far, hardly anyone is telling: of interruptions in supply chains leading to the necessary cessation of the West’s overfed lifestyles, of regard for the food on one’s plate and gratitude for the labour expended in getting it there, and of readiness to support fragile but retainable ecosystems no less stoutly than an embattled nation state. In short, our era calls for constructive ideas that can reform daily routines, along with the societies that encourage and grow from them.
The moment has never been more opportune for a move in this direction. At a time when the World Food Programme is having to look elsewhere than Ukraine for 50% of its grain sources and has estimated that 47 million people are facing severe food shortages, food wastage cannot remain a subject of mere curiosity. After all, only about half the world’s grain harvest ends up on dining tables, the rest going into animal feed or biofuels.
According to The Economist, 431 million tonnes of grain were fed to pigs in 2019, which is about 45% more grain than the Chinese ate during that same year. Admittedly, some of that animal feed does find its way into the human food cycle, because the animals themselves end up within it. But this observation is misleading, because the majority of calories present in animal feed do not get passed on. In fact, for every 100 calories of grain fed to a cow, just three are recovered in the form of beef. Chickens are more efficient at digestion and, for that reason, their drain on food resources is considerably less than bovines, even if not low in itself. Despite its image as an untouched land, Canada is fully integrated into this system, with 28.8 million tonnes of feed consumed by livestock in 2020 according to the Animal Nutrition Association.
Not that Canada is more at fault than other developed countries. Roughly 40% of the wheat grown in EU countries is earmarked for cattle, while a third of the maize grown in the US goes the same way. In short, old-fashioned feeding practices remain endemic and, regrettably, there are no immediate solutions to this state of affairs. Alternative forms of feed are available and have proven use value, but the animals don’t grow as quickly or as fully. With grain exports from Ukraine at all-time lows, substitute feed will have to be used in any case, meaning higher meat prices further down the line. All of which sounds rather dire, until one notices the false premise: that the world’s populations are expected to continue consuming animal-based products on a continual basis instead of embracing plant-based alternatives on at least some occasions.
Cutting back on animal-based products, above all meat, would reshape the way in which grain circulates in national and global marketplaces. Imagine if this were to happen at scale. Initially, the price of grain and other plant-based foods would increase to reflect the higher demand, but the need for grain as animal feed would decline because fewer people would be eating meat as an end product. As these two changes begin to balance out, the prices of plant-based foods should stabilise and then start to go down.
If nothing else, this would provide some relief to strained household budgets. In fact, lowering one’s consumption of meat will have that effect even before the wider economic implications become apparent. The probability of a recession will also decline, because there will ultimately be less animal husbandry and so the land given over to pasture can be repurposed for growing more efficient agricultural produce, leading to increased supplies of the same. Oversupply is unlikely to be an issue because the El Niño and La Niña phenomena mean that global grain harvests are becoming appreciably smaller, ensuring that excess produce will almost definitely find foreign buyers.
Then there are the knock-on effects for developing countries. Egypt is currently the world’s largest grain importer and its government is actively promoting modern irrigation methods over traditional practices, the aim being to boost domestic harvests in order to meet 65% of domestic needs by 2025. It’s a tall order, and yet the prospect of food shortages in the most populous Arab country would be even more greatly diminished if, instead of waiting for the war in Ukraine to be over, Egyptians could be assured of increased supplies from elsewhere. A groundswell of public opinion that sees cutting down on one’s meat intake as a form of collective self-interest would be a step in the right direction. If food practices remain unchanged, on the other hand, then the prospect of civil unrest may grow higher as people’s patience reaches breaking point.
In today’s world of climate change and extreme weather events, entrepreneurial genius is needed as never before and yet it would be a mistake to think that people must invent their way out of food insecurity. True, lab-grown meat and edible insect farms offer transformative alternatives to that which comes from an abattoir and both of these are well along the way at the present time of writing. But is it truly necessary to go so far? Surely the best solution lies not in meat alternatives, as such, but rather in a collective decision to cut out or reduce the consumption of ‘normal meat,’ leaving farmers and the market to do the rest on their own.
Step-by-step approaches to suit one’s preference are available. Meatless Monday, for example, is an international campaign whose premise is written into its name, while another model may be found in Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2019 book We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast. Neither of these campaigns, it should be disclaimed, are part of an international conspiracy to end meat-eating once and for all. At the most, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine may be available as a rallying moment and, were it to be so taken, momentum would likely build all the faster.
History furnishes abundant precedents. After the abolition of the slave trade in 1833, most notably, British people put up with higher commodity prices throughout the rest of the nineteenth century, knowing that those prices would have been lower had the slave trade continued. Not every Briton could have been fully convinced by the arguments for abolitionism, it must be admitted, but a point of total agreement throughout the whole population was no more attainable than it was necessary. The point stands, therefore. A people can sacrifice their everyday needs or change the definition of those same needs in pursuit of a moral good.

Arts & Culture, Editor's Pick, Fiction, Literature, Reviews, Translations

BOOK REVIEW: LET NO-ONE SLEEP

by Robert Montero • November 26, 2022November 26, 2022

Sometimes, a larger-than-life bird woman is all a book needs. In Let No One Sleep, translated into English by Thomas Bunstead, Spanish writer Juan José Millás has penned a story that is at times funny, at other times sad, but always wonderfully absurd.

Let No One Sleep follows Lucía, a computer programmer who lives in Madrid. Unfortunately for Lucía, she is made redundant from her job at the start of the novel, and the world is “full of programmers younger and better equipped” than she is. During her taxi ride home, she discovers that the driver is also a programmer. Following the collapse of his company, he decided to purchase a taxi licence – “now I’m my own boss”, he declares, and as he drives passengers around the city, he likes to imagine that he is somewhere else, such as New York, Delhi, or Mexico City. Lucia is intrigued by the prospect of being her own boss, but she is also attracted to the freedom that driving around all day can give her. Because Lucia, you see, is a “bird woman,” and birds love to be free.

Lucía does not have wings, or feathers, or a beak. But her “ghost body” does. Lucia first recognised her special affinity with birds on the morning of her tenth birthday. She had run into her parents’ bedroom and asked for her birthday present, which, incidentally, turned out to be a pet bird. As Lucía waited for her gift, her mother sat up in bed and said, “Something’s going to happen.” Later that day, during Lucía’s party, a bird mysteriously fell from the sky and crashed into her mother’s head. Lucía watched in stunned silence as both her mother and the bird fell to the ground. Then, Lucia noticed “a kind of soap bubble with smoke suspended inside it emerge from the bird’s beak before entering her mother’s mouth.” Not long after, Lucía’s mother passed away. Shortly before her mother’s death, she had again declared, “Something’s going to happen,” then “a swallow flew in through the open window, did a very quick lap of the room, and flew back out again.” Lucía recites this story to her very first taxi passenger, a woman of the theatre named Roberta.

“Sure you didn’t make the swallow up?” Roberta asks.

“Of course not.”

Or did she? Lucía is not so sure. Lucía, after all, has a delightfully inventive imagination, the essence of which is effectively captured in Thomas Bunstead’s English language translation. The writing is clear, but not clinical. The directness of the prose enhances the novel’s comedic effect. The novel works partly because its strange central character, despite her occasional doubts, chooses to trust herself. When one of her passengers tells his wife that she has “short arms,” Lucía cannot help but say, “If I were your wife, I’d have given you a couple of slaps with those hands she’s got at the end of her short arms.” There are also details that might otherwise get lost in translation. For example, when Roberta says to Lucía, “You’re so funny,” she moves “to the informal tú address for the first time,” suggesting a change in relations that may otherwise go amiss.

Let No One Sleep is, ostensibly, a comedy. However, as is the case with the best comedies, it contains an undercurrent of sadness. Lucía’s worldview inspires amusing reactions, but in her story one also finds alienation, remoteness, detachment from humanity. Losing her job as a programmer facilitates a disentanglement from the world of predictability and routine. In her taxi, Lucía discovers a freedom to explore her sexuality, her imagination, even the limits of her species. Lucía is a bird trying to break out of her cage, but her eccentric habits, her resolute otherness, can also work against her. The exotic bird is kept in captivity precisely because it is exotic, and Lucía’s exoticism routinely runs the risk of keeping her, to use a bird-inspired term, pigeonholed. She befriends Roberta, but there is a sense throughout their many interactions that Roberta sees Lucía more as a curiosity, even a freak, than an equal. At one point, Lucía reveals that when she is driving, she imagines Madrid is actually Beijing, and Roberta says, “You’re crazy.” It is unclear if Roberta means this in the literal sense, and throughout her exchanges with Lucía there is an unsettling ambiguity concerning Roberta’s true intentions. Does she care for Lucía, or is she merely interested in her, the way a botanist might take interest in a rare flower? Is Lucía a subject, or a spectacle?

Lucía may appear spontaneous and carefree, but she is more than just a wayward bird fluttering from place to place. Early on in the novel, she takes a liking to her neighbour, a thespian named Braulio Botas. When he unexpectedly moves away, she becomes obsessed with him. She starts seeing her life through the prism of Turandot, Giacomo Puccini’s 1926 opera. Indeed, the novel’s title comes from the opera’s famous aria, “Nessun dorma.” In this fantasy she is Princess Turandot, and Braulio is Calaf, the Unknown Prince. She even begins dressing like Turandot. When a passenger asks if she identifies with the Chinese princess, she replies, beaming, “I’m the real Chinese princess. The one in the opera is made up.” So convinced is she that, one day, Braulio will hail her taxi on the streets of her imagined Beijing (after all, it is “written in the stars”), that she sets about reading dozens of articles on the theatre to prepare for the momentous occasion. But even though Lucía lives for this day, she does not hold off on having other adventures while she waits for destiny to strike. Whether befriending Roberta, going on an awkward date with a writer of “not-current articles,” or becoming entangled with the corpse of a man who appears to be her old boss (“the asshole”), Lucía has enough to keep her busy as she waits for the stars to align.

The irony of Lucía is that, although she is an eccentric character, with a personality some may deem unpredictable and perhaps even reckless, she nonetheless desires permanence. She is in search of a life that is “written in the stars.” If she is a bird, flying free, she is a homing bird. And this contradiction between needing to be free and needing a deeper purpose gives the novel its “tragicomic” edge. Millás has made a touching observation: that behind the desire for adventure dwells the spectres of fear, loneliness and alienation. Lucía’s obsession with Braulio Botas reveals a need to be rooted. She feels “like a secret agent. Like a spy.” Lucía likes spy movies “because spies live in a world that isn’t their own, and nobody realizes it,” and she clearly revels in her adventures. But her zest for freedom springs from a deeper well. She may enjoy her bird woman’s wings, but she wants to be free for a very specific reason – so she can find her way home.

Let No-One Sleep

by Juan José Millas

Translated by Thomas Bunstead

Bellevue Literary Press, 208 pages

Arts & Culture, Books, Editor's Pick, Literature, Reviews, Translations

BOOK REVIEW: THE AGE OF DOUBT

by Katy Ward • November 26, 2022November 28, 2022

If I hadn’t been asked to review The Age of Doubt, I would have probably never encountered the work of Pak Kyongni. This would have been my loss. After reading this collection of short stories, it is easy to understand why the writer is one of the most celebrated figures in Korean literature. Containing seven stories, this book is a savage and touching exploration of the realities of life in post-civil-war Korea. The sentiment is perhaps best summed up when the protagonist of The Age of Darkness tells her mother: “You’re not the only one that longs to die. Who wants to live?”

Written in the 1950s and 1960s, many of the plots parallel events from Pak’s own life. The writer was herself a widow who lost a three-year-old child in an accident. In fact, Pak wrote in her memoir that she would never have become a writer had she been satisfied in life. And, while we see glimpses of war in The Age of Doubt, Pak is most interested in its aftermath, especially for the women who were often left widowed and destitute.

Against this backdrop, it is unsurprising that Pak tackles extremely dark subject matter, with both The Age of Darkness and The Age of Doubt detailing horrific injuries to children. In the former, the protagonist’s son is hurt in an accident on a mountain. Although he is taken to hospital, the incompetence and materialism of the medical staff further endanger his life, with his mother commenting:

“Dirty bastards! Drunk and talking out of their asses while they operated on him. Running their knives over our only baby boy while drinking lemonade, flirting. You call this a hospital. […] I ought to set this place on fire.”

The title story follows a similar theme, as another widow loses her son to medical negligence. The night before his death, she dreams of a dead soldier “with hordes of flies attacking his entrails like flesh-eating demons.” In this piece, Pak also turns her satire on the greed of organised religion, as the main character temporarily seeks refuge in both Christianity and Buddhism. Both institutions, however, prove equally corrupt, with the protagonist observing that a Buddhist nun selling rice is “less interested in sad stories than in striking a deal.” In the world these characters inhabit, it would be naïve for them to place confidence in the institutions designed to protect them.

Amid the misery, however, there are moments of undeniable humour. In The Age of the Darkness, the main character contemplates ways to support herself, her children and elderly mother, concluding “the only possible way to seems to be to sell her body.” With a biting wit, Pak adds: “What defeats this idea is the not the baseness of the thought itself, but the fact she doesn’t know how to do even that.”

While Pak is writing about an era and setting of which I know shamefully little and presenting scenarios I can only imagine, one of the most striking aspects of her work is the extent to which I could relate to her characters. In the opening story, Calculations, the protagonist fixates on the awkwardness of outwardly insignificant social interactions. In one example, she is preoccupied by an encounter days earlier, in which a presumably well-intentioned stranger buys her a newspaper. Feeling too uneasy to simply thank him, she flings money at him and flees. This reminded me of occasions on which I have behaved in an equally irrational manner through social embarrassment, and then berated myself for weeks or even months after. In these passages, Pak taps into the inner monologues many of us experience every day, thousands of miles away from post-war Korea.

Another aspect of the collection I initially found surprising is that each story (and its final commentary) has a different translator, several of whom are among the most well-respected figures in Korean-to-English translation. In fact, one of these is Anton Hur, whom I interviewed for Litro last year about his brilliant translation of Love in the Big City.

When I discovered the stories have different translators, I suspected this would make the collection feel fragmented. However, this concern was unfounded. Having different translators brings a unique flavour to each piece and underlines the distinctiveness of Pak’s characters.

It is in the final story, The Sickness No Medicine Can Fix that Pak is, for me, at her finest. The story centres on an unhappily married couple, with the husband infatuated with another woman. However, other members of the venomous community in which they live also play an important role in the story as they routinely gossip about the infidelity. One of the husband’s friends insists that a woman should not be angry “just because her man went to bed with someone else” and adds “you’ve got to go at her like beating a dog for a summer feast.”

Where Pak excels is in the creation of often dislikeable characters consumed by the violence of their emotions and often deriving pleasure from others’ suffering. When the husband confides his misery to a pedlar woman: “The old woman smiled again, cruelly, like a crow that pecks and pokes at the sadness of others. As if getting to observe others’ sadness was her compensation for aging and misfortune.”

For me, the only misstep in the collection is its penultimate piece The Era of Fantasy, which at almost 100 pages could also be classified as a novella.The story focuses on a Korean student attending a school for both Korean and Japanese girls. As the plot progresses, the character becomes attracted to a younger female student. The type of relationship Pak describes is, as a footnote explains, referred to as an S-relationship and considered a healthy stage of female development.

While its themes are fascinating, The Era of Fantasy, at times, verges on a stream of consciousness. For me, this made it occasionally hard to follow and meant the characters lacked the vibrancy of the embittered couple in The Sickness No Medicine Can Fix. What the story does share with all the others in the collection though, is an often-enchanting lyricism in its language, with the school music teacher described as “spread[ing] his long fingers like a hand fan’s ribs, tapping to the beat” as “he would bristle up his eyebrows like moving caterpillars.”

If you’re keen to learn more about historical context behind Pak’s work, it is worth reading the book’s commentary from Professor Kang Ji Hee as it provides fascinating insights into the writer’s life. For instance, learning that Pak wrote The Age of Darkness on the day she visited her son in the crematorium makes the story feel even more raw. It is also interesting to read of the intersectionality of Pak’s later work. The professor explaining that Pak included both plots and characters from The Era of Fantasy and The Sickness No Medicine Can Fix in her novel Toji. Often regarded as her masterpiece, Pak’s exploration of Korea’s struggle against Japanese imperialism took her 25 years to write.

With the exception of The Era of Fantasy, I enjoyed each of the stories in The Age of Doubt. And although there is often little hope for her characters, Pak’s work is never self-indulgent or maudlin. For me, it seems the writer is simply being honest about the struggles of women in post-war Korea. In several pieces, she is depicting the version of ourselves that we become during the most harrowing moments of our lives. These are pockets of our minds that few writers probe, and even fewer with Pak’s beauty and brutality.

The Age of Doubt

by Pak Kyongni

Translated from the Korean by Sophie Bowman, Anton Hur, Slin Jung, You Jeong Kim, Paige Aniyah Morris, Mattho Mandersloot, Emily Yae Won, Dasom Yang

Honford Star, 288 pages

Korea Korean literature translated fiction translated literature women women writers

Editor's Pick, Fiction, Story Sunday, StorySunday

The Monk Seal

by Ryan White • November 6, 2022November 6, 2022

They finished first, splashing the Kilo Hoku into Ala Wai Harbor with sails taut, rigging ahum. All but the skipper and a pair of trimmers hiked on the rail. Back at the pier, Bret accepted the bottle of sparkling wine and raised it for a sip, the bubbles burning his tongue – his first taste of Champagne, acidic and disappointing. He passed it to Tobias and Conor, eyeing the discontented sky – the briny haze, the tatter of high clouds.

“I can’t drive you guys back tonight,” Professor Aragaki said, coiling a line on the dock, the sunset paling behind him. “There’s a monk seal at Waikiki, right in front of the hotels.” His tone was reverent. The seals were endangered. They hauled out on shorelines to rest, but on town beaches, in those days, they were unheard of. “I’m going for a look.”

Aragaki taught their Introduction to Oceanography course and was the only reason Bret was aboard. One morning early in the semester, he’d called for experienced sailors. Bill, the boat’s owner and skipper, had asked Dr. Aragaki to find new crew. After class, Bret, Tobias and Conor – Bret a stranger, the other two old friends – had been waiting beside the dais.

Bret’s command of sailing was limited to a few long-ago afternoons with his grandfather in a borrowed dinghy, its weathered coamings slapping the foul-smelling lake water. But on his first afternoon aboard the Kilo Hoku, his inexperience had gone mostly unnoticed, as had the cheat sheet of sailing terms he’d scrawled on his palm – realizing too late that the first burst of seawater would render the notes unreadable. As he’d hoped, sailing was transformative. In this new reality there was influence and opportunity. Yacht clubs and friends like Conor and Tobias. Conor’s dad ran a private equity fund in Connecticut, which was offering an internship the next summer. Bret had applied immediately. Tonight was the only time he’d see Conor before break. His last chance to ask if Conor would put in a word with his father.

Bret’s unfocused transcript – his intentional turn from journalism to marketing was still pending – and general lack of upper-class suitability were not going to get him the kind of internship he needed without help. So the gig with Conor’s dad was his most viable escape from another summer working the fryer, the reek of hydrogenated oil trailing him home. Enumclaw – his mind recoiled. Soft mossy roofs and yards with busted trampolines. A meager main street clinging to desperate bars and antique shops.

“Conor boy, good hustle on those tacks,” Bill said, standing in the cockpit with a contented smile. Bill was bald, gold-watched and gruff. He’d founded an office machine company – the uninspired, saltine-cracker sort of success that instilled Bret with yearning, but also inexplicable dread.

Conor stood at the gunnel in his designer sandals, framed by strings of Christmas lights hung on the nearby clubhouse. An unselfconscious grin spread above the marble scaffolding of his jaw, a look honed for approving coaches to be deployed for supportive bosses – men like Bill. He and Bill looked invulnerable, standing together. Bonded by status, accustomed to winning. Wealth cloaked them with invisible armor – Conor more so because he was born into it. By contrast, Bret – five-nine, 160 pounds, loaded with student debt – felt naked and imperiled.

Dr. Aragaki tossed the coiled line onto the deck and stepped closer on the pier, nodding to the three of them. “You can come see it, if you want,” he said, still preoccupied by the seal.

Conor and Tobias turned him down. They’d spent last Winter Break on a Galapagos cruise with Conor’s parents, so the seal was just another endangered slab of fur and blubber. Unwilling to split with Conor, Bret declined too.

***

Bret convinced the guys to ride the bus to save the cab fare, promising the 13 would get them to campus with no transfers – which was true, though he underplayed the quarter-mile walk to the stop and the bus’s plodding circuit through Honolulu. They snuck the Champagne aboard and passed it among themselves in the air-conditioned chill, ducking for swigs in the back row, drinking with gusto because it was their prize. The driver indulged them with an eye-roll. Tobias and Conor grew bolder as they neared their stop. Bret worried about the transit police.

Bret planned ways to bring up the internship. The longer he delayed, the more daunting it became to redirect the conversation. Still, no awkwardness or measure of embarrassment could outweigh another summer in the kitchen of the Eagles Lodge. Returning home was failure. Success was a promising – albeit lonely and sort of mundane – summer in Greenwich, writing presentations for fund managers. Just the sort of résumé boost he needed.

At the last off-campus stop, the bus was delayed by an exiting rider, shouting at the driver, wearing grimy clothes and a Santa mask – not only the beard and hat but a whole face, loose and rubbery like the end of a condom.

“We should get a suite at the beach,” Conor was saying. “Tell the girls they can see the monk seal from the balcony. Rare wildlife,” he said, affecting Aragaki’s awed tone. “Once in a lifetime.” Then, switching back to his usual bluster, “They love that kind of shit. Bret, you in for a third?” He didn’t need to ask Tobias.

The argument up front had drawn the attention of a disheveled woman sitting nearby and she let one of her plastic bags slip, avalanching a rattle of plastic water bottles onto the floor.

“Uh,” Bret said, stalling, feeling the onset of mortification. He slid off the seat, crouching, gathering the woman’s bottles, feeling uncomfortable – even somewhat guilty – for having introduced Conor and Tobias to this squalid scene. A third of a suite. Maybe a hundred dollars? Food money for a month. No way.

“Forget it,” Conor said, impatient, swiping a hand in dismissal. “I’ll pay. But we tell the girls it’s my room.”

Bret finished loading the bottles and retook his seat. Conor elbowed him. “Dude, you’re gonna get syphilis.”

Bret shifted his gaze to the ground, eyeing Conor’s designer sandals again. He mustered a laugh – hoping to seem easygoing – and went silent again.

***

They spilled out in front of the law library, the hot breath of the bus fanning out, mixing with the ever-present scent of plumeria wafting down from the lawn. Bret spotted his roommate, Thuan, walking up from the bike racks where he stored his moped, straight black hair flopping on his forehead. Tall and disciplined about his workouts, Thuan met everyone with the earnestness and intensity of a Make-A-Wish kid at spring training. And now he asked Tobias and Conor the questions he asked everyone: What dorm are you in, where are you from and why are you here?

Interview over, Tobias and Conor went back to planning. “Thuan, you know any girls?” Tobias said.

Thuan nodded. “Lots.” Indeed, he did. He was so extroverted that Bret sometimes found it exhausting. Bret didn’t know how many of Thuan’s female friendships translated to hookups. More than he was getting anyway.

“Great. If you can bring four girls, come to my party,” Conor said. He signaled Tobias and they walked off toward their own dorm, in the only tower with private bathrooms. Bret realized then that the exchange to UH had been a downgrade from Tobias’s and Conor’s university.

He considered following Conor to spring the question. But with Tobias there, it’d be awkward. Their first night on the boat, noting that he and Tobias were closely matched in height and build, and seeing Tobias’s greater skill, Bret had made a show of outgrinding him on the winches, compensating for inexperience with grit. But he had a fondness for the guy because, on a shelf in the room he shared with Conor, he’d spied Fugazi’s 13 Songs on CD. He’d uncovered no similarly endearing details about Conor.

***

Up in his room, Bret bent and used a handful of tissue to pick up the husk of a cockroach he’d spied under his desk. The buzzing overhead fluorescents glared on the pineapple-yellow walls.

“You like Conor?” Thuan said. Bret had told him about the internship. Thuan wanted context.

“People seem to like him,” Bret said, dropping the wadded tissue into the waste bin and leaning in his desk chair. Having considered it a moment, he said, “Anyway, he knows a lot of people.”

“I saw him at a bar, talking to my friends,” Thuan said. Bret pictured tittering girls, Conor leaning with confidence. “I went to buy drinks and he crowded in and said he’d have a shot, like it was his round. But it went on my tab. And the next time he bought drinks he forgot I was there.”

“Probably wasn’t intentional,” Bret said, lifting a snow globe of the Seattle skyline from his shelf – an ironic gift from Cara, his not-quite-girlfriend who’d nonetheless broken up with him. “I think if you’re born rich, you don’t get so hung up on fairness.”

“Is that what you want?”

“Born rich? Sure, but I’m getting old for it.”

Thuan was changing shirts again – cords of triceps shifting, his confident posture highlighting slabs of pectoral muscle. He didn’t acknowledge the dumb joke. “You said you wanted to write for magazines.”

“I don’t want to go through life never knowing what it’s like to have money.” Bret glanced at his screensaver, watching the star field rush out of the abyss. “Is that tacky?”

Thuan eyed him, looking amused. “My family immigrated. If someone finds a way to earn, we don’t worry about tacky.”

Bret felt implicated in something – he wasn’t sure what. “If you want real money, you have to decide now. You can’t start out indifferent and then change your mind.”

“You’re American. You can change your mind whenever you want.”

That was awfully optimistic, even for Thuan. Bret turned the globe in his hands and picked at an errant bit of glue on the base, worrying over Conor’s demand that Thuan bring girls. “You better make some calls.”

***

As they rode to Waikiki in a taxi – Conor, Tobias and Thuan in back, Bret in front watching the meter – Bret was thinking about Thuan’s comments, about how little he knew about guys like Conor. The world saw them differently than it saw him. He’d become sorely aware of how he was perceived, on the fizzling of his quasi-relationship.

He recalled meeting Cara – the way she’d written her name in big vigorous cursive, how her face lit up with deep passion when they talked about the future. She was trim, with fantastic legs and a wide smile under clever green eyes – looks that could’ve imparted a sense of entitlement, but to which she seemed mostly oblivious. Maybe she was conscious of an advantage sometimes – how her appearance offered access to certain things, the way Bret’s sailing could.

He’d fallen hard, as he always did with girls out of his league. She liked his tousle of brown hair, his strong nose – his wry humor, when he was comfortable enough to share it. It hadn’t been a breakup exactly. He felt more like an intern who hadn’t received a permanent offer. She dreamed of vacations in overwater bungalows and five bedrooms in a good school district. He talked of backpacking and, someday, a loft in a gentrifying neighborhood.

Their split jibed with his mother’s worries. She wanted him to be a radiation therapist. Not a doctor – that was too lofty for their family. But she was only vaguely aware of the difference between a BA and BS. And she was ignorant of prerequisites. What stung was that her goals for him always seemed tied to concern the world might not love him – certainly not in her selfish mode – unless he made money.

So on the plane to Oahu, with sudden resolve, he’d rewritten his future. He could apply to become a marketing major. Work in branding – at worst, as a technical writer. Securing a good job wouldn’t be easy – not the way it’d been for his Boomer parents – but it was essential. A path to invulnerability.

***

Bret noticed Tobias looking sullen as they walked into the hotel, met by the salty-sweet smell of coconut shrimp and buttery ono from the restaurant, slack-key guitar in the bar and a froth of gold ornaments on an imported fir in the lobby.

They stopped by the elevators. “You guys wait here,” Conor said.

Bret watched the elevator lights moving up and down above the eucalyptus-green doors, distracting himself from his unasked favor. He felt the dampness on his palms and in his armpits. Could this be his last opening?

He swiveled to Thuan and Tobias. “I’ll be right back.” Tobias eyed him, puzzled, probably reading urgency on his face.

When Bret caught up to him, Conor was talking to a floral-dressed desk woman.

“Hey man,” Bret said. Conor clacked his father’s credit card on the counter, sweeping Bret with a glare. Bret stepped back, not wanting to crowd him. “I need a favor.” He explained his job search, and his application for the internship. “I was wondering, if you don’t think it’d be weird…”

The desk woman rattled the keyboard. Conor didn’t look at him. “Sure, no problem,” Conor said.

“Really?” Bret searched Conor’s face for any sign of irony, or teasing, but Conor seemed serious. Still, he sensed something unsaid behind Conor’s casual expression.

“I’m not sure why anyone would want it,” Conor said. “So boring.” He leaned and did a standing push up off the high edge of the desk. “A few buddies are thinking about being analysts at Lehman.” Standing straight again, he checked his biceps where they swelled from his sleeves. “You should try that. Pay’s shit, but at least it’s got status.”

Or maybe I’ll become CEO, Bret thought. “Yeah, I’ll consider it. But the internship…” He glanced at the exuberant ornamentation of the lobby tree again, a Douglas fir – he’d seen plenty along the White River – probably shipped from somewhere near home.

“I’m sure I can get it for you,” Conor said, looking around, as if searching for some more-discerning person. “But I also need a favor.”

“Of course, anything.” Bret tried to anticipate the request. And for a moment, he knew how it might feel to enter Conor’s circle – mutual benefits, a sense of acceptance.

The desk woman pushed a printout to Conor and he whipped off a signature. “Two cards?” she said.

“He’s just a buddy of mine,” Conor said, but he accepted the second card.

They stepped away from the counter. Conor stopped and gripped Bret’s shoulder, turning him so they were facing. “When you’re home, I need you to find some OCs.”

“OCs?” Bret had no idea what this was.

“Oxy,” Conor said. “Pain pills. You’re from some, like–” he winced theatrically “–shithole town out west, right? No offense. You must know people. It’ll be easy.”

And now Bret knew what he was talking about, but wasn’t sure what to do with the information. It was true. Bret was a few degrees of separation from a handful of addicts back home. One was in prison for stealing copper wire from a construction site and another was dead. None of his friends used, though. His cousin who’d been hooked had gotten clean, and now he never stopped talking about Jesus. “You want me to bring them back here?” This sounded illegal.

“Yeah, they’re prescription, you can just put them in an old bottle and bring them on the plane. I do it all the time. Everybody’s got pills.”

“Why me?” Bret said. “You’ve got every connection in the world.”

But connections talk,” Conor said, with an imperious shake of his head. “You’ll keep this quiet.”

Not at all sure he was sufficiently ballsy – or reckless, or stupid – to do it, Bret nodded. “Sure, no problem.”

***

Girls were arriving in the suite. Bret drifted, thinking of home. Frank, a dishwasher at the Eagles, had done time, and still lived in a halfway house. He probably knew ways to get OxyContin. And Bret’s friend Daryl’s brother had been to rehab. He was sort of scary though. Bret wondered how easy it was to get caught buying the stuff.

Thuan had become the center of activity. Most of the girls who’d come knew him best, so he defined their zone of security, which meant Conor and Tobias had to heed the same geography. Bret stood apart at the wet bar, mixing his second drink of spiced rum and something called pass-o-guava nectar from an open can. No ice in the bucket, so he added more alcohol, swizzling with a finger. He glanced at Conor, who was showboating for the group, and gulped his drink, shuddering from the astringent booze.

He envisioned Enumclaw – rattle of bare trees, blustery cold, tinged with woodsmoke – thinking of his flight next Thursday, wondering which car he’d borrow when he got to his parents’ house. It was the first of a series of calculated decisions. Winter Break had become complicated.

The more he thought about Conor’s request, the more it rang false. Was it really about discretion? Not wanting to give his contacts leverage? Bullshit. It was a test. Without money or connections, what value did his friendship have? But the analysis changed if he’d transgress on Conor’s behalf. His transgressions would make him complicit. And complicity was loyalty’s vicious older brother.

A few people were on the balcony, peering over the railing. A girl at the edge swung her head around. Bret recognized her – haole like him, with an upturned nose, gently curved face and a single beaded braid under umber hair. She looked vaguely like Cara.

“The seal’s behind the trees,” she said. “We’re going down.”

“Let’s do this,” Conor boomed from across the room.

In the elevator the hair-braid girl stood next to Bret. He’d guzzled the rest of his drink and now he felt its heat. For a moment he worried she felt it too. A dumb thought. He glanced at Conor, wondering if he should doubt the guy would honor their deal.

The hotel’s floodlights shot bright yellow light onto the sand, the beach now a rolling field of light convexities and dark concavities. They could see the orange rope and the signs warning tourists, “DO NOT APPROACH.” The lights were off over the monk seal, but when its oily black eyes opened, Bret saw the glint of the skyline reflected, like cold stars through broken clouds.

Conor shucked his shirt and shorts, briefs and all. The girl with him, Sara, stripped to her underwear. “Let’s do this,” Conor roared. He raised his arm, pointing at Bret, grinning. “You’re my guy, right?” Bret nodded weakly, his face growing hotter. But it was deeply satisfying to be noticed – to have value. Conor went buffaloing into the water, foamy wake blooming.

Beside Bret on shore, Tobias watched Conor, his expression subdued, pensive. “We’re friends because we grew up in the same neighborhood,” he said, as if Bret had insisted on some justification. “Swim team. Parents in the yacht club. Now we’re in this exchange program.”

Bret knew what he meant. So much of life was determined by one’s childhood address.

All the others had jettisoned clothing and were now splashing into the blood-warm ocean. Brett and Tobias followed.

“Let’s swim out where it’s dark,” Conor said, his tone hushed and conspiratorial. He swung his chin out to sea, then back at the seal. “We’ll come up on the water side of him.”

Bret and Tobias opposed it, saying they should let the beast rest. But Sara signed on, as did another guy, Charlie, a big, Hawaiian kid from the North Shore. The rest stayed behind in the calm, shoulder-depth water. Bret’s body loosened. His thoughts had a pleasing fluidity from the rum. The hair-braid girl swam close enough that he could feel the current from her body when she moved. They faced Diamond Head now, mirror shards of moon on the water.

A far-off clamor yanked Bret out of his brief reverie – an eruption of shouting on the beach. A stranger’s voice, a man yelling, “Hey there, stop!”

They turned to see Conor in the seal enclosure. A man in tan pants and white epauletted shirt was approaching. Sara was still in the water. Charlie – having grown up in a world with real consequences – had vaporized seconds before the guards appeared.

There was a moment of stillness as the men faced off. Then Conor began to run. A second guard swept out from the deep shadows on the hotel grounds, lunging at him. Conor easily broke away, arms pumping, hopping the ropes, pulling ahead of his pursuers. And even from forty yards Bret could see he wasn’t scared – he was grinning.

The guards gave all they had to the chase, sprinting in Conor’s wake, puffs of sand rising behind them. Conor must’ve decided to go for cover on the other side of the street, because he feinted right and veered left toward the three lanes of traffic. The driver of a landscaping truck saw him coming and braked hard.

As Conor passed the truck’s grill, his head pivoted toward the oncoming car. Too late. The bumper caught the side of his legs and for an instant he appeared weightless, turning in the air. Bret heard a groan escape his own lips, a sound of helplessness and private loss. Conor smashed down on the windshield, limbs rending, meat and bone compressing, glass bursting. He tumbled back over the front end onto the sandy pavement. The sound arrived a quarter second later: a nauseating thump, followed by a hiss of glass on concrete. He landed out of sight.

Dressing on the beach seconds later, all eyes were on the disturbance on Kalakaua. Except the monk seal. Bret glanced over and saw it staring back at him, head raised, fixing him with its black, pitiless glare – an aspect older than humanity.

***

12 years later, in Seattle, inside the candy-colored expanse of cafeteria at the online travel startup where he worked, a Facebook notification appeared on Bret’s phone – a friend request from Conor, which he immediately accepted.

Scrolling the pictures, he saw Conor’s face bearing the same happy arrangement of features – posed humdrum rosters of friends in restaurant interiors designed to justify high prices or ensconced in family vacation homes with holiday décor unlovingly arranged by staff – but the glow of heroism that’d once persisted behind his eyes had dimmed.

Bret recalled that night – bits of memory washing up like old, uncanny artifacts. Conor’s brain had swelled, and they’d induced a coma. After his release, his parents had brought him back to Connecticut, his college career displaced by physical and speech therapy. The internship was forgotten, and Bret lost touch with him and Tobias. But now Conor was here on Bret’s phone, subtle suffering etched in his face, having never received full access to his world.

Bret recalled the ecstatic charge he’d felt just before they’d heard the shouts from shore. And he remembered the way they’d dressed and run together, up from the water’s edge to the street where Conor lay limp, blood pooling from a head wound. Someone had spread a red-striped beach towel over his middle, a small token of dignity in front of the gathering crowd. And Tobias had knelt, speaking to him – a stream of words, kind and incomprehensible.

The impression left by these memories was of vastness in tension with meaning. Like standing on a forlorn stage, crowded with supporting characters, with no lead, playing to an empty house.

After work – his mood muted but serene as he climbed the stairs to the two rooms of his apartment – Bret fixed himself a bachelor’s dinner and sat eating at the coffee table, glancing with vague contentment at some show. He went to bed early and lay in the semidarkness, listening to his neighbor’s television – the wahr-wahr of muffled voices and brief clips of song – and thought of swimming.

online fiction short fiction

On Being A Mother: 20 Observations

by Julie Boutwell-Peterson • November 5, 2022November 10, 2022 • 1 Comment

Motherhood began when the world began.

Being a mother has never been easy.

An important question: why do we insist on elevating mothers of human children over mothers of other species?

What about bacteria mothers, for example?

Bacteria reproduce by dividing themselves into two identical daughter cells, a process called binary fusion (this does not sound pleasant). Humans reproduce by combining genetic material from two separate individuals (sometimes this is pleasant, but not always). Sure, the reproductive process is different, but how many daughters do you know who are (more or less) exactly like their mothers, or sons who are just like their fathers? Is there not some subconscious, remnant desire for binary fusion going on in human child rearing?

Anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy claims that approximately two million years ago, when our ancestral mother apes enlisted the help of other apes to raise their young, the foundation was laid for the development of the human empathetic mind. Around this time, hominoid brains began to grow larger as well, perhaps as a result of this growth of emotional empathy toward others. It took 13 million calories to raise an ape child from birth to nutritional independence, and Hrdy points out that mothers could not do this alone. But neither could fathers. Thus the need for “alloparents” – outside caretakers – was born. Still, it is worth noting, a mere 50 percent of ape offspring survived. After all, alloparents could only do so much.

Somewhere along the way, hominoids figured the whole parenting thing out, and today, 95.4 percent of human infants survive to the age of 15, even though, of course, human children remain shockingly needy. We must wipe their bottoms for two years, for example. And that large brain capable of empathy? Let’s just say that’s a skill that needs a lot of honing.

Social economists say it takes $233,610 to raise a child from birth to age 18.

My sister used to say, referring to her children, “When we get these people out of the house, we’re going on a vacation.” I pointed out, “You won’t have any money left.” My brother, who has never raised a child, laughed. He had never heard anyone refer to their children as “these people.”

Eighteen years is a long time to engage in child-rearing. We might compare this to dolphin offspring who stay with their mothers for five years, or alligator babies who leave their mothers after three. Cows can be on their own in eight months. Kittens and puppies can leave their mothers in two. Some newly hatched fish can just swim away.

I hate to be an alarmist, but I find it telling that our world is full of species that regularly commit infanticide. In fact, across the animal kingdom, from microscopic plankton to insects, from fish to reptiles, from birds to mammals, this practice has been observed. Mice fathers, for example, will eat their young. Hens will eat their own eggs. Mother bears will kill – and then eat – their weakest cub.

But it’s a two-way street: desert spider babies will devour their mother alive.

In ancient times and up until the 19th century when the baby bottle was finally invented, it was common practice for upper-class mothers to hire wet nurses. Alloparenting, it seems, could be useful even if you didn’t have to forage for food. It could be useful, for example, if you just wanted to be left alone.

Queen Victoria had nine children although she was known for not appreciating the whimsical and illogical natures of the small creatures. Much consideration was taken before hiring a royal wet nurse; she would be chosen for her physical strength and moral virtues as the attending belief was that breast milk would transfer these desired qualities.

Mary Ann Brough, who had seven children of her own, served as the wet nurse for Queen Victoria’s son, the future King Edward VII. Later, she murdered six of her children by cutting their throats. She attempted suicide at the same time, but survived. At the time of the murders, her children were stricken with the measles and her husband was threatening to leave her and take custody of the children. She lived the rest of her life in an insane asylum. I’d say Mary Ann Brough – the queen’s alloparent – could have used some alloparents of her own.

For many in the West, alloparents are no longer grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Instead, they are day care workers and teachers. They are also TV and movie actors, and Internet Influencers.

I stopped doing each of my children’s laundry when they turned 11 years old. I had read somewhere that humans begin to develop the ability to understand and think about abstract concepts at that age. Operating the washing machine is not abstract at all, but that wasn’t the point.

I never used a wet nurse, but I did use television to get supper on the table. Or to clean the house. Or to drink a cup of tea before it got cold. Or to breathe for a few minutes. Now my children are teenagers, and I employ cell phone tracking as an additional helper. You’ve got to get your alloparents where you can, in whatever form they come in.

I love my three children with a depth of emotion that I never could have imagined until they appeared in my life.

I probably love them as much as a bacterium mother loves itself split in two.

motherhood mothers

death family family dynamics grief hometown memory reflection

Summer of Acceptance

by John Chambers • July 10, 2022July 10, 2022

I was sixteen and mesmerized by the graffiti – framed by tunnels, bridges, and walls of industrial buildings. It seemed the only view on an Amtrak train from Springfield, Mass to Philly, PA. Like running through the halls of Art Basel – surrounded by creative expression – just long enough to glimpse the eyes and earnest urges of people craving to be seen.

The dichotomy of artist inequality, and sociological biases that place worth and value on art was not lost on me. My father took me to see Beat Street when I was thirteen. It introduced me to a culture that was distant, yet only a five-hour train ride away.

In the small town where I was raised, thirty minutes north of Springfield, the only graffiti I’d seen was spray-painted on the back of a wall. It read in big black block letters visible from the Friendly’s diner, “Niger.”

My father was the tip of the family spear that had to penetrate the town’s racism and ignorance – couldn’t even spell a racist slur correctly. A hate crime was not in our lexicon or laws back then, but we endured more than our share as speckled black dots in circles of white dominance. Mom and dad were both shield and spear as much they were able.

Hence, the summer escapes to my father’s hometown and city of birth, Chester, PA – six miles north of Philly. My grandfather and grandmother mother were the first to settle there after migrating, or more like fleeing, Southern Georgia after a shotgun wedding. My grandfather became the first Black foreman at a local steel plant, and he soon started bringing up more family members and helping them get jobs. We’d make family excursions there some holidays, after stops in the well-to-do enclaves of Montclair, NJ and Bryn Mawr, PA where my mother and cousins were raised.

But this trip to Chester was my first solo journey, on a train, toward the one place I felt accepted. Near the end of the ride, the window looking west offered a movie trailer of sorts. The tracks passed right by my aunt Josephine and uncle Henry’s row house on West 6^th Street on its way to Penn Station in Philadelphia, where I would take a SEPTA train back up to Chester.

I was to stay at their house and sleep on a cot in a narrow room between their second-floor bedrooms. Their doors were always closed to keep the A/C inside their rooms. Don’t close the door behind you fast enough, expect a scolding. Inside, the entire house shook when a train went by. If you were outside on the steps or porch, you could feel the blasting breeze, trembling vibrations, and the loud clank of metal friction rise and fall like volume control.

When I arrived, there was no big celebration, just a silent understanding that I belonged, even if for a summer. It was a Sunday, and my uncle Henry was out on the patio with the three papers he read daily on his lap, cover-to-cover, including the cross words: The New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Philadelphia Daily News. He was wearing his signature baby blue Kangol hat and had a pack of Kools on the table beside him.

He had a brilliant mind, but it took me a while to understand his mumbled words, especially if he didn’t have his ‘teeth’ in. He was kind and could tell stories for hours.

About how he was a chef, and cooked for governors, or childhood stories about my father, uncles, and aunt Josephine. He had a gruff laugh that could easily spill tears as if his reminisces were as vivid and funny as a Richard Pryor special watched a hundred times on a VHS tape.

They called my dad Val, for unknown reasons, but his real name is John Walker Chambers. A first name passed down for three generations, and then a fourth when I came along. We all have different middle names, so I guess there was no concern about the regal Roman numerals to signify our lineage.

My dad was the youngest of the Chambers kids, and they were all very protective of him, and his offspring. He was the first to go to college and go on to earn graduate degrees. He was the pride of the family.

That probably factored into his family’s acceptance of his White girlfriend who fast became his wife. She had just graduated from Antioch College, and took her activism to Chester, PA, where the Civil Right Movement of the 60s first landed in the North.

My father and uncles were all leaders in the movement and helped found the Committee for Freedom Now. Chester had an early jump on notoriety – Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. attended Crozer Theological Seminary in the late 40s.

The committee would meet in church basements to plot their next protest or civil disobedience action. My father was tasked with walking my mother home at night. She was staying with a family who supported the movement – in the SNCC tradition that gave shelter to organizers in the South.

That’s how they fell in love. And where my origin story began.

But there would be no protests action during my summer days in Chester. They usually started with a drop off at my cousin Tina or Gail’s house on the west side of the city. The safer part of town. Chester was the per-capita murder capital of the country at the time. My cousins all had kids slightly younger than me.

We’d spend most afternoons on the basketball courts or listening to Power 99, the Urban Contemporary radio station, where I fell in love with Mariah Carry and “Vision of Love,” that they played in constant rotation.

I gorged myself on hoagies and cheese steaks, two of the region’s staples (before I became a vegan). I upgraded my small-town wear to the urban gear of the late 80s. Silk polka dot shirts, MC hammer pants, and Black Bart Simpson tee shirts.

My Western-Mass non-accent slowly slipped away until the code switching was automatic and authentic in both worlds. A survival technique in the White world, a language of brotherhood around my Black friends, done with unconscious ease.

Acceptance was a given, but it was the exceptionalism that made me uncomfortable. My cousins all thought I had it easy. My light skin and curly brown hair was the subject of praise and compliments; “He’s got that good hair,” they would say. It was my first exposure to colourism and the feeling that I had unearned privilege just because of my blood, skin colour, hair texture, and proximity to White culture and opportunity.

The jump from the lowest status in the White community I grew up in, to the high status of a light-skinned Black kid in mostly Black Chester pushed me to lean in harder to my Black identity. I watched Video Music Box in the early days of BET. I learned all the lyrics and practiced the dances. BET was not among our cable options back home, so I soaked up as much as I could.

I roamed the city and didn’t feel like an “other.” I didn’t feel the fear of a neighbour making a false accusation anytime something went missing in their garages. I later learned that my older cousin Conrad had put word out that I was to be looked after. Not to be messed with. Protected. He was a baller in Chester and had the respect of the streets. I was safe.

My cousin Dante was four years younger than me, but that didn’t stop him from being a ladies’ man. I was in awe of his confidence around girls and profoundly confused how he’d have girlfriends my age and he’d barely started puberty. I wasn’t shy, but there were no girls in my hometown who would give this Black kid a second look. Chester was a new paradigm. To be sought without seeking. To feel affection without wondering if I was an exception, or consolation prize. My whole self, something to celebrate, not signify tolerance.

When my mother picked me up at the end of the summer, I directed my rage at her for bringing me back to White dominant homogeneity. As “Vision of Love,” came on the radio one last time before hopping on 95 and headed north, I screamed, “I can’t even listen to Black radio where we’re going!” She sat in silence. She knew I filled some missing holes that summer. That Christmas she got me subscriptions to Hip-Hop magazines Right On and The Source to add to our family subscriptions to Ebony and Jet. Bless her, my mother did her best to bring Black culture to her children.

An identity that would continue to be imbued the following summer, and my final year of high school when I transferred to a diverse boarding school in New Hope, PA; and when I went on to the Black Mecca, Howard University.

As I became humbled in adulthood, I finally found balance and nuance within the communities I inhibit and try to build. My activism and ability to bridge worlds filled out a purpose that measured on par with multitude of identities that shape my worldview. Even if the world still sees me as a Black man living in America.

But unlike the artists and the graffiti, there was no urge to be seen. Only the compass to act on what I see – inequity, injustice, isolation, exclusion, and poverty.

When I go back to Chester now, it’s usually for a funeral at the same funeral home, followed by a burial at the same cemetery. Followed by family meet-up at a restaurant. I find it hard to believe the chemical plants a few miles away, that blow fumes through the city, and family members who died from rare cancers, are not related.

The house on West 6^th is now an empty lot. A knot in my stomach forms every time I pass it, by car or by train. Sometimes I drive around to see what else is still there and what has changed. The city seems empty. Faded “For Sale” signs dot lawns and fences.

There’s a boardwalk by the river now, attached to a big casino. To enter, you have to pass through an archway that connects a large prison. No irony there. Forces greater than the movement’s stamina were too strong and systemically in place.

After the tour down memory lane, I jump back on Interstate 95 and head south toward home, Washington, DC. I think about my old friends and family members who past. I try to push my thoughts to what was gained and not lost.

I remember joy, empathy, imagination, love – and the wisdom to choose where I belong. Even if I don’t change the world, I can change a small corner. I wish it could be Chester, where I found acceptance one summer.

(Writer’s Note: Two days before this essay was set for publication, my dear cousin Tina, who welcomed me into her home in Chester, suddenly passed away. This essay is dedicated to her memory, as well as her surviving children, Dante and Jemera, and all of her grandchildren, nieces, nephews and cousins. Rest in peace.)

The Litro Blog

Join the Litro Team, Deadline to Apply: May 13th, 2022

by Litro • April 29, 2022May 1, 2022 • 4 Comments

Pick any hour of any day and you can be certain that, somewhere in the world, one of us is working hard on a quarterly issue, a weekend newsletter, or a weekly fiction post.

If you have some free time, have enjoyed our stories these past twenty years and want to help us give a platform to the next generation of writers there are many ways you yourself can get involved, starting with applying for a volunteer role or a paid role with us. We’re especially looking for a fiction editor, copy editors, graphic designers, visual editor, and even a data specialist (details below) to join our Award-winning team of editors.

Litro operates its online platforms through a system of structured volunteering—requiring six to eight hours of commitment each week. It’s easy to make a real difference to an emerging writers career while getting to know like-minded team members hailing from five continents.

If you are considering a career in literature, Litro also provides the perfect training ground. Former Asymptote staff have gone on to take up senior positions at Penguin Random House, Harper Collins, BBC, and many more organisations globally.

We hope you’ll consider supporting our efforts to shine a light on emerging writers and be at the frontlines of diversifying literature. All open volunteer positions are listed below. Permanent staff members looking to be involved for at least a year (for the editorial roles especially) are preferred.

Editorial / Art

Fiction Editor

If you have at least one year of editorial and solicitation experience under your belt and a passion for creative nonfiction in the context of literature, we are looking for a new Section Editor to take over the curation of literary fiction in our online platform starting from the Summer 2022. The successful applicant will not only have a bold vision of the possibilities of this genre, but will also work with our multicontinental team to assemble lineups as diverse as they are rigorous. Please include samples of your own writing with your application.

Visual Editor

Are you passionate about the intersection between the visual arts and language? Do you have connections with the art world that you are hoping to deepen? If so, we are seeking a new Section Editor to maintain the high standard of our visual section, which has in the past featured artists like Maaike Schoorel and Laura Lima, Alice Neel, and Sir David Adjaye. To Miguel Calderon.

HR and Operations

Media Advertising Sales Executive

JOB TYPE:

Permanent + Part Time roles.

Paid role.

Location: Remote, New York + London

The Litro team is seeking an enthusiastic and motivated individual for a Media Sales position to work across our print publication and online platforms….. Read more

Executive Assistant to the Editorial Manager

Essential to keeping Asymptote afloat, the Executive Assistant we’re looking for will help with organizing submissions, uploading content to our website, therefore assisting directly in our issue production. We seek someone with a sharp eye, meticulous, and good at communications.

Assistant Managing Editor

Do you have experience motivating and supervising a virtual team? If so, and if you would like to apply your organizational and management skills toward the development of Litro to find and publish the next generation of writers, we would like to speak with you.

Design and Multimedia

Graphic Designer

Crucial to maintaining our aesthetically particular brand image, good Graphic Designers are always in high demand at Litro! Team members in this role cover the graphic design needs of our many platforms (ranging from print to online, to even ebook design). Please submit a portfolio along with your application.

Sustainability

Business Developer

We are looking for a Business Developer to work with our Business Development and Sustainability team to brainstorm, pitch, and implement initiatives focused on bringing in revenue for Litro and ensuring the platforms financial survival. This could involve revamping current Litro initiatives, or building out new initiatives from scratch. The ideal candidate is someone who is creative, strategic, and data-driven, with a strong commercial sense and fresh ideas for revenue generation. Interpersonal and communication skills, as well as an understanding of shifting organization structures are a must. Flexibility and ability to work within a team are extremely important. Project management skills are a big plus, as well as having a strong sense of ownership over initiatives and projects.

All Litro staff work from home and communicate via email and Zoom or Google Hangout; upon admission into the team.

To apply for any of these positions, please send a cover letter (as a Word doc or in the body of the email please!) explaining why you’d like to join our team and a copy of your CV to work@litrousa.com with “APPLICATION:” and the position(s) you’re applying for in the subject line. If volunteering please take note that most positions will start out with a 3-month orientation (requiring a commitment of 8-10 hours a week) during which you will get to know the platform and your fellow team members. After this orientation period, we will evaluate your performance and determine your future role with Litro. ( Hours will come down to 6 to 8 hours a week, depending on which permanent role you’ve taken with us—some project-based positions may not even require a weekly commitment.)

And if you’re not able to volunteer your time, there are other ways to support our mission: Consider, for example, joining us as a digital member from as little as USD6.99 a month!

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The Ice Man

by Jane Ainslie • April 17, 2022April 19, 2022

Nothing else about that day was particularly stand-out. If it hadn’t been for the ice man, I doubt my memory would have been so lucid. Intact, you might say.

Clarity is very rarely a blessing. At least, it hasn’t been for me.

Mom and Diego unfolded their chairs, staking them into the clumpy ground. Boldly striped beach towels were shaken open in ways that made me shield my eyes from the sting of yesterday’s sand.

I watched a tendon in Mom’s leg tighten as she stood facing the water. Her bulging bottom was packed tightly into her swimsuit, the cellulite on her thighs falling in layers. Diego rummaged in her bag for the sunblock, absurd swim trunks inflated around his knees, not yet converted to their opposite, equally absurd form: soaked and clinging to everything in ways that made me reflect on the purpose of clothing–to cover a damn person up.

I gazed out on the dispersion of multicolored umbrellas and sunbathers on the shore: the men who splayed their pasty legs over their towels like drowned frogs. The women who wore only their tan lines.

The ice man set up his kiosk at the soft back shoulders of the beach, where the sand dunes looked as if they’d been dumped out of a giant’s toy bucket. I noticed the struggle he went through every day to plant his commercial umbrella, how he’d steady it in a kind of wrestler’s hold between his legs that glowed with white hairs, the salty breeze ruffling the back of his Martha’s Vineyard t-shirt.

He’d announce the two flavors of the day in plastic tubs, heavy like propane tanks. They made a thunderous clattering sound as he loaded them into the cart’s circular openings.

Rainbow and Watermelon. Coconut and Honeydew. Chocolate and Lemon.

Those Italian ices gave my drowsy days at the southern tip of New Jersey their sweet, pointed end. They were the answer to hours of lying in the sun until I was nauseous, to sinking myself into the ocean’s cold, salty broth, feeling the waves warp around me as they passed, to treading on slimy things I assumed were half-decomposed jellyfish. They helped me to feel less grouchy about the sand that got under my fingernails, the sand that got everywhere.

I never really understood people’s devotion to the beach, to this ocean with its constant sighing. There was no coherent beginning or end to it, which made me feel both here and not. I needed those ices, or my mind would overheat like a parked car in an unshaded spot.

The best part of vacation was always the food, anyway. My mind wandered to the basket of chicken fingers I’d eaten last night at that dockside restaurant, the red-and-white checked paper I’d decimated one corner of with ketchup. I’d watched the seagulls sail away with french fries in their mouths while Mom and Diego talked to each other and not to me, drunk 7-UP’s in a tall glass through a bendy straw that had come wrapped in paper.

The restaurant food always tasted better than the food we ate at home. That was because it was high in fat, Mom said, more than once that summer, as if she were waiting for the meaning to catch in the sun-washed netting of my vacation brain. Only on vacation, she said, though I wished we could live the good life all year ‘round. I didn’t see why we couldn’t.

“I’m going for an ice Mom, ok?” I said as I got to my feet. The Night She Disappeared lay open across Mom’s face. She had been using it to cover her eyes while she sunbathed.

She lifted the paperback, with its cracked spine and gold relief lettering, to squint at me. She looked vaguely purple in the shadow I cast over her.

“Now? You just had breakfast!” Her upper lip scrunched unevenly to show her long front teeth that faced towards each other. It was that displeased look that she did with her entire face, and it made her look like a hopelessly human impression of a squirrel.

I wanted to tell her that.

“Mhmmm…” I vocalized, my eyes already drifting to the line forming a few paces away, made up of children mostly, dancing, hopping up and down on one foot. The ice man’s cart looked like some kind of magnet that drew in short people.

I was aware of being the tallest kid in line. I didn’t like how it made me feel: big. Not the good kind. Was there such a thing?

A girl trekked through the sand to get in line behind me, veins of ocean water trickling down her mocha-latte-colored thighs. She wore a one-piece shot through with a lightning pattern. It was the kind of suit worn by competitive swimmers. I stared dumbly at her. Under the filmy white sheet of this direct sunlight, that shot invisible flames across the seraphic gradients of the sky, I felt another disorientation coming on. The loose friendship bracelet around her brown ankle was soft and ready to break, the sign of a summer well-spent. Sand stuck to it, glittering.

The sun glinted hot off of the metal of the ice man’s cart as he scooped up the last of the Mango. The force of his scooper against the nearly empty barrel made a hard slishing sound.

“Cherry, please.” I said once my turn arrived. He didn’t look at me, just began the effort again. The muscles in his deeply tanned forearm twitched as he reached down into the Cherry tub. It was fuller than the Mango, and the sound as he scooped was softer, like tires cruising through wet snow.

“I see you here every day.” The ice man looked up at me. He smiled, and I noticed a flesh-colored mole just above his upper lip, almost encroaching on it. “Are those your folks?” He pointed to my mom and her boyfriend, who, at that point, looked very far away.

I nodded.

“How old are you, anyway?” His head cocked to one side in a movement that I barely noticed. I considered the pinch of wrinkles at the corner of his eyes that drew his skin tight against his temples. The sun hit underneath the umbrella, making a halo out of the thinning hair at the back of his domed head. The shape of his skull was visible as slight depressions under the skin.

We had never spoken before this. His eyes, I quickly saw now, were little camera lenses. Behind their stillness, I became aware of another more rapid movement: click, click, click, click.

Meeting his gaze gave me the sensation of holding my breath underwater. I looked away from him, and onto the thin, dry tops of the grass that sprouted from the sloping dunes, like the ingrown hairs at my bikini line.

“Thirteen” I said, turning back to him.

“I wish was I was thirteen.” He said, cheeks lifted in an amicable smile.

“Why?” I asked him.

“So we could go out.”

I felt my face blaze with heat. Two traffic lights flashing on each cheek. STOP. STOP.

I thought of my bike ride yesterday. The sting of my thighs chaffing in those cut-off shorts hurt more the harder I peddled, and peddled. A tornado of thought raced in parellel to my bike, egged on by a stern voice that had announced itself a couple of days prior, telling me to go faster, peddle harder, go faster, peddle harder. Harder-faster-harder-faster-harder-faster! I wasn’t accustomed to obeying orders like this, but I was surprised by how comforting it was to do what she said. I did hate the way the button above the zipper cut into the donut of fat around my navel. I’d pinch and fondle it in any passing mirror or window in ways that were almost pleasurable in the self-disgust that they inspired. Peddling harder, I recalled in roaming detail the sausages we grilled for dinner the night before, and that second helping of pasta I’d had the night before that, fully lubricated with liquid butter, topped with heaping spoonfuls of parmesan cheese. The connection between what I’d eaten and how my body looked was starting to become more traceable. I was learning a new language that spoke only in calories, grams, ounces and serving sizes, and evoked a certain feeling in me that had no length and breadth, no set duration or depth, or name yet. I couldn’t measure it at all.

Guilt. I’d learn that summer what that feeling was called. I’d also learn and that it was as effortless to being a girl as sparkle nail polish.

I saw out of the corner of my eye the ice man reaching out to me. Every muscle I had seemed to know how these next few moments of my life would go. My heart didn’t appear to be beating anymore. It took on an alarming high buzz, the way I imagined a rabbits’ heart would when retreating into a bush to escape the cat, or the four-by-four.

I felt my hand close around the white paper cup, cold with the lush, icy mass inside it. I felt my heart rate drop and lower.

I looked down at my scoop of Cherry. The color was so bright, an unnatural maraschino. There were rifts in the top where the ice was hardest. The fast-melting bottom lip on that hefty scoop was just begging for that easy sweep with my tongue I always did, to catch the drips before they fell. I reached my tongue out instinctively, but feeling his eyes still on me, pulled it back. With a regret that I remember to this day, I watched the red drops from the melting ice roll down the sides of my hand.

I looked up at the ice man. His eyes popped in an almost goofy way as he smiled at me, like he had just produced a coin from my ear. The few tufts of white hair still on his head waved in the surrounding breeze, turning from right to left at the top of his scalp, that was dappled with sun-spots.

He smiled down at me like he wanted to regress me further in his mind, like I was even younger than I already was, like I was just a baby with my legs splayed blissfully apart, blinking my eyes up at the impossibly bright sun of him. I saw him then, in his boxy, oversized t-shirt and cargo pants. I saw myself in my bikini. The difference then felt unbreakable. Fixed. Permanent.

There were two singles rolled tightly in my other hand, damp and fragrant with the smell of money.

“Thanks.” I said, shoving them into his. I took off then, almost stumbling as I ran on the uneven pockets of the beach. I felt the sand, the warm, granular weight of it, sifting through my toes as I picked up my pace, cherry ice dripping faster over my hand. Drops of neon red splashed and scattered as I ran, dying the bleached ground where they fell a fleshy coral.

I thought briefly about sitting in the palm-tree-printed chair that had been opened for me. The sight of Diego smearing sunblock where Mom’s suit dipped lowest at the back was vast motivation to not. The Igloo coolers and the shrieking kids, the waders and the wave-jumpers, the sand-castle-makers and the boogie-boarders, all thinned out as my walk turned into a run.

The dry sand on my toes combined in a batter with the wet sand as I reached the part of the beach where the waves sighed the loudest. I could still hear the squeals of children off in the distance, but I was alone now. The footprints I made here were messy, like my feet were lead shovels turning up the ground. They looked too large and disruptive to be mine.

I spun around like I was the star of my own private MTV music video. There was no one here except me and my footprints.

A wave came rushing over my toes. Shhhhhhh, the waves kept saying as they broke in thin foamy layers, rich as egg-whites, before being sucked back in ways that made the sand bed shimmer like mirrored glass. Here it was like walking on firmly packed clay. My feet barely left a mark.

I feared that my manners, the same ones that had been cemented in me by all of the adults—“Katie? What do you say to the nice man?”— had been broken in that exchange with the ice man, like a digital clock that flashed the wrong time all day long.

I knew that the people who spoke poetically of this ocean I was ankle-deep in all wanted things from me. And I didn’t know, in that moment, that I wouldn’t give it to them. Ms. Costello, our P.E. teacher, said that morning we were all packed into the gym, “It takes a very strong person to resist drugs”. Well, what about the strength to resist doing what my family taught me, what society taught me? What kind of strength does that take? How do you stop winding up in situations where all you know how to say, all you feel that you are allowed to say, is “Thank you”?

I hadn’t been trying to contain the drippy mess of my ice. It was almost entirely liquid now. I held the soggy paper firmly and tipped what was left down my throat. That cherry taste was almost medicinal. Its flavor and the cold that threatened to turn to brain freeze dissolved the haze that still hung around me, made the blue of the sky sharper.

“Hey!” My eyes zig-zagged a path towards the flurry of red in my periphery.

A boy much older than me, hair slicked wet, hip bones like shark fins rising out of red swim trunks, was performing a gesture of some kind. His hand looked so mechanical just waving at me like that, like it was about to fall off that bony arm of his.

Where had he come from?! My thoughts shrieked, incredulous. I had been alone. I had been alone!

And I suspected then that I didn’t have what it took. I didn’t have the strength to resist this. Because with my lame-ass wallflower wave back, with my decorous, “yes, I will have this dance” wave back, I was letting it happen all over again. I was volunteering myself as the rabbit.

And I saw then too, in a way I couldn’t un-see, that it would take more than one man to break my manners.

I’m thirty-one now, and I can tell you, they’re still intact.

childhood memories short fiction short stories summer

This Way

by Bethan Cooke • April 10, 2022April 11, 2022

In the sunlight of the boat he is a sepia photograph, a ghost from another century with vanished eyebrows and blue eyes like clean cuts that blink just once when you speak. He surveys the riverbank with a gradually moving head, as though he could never think much of it, the way the grass turns lime in the sun and the river curls against the slope of the bank, taking it by grain, by pebble, down to its bed.

I’ve waited for him all morning, and I’m full from the chewy call of blackbirds, the zizz of insects rising. But I take in the banks, the hills, and all the sky above it on his behalf. He mentions the time, and after a while of my looking, and mentioning, he peels his impeccable lips away from his teeth and whispers the words “contract” and “verbal agreement.”

Water muscles the boat from beneath, snaps the frayed mooring rope tight, lets it sag and snaps it up again. From a house somewhere far away comes a sound so unexpected that it can’t fail to spark something between strangers, so I say, “I haven’t heard a flute since I was a girl,” and smile, and he hurls an apple past my head and tells me to get the fuck moving. So now I know what’s what.

Once I would have had slept with a man who treats women this way. But I can only imagine this one in a bed and there are no beds for me unless he decides to take me with him. I stray into a dream of new clothes and baths and a shaft of light through a split in a curtain and a breeze you can’t feel chasing dust down onto carpets. He leaves through a door and the house cracks apart like a knifed birthday cake. I stare at him and twist my hair down my shoulder. He lifts a hand to brush an insect off, but his fingertips flutter away from the direction he wants them to go, and I feel the relief of understanding and drop my hair.

“Do you actually want to get out?” I say.

“It’s the bobbing,” he says, and looks sick.

“Please move the boat,” he says.

“Let’s get out for a bit,” I say, and he relents.

The bank is steep and the ridge bursts with long grass. I climb steadily on all fours while he stumbles ahead of me. At the top of the bank he looks at me from a head reined back in sharp assessment, as though I’m a menu he’s reluctant to choose from.

“That way,” he says, pointing to a clearing that leads to a path running along the river.

“We need the boat,” I say.

His shirt is crumpled and he pinches his nose. He puts a hand on his hip and lets it drop by his side.

“We can’t reach it on foot,” I say.

“I’m sure we can,” he says.

He walks five paces away from me and turns and bends to pull his trouser leg up. He took the bank upright, hammering his feet into the compacted ground as though they were simple tools. His ankle is swollen and has a grey sheen.

“The boat would be better for that,” I say.

“Not again,” he says.

“Are you afraid?” I ask.

He glances at the river, then holds his eyes on mine for the first time. He must read a sensitivity in me that can be usefully called to weakness, because I say it for him: “you can’t swim.”

The clouds snuff the warmth of the falling sun and it begins to rain. He takes my hand when I offer it. His breath sucks at his dry throat. It seems a moment for niceness so I tell him it will be all right, even though I don’t know how to rescue him if he falls in. He is five inches taller than me with a dense frame. He groans in the boat as I take the oars and push away from the riverbank. He seems like he has one of those scrubbed minds that believes in nothing at all, except for oblivion, or luck. I rest the oars and take a friendship bracelet made from multi-colored cotton threads off my wrist, tell him it’s good luck and give it to him. I tell him it’s the last thing I own and he throws it back at me.

Night arrives and with it the door of imagined dangers creeps open in my mind, on this English river, with not a sign of destruction in sight, that some ancient part of my brain nonetheless insists it can detect. I row to the riverbank and reassure him in controlled ways with certainties and outcomes that I have no faith in. Lying face to face on the bank I can see the pockets beneath his eyes dip into two distended bulges above his cheeks. His sculpted body looks frail out here, the raindrops feel their way along the brittle plasticity of his skin, stopping to note its caving tension and rolling away with their news to be embraced by the ground.

I manage to drag him under a tree, where he curls up in pain. The branches fan above to meet others to form a billowing canopy. The wind rises at first through the treetops, then breaks through to the ground, freewheeling through sand and soil, scooping it up and sieving it down. He has just enough strength to push me off him and turn on his back. His mouth opens and his jaw falls back and the forest embalms in him sleep. I run the palms of my hands over his arms and with my thumbs I try to rub warmth into his cheeks, I feel the rain over my neck and all over him, indifferent, insistent, you can never wipe it away. Perhaps his dreams will absorb my show of kindness, and tomorrow he’ll take me with him. With this comforting thought I fall asleep to the symphony of a gale, with its resting base moan, as the wind lapses and pledges more in the same moment.

By dawn our bodies have melted into the mud and our faces are speckled with broken leaves. He sits up automatically with the first light, and I notice the crease of pain between his eyes has vanished and his face is smooth with clear urgency. I place a hand on his back and he lunges at me, but I wave my arm at the river and he removes his hand from my neck, remembering that he needs me. He crawls towards the river and I follow.

The boat carries us along rapid currents to the point where the river opens its mouth to the ocean and the woodland retreats. We reach a wide beach and I see a pause in the storm in a pocket of sky ahead. But beyond that, crouched deep on the horizon of the sea are a line of clouds, fat from themselves, impatient with one another. A silent wink of lightening slips ahead and its luminous twin cracks into a patch of sea a mile from the shore. I tell him to look up, but he is staring at the reflection of a blue patch of sky on a film of light over a puddle. He leans over it and finds himself there. I try to squeeze my face next to his in the reflection, but he lifts me up and slams me on the sand.

On my back I look all around. To the east is more clear sky, but to the west the clouds convene to an unbending hurricane that is moving to play with a plane and its passengers on a concrete runway. I turn my head to the side. Crabs prick and fish gasp at a naked seabed left uncovered by the tide the storm has pulled away. I look at him, but he is looking in another place. He catches sight of the plane and his ghost eyes marble.

I get to my feet and brush the sand from my legs, and while he looks at the plane I am able to look at my reflection in the puddle. There I find a face looking back at me, with a bruise on its forehead and gash on its lip and a soft, dissociated look in it’s eyes, and I feel heat in my fingertips.

“It’s a good day for flying,” I shout at the top of my lungs.

He turns to me with an expression I haven’t seen before, with full, suspicious eyes.

“I’m not bringing you with,” he says, through barely moving lips.

“I wouldn’t touch you,” he adds.

I grin at him and lift my tongue.

He turns and runs, and I know that all he can think of in that moment are the three missing teeth at the top of my mouth.

The feeling hand of the storm’s shadow spreads ahead and runs its fingers through the sea, bleeds its white veins into the punches it lends to waves the height of oaks that beckon the body of the storm on towards the runway. The wind pulls forward and drops a ripped quilt of clouds, sending sea creatures deep and birds flocking to land.

A group scramble away from the runway and sprint across the beach towards me, but he isn’t among them. As the plane takes off the hurricane breaks across the last remaining stretch of ocean, tearing at the shoreline, lifting cars and slapping them down. I make myself watch the plane stop, flicker in the first gusts, then dive. The sea catches it and flips it on its back. Its belly rises, a hapless aluminium whale splaying itself in the dishevelling sea. One wing tears off and the other hangs by a cable and tugs the plane in a circular motion. It cracks apart, revealing missing windows and a hole where an engine would have been, until all the people pour out of it, and I have to look away.

Everything else is left for me to wonder. I imagine he breaks the seal of his own impatience in those last moments. He sinks and looks up with amazement at a glassy sky and lapsing waves. A quietening epiphany follows a struggle. The ocean with a hush in his ears tells him, “perhaps now, maybe in a moment.” He has to wait to know, but soon to know will be nothing at all.

I feel the sun lick my back towards it. The group from the plane gather around me, fresh from failure, newly terrified. My voice strays out of me.

“Excuse me, I’m lost,” I say, and I twist my hair in my finger. But then I let it drop, because then comes the strangeness of eyes moving kindly over my faded tricks, and what follows is the shock of connection, the stepping of heartbeats on my ribs and eyes dilating close to mine. I step back, but it’s enough. I know after this I will walk through hard beads of rain, stay in mirrored mist and in the startle of dusk, through the discordant calls of comfort.

It is in the way they reach to see me, the way the edge of their fear touches mine that tells me I will leap off from here. I might never dream of dust in homes that were never mine, of being searched by eyes in bodies in empty rooms, something I could never do.

disaster nature storm

Editor's Pick, EssaySaturday, Literature

White Deer

by Carissa Chesanek • March 19, 2022March 19, 2022

First place winner of The Art of Reflection Competition 2022

Gustave Courbet. “The Deer,” ca. 1865. Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

I was ten when my father first spoke of the deer. He sat at the dining room table, a cup of hot coffee out in front of him, steam floating under his chin. It was autumn, the morning air was cold, the house drafty with the scent of dead leaves. My father’s eyes, a royal blue, were glowing as he talked about the deer. I watched hunched over my oatmeal, the smell of maple all around me, brown sugar coated the back of my throat.

It was white, my father said stopping to sip his coffee. He winced after swallowing, then put the cup back down on the table. She just stood there, he said. She stood there staring right at me.

I pressed my spoon down into my oatmeal. The chunky brown oats slowly flooded the spoon like quicksand.

My mother sat down beside my father, across from me and my oatmeal, a cup of hot coffee in her hand.

What did you do? My mother asked, sipping her coffee, her eyes on my father over the rim of her cup.

I reached my spoon up to my mouth, it was full of oatmeal, too full, and the thick chunks dripped back down into the bowl. I too, eyed my father over the spoon that was in front of me. I too, had my own question for my father to answer: How did he know the deer was a girl?

I spoke to her, my father said very matter of fact. We were the only ones out there, what else could I do?

And what did it say? My mother said with a playful grin.

My father paused, looked down. She said she was looking for her family, my father said, smiling into his cup.

During that time, we lived in a small town in Connecticut, right on the border of two separate towns, one no bigger than the other. Our home was settled in the woods with a long drive that led to our large, old white house. But the house was not our own. My mother and father worked there, hired by a surreptitious person before I was born, an employer I never knew anything about. It was a hunting and fishing lodge. Members-only. We lived on one side of the old house, the members stayed on the other. Naturally, the yard was full of woods to explore, the woods where my father spent most of his time clearing paths and checking for trespassers as the property’s groundskeeper, a dream of his to work with so much land. My mother spent her time indoors, the designated cook and maid, taking care of the interior of that great big house, a dream she never envisioned. There was one time my father came home after being outside all morning, his face was flushed from the chill in the air, but yet his skin was of very little color. I overheard him tell my mother he had found a man hanging from a tree, a rope around his neck, feet dangling inches from the earth. I froze in my tent, the sun passing through the white sheet that I hung above me, draped between two dining room chairs. The book I held, Goosebumps, lowered down to my lap as I listened to the quiet whispers down the hall.

Of all my father had seen out there in the woods, the white deer was the biggest mystery to him. And soon, it became a game. He’d go out there everyday to work, but also to see whether the white deer would find her way back to him. When she did, my father would come home with a smile on his face, gather my mother and me to tell us everything. How the white deer seemed to appear out of nowhere, how she’d watch him while chewing on wild berries. How after a while she’d move closer to my father, how my father would continue to go about his duties of planting seeds, digging up rotted plants, all the while feeling the white deer near. They were simply two creatures out there in the wilderness, equally curious about one another.

My father grew protective of the white deer, fearful of the hunters that might see her. You can’t kill an albino deer, my father told my mother in the kitchen one morning. I was in the laundry room across from the kitchen, hiding in the closet; a cave for my dolls. It’s against the state law, my father said.

My mother didn’t say anything in response, only the sound of her feet on the linoleum, skin sticking to the floor, a refrigerator opening and closing as she prepared lunch for the guests next door. I held the dolls close, their pointed feet dug hard into the tops of my thighs as I thought about my father’s white deer out in the woods, the hunters that might find her. The man that hung by his neck out there all alone before found by my father. Unlike my mother, I had something to say: How would anyone know if a hunter killed the white deer?

It had become an obsession, this white deer, for my father yes, but also for me. It was felt throughout our side of the old house. Words unsaid, sitting stagnant in the thick air, a secret kept. When will my father see her again? What will happen next? With death around us, that white deer gave us hope. A symbol of life, but also of magic. The excitement of rare possibilities, our imaginations soared of the unknown. I’d take this feeling with me wherever I’d go, even as I’d venture to the other side of the home. The hunter’s side where joy could easily be replaced with dread as the thought of the white deer getting hurt became more prominent.

I was only allowed over on that side when no members were visiting. That’s when I could slip through the white door in our living room that revealed a vacant dining room with erect chairs, a long table dressed for those who would return. The temperature was always colder on that side, much colder than our own, even with the sun crawling through all those windows.

During the off season or a quiet few days when the hunters went back to their homes Upstate or in the Berkshires, my mother would be left with a mess to clean. Blood-stained white towels, dishes crusted with whatever game was shot and brought back. After my father had to gut the fish, skin the animals, my mother would be expected to cook it all, to know what she was doing.

Sometimes when I’d slip through to that side of the house, I’d catch my mother upstairs stripping the beds or wiping down one of those old bath tubs with the claw feet. She’d be humming to herself in a world of her own, with no one to bother her, no interruptions at all. It was in those moments that the house, all of its entirety, felt like our very own. Us against the world, masters of the woods. We lived among ourselves and the animals. No one could bother us, no harm could come of the animals.

Then there were times I’d go over to the other side and find my father sitting at a small table by the windows overlooking the perfectly manicured lawn he created. It’s greenery a brilliant backsplash of color, more bold than any painting placed on those walls. My father would be sitting there with a cup of coffee without any steam. A cigarette burned between his fingers, smoke huddled around him. That toxic smoke that would someday kill him. He held a pencil to a pad of paper as he scribbled erratically, with such intensity that I was afraid if I approached I’d scare him.

During those moments, I’d wonder what was on those pages, never actually being able to see what it was my father wrote. He wrote hard and rough, illegible writing no one could detect. When he was finished, the pad and pencil would be gone, lifted up and away in a shirt pocket, guarded and protected near his heart. But even though I didn’t know what he wrote, I wondered if maybe it had something to do with the white deer. That maybe those scribbles were plans on how to keep her safe. A protector, like a father with a child.

When I stood in the spot my father sat all alone so many times, I’d stare out those windows overlooking the lawn and wonder where that white deer was, if she was ok. I had hoped she was not out there alone and scared, or worse, somehow hanging from a branch in one of those trees. I made up scenarios on my own, thinking of her picking berries with her teeth, bringing them back to her family, bouncing through the woods and making friends with other animals: a fox or raccoon, maybe an eagle. There were so many scenarios in my head I felt exhausted. I wanted to see her with my own eyes. I wanted to know she was real. My father was not a liar. I had no reason not to believe him, and yet, I needed to see her myself. I craved to meet her.

One morning over oatmeal and coffee, I asked my father to see the white deer. My eyes widened to take all of him in, his entire expression when he finally answered.

That all depends, Buckwheat, he said, eyeing my mother’s grandfather clock resting against the wall. The clock had not worked for several years and still it took up so much space in our home.

Depends on what, Dad? I said, pressing the bottom of my spoon down deep into my oatmeal.

It depends on whether we can find her.

That morning after breakfast, we went out into the woods while my mother was over on the other side of the house, dusting ledges and rearranging magazines on coffee tables, preparing for an upcoming arrival. My father and I were out there for what felt like hours, our skin growing pink and cold, our lips chapped from the wind. We were out there so long and saw so much: birds overhead, trees changing color. But we never saw that white deer.

She must be hiding, my father said, a stick cracking under his boot as he led us off the trail. Probably just hiding.

I nodded behind my father even though he couldn’t see, even though I was deflated. The deer always came out of hiding when it was just my father out in the woods. It was because I was there with him that she was not coming around.

That afternoon, I stayed on my swings longer than usual, my legs grew tired after all the pumping, but I was not ready to stop. I was not ready to go back down to the ground just yet. If I kept pumping my legs, the blue of the sky with its white clouds, feathery and barely there, seemed almost reachable. Each time I’d go high in the air, I’d tilt my body back, press my bare feet out in front of me, pretending to stomp on the sky, my toes dipping into the blue. And each time I’d come back down, I’d look out into the woods, my eyes roaming. Was she out there somewhere watching me?

I had wondered that day on those swings what my father had that I didn’t. Why a white deer would come to him and only him, and not me? I didn’t have an answer but I knew there was something. Creatures loved my father. Our cat, Tigger was always by my father’s feet, accompanying him on his everyday tasks like a best friend. Birds seemed to chirp louder when my father was around, singing to him high up in that old maple. Any dog who came with a member would find my father and beg for his hand, licking my father’s fingers until told that was enough.

I wanted to be like my father was with animals. I wanted all creatures of the earth to love me the way they loved him. When I’d tell him this, my father would laugh and rub the top of my head as though I was our cat who followed him, or one of the member’s dogs who begged for his attention.

It takes time, Buckwheat, my father said. It takes patience.

I nodded again without really listening, too busy concentrating on the next question in my head: When can we look for the white deer again?

It would be another week or so before my father and I would go back into those woods. After he cleaned up the trails, cut the lawn, raked the leaves. After the members came and went, we ventured back out there, walking along those very trails my father cleared, our fishing rods pointing high up to the sky. As we walked, we spoke very little, allowing nature to do the talking for us. The birds sang, the dirt crunched under our feet, the wind made the leaves on the trees clap as we walked by.

When we got to the river, my father helped me bait my rod before dropping our lines into the babbling waters, a language of its own.

You see that out there, my father said, pointing to his right. My direction followed his thick finger where an old, dilapidated stone wall stood.

That was here way before us, my father said, his hand now propped along his hip. It needs to be cleaned up a bit, those old rocks should be replaced and resealed, my father said, squinting. But it has potential, don’t you think?

I stared at the stone wall, imaging my father replacing each stone one by one with bare hands. I looked back at my father standing tall with one hand on his hip, the other holding his fishing rod. I didn’t ask what the stone wall was for. I thought of the other large wall made of stone by the garage, the one my father built himself and the sunflowers we planted growing along it. I knew this wall would have its own purpose, I knew my father would make it special. He loved it out in the woods, doing a job that allowed him to build and be one with nature. For that moment, it felt as though all of the woods were our own, that we owned that river, that we owned that stone.

I was in a daze staring at the old stone wall, watching the sunlight dance along its crevices. I glanced up at the trees, a golden white streamed through the branches thick with leaves. I thought of my father out here all alone every day in all this beauty, I thought of the man my father found hanging from one of these very trees, his body silently swaying in the wind.

When my father called out to me again, lost in a moment of stillness, I jumped when he touched my shoulder.

Tighten your grip, my father said, nodding his head toward the fishing rod held gingerly in my hand. The fish will take the bait and the rod too.

I turned my direction out in front of me. But it wasn’t the fishing rod that caught my eye.

It was the white deer. She was standing across from us. Her long white legs submerged in the stream. She stood silently, still, as she stared at us. As she stared at me. Our eyes locked, I held my breath.

Well, look at that, my father said over me. She’s taking you in. Just be still, let her see you. No sudden movements now, you don’t want to spook her. You don’t want her thinking you are a threat.

My heart was in my throat. I couldn’t move if I tried. My fingers gripped the fishing rod hard. The white deer was illuminant. So pure and white against the color of fall. The reds, yellows, and browns, all the remaining green. The white deer’s ears twitched, her eyes never leaving mine.

I was worried someone got her, my father said beside me.

You were? I said, a breeze tickled my skin, a mourning dove cooed somewhere far away and unseen.

I’m always worried, my father said.

I blinked at the white deer, finally turned to my father. He wasn’t looking at the deer, but down at me.

Then he turned, told me to look.

I did as he asked and looked back at the white deer. I sucked in a gulp of fresh river air when I saw the white deer had dipped her head down to the stream.

She’s comfortable around you, my father said, standing taller. She knows you aren’t here to hurt her.

I watched the white deer drink the water. Her long, slender neck. Her strong, lean body. She was at ease now, no longer rigid, and I too, felt my own body begin to relax as the three of us stood together by the river.

That night in bed, I retraced each moment in the woods. The white deer’s eyes on mine, were wide and brown, maybe lined in a shade of pink. Her body was muscular with strength.

That white coat so bright. I thought of her out there at night, hoped she was safe from whatever could cause her harm, which seemed like so much. Hunters, yes, but other animals that saw her as prey. Natural disasters that could take her, maybe even loneliness that could one day break her.

But after that day, the white deer was gone. Fall came and winter quickly followed. My father was outside almost everyday, but that white deer never came back. Maybe she got scared off, maybe she was impossible to place against the white snow. My father was disappointed even though he never said. It was in his face, the way his shoulders slumped slightly when he’d come back in from the outdoors. There were no more stories to tell.

Even years after the day my father and I saw the white deer in the woods, even after never seeing her again, I’d still find myself searching for her. No matter what I was doing –– walking, skipping rocks, writing feverishly about her beneath the Apple Blossom tree –– I’d find myself stopping to look around. Every snap of a branch, a rustle in a bush had me believe it could be her, that I’d find this white creature standing quietly beside me drinking from the stream, chewing on berries. But it would not be her, rather a small animal, a chipmunk or squirrel. It was the wind, an old branch that fell to the ground. It was my father raking leaves. It was everything but the white deer, and yet, she was everywhere. She was still all around me.

Even after we moved from that old house and it’s deep woods, well after I grew up and moved out of the country to the city, replacing the wilderness with high buildings and bustling traffic, even after all these years my father has been gone, no longer on this earth, I still think of that white deer. I think of her skin the color of snow out there in all that green. I think of her big eyes locked on mine, and I wonder where she went. I wonder if by any chance she is still out there somewhere roaming free in my father’s woods.

Art of Reflection short stories

Best Jerk They’d Ever Seen

by James Morena • March 12, 2022March 14, 2022

The other day I had a tough conversation with my middle-school students. It was lunch time. They again complained, with food lingering in mouths, about Social Studies and their dislike of learning history. There were whines of “boring” and “waste of time.” There were nods of agreement and chocolate milk droplets splashing the table. I teach English but I used to teach Advanced Placement Human Geography, which means I have a soft spot in my heart for Social Studies.

The middle school where I teach comprises ninety-eight percent students of colour, so I asked them about the Confederate Flag.

“What’s that?” a student said.

There were shrugs and acknowledgements of unknowing. I pulled out my computer and showed them the flag.

“I’ve seen that before,” another student said.

“There’s one by my house,” a different student said.

I asked them about its history. I asked them about the Civil War and symbolism and if they could infer meaning from what I was telling them.

“Is that true?” a student said.

I explained how if they didn’t know history they wouldn’t understand how things affect them today. They wouldn’t know that their neighbor might have racist tendencies or might be outright racist. I then asked my students where the reference point starts when we say East Asia: “Asia’s not east of the United States.” I asked them: “Why is the US considered western?” None of them knew that everything was either east or west of England. That we still use colonizer language in our everyday speak. That we are unwittingly perpetuating racism and discrimination and colonization and such and for that reason, we must learn history.

The lunch dialogue inspired me. I thought for a moment that I should return to teaching Social Studies, but then the conversation veered into learning to dance the Jerk and TikTok videos. My moment of Zen dissipated and the reality of a twelve-year-old’s attention span reared its ugly head. What did I expect? I failed to recognize the signs of colonization when I was their age.

It was Thanksgiving. I was twelve. We lived in England. My white father was in the military. We were stationed at RAF Woodbridge. My Filipino mother had been up since three in the morning cooking and cleaning. It was my family’s turn to host the Filipino party. Potluck-style. Pinays would bring their fare: sinigang, pancit, Bistek Tagalog, siopao, and other dishes. Mother agreed to provide lumpia, dinuguan, and sticky-white rice. She also had to cook the turkey and stuffing, enchiladas, fried chicken, lasagne and other favourites. Our holidays were always a hodgepodge of cultures.

My father slept in. He missed the vacuuming, the wiping down of toilets, the dusting of shelves. He also missed the raking of leaves and the sweeping of the walkway. When he woke then came downstairs, he ambled by the aligned shoes in the foyer, the dusted curtains, the coasters strategically placed to prevent watermarks on furniture. He landed at his bar, which he kept stocked with brown and clear liquors and fizzy sodas. And in his minifridge, the finest, chilled Budweisers and Bud Lights.

The tssSSS kr-POP proceeded: Did you do this? Is that done? Where did you put…? What about behind doors…? And so forth. After every question we – mother, my older sister, and I – answered: Yes, sir. It was always “yes, sir” because the to-do list was created the night before and we knew our roles. And, we knew the punishment – an in-your-face spit-filled scolding, a backhand, a balled fist – for failing to complete it in a timely manner. The tssSSS kr-POPs also proceeded breakfast and lunch and guests arriving. By the time the first partygoer showed up, Father needed a nap.

That Thanksgiving I was dating – however you want to define dating at twelve-years-old – Samantha. She had blonde hair and blue eyes. She stood about my height. Her father was in the military and her mother was English. She, too, lived in base housing and we had been dating for a year. I often went to her house to play video games with her younger brother or she would come over to my house to help me – sitting at the kitchen table – with my homework. She had wanted to become a lawyer when she grew up. I wanted to be in the NBA. Sometimes we visited our friends and danced to hip-hop or played “Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board.” Samantha and I interlaced our fingers. We wrapped our thin arms around each other’s shoulders. We pecked on the lips before going home. We were in love.

No matter whose house – Ate’s, Lolo’s, Kuya’s – my friends (Brad, Miguel, Patrick, Eric) were welcome. Sean, my best friend, would already be there because he too was Filipino. They often brought their girlfriends if they had one at the time. They enjoyed the chicken adobo, lechon, and kare kare. They laughed at the pinays bock-bocking their gossip in the kitchen and sat with the pinoys – slapping high fives – in front of the TV while watching football or basketball or some other manly event. My boys also would become my accomplices – my James Cagneys or Al Capones – against our age-related alcohol prohibition.

“No, you put it in your jacket,” Patrick would say, trying to shove the can into Eric’s jacket.

“I’ve got to distract them,” Eric would say.

“I’ll do it,” Miguel always volunteered, reaching for the can.

Then we would sit at the playground sipping and passing our one beer, shouting and celebrating as though we had hair on our chests.

That Thanksgiving everyone had come over. Samantha and I followed each other from kitchen to living room, from upstairs to outside. When she went to the restroom, I dawdled six feet away. When I had to help my mother with plates, Samantha asked, “Can I help too?” The pinays oohed and ahhed and said, “Ang cute nila together,” because we did look cute together. We were in love. My boys went outside to toss the football. They watched the Cowboys lose to the Seahawks. They devoured the food.

When Father woke up, the tssSSS kr-POPs increased. Clinking of ice against glass and the glop-glopping of brown liquor began. The TV was turned off when the radio was turned up.

“Have another beer,” Father shouted.

TssSSS kr-POP.

“Drink up,” he tossed a Budweiser to someone.

TssSSS kr-POP. “Chug it,” he encouraged.

TssSSS kr-POP.

My father, though only five-foot-nine, towered over most everyone at the party. He had salt and pepper hair that he attempted to cover up with boxed dye every six months. His white skin had begun to glow red the more he drank. He guffawed as chunks of turkey and gravy or lemon meringue pie threatened to fall from his mouth. He slapped backs. Bent forward to tell jokes. Gesticulated like one of those waving inflatable-tube guys. Then his hands started to touch: a woman’s shoulders, waist, hip, the inside of a back pocket.

“Where’re you going?” we all heard him say.

“Get over here,” he shouted as he motioned for some pinay to come near.

My boys and I knew to stay away from him during parties. We knew to watch our loose arms or open necks or exposed guts. We knew at any minute an arm lock or chokehold or uppercut could collapse us.

“Didn’t see that coming, did you?” he would say in celebration, standing over us, hands on hips, as we gasped for air.

Sometimes he would twist our arms then push our elbows in the wrong direction saying, “It takes sixteen pounds of pressure to break an elbow. This is what fifteen feels like.”

“Stop, please,” one of us would shout.

“Be a fucking man,” he would say then sling that person across the room.

We boys ignored him as best we could. We distracted ourselves by playing card games. By planning our beer heist. By nonstop eating. Samantha and I held hands under the coffee table. We sat knee to knee. We drank soda from the same red plastic cup.

“I’m going to throw this away,” Samantha said.

“Okay. I’ll be here,” I said.

When she got up, I held onto her fingers as she started to walk away. She jerked back a bit, but she smiled at me as I smiled at her.

“I’ll be right back,” she said.

Samantha scooped up some abandoned plastic plates and paper napkins. She stacked empty cups into empty cups. Then she left the living room.

“Okay, when your father goes into the kitchen,” Brad said, “I’ll follow him.”

“Then you go around the bar,” Sean said, pointing at Patrick.

“I’ll go with him,” I said.

We were all smiling, rubbing our hands together. We felt like geniuses.

“Let me go,” we heard someone shout. “Get off of me.”

My boys and I immediately looked at the bar. Father was nowhere in sight.

“Leave me alone,” we heard Samantha yell.

We all sprang to our feet. We headed toward the bar. I noticed Brad turn into the hallway. Then Patrick and Eric and Miguel followed. I trailed behind with Sean.

“Let go of me,” Samantha yelled again.

Brad, who played offensive guard on our football team, grabbed hold of Father. Miguel helped push Father back against a wall as I went to Samantha. She was holding her elbow.

“He tried to make me go upstairs,” she said.

I balled my fists. The chatter in the kitchen had stopped. Music on the radio echoed throughout the house.

“I just wanted to talk to her,” Father slurred.

“Why were you trying to make her go upstairs,” I shouted.

“I just wanted to talk,” he said, “I want to make sure she treats you right.”

No one knew what to say. We all glanced – eyebrows crinkled – at each other. No one understood what that meant: treat you right. Brad and Miguel continued to hold Father against the wall. Samantha had started to cry. Patrick, Eric, and Sean looked stunned and confused. They had their arms held out wide, standing between everybody, as though they were separating boxers.

“He kept pulling,” Samantha said. She was cradling her arm close to her chest.

“I just wanted to talk to her,” Father said.

I stood up. I walked toward him.

“What’re going to do?” Father said.

He began to shove Brad and Miguel.

“I wanted to make sure she treated you right,” Father said, then he twisted and turned and dislodged himself from their grip. “I was just going to talk to her.”

He staggered over to me. He looked into my eyes and smiled. He shoved me into Samantha who was sitting on the stairs.

“I can do whatever I want,” he said. Then he walked away.

I helped Samantha to her feet. I shepherded her toward the door.

“Let’s go,” I said.

As we all exited the house we heard tssSSS kr-POP. No one said a word as we walked along the cold streets of our military base.

I didn’t tell my middle school students this Thanksgiving story. I could have used it as a Social Studies teaching opportunity. I could have told them about the Latin phrase jus prima noctis or “right of the first night,” which gave rulers the right to bed any female subject on her wedding night. But no one knows for sure if this “right” actually took place. There is mention of it in the Epic of Gilgamesh. There is evidence of it in Italy: the Etruscans and their abuse of their female population. But no one knows for sure if this took place.

I could have also used it as a teaching moment about the memories of those who have historically been linked to racism and discrimination and colonization. I could have told them that people associated with horrible acts tend to forget (much like my father has) or tend to deny (much like my father does) the evidence of such ways. I have asked my father about that day. I have told him that I could call Brad and Sean and the others to verify my claims. But he continues to deny it and all evidence of that Thanksgiving.

I could have connected this moment to English class and had my students write a five-paragraph essay. But one of my middle schoolers had challenged me: “I bet you don’t know how to do the Jerk,” she said. There were oohs and ahhs. There were laughs and mouths full of food.

“Okay,” I said, then stood up.

Everyone was watching me. There were smiles on faces. Students huddled around each other. I spread my arms out to make room. I thought about my father for a couple of seconds. Then I did the best Jerk they’d ever seen.

Means of Conveyance

by Ryan Pollard • March 11, 2022March 12, 2022

I can’t remember if the bench was wooden or metal or painted or plastic-coated or anything. Nor how it was structured—slatted throughout? A latticed back? A solid seat? No matter. Such facts are mere paraphernalia now, as needless as the width of the street we crossed to get there. It was for sitting on and so we did, to rest and talk some more after strolling under the lamp posts and old campus trees with unswaying branches held delicately in the late summer air, past buildings with names we didn’t know but would learn, some of them, that year. It was partway up a gentle hill, enough to offer a slight vista to gaze on: a tableaux of cool, black grass etched with paths and indeterminate, fellow travelers. I don’t remember what was spoken, only that words were assembled, then uttered, spilled out into the night like unfledged owls jumping too soon. And I couldn’t imagine there being another place in the world.

Hardly anyone had a porch swing, let alone a front porch to hang it from, where I lived. But your house did: a faded, chipped green affair with weather-beaten newspapers, three-days-old and more, lying underneath, scattered like dead birds. Your house was a long, powder blue bungalow perched at the top of a long, steady hill, coming as I did from the lowlands in my whirring little sedan, an ‘84 Honda Civic, common and serviceable as myself. Sometimes we sat on the swing and considered, watching the tall pine trees, waiting for the bats to farewell the day with their sinuous darting. Or we looked west, past the eaves across the street, at silent lightning near the mountains, distant as a dream. On clear dusks pinprick stars would pierce through, as if to inform us that more would come when the night deepened upon our return. For now, the boards creaked beneath our feet as we swung lightly and surveyed the prospects for the evening, deciding where to go, what to do: a movie, a coffee shop, a bowling alley; sit on the roof, meet others downtown, circle the lake nearby; a game of tennis, a stroll through the public golf course, a stealthy swim in the gated pool up north; go inside to play games with your family, perhaps a drink or two. Or maybe, just maybe, we could stay here forever on this old porch swing, canting lazily forward and back, fore and aft, lilted by the soft spectral sea of the summer night.

The swing set propped up next to the school is still there, but now painted a fresh, vibrant yellow. It shows itself brightly, I imagine, under the dull drone of the light pole at two o’clock in the morning. The abrupt slope at the end of the grass field is still there, still falling off into a tangle of cottonwoods and ash and peachleaf willows and, beyond that, the ponds and the creek, and then the highway, where cars passed by singly, perforating the cool summer air, reminding us that life existed and went on carelessly beyond the bounds of our conversation, with its earnestness, and gentle ribbing, and musings, and many, many silences. It felt like the earth ended there beneath our feet, at the edge of the city, where we opened ourselves, shoes dangling, scraping the gravel, legs pumping absently, my stomach always a little nauseous from the motion. I never told you about that for fear we’d stop coming to this magical place. I passed by it the other day returning from a trip with my wife and children: a beacon recognizable only to me, standing unaware just off the highway, still in use, it seemed, indelible as these memories that bear me back, flashing briefly through the trees before the angle closed and we sped along back home, my eyes returned to the road.

fiction flash fiction

My Countries, ’Tis of Thee

by Carlos Alvarez • March 5, 2022March 5, 2022

I am Carlos, a refugee to America, part Cuban in exile and part Cuban-American and, sometimes, something else. I am the grandson of a Presbyterian minister, whose mission in Cuba was to bring the word of God, and the son of a lawyer whose sense of justice was largely responsible for my family having to seek a home in America. On occasion, even after living in the United States for almost 60 years following my arrival at the age of 14, I view my mental relationship to my native land and America in a variety of ways. Despite the citizenship and full range of educational and lifestyle opportunities that the United States has generously afforded me, a debt which I have honoured through a career of public service, I have been unwilling to have children on my non-Cuban soil. My cultural and ethnic self-identity is still in a state of fluctuation. I don’t fully understand it, although I try; I really do try.

I suspect that a varying and evolving sense of personal identity is not an uncommon phenomenon among refugees to this country and I caution new arrivals, be they from Afghanistan, the Caribbean, or elsewhere, to expect no different. Some might find this oscillation disturbing and, occasionally, I do too, because it can grab you by the mental equivalent of the scruff of the neck and shake you up. Mainly, I find it to be a trustworthy, floating reference point reminding me to question what I see and to be prepared for the good and bad surprises that life brings.

I write this to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of the first time I was forced to acknowledge this state of cultural-identity fluctuation. The moment came as a surprise, but its power is measured by the fact that the memory of it lingers so strongly. In the fall of 1971, soon after I moved to the Upper West Side of New York City from Chicago for my first post-college job, I chose to walk to work via a route in Midtown Manhattan that took me down through the heavy traffic of people and vehicles to the corner of West 59^th Street and Central Park West – the spot that marks the entrance to Central Park. Despite previous visits to the area, this was the first time that I gave serious notice to a large piece of grey granite, a pylon decorated with a fountain and ornamental symbolic statuary displaying America’s principles and military might.

My curiosity taking hold I inspected the shining bronze letters of the inscription on the plaque that proclaimed its purpose: “To the victims of the USS Maine”. This monument I had stumbled upon, honored the more than 260 American sailors that perished in Havana Harbor when the battleship exploded in 1898. The gilded figures atop the pylon represent Columbia Triumphant leading a seashell chariot of three seahorses. They are said to be cast from the metal recovered from the guns of the USS Maine itself.

Back then, the generally accepted American schoolbook version of the scene memorialized by the monument was that the Spanish masters of Cuba were responsible for the destruction of the ship whose presence was a symbolic demonstration of America’s support for the aspirations of the “Criollos”, native-born Cuban Creoles, who sought to be unleashed from 400 years of harsh and exploitative colonial domination. The event was used to justify America’s armed intervention in the Cuban War of Independence, a trigger for the Spanish-American War. One of the consequences of the American intervention and subsequent victory was U.S. assumption of guardianship power over Cuba in the form of a four-year military occupation, followed by thirty years of oversight of an allegedly independent nation. Cuba was forcibly transitioned from a rebellious colony into an American dependency.

As a Cuban refugee, my understanding of the situation, based upon information I gleaned from my family and formal historical scholarship that I gained access to through my American university education, was different than the popularized Citizen Kane, Hearstian newspaper version. My first reaction to the monument was one of outrage as to why the theft of Cuban sovereignty should be honored in such a prominent place. Anger over the role that had been imposed on the land of my origin and the consequences that flowed from it overwhelmed me. I thought of the futility of the deaths of the hundreds of thousands of Cuban freedom fighters and civilians during the quest to be free from Spain. Rather than achieving independence, they merely gained a change in masters. This event, the explosion of the battleship, resonating over seven decades, led to my being in a corner of a cold northern island, rather than in my tropical homeland. Surprisingly, I was also flooded by shame, my inheritance from an oppressed people who failed in their quest for independence. My mental state was both complicated and intensified by the thought that I was merely another victim of the haphazardness of history which had brought me to the house of the Master, where I passively allowed myself to be a happy resident.

The cold wind of that exposed corner of Manhattan, and my need to step out of the way of traffic pouring in and out of the Central Park, brought a more nuanced view of the monument to mind as I struggled to restore my emotional equilibrium. Drawing upon the American portion of my self-identity, a product of the safety and numerous kindnesses that my family and I had been blessed with since we arrived in New Jersey as refugees, I reasoned that the monument was dedicated to innocent victims, whose only fault was to have been present at the wrong time and place. What it commemorated was sacrifice, not the oppression that I identified with. My intense feelings were an excessive reaction to a symbol of honour to those who had served, not to the humiliation that came from its consequences.

Over the next few weeks, I walked by the monument twice daily, captured in an odd state of fascination. Dominating my thoughts were a set of feelings related to the granite that occupied a place, both in the city and in my mind, that I could not extirpate. My relationship to the statuary changed with the reflection of the light upon it and reflected as many moods. I was developing a personal, almost intimate, relationship with an inanimate piece of granite that memorialized an event that had occurred many years before my birth. Perhaps this was the true moment of my formal induction into existential adulthood, the moment during which I struggled to reconcile my need for personal agency, my need to be the author of my own life story, with the ponderous sense that the pathways of my life, including my very presence in this city, were preordained by a series of events that I was the outcome of. I was not an active participant in the choices that had led me here. I was insignificant flotsam in the stream of history, no more meaningful than the cacophony produced by the madness of traffic on that corner.

The more practical outcome of all of these musings was that I was chronically late for work. Also, I began to attract the attention of a police guard stationed nearby. I forced myself to modify my walk to and from my office and to avoid that particular corner, moving across the street and to the far side of the intersection.

One evening, as I returned home, I happened to note a shadow across the sidewalk, and glancing up noted a phallic pillar with a statute of Christopher Columbus. This was a monument honouring the Spanish sponsored, Italian-born “discoverer” of the Americas, and the prime cause of the genocide of the natives . . . .

Ah! I realized that once again I was torn between two motherlands and conflicting realities, where I remain to this day, 50 years after my first close encounter with the USS Maine monument. On some days, I ask myself, “Am I growing, or just growing old?”

Black Shirt in the Middle

by ANNE ANTHONY • March 4, 2022March 5, 2022

The rusted pickup truck parked outside ends your pursuit; you pause in the doorway, your eyes adjust to the haze and track the room, past the jukebox, past the all-you-can-eat buffet, past the couple, their hands below the table rubbing each other’s thighs, and then you see he’s there, the black shirt in the middle, his back faces you, but the bar’s mirror reflects his stare into his empty shot glass, and you’re certain it’s him because you’ve seen his bald spot when watching from above on the manager’s balcony at the grocery store, watching that spot, white and as round as a softball, swivel slowly, while scanning barcodes of one item and then the next, and you’ve watched that swivel pause to watch your teenage daughter in the next lane, wearing her mask, her blue work shirt which you’d told her was too damn tight; didn’t you tell her she needed one size larger, not as tight as the one from twenty minutes before – top buttons ripped off, tail untucked – when she stumbled from the employee break room with the wild-eyed stare of the hunted, shortly after this balding fuck clocked out ahead of schedule so here you are advancing toward him, your feet sticking to the spilled beer on the floor, crunching the peanut shells tossed there too, gaining a speed they never achieved on the ball field and you grip the bat you pulled from your back seat, the one you keep for pickup games after work, and the palms of your perfectly manicured hands tighten around its neck, hitting with a force only mothers achieve.

Freak Accident

by Jennifer Taylor-Skinner • March 1, 2022March 11, 2022

The night my oldest sister died I hung new curtains over the large window in my living room. It
was a chore that had been on my to-do list for weeks and I’d bought them following a brutal heat
wave which had caused over 100 heat-related deaths. I was never in danger of dying; just of
being uncomfortably hot. And my new curtains were intended to filter the sun and make the
room bearable for a future heat wave.

That night, my middle sister sent me a text message that simply read, “She passes…” Passes? I
knew she meant our older sister was dead. She’d just been admitted to hospice the previous day,
and apparently only about 11% of patients leave hospice under what they call a “live discharge.”
She hadn’t eaten in a month, since she was first admitted to the hospital, so it was unlikely that
she would be a part of that 11%. I spent the days after her death oscillating between grief – those
early stages of grief where it feels like the moment your legs go weak while riding a roller
coaster – and admiration of my new curtains. Somehow the curtains made me feel better. And
when I thought about it, I realized that it was because of the planning – planning for a future
heatwave was a reminder that I was alive, and had a future. Also, the curtains were just very
beautiful.

Of course, it’s of interest how my older sister died. All I will say is that it was a freak accident at
the hands of someone else. And because I know this someone else is devastated, I won’t reveal
more. But imagine a scenario like this: you’re taking a bath and someone you love accidentally
drops a hair dryer into the water. Or a curling iron. This is not what happened to my sister, but it
does convey the absurdity of the split-second event that ultimately killed her. A terrifying
reminder of the precarity of every moment. Like that split-second you realize that you didn’t
chew a grape well enough, and there’s no one there to save you as you choke. Or you’re driving
and, because you’re running late, you decide to take a risk and cross the railroad tracks, despite
an oncoming train, only to realize that you’ve miscalculated. Except, imagine it isn’t you taking
the risk or unknowingly making a fatal, split-second decision; it’s someone else. And you’re
helpless to intervene.

So. My older sister passes away, and I hang my new curtains. As I reach for the curtain rod I grip
the side of the ladder extra tightly, because I am now constantly aware of the “precarity of each

moment.” I climb the rungs slowly, as if incapable of moving any faster. And I know that I will
probably be this cautious about everything for the remainder of my life. This is the first lesson
from my sister’s death.

I also learn that death is death and pain is pain and no matter how absurd the circumstances, the
ordeal is torturous and hard. If one is crushed underneath a war tank on the battlefield and dies a
hero, or crushed by a parade float carrying a band of holiday elves, there is still a loss and a
funeral. The difference is that, with the latter, those who survive are left with competing
emotions when retelling the story; you have to hold the attention of your audience long enough
to relay that the ending is tragic, and has broken you, and is not, in fact, a comedy of errors.

I learn that grief drains you in a second, and the moment I read the text, it sits heavy on my chest,
making it nearly impossible for me to breathe or think. So, I take to my curtains. And when my
arms begin to tire from the repeated motion of reaching for a new curtain ring, affixing it to the
top curtain hem, and clasping it onto the rod, I decide instead to clean up my inbox – another
task suited to someone who doesn’t want to think. Except, after a while, I somehow lose track of
time, as if I’ve blacked out, and when my eyes refocus, I find that I’ve filtered the emails by my
sister’s name. They go back a decade and a half and most, maybe 70%, are unread. My chest
begins to burn and, in my head, I chide myself for not replying. My sister had a habit of
composing subject lines that betrayed the enclosed message which was, usually, that she was
disappointed over my distance, both my physical distance and otherwise. Then I remembered
why I never opened them: “Are you going to miss Christmas again?” or “I found a job for you –
at home…” Home, as in my hometown, which is 2,286 miles away. The job offers were never
sincere – but were a reminder that I’d left her, and that she (and the rest of the family) wanted me
back. I had, however, replied to an email about a muffin recipe, and a separate one with a
technical question about a spreadsheet. Then there were the dozens of emails with photo
attachments; one photo showed my sister holding me on her hip when I was a toddler and she
was a teenager. Her head is turned to face me and she’s smiling as if I belong to her; I am not
looking back at her, but forward, and reaching out for the person beyond the frame and behind
the camera – who is most likely our mother. My sister had taken a digital photo of the old,
physical photo and emailed it as an attachment; the original photo was yellowing and creased

and I could see the outline of her wooden dining table in the background. I imagined her sitting
there, going through our family album with photos of the two of us fanned out on the table, along
with crumbs from breakfast and coffee stains. “Nice!” I replied. My sister never had children and
I was too exhausted from my own to absorb her messages of disappointment – so I left most of
the emails unopened. My chest begins to throb, so I close the email and return to my curtains.

The fourth lesson is about how to be a sister. And not just a sister, but someone in the world that
people will regret losing. Or how to be a friend. Or a wife, a mother, or a neighbor. If you die in
a freak accident and people use the word “karma” when discussing your death, I would guess
that more empathy for others was warranted while you were alive. Or perhaps more therapy. So
in the days after I hang the curtains, I am extraordinarily attentive and generous. I give my kids a
lot of candy and buy them toys they don’t need, a few of which they may already have. I don’t
bother searching; I just buy. I’m deliberate in making espresso for my husband, taking care that
the crema is golden and thick; I offer to pour more wine and prepare special dinners. I assume
that everyone’s love language is baked goods. I call and text people just to ask, “How are you?”
My apologies are long, a bit groveling, and mildly insufferable. I send flowers. I’m exhausted. I
know that I can’t sustain this for the remainder of my life, but I take the lesson: every interaction
contains a sort of precarity, and the goal is to leave each one with as little harm as possible,
ideally no harm, and, in fact, leave behind something good. And it’s precarious because it only
takes a moment – of frustration or impatience – and it’s those moments when we aren’t guarding
ourselves for optimal kindness that are the most memorable. It’s called negative bias. But we do
what we can to exercise the muscle of patience and empathy – to try to be remembered for more
good than bad.

But the important things often come too late; like hanging curtains following an historically
brutal heat wave just two and a half weeks before autumn. Reading an email received three and a
half years earlier. Or deciding that you should suggest to the people that you love that they may
regret not exercising the empathy muscle. So, I indulge in the meditation of hanging curtains,
await the next heat wave, and digest the lessons of my sister’s freak accident.

IMPRINTING HER OUTLINE ALL OVER ME

by Michelle Hoppe • February 19, 2022February 19, 2022

After Brian Doyle

“It’s okay,” I told her.

She apologised: “I was just so out of it, you know.”

She had gotten in touch around the same time my legal advocate had notified me that the case had closed. “Lack of evidence,” he said. “You know, sometimes women are the worst in these cases,” he continued. “It’s the women on the jury who are the worst.”

I recalled all I had heard over the course of that year regarding those three months of rape. There was a guy friend’s slut-shaming defence. There were fatherly “don’t get drunk” rationalisations. There were the “he was your boyfriend” excuses from a dude boss. There was the “you just got drunk and slept with someone you barely knew” prosecutions from my previous boyfriend, a reduction of lethality into noxious romance. The psychology professor from undergrad asked, “Who do you need me to beat up for you?”

But she, a 19-year-old, had walked into a crime scene that night and crawled into the bottom bunkbed of a hostel workroom with me. I was 28 years old. I had lost my virginity to a serial rapist with warrants out for his arrest in Texas. She whispered, “It’s okay.”

Despite all of our vulnerabilities and the entirety of his hatred, the bloody comet stains up the white sheets where I had scooted up the mattress, trying to escape, the shaking, and the endless murderous excuses that existed in our flawed human connections, I did not push her away. I wrapped my quivering legs around her shorter ones. I clutched onto her at her tiny waist and pulled her close to my heaving chest. I took one hand and placed it on the small of her curled neck. She held me for six hours as I sobbed into her dirty blonde hair, pulled loosely into a messy bun, tendrils wrapping at her pale shoulders. Two women holding fast against that midnight. Two women woven together in the flesh, giving ourselves over to one another. I felt time halt and argue that who and what we hold within us is what we are. I felt numb, too, frozen in that inebriated still, rainbow graffiti doodling across a charcoal cityscape, shooting stars across a kitsch skyline, and the words “Katsooooooo,” the artist’s street name, sprayed all over. An out-of-place tiger graced a wall above a toilet. High local artists had stencilled Seattle’s outline in our hostel staff room. For six hours, I gazed, drugged up, at that inky complexion of contemporary civilisation rendered flat. Because all violence happened in connection, so did all healing.

I held her right back. For the rest of my life, I would hold onto that.

healing sexual violence

FOR GRACE AFTER 9 P.M.

by Sean Ennis • February 13, 2022February 13, 2022

I feel like a princess in a story waiting for Grace to come to bed. And when she does, it’s as exciting as seeing myself on TV. No one else knows this thrill, which is thrilling. This is not really about sex. One night, as usual, I said, “I feel like I need a weapon to protect this,” and she said, “It’s still early, but I’m so tired.” Then she is snoring, which is a good sign. Some nights she has to turn the TV on and wrestle with something. I get up and check the front door, which is already locked.

I had thought there wasn’t really enough hours in the day to cheat, but then I witnessed what’s going on with Colleen and Connor. They were raising their voices like it was time to leave. He was quoting a poem he wasn’t meant to have read in mixed company. She was basking in its words guiltily. This is all happening at a PTO meeting.. They each had two margaritas, so, four total, and the tequila was making them aggressive and sarcastic even though they ate dinner together.. Connor said, “‘Your legs are honeyed pathways to bliss,’” and Colleen said, “Don’t stop, coward.” I mean, it was a total mess.

That Connor had memorised the poem from his wife’s lover. That Colleen was newly turned on. That the vice principal kept talking about the raffle. When this is all over, the couple will be divided up among friends, each calculating who has the most power and who deserves the most empathy. A butchery.

After the PTO meeting, I baked 48 cookies. I had volunteered among the tumult. I took out the trash. I snooped in Gabe’s room for drugs. I made a big deal out of all of it, kept clearing my throat, so Grace would notice. Don’t leave me. And if you do leave me, don’t cheat. And if you do cheat, leave no documentation. This is dedicated to everyone who has ever driven in front of me, seeing in their rear view the speaker at his most vulnerable.

relationships

Halloween haunting prison

ON HALLOWEEN

by J. D. Mathes • February 13, 2022February 13, 2022

The board denies my application for parole, unmoved by my argument that my family had suffered enough, so I didn’t ask them to write letters of support, and so I stood before them on my own merit and my own word that I wanted to make something better of my life.

I can try again in four months. Fuck those assholes, I think as I walk to the edge of the bluff of this fenceless camp to stare into space before going to see Ms. Smith, the prison camp’s therapist. Other inmates walk by on the road that rises from the camp and circles the summit, past a radar dome left over from the Air Force, and the maintenance buildings and shops, before dropping down to the camp. I call it the teardrop because that’s the shape it makes. I hear guitars carrying over the desert. Brew and Flat-Five are playing the blues. They’ve been teaching me to play and sing. It helps me. I wish I had time to sit with them, but I need to go down.

October is ending. Ms. Smith has a jack-o’-lantern on her desk. She has painted her eyelids and her fingernails black and has on deep blue lipstick. Her blouse is black with red poppies like bullet wounds blooming. She smiles when I sit down and one of her teeth is missing – covered with black wax. I smile back.

“I love Halloween,” she says.

“It doesn’t show,” I say.

She laughs.

“It’s Lynne’s birthday too,” I say.

“I’d love a Halloween birthday. What did you do to celebrate?”

Two Halloweens ago I’d dressed as a soldier. Clever for a kid in the Guard. What did Lynne go as? A hippie possessed by the spirit of the dead? We went to our favourite bar where our favourite bartender, who never carded us, wore a tux and told everyone he had an offer they couldn’t refuse. Lynne dressed as a flapper. That was it. Her calling everyone darling, saying jeepers-creepers, singing “life is a cabaret,” and doing some vaguely ’20s dance moves. She smoked her cigarettes through one of those long cigarette holders and drank gin and tonics. She told everyone to call her Zelda, “Mad Zelda, darling.”

Why did I wear my uniform?

Did I feel like an imposter so I put on the uniform or was I just lazy? Do you dress like a normal nine to-fiver if your everyday getup is punk? Is it really a costume if you dress like a regular job? Maybe if you painted your face white with some blood trickling down the corner of your mouth or some fake fangs. Zombie hippie. Ghost biker. Vampire hooker with angel wings. Ambulance-chasing lawyer run over by next of kin. Dismembered construction worker. Franken-cop with an attitude. Poltergeist soldier coming to the end of his own days, because soon the house would be empty with no one to hear the crashing of pictures and glass against the floor. Do angry ghosts still rage with no one home?

In ancient times we dressed in costumes to trick the spirits into believing we were one of them. We shifted our identity and camouflaged ourselves out of terror. In our modern times we dress up almost as an excuse to act like someone we aren’t – to escape everyday life. For one night we walk among the spirits who wander the earth in search of the living to kidnap.

At the party, I started feeling down with all the drinks flowing and Lynne’s laughter like music. It crept over me like how the darkness comes in the open desert – the long twilight and then the black. It wasn’t like I was upset or angry or anything had happened out of the ordinary. In fact, it was a ripping good time with dancing and drinking games and everyone masked or painted and loose in the joy of life disguised from death.

As a boy, I would wear parts of my father’s Vietnam War uniforms and later in high school I bought surplus battle blouses and pants to wear. After I came back from basic training for the National Guard, I’d wear my camo pants off duty as part of my “image.” Here, I’d found an old flight suit and paratrooper boots in the supply cache and I wear them all the time now. I laugh. I end up two years later dressed like a poorly outfitted soldier on the edge of the frontier where the supply caravans only make it once a year if they don’t get ambushed and looted. What does this cycle of cast-off uniforms mean?

Ms. Smith writes in her notebook. “It’s part of manifesting what you want to be. In a way you are living proleptically. You feel, unconsciously, if you masquerade long enough, you will become the thing you desire.”

I wonder.

“You have to find a new way to dress to break free of the cycle.”

As we end the session, she tells me I must try harder with the parole board next time. No amount of desire will overcome the will of the state without the proper paperwork.

I leave and walk back up the bluff to watch the sunset. The radar dome blushes with the last light and Molly, who believes it’s an alien communication installation, stands under it staring at it like a pilgrim who has arrived at a holy site. He mumbles, his mouth twitches as he rocks back and forth before walking around it, always ending up at the same point he started from. Other inmates jog or walk past and some pause to watch the sunset. I can hear Flat-Five and Brew playing just around the bend. I figure I’ll turn around and not talk with them. I don’t much feel like singing any blues. The desert cools as I stand there. A guy they call Frog sprints by several times as the night spreads over the sky like blood on a gauze pad.

On this Halloween, I think of Lynne as I watch the stars materialise as if out of nothing. Her birthday. Twenty. Beautiful. Blonde. Stoned. I haunt this bluff, this falling darkness, living but not living. Pallid skin of the undead. Not dead. Not living either. No chains to clink in the night. But a ghost for sure.

DIDN’T SEE YOU COMING

by Emily Hunt • February 13, 2022February 13, 2022

Those two weeks, when the sun touched the earth, and we all died so absolutely that there was no coming back, and our feet were inches off the ground, and the light was so bright that even in the afterlife we went blind, we saw.

Those two weeks.

There were a number of weeks prior to those two weeks, and the same number again afterward, during which the sun approached the earth and swung slowly away again. Hot, muggy. Clouds hued dirty and orange as the pollution of our planet condensed and burnt in the sky. Ominous.

If the meteorologists saw it coming, they didn’t tell us in time. Some of us they didn’t tell at all. Hard to say what was post-recorded as if pre-released, as they pretend to have prepared us to brace for the burn. Hard to know truth from lie, and of the politics between meteorologists and astronomers. There are theories that they kept it quiet not to invoke global panic, offering up just that one stretch of mountain range and its occupants in sacrifice, relieved their predictions landed on a scarcely populated region. I try to imagine what I’d have thought of the news. The sun is coming. Just for a skim of the surface. I’d have laughed, or immediately done the things I’d dreamed of doing if not for the consequences. Confess an untold love. Tell a friend they’re an asshole. Sleep with a woman.

They’re much quieter now, the meteorologists. They share their predictions for the week ahead with less certainty. They know they know nothing. There’s a note of apology in their quieter words, and a note of awe: the sun can touch the earth.

We, the ones who cowered up in the altitudes of the Cascade Range, not knowing in which direction to run or if running would have changed anything, we the ones who were swallowed by the sun, refrain from encouraging more beliefs. We are not so quick to suppose, anymore. Nobody saw it coming. Nobody would see it again.

We close our ears to rehearsed theories, arguments. Bickerings amongst the departments of state. Amongst countries. Perhaps it’s all a ruse, the arguing; gleaning forgiveness. If answers are important to the people of the world, they aren’t to us on the mountain.

The sun left scars all over us. Scars on our skin, on our retinas, scars in our hearts and minds. We are so terribly damaged and, at once, inviolable. It was a death that cannot be touched again by death. I’m the wraith of myself.

I don’t know how many millennia separate two such events. There are scratchings in desert caves and early poems that tell of the sun’s previous arrivals, and of beings who have known of it, and have spoken about it, but none of those beings were incarnate humans. Visiting giants, otherwise angelic, or gods who walk and talk like the god in the garden, or dwellers that govern the earth from the inside, depending on which cave you’re reading from. The writings were memories of memories. Myth or not, they knew.

And now that the memory is ours we have no words to speak about it. We have no lasting images. Not of the approach of the sun, not of its arrival, not of its departure. We just have scars, and a strange sadness in our hearts that such a thing exists and we are not strong enough to know it properly.

In my town, we had little option. The lake was too far, the falls too dry in August, and all the buildings hot like the sun. Too hot. Unapproachable. So we made for the murk of the woods on the final day of the sun’s approach. The oak tree where we sheltered – whose body splits into finer and finer parts in a hundred divisions on each branch – blew mostly away as ash in its first moment inside the sun, because of its fine parts. Other trees – the resinous pines, the older redwoods – went in later moments. Like the oak, though, went our minds. Our thoughts and understandings, our beliefs. Our fine parts. Each scar in our minds came with each belief that burnt away in the sunlight. Each belief, each fragile, gracile leaf, had only spent its existence flickering this way or that in the wind anyway. None of what we believed in before the sun touched the earth made it through. The oak’s trunk remained, only in the way that our minds remain. Unencumbered. And in that way we huddled together, skin to skin as our clothes fell away, heart to heart, only whispering into each other’s ears so not to have our voices taken too. Inside the sun we dared open our eyes, catch each other’s gaze; know. We needed nothing – no food, no air, no water – so gone were we, but the presence of each other. That was all. The reason for being. What kept us conscious.

It was beautiful.

I watched a man’s shirt come away and his bracelet melt from his wrist, while shining strands of soft, fine hair lay intact against his forehead, oscillating in the heat. He watched me watch him, our fascination mutual. My things had come away, too; my clothes, my various adornments. The ink evaporated from the tattoo below my breast. And we were naked. Stripped of our personhood and laid bare before one another as the very matter we were composed of in the first place. Sun stuff. Stuff of the sun. It’s all we ever were. We leaned in closer, rode it out, seconds drawing on like small eternities we didn’t tire of.

Even if we could invite a reoccurrence – loop the sun quickly around its circuit to have it touch us again tomorrow, and move in a light like that – I don’t think a single one of us would. While we survived with our sanity once, to invite it twice would be to invite the possibility of madness.

Not everybody in that stretch of mountain survived the way we did. There were others, in other towns, under other trees. Some went mad, inside the sun. Some tremble all the time now. Some closed their hearts and live bitterly. The majority of us, though, the scarred grateful and the sad, the living, loving dead, we were the ones who saw.

Though it took a lot from us – though it took everything – we were given a new thing: a strange knowing. Not quite solid enough to put into words on a desert cave wall or in ink upon paper, or characters in bytes upon the ether, as if we were still interested in that, but solid enough to live by. We know why we are here. Humans, on earth. We know that, now. We can answer that question. We only lament that we cannot share the answer with others, all the ones who were not there, to enter the sun, to survive the death. Though they are lucky in their own ways, they’ll never know what we know. There are no words. When we speak amongst ourselves, we only get so far as a sentence or less, before trailing off and carrying on in silence. And we nod, and small, wondrous smiles are at the edge of our mouths, and we shake our heads and bite our lips. Our eyes are wide and alive for a while before they glaze and our faces set, as we return like spectral aeronauts into the memory of the sun. There’s no going there with what remains of the mind. No true remembering of a thing we had no true sight to see. No thought to survive the magnitude of consciousness.

The man I huddled closest to amongst the trees, the man whose eyes I met and whose fascination I shared, stayed close. We live in a cabin half way down the mountain, at the edge of the devastation, no longer in the town at the top. Nobody can live at the top. It’s too much, too haunted a shrine. We visit the top, get lost in its stunning desolation, and leave again. But the man and I don’t speak much. We touch each other’s skin, catch each other’s eyes, sit together on the veranda in long silences looking out over the plains and glittering towns in the distance, breathing in each other’s scent in the too-warm breeze that’s always there, in one direction or another. We’re together because we shared the impossible, and people didn’t. Together because we are strangers to people, and because people talk so much, and because I loved him inside the sun.

But I love people again, too. I love us because of our delicacy and our frights, our imperfections, our juvenile pride. I forgive a sin while the sin still forms in the sinner’s head, before it is even a sin. I forgive me. What was I thinking. What were we thinking. We thought we were immortal, but we were just children who had yet to be burnt by fire to know not to touch it. At last I am immortal, only because I’ve seen my mortality. The scars are worn like gold at my wrists and neck.

Our skin is softer, now. Prone. We watch the sun in the sky like a violent lover we were not ready for, never meant to fall for. We look up, at once scared of her and aching from nostalgia. We are endless ghosts of a strange war we could never have won, wrapped in the rags of the living and the dying, resplendent in our way.

I look back at the years I lived before the sun touched the earth and the years I lived after, I wonder, of the two sorts, which were pretend. Was I pretending then, or am I pretending now.

When we come to understand, if we ever do, we may one day be able to talk about it with others – human or otherwise. To love people is to love people, whether they died with us or are still scratching memories on their cave walls. We would tell them that the sun can touch the earth. We would tell them of the after-life, devastating and terrible, and sad and beautiful. We would tell them of broken things. The broken before, and the broken after. We would tell them that we chose it.

apocalypse

DOUGHBOYS

by Deya Bhattacharya • February 6, 2022February 6, 2022

I have the following in consecutive pop-ups on my phone: “Teenage girl assaulted in caste encounter,” “10 tips to boost ecommerce SEO,” and “Influencer displays tanned legs in the Maldives.” They say Google recommendations are based on one’s interests, but the last time I read up on caste was for a seventh-grade, deeply problematic assignment on Hinduism and it is a matter of principle with me to never set foot in tourist traps. From my window I see dumpsters and a man in a black slicker tipping bins full of new trash into them. Someone on a bike nearly runs into him – he stumbles, holds on to the bin by a whisker and screams “Fuck!” as half the contents spill out. I prepare my breakfast in the kitchen, layers of sliced meat and cheese on day-old bread that I get for cheap at the supermarket. My mother reminds me every day to eat healthy, but my body has been out of balance for too long – if I go green now, my system won’t know how to take it.

Excerpt from my neighbour’s new book: “She tossed her head back, stretching her neck and leaning back on her elbows to relieve any cricks, and that was when she felt it at the back of her throat – the unmistakable taste of bile. Caught by surprise she swallowed – quickly, automatically, and felt it go down, the tepid sour-sweet liquid, no more than a small mouthful but enough to unnerve her.” My neighbour has been releasing a book on Kindle every other month for the past four years and has tailored down to an art form the ability to stretch out for sentences what others might wrap up in a few words. She claims to have won awards for her writing, and when I looked her up afterwards I saw it was true. She has won awards, three of them, all from a publication based somewhere in Atlanta, Georgia that doesn’t show up on Google Maps. It is suspected that she is not actually a student and thus does not belong in this building. Face-wise she could be thirty, but then age is a tricky business. I was suspected myself of being under sixteen the first time I went to buy a bottle of wine.

I use the patch of clean counter beside the stovetop to roll my dough, dusting my fingers with flour first as the Internet said to. The dough always rises, in its defence, and having risen refuses to be felled again however assiduous the onslaught of my rolling pin. In all the videos I have seen about rotis they always cut to the part where things are nice and circular, as though someone had waved a wand or pulled a 3D-printing trick and there it was, the perfect flatbread, guaranteed to fluff up over a flame and be unstintingly amenable to the scooping up of lentils. In the end I throw golf balls or patty-cakes of the dough into the oven and bake until puffy. I have friends who would be deemed unfit for marriage on this count.

From the girl in the room opposite mine I learn a new word – dépaysement. In essential terms it means homesickness but it is more along the lines of being uprooted, of drifting in space, and only someone reared on the language would know how to use it and when, the exact sequence and coincidence of events that would call for the use of dépaysement over all its synonyms. “What he feels when I’m not around, that’s dépaysement,” she laughs. The he in question is her Caribbean boyfriend, about whom she talks with the certainty with which one might talk of one’s birthday. Dépaysement, I practise in the shower, and get the accent wrong each time.

I visit museums around once a week, as much for the fact of their being free as for an interest in art. As a child I could spend hours looking at paintings, but there is a sarcophagal sameness to all these Old Master renditions and even the best of them have eyes that see no good in you and make that plain. You, I say to an early Bruegel, you would only be valued by someone looking to never get a night’s sleep again. The thought trails into a fantasy where someone gives their enemy the Bruegel as a form of slow revenge, like arsenic, seeping into the recipient’s mind and keeping him up night after night until he kills his lover and then himself. Back home I seek out my neighbour and tell her about it, saying that maybe she’d like to spin it into a psychological thriller of sorts. Her face puckers up and she shakes her head. “It’s too commercial,” she says. “It’s not literature.”

I have been coming home to cigarette butts in my sneakers and under the pillow for about three weeks now. I mistook the first one for a bug, and indeed it was about the size of one, dull and lonely. I have confronted the lady who comes in to clean once a week – no, was all she would say, shaking a fresh one out of a Dunhill pack, no. She is past forty, heavy in the bottom, straw-haired, lines across her face like someone inked them in. At the same time I remember that the butts in my room are Marlboros.

They mistreat the cat that lives down the corridor. Every night I hear it yowling, often for minutes on end, and during the day it is silent, presumably recovering. I try to tempt it out with tongue clicks and meows and a helping of milk in a saucer, but to no avail. Perhaps it knows that lactose is in fact bad for cats and thus refrains.

My visitor seems to have switched loyalties. The butts today are not Marlboro, but Player’s.

I think of a new use for an old shirt – curtain. I take the allocated ones down and knot a row of unwashed upper-body-wear along the rail by the sleeves. I pay some attention to aesthetics, putting them as much in the sequence of the rainbow as I can, but my only green shirt is currently serving time as foot wipe and so I use something black with turquoise piping in its stead. Between the mustard yellow and the cerulean blue it looks subdued, as though aware of the insufficiency of its greenness. I test my handiwork by sniffing – the smell is there but only faintly, a sweat-dust hybrid, thinned out by dispersion enough to be unpinnable to any one source. And I can use the allocated curtains as extra wraps.

The girl in the room opposite mine does not take public transport on principle. She walks everywhere, even if it is at the opposite end of town, and lives off mostly to-go meals on that account. Automobiles are killers, she maintains. Her legs are lead pipes encased in lycra, as thick in the thigh as in the calf. I recommend strength training to avoid muscle wastage; she pulls out a statistic about how strength training is bad for women. She is pale, the girl, and has no breasts to speak of. I once caught her doing ballet moves in her room wearing nothing but stockings and a little white band of cloth around the waist.

Excerpt from my neighbour’s next book: “It was a dismal state of affairs by any account, and yet it could have been worse. She could have been flipped out head-first instead of feet-first and landed with her nose in the bog below. She could have caught on a tree branch and dangled all night like an old dress. She could have fallen upon the back of a cow who would have jumped over the moon with her.” Are there links between each book, I ask, connecting themes, bigger questions of some kind. It’s absurdism, she informs me coolly, there are no themes. “Everything’s fucked up. Absurdism is the only way out. If you read my blog,” she adds pointedly, “I talk all about it.” There is an ashtray full of safety-pins on the kitchen counter that I am debating ways to help myself to, but right then a flatmate comes out of her room and picks it up. “We need more chess pieces,” she says to no one in particular as she retreats.

Classes at my university last anywhere between two and five hours, and the teachers follow a version of the Pomodoro technique in which we all take a break every hour and regroup five minutes later. Everyone else has their established friend groups; for myself there is the coffee machine, riddled with buttons, by which I can conjure a triple macchiato grande should I wish. One can drink or eat in class as much as one likes, the focus being on the lessons learned rather than whether or not one’s mouth is full. At the schools I went to, public humiliation was the norm – woe betide the first-grader who raised a bottle of water to her lips without asking. It is only when we file back into class that I remember the test. I am handed a page with a column of questions, each with four choices. Players of Russian Roulette would be glad of their odds being 25% – I am unable to be glad, but I am at least less ruffled. I start to tick.

I have been located by a student who speaks my language. She swoops upon me with a gush of it and carts me off to the campus bistro for lunch. She speaks German well enough, but rolls her eyes at me the moment the cashier’s back is turned. “So guttural,” she says, using the accepted term among us foreigners for the language. I state that I have not learned any yet; she nods in approval. “Hold on to your cultural pride,” she advises. As she munches on a cheese roll and talks about her PhD I try to place her geographically in relation to myself, her name being the sort that could belong to any of the states. My sandwich arrives and she wrinkles her nose. “You eat pork?” “This is beef,” I say, watching myself fall in her estimation. She eyes me without speaking through my first three bites and then shakes her head. “You’ll end up like one of them at this rate,” she says, inclining her head towards the cashier.

There is a homeless artist at the university metro stop every night after seven. Tonight he is spray-painting a monkey on the station wall. The monkey stands at least eight feet tall and has plantain-size ears and an angry red penis. The artist moves without pause or visible breath, switching one can for another as arms might protrude and retract on a machine. I let two trains get by as I watch him work and it is only the sleepy heralding of the last train for the night that unpins me. As I leave he is adding a spurt of flowers to the monkey’s head with fat wavy petals, like worms.

It is nice to not have to check the train seats for betel-leaf juice before sitting.

Today my visitor has been smoking weed. I find the end of the joint under the pillow and unpick the paper, crumbling the still-warm leaves between my fingers. With weed my attachment is a childish one, born of the popular associations with artistic thought and higher states of being, and while my own trysts with it had been dull in the extreme, who knows that my visitor may not have cracked the code? The girl from down the hall on the right is eating a burrito in the kitchen and shakes her head when I ask if she’s seen any outsiders around. “I just returned five minutes ago,” she says. She is about to retreat when she turns back. “Have you seen my jade brooch?” “I saw you wearing it two days ago.” She frowns, shrugs and enters the bathroom as I begin to peel a carrot, patting my pocket first to ascertain that the brooch is where I put it.

I remember in the middle of dough-making that there is a Project Management presentation on Friday. I check my phone for messages and there they are, sixty-seven of them, on the chat group I have muted, mentions of me followed by where-are-you and can-you-please-respond-asap. The other people in the group are all from Madrid and speak exclusively in Spanish, planning each project their own way before switching to English and assigning me the introduction or the conclusion as one might assign a visiting cousin the smallest bedroom. We are supposed to meet at three and it is two-forty-five now. I cover the dough with a towel, check my T-shirt for obvious wrinkles and head out.

The girl down the hall on the right has a boyfriend. I have seen the backs of his head and arms, both scabby. She seems to like projecting a life independent of him – the few times we have talked, she has mentioned night runs, fish fingers and the difficulty of maintaining a white lab coat. The girl in the room opposite hers is the youngest of us and has only ever been with a man once. “Someone from school,” she confesses, “he’d moved away when he was fifteen and I ran into him again just last month, at the movies. And it was so good, what we felt, it was like ‘where have you been all my life’, you know? But then it got weird after that first time, so we kind of stopped.” There is something appealing about her breathy candour, and I contemplate making a friendship of it. She goes on, however, to talk of the many classmates from her college who found rooms in the same building and how they were planning a hike that weekend. “You can join us if you like!” she offers nicely enough. I observe the passive slump of her shoulders and decline.

I take on average twenty minutes to shower, singing first a Whitney Houston and then a Jonas Brothers song, one ear on the alert for knocks on the door. We have a single bathroom and a cupboard-sized kitchen among the four of us, and yet I cannot recall ever not having either of them free when I needed it. It’s as though the other three know what I am like and are punishing me for it this way, by giving me a wide enough berth to do what I do but also to make me second-guess myself, to keep me always on my toes while showering or cooking about whether or not I’m taking up someone else’s space. I imagine the whispered conferences when I am not around, about the way I speak, the way I walk, the way I hold pens between my forefinger and middle finger when I write. On the latter I have been quizzed ever since I was a child, but what is one to do, reflexes like that can’t be unlearned. Or can they? I search for YouTube videos on the topic and find them all circling around the theme of ‘how to fix your handwriting’. The notion that I need to be fixed is repellent and I switch to the new album from Kaleo. From thence to acrylic pours, to fried rice techniques, to interviews with James Corden, to goats attacking truckers, to scenes from Jurassic Park. It is past four when I sleep, and past ten – two hours into my finance mid-term test – when I wake up.

Someone has left an empty jar of face cream on the kitchen counter. I wait a day and a half before slipping it under my top and darting back into my room. The Internet calls it a coping mechanism, a response to unacknowledged trauma. I prefer to think of it as a found art project – things I take from street sides, from open surfaces, from bathroom sinks where people have left them behind. It will be a statement someday, I promise myself as I sift through the bagful of finds I have gathered so far, even though the part that evades me is what that statement will be. A local flavour will likely be involved, a way to fix it temporally and spatially as representative of my life. Only yesterday, however, I removed a picture postcard of the parliament house swiped from the bulletin board in my classroom. No cliches, I had told myself as I tore it up. And all at once with a not-unpleasant shock I see what my neighbour meant that day about the Bruegel story being too commercial. I put the bag away and open her blog on my laptop, a mostly-black webpage titled somewhat ominously “Thoughts From The Deep.” She shares posts about once a month of the semi-intellectual-diatribe-against-life type – common enough, and yet there’s something fresh about the way she does hers. Right at the bottom, from about six years ago, is a post that reads: I have secrets I cannot abide to share. I close my eyes and think of the secrets I couldn’t abide to share – lies told, math tests copied, men cheated on – and for a few brief moments I allow myself to feel sorry about it all. When I open my eyes there is the ping of a notification. She has uploaded a new post, a page-long essay on the boiling of water that begins as a sort of battleground setup and concludes metaphysically: “It has begun, the transcendence into a higher state of being, and it will not be paused now.”

There is a card on the kitchen table when I return from class. It is from my neighbour, inviting myself and the rest of the block to dinner tonight. She has been accepted, runs the calligraphic text on the card, into a writers’ conference somewhere up in the mountains, and wants to treat us all to a celebratory meal. The girl from the room opposite mine is spooning peanut butter into her mouth and watching me read. So is it true, she asks me as I put the card down, did she really get into a conference? She’s won awards, I say with a shrug, I guess a conference couldn’t have been far behind. What do I care, either way I do not have to cook tonight, she laughs. Back in my room I ponder the question – what does one wear to someone else’s glory? It is too cold for dresses, and too warm for fleece coats. I find a pink blouse that has transitioned past ripeness and bears now a muted smell, like dry grain or rice. In honour of the night I add an extra layer of perfume.

There are fairy lights draped around the appliances and sequinned stars pasted on the wall. On the table sits the proverbial roast, a chicken that is whole and brown and glistening, actually glistening like in the advertisements for Thanksgiving I have always distrusted, and bedded in fixings of green and yellow drizzled with something spottily white. My neighbour has assumed position by the table with a knife in her hand and is dispensing with the chicken generously, almost eagerly, shaving slice after slice off the breast, sides, wings, flanks, fanning them out in threes on paper plates and putting one into every hand that approaches. A girl in dungarees has refused a plate. “I’m vegetarian,” she says. My neighbour looks at her with ill-disguised suffering and retracts the plate inch by inch, as though giving the girl a chance to change her mind. I shred the top half of my portion with the fork and that’s when I see it, the veins of red running through the inside. It is raw. I peel the skin off and chew, reminding myself that some people take their steak half-cooked on purpose. After the first layer of crispy brine comes a sting, truly a sting, of some metallic fluid. The Greeks divided our inner workings into four humours, only three of which would make it into modern textbooks, and who was to say that black bile – the one dismissed – did not in fact refer to the curse of eating flesh unjustly taken and served? I conceal the meat beneath the fixings and make my way over to the dustbin.

“Wait,” says my neighbour from behind. I smoothen my face into one of not-guilt.

“The compost heap is outside.”

Two people are kissing in a wooden chair, their pace neither quickening nor slacking as I pass them. I tip the food into the compost bin, and then drop to my knees and expel a mushy-briny mixture in which I can see the shreds of chicken and my own teeth marks in them if I imagine hard enough. Somebody giggles.

There is beer on the table when I get back inside. The chicken platter has disappeared, as have the plates from everyone’s hands, and I start to wonder if what I had thought was raw meat was merely a different style of cooking than I am used to. More people have come in, one of whom I recognise as someone from the house with the mistreated cat. Propelled now by an empty stomach as much as a sense of righteousness I decide to confront her about it. There is no cat in the house, I am informed with asperity.

“Then what is it I hear yowling every night?”

She blushes, a deep and actual pink, and walks away quickly. I watch her approach a man at the other end of the room and gesticulate towards me while talking as the man visibly twitches in response, and then it strikes me what they’re talking about and what the cat really is and I say “Oh!” out loud, like any tin-headed Enid Blyton schoolgirl who stubs her toe playing lacrosse. My neighbour has a beer in each hand and is talking loudly about child prodigies, which leaves me free to leave before she catches me doing so. Entering my flat I see a girl with purple hair grinding coffee for the filter and smile back at her before it occurs to me that I haven’t seen her before. I open the door to my room and find the bed made, the floor empty. For a moment I think the cleaning woman broke in, and then I spot the boxing gloves on the chair and register that it isn’t my room, and this is the wrong flat. And then I have my second “oh” moment in ten minutes as I realise how the cigarette butts came to be in my room and how the sameness of the flats extends to the keys as well, fitting just as smoothly into any of the four equivalent rooms on my floor, and I step back and out and count the doors – first, second, third to the left of the stairwell – before I reenter a flat and a room, my own this time, and lie on the unmade bed and drift off, my mind a whirl of thoughts about coincidence, secret visitors, the possibility of sharing a joint with them someday and the truly remarkable style of room security in this building.

I am invited to see the dean after lunch, runs the message notification on my phone, as though I am a guest and she is speeding up her afternoon salad on my account. And indeed when I walk in and take a seat it feels like we’re equals, the way she smiles and asks after me before introducing the purport of the invite. Here at the university, she says, they believe in the comfort of their students, and even more specifically that the boundaries of comfort are amenable to stretching. Consider it a rubber band, she says, one with a high – she extends her hands – degree of elasticity. She speaks with more deliberation than the words call for, and I can tell that she has rehearsed this metaphor, making sure she doesn’t fumble or even frown in front of me. But at some point – she continues, bringing her hands down – even rubber must stop stretching if it is not to break entirely, and even student comfort must have its breaking point, especially when it comes to either failing tests or missing them altogether. And far be it from them to judge a student by tests or assignments alone, but we are after all in a system, not a vacuum, and in a system, everyone who receives must also give. In short, I have six months left, enough to turn things around – and she has no doubt, she adds warmly, that I will do so much sooner – and I can refer to the student handbook for the minimum grades I must achieve. Anything less – she drops her voice to an apologetic pitch – and I will be recommended to my home institute for retransfer.

I used to like to tell people: “Give me the right stage and I will move the world.” The dean is waiting for me to speak, her hands clasped in front of her as though there’s nothing she’d rather listen to. And so I open my mouth to speak of – what? My found art? My unwashed clothes? My neighbour’s chicken? Which among these will resonate with the woman before me, she with the academic title and the earnest student-first principles and the right to a leatherback chair? She nods her head encouragingly, and there is a pencil on the desk I could flip and strike her on the nose with. Instead, I nod back, get up and leave.

As I come out I collide with someone whose files I drop. We crouch and gather in unison, his hands thick and knottily formed and with a crested ring that I recognise as that of the Freemasons. Standing up he towers a foot and a half over me and his English is only mildly accented as he smiles. He asks me which classroom I am in and seems pleased to know that it’s the one next to his. It is only when I am halfway down the quad that I place him as someone from my own building. Had he been at the dinner last night? What had he thought of the chicken? A month ago I might have been glad of the chance to see him again – today, I will likely forget him by the time I am home.

I can smell it as soon as I enter. There is a small mountain of it at my literary neighbour’s elbow and more to come, the knife going chop-chop-chop. She has been crying. For a moment I think that she too has misplaced herself but no, the girl down the hall on the right had admitted her about twenty minutes ago and told her that I’d be back from class soon, and in the meantime she needed something concrete and repetitive to do and there was an absolute mountain of onions beside the microwave. I refrain from pointing out that they are not onions, but shallots. It has been cancelled, she goes on, that conference she was accepted into, and they will not be returning her money. She tried to track them down online, and it turned out that they had no address and the number listed was out of service. They were a fraud.

We look at each other, and we look at the shallots. And then I pull out the covered bowl I had left in the microwave to rise.

“This might sound strange,” I say, “but those would be really good cooked up in dough.”

Out the cheap wine to keep us going, out the canola oil for the frying. I show her how I pluck bits off the dough and shape them into balls and she is dubious at first, but I reassure her by saying that this is by no means an original invention, people eat them everywhere in all kinds of cultures and give them their own special names – sopapillas, youtiao, doughboys, take your pick. From the cupboard I retrieve spices and red chilli paste to add to the shallots, making dents in each ball with my thumb and patting some of the mix in and pinching the dough back over it before tossing the ball into the Dutch oven, watching it puff and crackle and grow brown boils on top. There is a macramé-type bracelet on my neighbour’s left wrist with horsehead-shaped charms hanging from it. I can ask her where she bought it, or even persuade her to lend it to me, and perhaps she’ll just give me the whole thing if the food mellows her enough. She’s started eating one from the first batch and I can tell that she has burnt her tongue but she’s liking it, the way she’s nodding, and now she’s saying maybe we can add some cheese to it, parmesan or something, give it a little more of that nutty flavour. We’ve each had a glass and a half of wine and the world seems a little prettier than it did twenty minutes ago. Food connects, food enlivens, food expands the mind and body and I can live with that, I’m almost sure I can, the way I can maybe learn to live with myself someday. I take out the packet of Grana Padano from the fridge and glance at the per serving calorie count and shrug. A walk around the neighbourhood after dinner, perhaps, would not be amiss.

student life

New York relationships shame trauma

NEW YORK HANG-UP

by Victoria Lancaster • February 5, 2022February 5, 2022

My clothes hung from the tree on 73rd Street like dead fish. I’m not sure why I thought to walk down the street in the first place. It had been six months since we broke up and I dimly assumed myself ready for such voyeuristic indulgences.

It was late summer, my skin slicked in a layer of sweat, the streets half-empty from the exodus of residents from the piping hot city. What was the worst that could happen? I thought. I knew you were one of the individuals to retreat in August, so I considered myself protected from the possibility of running into you. I just wanted to have a look, a quick glance through the window to see if the apartment had changed at all since I left.

It looked as though the street had hardly changed. The black car with the man who lived inside it was still parked in its usual place at the end of the road. The windshield of the car was wrapped in tin foil to refract the sun’s punishing haze. I looked inside the car for the man, the top of his head just scarcely visible. He reclined back in his chair where he took an afternoon nap.

I looked up at the little-leaf lindens and Callery pear trees that lined the street. They were adorned in chlorophyll-saturated leaves. They stood tall, swept in partial shade, and somehow indifferent to the city conditions. As I neared the apartment, I studied the cracks in the sidewalk, counting each slab of concrete. I stopped when I noticed a cigarette glowing amidst the soil at the base of the tree outside of your building. I knew it was your abandoned cigarette by the half-burned eagle motif affixed on its side. One of the bird’s wings still survived.

Everything seemed pretty much the same about the four-story walk-up. The front door was held ajar by a brown shipping box. Two children with gauze in their mouths and their mother with her cell phone pressed into her ear walked out from the dentist’s office that occupied the ground floor of the building.

I walked to the other side of the street so I could get a better look at the second-floor apartment. The tree’s leaves and branches made dappled light on the prewar facade. I looked up into what was our first shared space together. I remembered how the realtor told us that the two looming windows were like gold dust in Manhattan. The air conditioning unit hung in the second-floor window and when I listened close enough, I could still make out its low murmur. I could still recall the way the rain at night splattered against it. The harsh pitter patters had bothered us over our first few rainy autumnal nights there until they eventually relaxed us and drew us into a most peaceful sleep.

I couldn’t see into the apartment because there were shades hanging which hadn’t been there before. I imagined you standing atop the chaise longue we picked up from someone else’s trash to fasten the shades to the windowpanes. We had once spoken about getting shades, but we decided against it when we realised how much we savoured the few daily moments of sunlight in the apartment. Each day we sat around waiting for the moment at half past five when the parquet floors of the south-facing studio would be washed in stripes of white light. Even the film of dust that the sun exposed didn’t seem to bother me in those moments.

I remembered how, in the spring, the tree bloomed clusters of minuscule white flowers; when the petals dropped, the branches were sprinkled in a layer resembling fallen snow. When we laid in bed on a Sunday morning, torn between a hangover and horniness for each other’s bodies, we watched the birds in the tree eating the tiny fruits. They would scatter seeds in their droppings elsewhere.

I yanked myself out of nostalgia. There was a breeze in the air and one of the tree’s branches tapped lightly against the window. I followed the branch’s sway with my eyes until I noticed a garment hanging there, billowing lightly in the wind. I thought I recognised it as a shirt you used to wear. My first instinct was to worry about the shirt, you, and how you must have got it there. Once, when you were drunk, you had climbed the tree, your bare feet digging into the trunk for dear life.

Then, as the branch swayed into a patch of light, I recognised the shirt as my own, a deep blue turtleneck with a slightly sparkled patina. As I looked further up the tree, following its branches up and up with my eyes like I sometimes followed the varicose veins in your arms, I noticed several of my garments hanging like ornaments, the tree itself like some kind of effigy. There was a T-shirt I wore to bed, a leather skirt I stole from my sister, and an unidentified blouse.

My blood pressure dropped like it did when you embarrassed me on a night out or spoke offensively out of turn. I felt exposed and ashamed, my clothes hung out to weather the elements on 73rd Street in a public spectacle. I imagined you throwing the clothes from the apartment in a drunken fury. I felt red-faced and abashed for walking away from our risky, youthful, and intoxicated first love.

There had been a moment a year or so before we broke up when we went to the Christmas party of your best friend. I had wanted to stay back, because I had the gut-wrenching feeling in my stomach like something was going to go wrong, like someone I hadn’t wanted to see was going to show up.

“Victoria, I promise you that guy will not go anywhere near the house,” you said, wrapping your strong hands around my torso and squeezing me tight in a way that reassured me I was, indeed, safe.

So we went to the party that night. Several cups of tequila with lime later, your friend, the host of the party, came up behind me and whispered I’m sorry, you may want to go out the back door into my ear. I quickly found you elsewhere in the room, an American Spirit tucked behind your ear and your lips carved in deep lines of red wine. I asked for help and gesticulated my eyes at you. You slurred something back at me. Before that point, your drunkenness to me was exciting and enticing, a risk that I was curious to take. Then, as I begged for you to process what I was trying to say, your drunkenness became a threat.

Over the clamour of the room and the drawl of the speakers, I heard the heavy lacquered front door to the house open. I looked up, suddenly sober. He whom I had never wanted to see again loomed in the doorway, his figure reemerging from what I wished were a nightmare. He was the boy at university who had, in one grey and fragmented night, taken advantage of me.

Before I got in a word with you, you walked up to him. Your body was loose and aggressive, your mouth was wide open, the word rapist hissing from your tongue. The others at the party stood around in silent passivity, while I let myself out the back door of the house.

There’s no proof, I heard someone say before the door shut behind me. I was somehow very warm in the frigid winter air. The words followed me home, the three-syllable sentence syncing with my breath.

In my mind, the two moments are inextricably linked. As I looked at the tree, in awe of its formidable power over the city, I felt sorry for it to be littered by my things. You loved that tree, in fact you had a great affinity with trees in general. It was one of the many fascinations of yours that I adopted because I wanted to be consumed by everything that consumed you. I thought of the poor birds, who seek refuge in the tree for food, protection, and oxygen.

The way I felt about my clothes hanging there, where they had likely been tormented by wind and rain, was no different from the way I felt when I slipped out the back door of the party that evening. Exposed and ashamed.

After I recounted the story of the party to friends, they gasped in awe, like you had acted a hero in an otherwise withdrawn room. It was true, you were the only person to defend me. I did admire you. Was I supposed to feel grateful? Shouldn’t that have been expected of my best friend and lover? The attention in that room was not on me nor my suffering but on your dramatic performance, which may have sprung from the right intentions but initiated a tableau of self-indulgent fists thrown.

When I later recounted the story of my clothes hanging from the tree like scarlet letters, they laughed at the melodramatics of the act and rolled their eyes at its novel-worthy volatility.

Why do survivors of destructive relationships feel shame? Why does shame spur from trauma?

My clothes, like relics of our lost relationship, hung there, some of them only held up by a single brittle branch. My instinct was to climb up the tree, to follow the same path I had watched you take to get to the top, and to take my things down. I decided, however, that the clothes were no longer mine, and certainly not mine to do away with from the tree. Part of me even felt optimistic that you would retrieve the clothes yourself.

Until that moment, I considered walking away from pain an act of denial. I wanted to stay to confront, change, erase, and fix things. Suddenly I realised that by walking away from your airing dirty laundry, I displayed a new form of kindness towards myself. Self-compassion – and in this case walking away – is, after all, the most powerful antidote to shame and heartbreak.

BY SAIL AND BY STEAM

by T.C. Mill • February 4, 2022February 4, 2022

“à voile et à vapeu” – “To work by sail or by steam,” French slang for bisexual

You, whoever you are, and above all that you are, are motion and heat and air and water. I breathe you – I try to breathe.

I turn to vapour.

We sail. We steam ahead, gliding on these sheets, skin slippery, muscles tightening and pushing with propulsive strokes. We lie back, gasping, as the engines cool into afterglow.

Hello there, to lovers past and future. To each of you and all of you. To you who are both, and to you who are neither, who have other ways of traversing this sea which encompasses so many voyages, so many destinations.

You are the reverberating hull, richly, fully steady in the waves. And I the sea that would swallow it, the storm that tosses, the rock that offers peril or shelter.

You are strung with cables humming in high winds, singing like the veins. You are laid with circuits of nerves in electric wires, sophisticated and swift. You make a sail with your broad back, a canvas of your bending, billowing body.

Hello to the steam of your breath. Thank you, when you guide me home with your hair like smoke. Welcome, when you find your way as I stoke the furnace within you.

Vapour dissipates into the atmosphere, not before it curls our hair and glistens on our skin. Hot enough to scald.

A heaviness in my lungs makes my heart beat rapidly, hammering, like the pistons in an engine. Something in me rotates, a propeller faster and faster. A smooth, sharp prow slices the waves. Sheets of it water across the deck in a smooth gleam.

Hello to you and your currents, you with whirlpools of hair swirling on your arms, your legs, leading down from your navel to the cradle of your hips, to the cyclone.

I am waves; my hips move in them with no more volition than the tide. But you are more than a strip of sheltering sand, absorbing what’s left of me after the crest. You swell above me as if full of the sky. Filled with me, filling, and yet there are gasps and panting from both of us as if never filled enough, still straining after something. Gusts of breath and sharp, sharp blows of something else, something more…

We surge against the current, push on through the storm. You stand in the rain, loose clothing in turns swelling around you and pushed flat against your body with the wind. Weather reveals and revels in every shape of you. And just as easily, I think, could such fabric be ripped off.

Cables gone salty with ocean breeze, with sweat, hold sails taut against the bodies of air that push into them. Seemingly so thin, so strained, but holding. Knots grow tighter as they dry. Perhaps it’s dangerous. Perhaps we shouldn’t let them ever get dry. Let’s not.

Hello to you, past and future, familiar and unfamiliar, never identical, never alien.

To you who are…

You are this, or that, in a language I barely know, in a language I cannot speak; there’s no language I can quite speak at this moment.

Am I a sail? Am I steam? Am I hull or zephyr? Am I anything so vast, so real? Am I water? Am I rope?

What am I above you, and at your side, and beneath you – watching your broad back, your strong shoulders, your breast full like clouds bearing storm, your straight and curving parts, the uplifting weight carried by your bones?

sexuality

THE JANUS DOOR

by Beatrice Williams-Rude • February 3, 2022February 3, 2022

Janus, god of doors, represents looking forward and backward, beginnings and endings, and transitions.

When Alan hit his head falling against the bathroom door, neither he nor I nor EMS could open it. It took the fire department breaking down the door to rescue Alan and rush him on his way to the hospital.

I wanted to be in the ambulance with Alan, but EMS would not wait for me to dress because it was a head injury and Alan needed treatment immediately. It was seven a.m., and I was in a robe.

Alan wanted his wallet, which I gave him after filling it with “tip” money. EMS asked Alan what else he needed. “I have my wallet and my wife; don’t need anything else.”

Alan loved our apartment, which at five o’clock became a golden pond. He’d long said the only way he’d ever leave it would be “feet first,” and as EMS wheeled him out feet first, a chill ran through me.

I tried to dress quickly but was impeded by the wood and nails that had turned bathroom and hall into what looked like a war zone.

Alan went into the hospital with a head injury and was transferred to rehab for the weak leg that had buckled, causing the fall. He was tested for COVID-19; the result was negative. He declared it the third-happiest day of his life, the first being when he married me.

Three weeks later he tested positive and 10 days later the virus claimed him.

During the period from March 7, 2020, to April 15, 2020, I cared little that our apartment looked like a construction site or that walking barefoot was not an option as the floor was littered with splinters and hidden nails.

At some point, management had the place cleaned up and a temporary brown door was installed. It was the peak of the pandemic in Manhattan, and I was told that all nonessential work would be delayed until the threat had lessened.

There was no funeral, no memorial service, no gathering of friends and family, no hugs. I’d been prevented from seeing Alan for the last month of his life. I wasn’t even allowed to view his body.

I mourned in isolation.

I was advised to focus on the happy memories, but I couldn’t. Seeing the door and damaged door frame forced me to relive the morning of March 7 and the weeks that followed.

COVID-19 had destroyed the rituals of grieving and the comfort to be had by human contact.

Alan had said that at any ceremony for him, he wanted the Mozart Requiem Mass in D Minor. So, this past April 14 – anniversary of the last day he was happy, expressing joy at our upcoming anniversary on April 17 – I immersed myself in the Mozart Requiem. On April 17, I switched to one of Alan’s favorite operas, Le Nozze di Figaro.

I still couldn’t indulge in looking at our myriad photo albums, proof of our happy times – in Budapest, Venice, Vienna, Paris, Prague, Florence, etc.

Alan and I usually started our evenings at home watching Jeopardy!, competing to be faster than the contestants and each other. Now, as I watch without him, in one of the commercials the background music starts with Chopin’s Minute Waltz followed by a rousing segment of Mozart’s Requiem. Yes, the Requiem. Alan’s Requiem.

Several weeks ago, on a routine inspection of smoke alarms, the supervisor noted the bathroom door and frame. The pandemic, sadly, is still with us, but he ordered that the door and door frame be painted.

It was done – beautifully.

That night, scarcely aware of what I was doing, I started to look at our photo albums and felt Alan, in his Hudson blue urn atop the music cabinet, smiling at me, guiding me through this transition and reminding me that Janus looked forward as well as backward.

COVID-19 grief marriage

Iran Iranian Fiction Iranian literature translated fiction translated literature

BOOK REVIEW: SEASONS OF PURGATORY

by Paul Eaton • February 3, 2022February 3, 2022

What is purgatory? In Shahriar Mandanipour’s stories, purgatory transgresses memory, personal history, political upheaval, war, and social norms. Boundaries and lines of demarcation are not clear in this collection of stories. These stories invoke constant unease in the reader – the feeling of dislocation from place, time, society, and self that one imagines must accompany any purgatory. Each story leaves you haunted. Ghosts figure prominently in the tales: those who are dead, our past selves, lost loves, drifted purpose, dreams, and memories. No character really cleanses or purifies themselves, and no story ends without interpretive possibilities. Purgatory, it seems, is the act of being human, living with the consequences of our decisions and the realities of our times.

Translated from the Persian by Sara Khalili, and published by Bellevue Press, Seasons of Purgatory is a collection of short stories clearly inspired by the historical events of 1979–1980 in Iran. Revolution, coup d’etat, war with Iraq – almost every story deals in some fashion with the aftermath of this momentous period in Iranian history. No character is left unchanged by these events. Each mesmerizing story follows decisions of dissidents, soldiers, and families.

Captain Meena – the only character who appears in two stories within the collection – grapples with the complexities of his decision to let a defecting Iraqi soldier die to protect his own men (“Seasons of Purgatory”). This soldier, named Nasser, becomes a specter for the soldiers in this mountainous outpost, his corpse decomposing on the mountain, the white flag waving in his bony hand. His corpse seems to move – one day his head is looking left, the next day it is looking right – sending Captain Meena into a sort of madness from which he cannot escape. In a later story, “The Color of Midday Fire,” Meena reappears. Facing burnout, fatigue, and questionable mental stability, he is on a mandatory vacation when his daughter is killed by a leopard. He hunts the leopard, facing him directly at one point in the story: “he explained that during his fray with the leopard, for a few seconds, they had locked eyes. He spoke of the leopard’s amber eyes, of their coldness, of the icy flames that lived in those eyes”. Meena, though given ample opportunity to kill the leopard, never kills him. “I couldn’t,” he says. “My child’s flesh is in its body…my child’s blood runs in its veins… I just couldn’t”. This is a purgatory, and it will last all the seasons of Meena’s memory. As readers, we are left to question Meena’s decision making – his leaving Nasser to die, not taking out revenge on the leopard – and imagine our own decision making if put in these situations. They are not morally rational decisions, but rather choices fraught with the complexity of life, death, and the connected nature of reality.

Animals and seasons figure prominently in these stories. Bellevue Press publishes books that seek to open interdisciplinary dialogues at the intersections of arts and science, according to an imprint at the back of the book. Two questions seem central in Seasons of Purgatory: what makes human decision making primal/animalistic? And, does “nature” (in the form of seasons and animals) act more rationally than man? A truly gut-wrenching story in the collection, “Shatter the Stone Tooth,” portrays the limits of man’s compassion for the animal world. In the story, the narrator serves as an aid worker in a remote village struggling with crop failure, poverty, and disease. A stray dog comes to the village, is assisted in survival by the aid worker, but is ultimately gruesomely killed by the villagers. This act of human cruelty sends the aid worker into a downward spiral of madness expressed in letters sent home to the love of his life. She cannot decipher the letters, as they become increasingly erratic and delusional. He speaks of a cavern where he has discovered a carving of a man and a dog. The aid worker is trying to decipher the cavern art – what does it mean, its significance to his own situation. He is driven to the cavern, never heard from again. Is this a return to the elemental – our primal relationship with animals in the face of so much human cruelty – or psychological madness? These types of uneasy endings and questions typify Mandanipour’s stories.

But, as importantly, the stories play with this uneasy relationship between reason and madness, particularly in the juxtaposition of humans against the natural world. Animals and seasons have knowledge and agency in each of these stories. Fish are premonitory, vipers develop agency, trees, mountains, and streams contain secrets and truths.

The psychological and sociological consequences of retreating into ourselves, that results from our own and other people’s decision-making, is another theme of the stories. Most of the characters find themselves alone. In “Shadows of the Cave,” Mr. Farvaneh remains socially isolated, unable to sleep after his release from incarceration during the coup d’etat. Farvaneh is haunted by the dark, the shadows – he leaves lights on and must resort to having neighbors stay with him until he falls asleep. The soldiers in “Seasons of Purgatory” are haunted by the night sky: “in the middle of the night, one of us would jolt awake, drenched in sweat, and he would listen to see whether he heard that scream in his sleep or whether someone in the valley was calling for help”. Dorna, the main character in “If She Has No Coffin,” suffers from a psychological affliction, perhaps split personality disorder, perhaps just an imaginary friend, that accompanies living in a war-torn nation. Similarly, the narrator of the closing story, “If You Didn’t Kill the Cuckoo Bird,” is imprisoned. He seeks to remember the woman he loves, and through narrative stories he shares with his cellmate, awaits the day when he will be released from prison and reunited with her. In the end, we cannot as readers reconcile whether his cellmate is real or fictional. The narrator doesn’t escape prison, nor is he released. He is left only with his memory.

The stories also deal explicitly with the ramifications of war, injustice, cultural norms, and forgiveness. Two stories highlight these themes poignantly. “King of the Graveyard” centers the narrative on two parents grappling with the disappearance of their son by the state. The mother, Mahrokh Khanoom, seeks to find her son’s grave after he was wrongfully accused of a crime and executed. The father believes he has found the grave but is not certain. His source seems shady and untrustworthy, motivated by his own financial gain, and the mother questions whether the grave is that of her son throughout the story. By the end, the father also has his doubts. It is a heart-wrenching tale of not having closure on the death of a loved one. In “Seven Captains,” the cultural issue of stoning adulterers to death is examined. Decades after he slept with a married woman (Kokab), a man seemingly from a Western country, returns to Iran to visit the site where she was stoned to death. He wonders why, after planning their escape, she never came to be with him. The story questions the cultural practice of stoning, but also people’s decisions to participate in such practices. In this story, the narrator is culpable in Kokab’s death.

As a closing note, a word more about the narrative style of these stories. Part of what makes the collection so arresting is the writing. Many of these stories are nonlinear. They flow back and forth between memory, dreams, and the present. They transport you in a disjointed fashion across the narrative arc. Thus, readers are encouraged to read slowly and carefully. You will not always understand the construction, nor the conclusions, but this is part of Mandanipour’s project: to put us into a state of disequilibrium in a way that highlights the complexities of the human experience in the fallout of war and revolution. Seasons of Purgatory is not an uplifting book of short stories. Many are quite jarring, discombobulating, and challenging to read. But they are necessary.

Seasons of Purgatory
by Shahriar Mandanipour
Translated from the Persian by Sara Khalili
Bellevue Literary Press, 208 pages

French Literature translated fiction translated literature women writers

THE END OF BRITISH SUMMER TIME

by Tony Osgood • January 28, 2022January 28, 2022

Lee would tell the curtains if they’d cheer how “bodies have a mind of their own, flesh occupies itself with new desires,” and he knows that now there’s no need for Bex to spit out the bloody obvious. He’d say, could he turn back the clock “and surely, you should see – ” as palms spread Christ-like innocence itself, though God-knows X-ray Bex she always saw too well, CT-scanned his moral fudge. “My body, too,” she said as she set off. His body chose to not make worse the scene, flesh defaulting to lumpy mope not flight nor fight.

Let’s move on. How the weeks become litter. Here’s Lee, alone, housebound, slothful legs imitate absenting until an empty sofa blocks his way; shouts at furniture, ceiling, unflushed cistern, throat lying to the emptiness how he’ll “face discomfort in comfort.” He’s unmapped in an avalanched room, tells the fat-encrusted hot plate a mitigation, why, unjust it is, a man as blossom as he must have a hobby not undeserved punishment, plain to see, it’s his nature, nurturing adventure, much like setting out for Asia and discovering America. Chief product of his land: Floors emptied of her shoes. Population: One. Imports: Wine. In an altogether different time-zone.

His body shudder-sighs, sits squat-sulk, flutters creak-cracked lips to sip imports to slip through news of current affairs, not his, no no, it meant nothing, not that, rather hanky-panky in the Cabinet, as per, Parliament of Cocks, power pooled in privately educated spaces, relay team of twits, where among corporate nibbles, sauvignon blanc, leaks of CCTV infidelity, as the television schedule begins its nightly mockery, the announcer warbles “now the weather where you are at six.”

At seven it transpires the world’s end is a sour front of low pressure, all frost fingerprints on the metal handles of artfully closed doors, but look, let’s be reasonable, he contrives to game the hard soap sink, lectures it now Bex is long gone, not that she listened, how a phase-change is no mystery, it being comprehensible, at least to someone somewhere settled.

Still, may cause disruption.

London’s forecast is for fragile crystals by late evening, mizzle turns to sleet, hail to locust, usual for this time of year, though things will settle, in some new region she will settle, while beside himself the television chirrs “coming up next filmed before lockdown a new series of Pointless.”

He unpeels a land of unlit lamps where a coat hook shrugs fibres of her fabric into his lungs, exhales an unintended air, no graces, at least he’s the house to himself, home as castle, battlement bafflement, and her bedsit well worth his fuck, bit of fun, hobby, nature unnurtured, why not rather stamp collecting? as the schedule drones, fails to condone, trills “Only Connect, Mastermind, Would I Lie to You?”

Her going snuffed his coming, home fired burned after losing an hour on a stranger’s threadbare sofa, 50 quid, claim it through expenses, showered, usually, as Bex cooked, as if he wished to change early every clock while home proved able to twist itself into a house, right location, do it yourself, wrong channel, wide-screen peeps “up next DIY SOS, Grand Designs, Amazing Small Spaces.”

In the corner lounges an outline of bugger all, there, can’t you see her memory? floored, a thread, wholly lost by threshold, a rug rich with fossil footfall, furnishing a singular key hung high on undusted walls as dust motes from love’s last needlework award a thimbleful of nothing, though he will settle, she will settle, with someone somehow settled.

Don’t forget to turn back the clock.

“I haven’t lost my head,” Lee tells the kettle. “This is me rattling the cage.” On it boils, limescaled, her job to clean, cold room of roiling steam, though maybe he will settle as she has settled in relief. “It could be worse, got to laugh,” he lies over the continuity announcer, chitter “Scandi crime thriller, long silences, lingering shots of lakes.”

The one thing able to satisfy the longing in his lungs is the goodnight cigarette they shared, a small addiction, more a habit, settee settled, which for her was a sniff of stupid sin, for him a fluttered intimacy, crammed with bitter lipsticked nicotine, neither able to finish a whole one alone.

“How come, how I did come, how did I come to be alone unsettled at this windowsill of moments?” Notwithstanding her gone-scent wisdom or the memory of the forgiveness of her body. “This being the last episode of the current season,” these documentaries of lost men in colourless rooms, trills tele “Storyville, some viewers find offensive.”

Rioja two-for-one toasts empty belly. Given there’s no witness he licks her favourite glass in search of her last drop. Colder than he can remember. A nice woman on the other side sings soft, blue, forecasting “Sufficient for snow, a weather warning, Question Time.”

Don’t you have a bed to go to?

relationships time

Books, Literature, Reviews

BOOK REVIEW: THE SKY ABOVE THE ROOF

by Jane Wright • January 27, 2022January 27, 2022

In her latest novel, The Sky Above the Roof, Nathacha Appanah takes us on a journey through three generations of a fractured family, told from the different perspectives of a mother and her two children.

One night, a 17-year-old boy named Wolf steals his mother’s car to go and find his sister, who left home 10 years earlier after a furious argument involving a cake and a brandished knife. Most of the journey passes carefully and without incident, but when the unlicensed Wolf reaches the town where his sister lives, he panics and starts driving on the wrong side of the road, causing an accident. When we join the story Wolf has just been arrested and is on his way to the local remand centre, leaving his mother (Phoenix) and sister (Paloma) to deal with the fallout.

The Sky Above the Roof is a short book (134 pages), and I think it’s fair to say that there isn’t a wasted word. Appanah’s writing is truly beautiful, shimmering in places, poetic in others. The prologue has an almost fairy tale feel to it – indeed, it begins with ‘Once upon a time…’ and bounces along for a couple of pages setting the scene in much the same way as the narrator of a play or a pantomime might do, before the curtain is swept away and the main players are introduced:

‘And so once upon a time in such a country there was a boy whose mother called him “Wolf”. She thought this name would bring him strength, luck, natural authority, but how could she know that this boy would grow up to be the gentlest and strangest of sons and that he would end up being captured like a wild animal and there he is now, in the back of the police van, as we turn the page.’

Names and their meanings are incredibly important in this book, as is the power that they have to define us, both good and bad. Phoenix used to be someone different. Born Eliette (which means God has answered), she was the only child of parents who thought they were unable to have a family after years of unsuccessful attempts. When they do finally have their much-wanted baby, they have had her name picked out for years – a name chosen to honour their own grandparents. Much is made of Eliette’s beauty, indeed she is the most beautiful baby in the hospital according to the doctors and nurses on the maternity ward, who call in friends from other wards to come and marvel at her. But her mother knows instinctively that she is not an Eliette and that the name is wrong, yet she sticks with it anyway and tries to make her into the Eliette of her dreams. She is a child of many talents and an accomplished singer from an early age. Crammed into uncomfortable costumes and made-up to look more mature, Eliette is acutely aware of the looks she gets from her audience – lustful from the men, disapproving (sometimes) from the women. As she grows and develops it becomes only more painful to her and she lives with a constant ball of fear in her stomach that she tries in various ways to suppress or vomit out. Eventually one of the men puts thought into action, forcing a kiss while she waits to go on stage. His hands are so big against her 11 year old cheeks that he could easily crush her skull as he holds it still and forces his tongue into her mouth. When he has gone, her mother scolds Eliette for messing up her makeup and reapplies the cosmetic mask – the perfect painted-on personality – before sending her daughter back out to face the crowd. That night, Eliette’s performance doesn’t go as expected, and Phoenix is born.

The name Phoenix is of course symbolic as that of a new woman rising from the ashes of Eliette, but it’s also important in that it’s the name that she chooses for herself. Eliette was a persona she was forced to wear and in throwing it off and choosing something new she is reborn. All traces of Eliette are obliterated with hair dye, dark makeup, goth clothes and, later on, by tattoos. No-one (except her psychiatrist) is allowed to call her Eliette anymore. Eventually Phoenix is able to quiet the demons that live in a skin she never felt was her own and is able to be the person she has always felt she really was.

For her children though, this pattern is just repeated again: she gives them names that carry weight and preconceptions that they will almost certainly fail to live up to. Wolf, in particular, is nothing like a wolf. He is a small, delicate child who gets lost in his own world and stumbles over his words. He can fix almost anything mechanical, yet he suffers from an almost crushing anxiety. He is just as imprisoned by his name as Eliette was by hers and struggles under the weight of it. Throughout his childhood, Phoenix regularly takes him to the doctor, worried that there is something wrong with him and looking for an explanation for his strangeness, his other-worldliness, but Wolf is not ill, he is just… Wolf. After the accident, and knowing that her son wants only his sister, she falls into a deep sleep and dreams she is in the car being driven by the Wolf she had always dreamed that he would be; strong, respected and in control.

Whereas Eliette and her parents existed very firmly in the centre of their town – visible and social, a factory worker, a dressmaker, and a popular daughter – Phoenix’s family exists in the margins. They live in a ramshackle house that stands alone on a road that looks as though it leads nowhere, Phoenix making her living by running a spare parts business. We know that Eliette had friends at school, but Paloma and Wolf seem only to have each other. Whereas Eliette and then Phoenix command attention (albeit in different ways), Paloma actively tries to take up as little space as possible, sitting on the very edge of the chair and trying to disappear through silence. Even when she has moved to the town she exists on the edges of society, working as a librarian (a role that is quiet and unobtrusive), and living through the noises made by other people as they enjoy the warm summer evenings outside in the park.

All of this makes Phoenix sound as though she’s painted as a bad mother but that is not so. Appanah takes great care not to judge any of her characters, nor to give them labels. Instead, she tells their stories and just allows them to be on the page. Phoenix’s parents, who lived a comfortable middle-class life and gave their child everything they thought she wanted, could also be accused of failing their daughter, but they are not. Likewise Phoenix, who is unconventional and cold, unforthcoming about the past (neither of her children know a single thing about either of their fathers) but who has taken control of her life after struggling to find her place within it, is doing for her children what she thinks is best, so that they don’t have to go through what she did. She is wrong about this, as it turns out, but again Appanah doesn’t judge, she merely tells the story, allowing us as readers to reach our own conclusions. Of course, no-one ever really knows what others need, and we are often scared of communication, of looking back as well as forwards and of embroiling ourselves in uncomfortable conversations. Yet this serves only to perpetuate the trauma, to ensure that it is inherited by each generation in turn, leaving fresh scars and bringing new fractures to an already fragile family unit. In the end though, Wolf’s accident and detention go some way to healing this desperately broken family. They haven’t seen each other for 10 years but his actions bring them back together and at the end of the book there is a sense that, even though it will take some time, this family is going to be alright.

The Sky Above the Roof
By Nathacha Appanah
Translated from the French by Geoffrey Strachan
Hachette, 134 pages

PINK TEAKETTLE

by Mercury-Marvin Sunderland • January 23, 2022January 23, 2022

Barbie told me that I woke up five weeks later inside a box of bricks. Of course, I was perfectly aware of the waking up in a box of bricks, but I didn’t know it had been five weeks.

“That’s what happens if you eat human food. You lose sentience for a period of time.”

I stared at her. “Then why the hell didn’t you stop me?”

“Uh, I tried to for ages and you didn’t listen.”

“Hey,” I protested, “You told me that eating a raw potato was impossible.”

“I did. Because you wouldn’t have believed me.”

We were in her dreamhouse. She turned off her pink stereo playing Barbie Girl by Aqua in the background. She turned on her pink teakettle. “Do you want cherry, cherry blossom, bubblegum, cranberry, or grape?”

“You have bubblegum tea?”

She turned around and gave me her best I’m-fucking-Barbie look.

“Bubblegum it is.”

She gave me a crimson mug, and sat back down. “That won’t kill you.”

“Well, yeah, I know that.”

“I’m just saying.”

“Okay, but, like, the potato didn’t kill me. So why do you feel the need to say it this way about the tea?”

“Because the tea won’t kill you.”

“Are you saying I was dead?”

She snatched the tea from my hands, drank it in one long gulp, then did the same for her own.

“Wow, you asshole.”

“Look, with the route we were going, you would’ve thought I poisoned your food. What I’m saying is, you can have all the pretend food and drink you want, but it’s extremely dangerous for you to eat human food. Do you understand? I want you to never pull that stunt again.”

“Then why did you let me?”

She produced a set of pink french fries from the cupboard. “Look. Eat these.”

“I told you, I don’t like cooked potatoes.”

“You’ve never had them.”

“If I’ve imagined they’re terrible, then they’re terrible.”

“Eat.”

“Fine.” I took a bite and made a face. “These are too burnt,” I complained. I was having a hard time not throwing up. Honestly.

“Exactly.”

I looked at her.

“You imagined that real fried potatoes were always too burnt. So I gave you pretend french fries and they were too burnt.”

“Yeah?”

“And it wasn’t poison.”

“So?”

“You can’t make up what the human realm of things is like. Unlike how it is here. Do you understand? If you try to eat another raw potato, you’ll be thrown into another consciousness-less coma again.”

“Isn’t a coma already consciousness-less?”

“Who knows, I’ve never been in a coma.”

“Are you sure? You never had a Barbie Coma Victim set?”

“Lego Guy, you’re being ridiculous.”

Yeah, I knew I was being ridiculous. But I was also bitter. And angry. “Okay, yeah, high-and-mighty-rocket-scientist, Barbie-of-all-trades, if that’s so, then why are raw potatoes so prestigious that I have never seen a single toy raw potato in my life?”

She gave me a look and rubbed her eyes. “Are you SERIOUS.”

“Yeah, I’m filthy serious.”

“Never mind. You have problems. I’m done.” She then went upstairs to ignore me in her pink hot tub.

“Ugh,” I muttered, staring at the pretend bubblegum-pink tea leaves at the bottom of “my” teacup. I decided that Barbie could do her own dishes. So I left, without even saying goodbye.

Barbie the absurd

KITCHEN

by Jesse Edmondson • January 22, 2022January 22, 2022

The cooking profession, while it’s a noble craft and a noble calling, ’cause you’re doing something useful – you’re feeding people, you’re nurturing them, you’re providing sustenance – it was never pure. – Anthony Bourdain

I always enjoy meeting people who haven’t experienced a single shift in a professional kitchen yet because they threw that one dinner party for seven people two years ago that everyone said was just perfect is now under the impression that they must be a natural. They feel deeply in their hearts they could step out of whatever non-food-related profession they hold and take up a new career doing what they love, cooking. They usually have a grand collection of cookbooks authored by the food network demigods, along with matching kitchen wares. If serious, they often will even possess some skill as it pertains to putting together a moderately involved recipe, as long as they have sufficient time, space, and order to do so. Of course, these three are by far the hardest things to come by in a professional kitchen, maybe next to clean towels. They will have a blog detailing some of their favourite recipes, complete with unnecessary 3,000-word essays on the history and emotional connection they have with this particular food before ever showing an ingredient. Yes, the home “chef” is easy to spot. I can take one look at your scarless fingers and unjaded eyes and know no real-time was spent in the shit. It is not lost on me that a kitchen is not a Hadron collider and every single person reading this can cook something. Everyone can boil water, turn on an oven, mic something, and keep yourself and maybe even a family alive. In this fast-not-good world, I’m happy when anyone takes the time to improve their culinary abilities, but because everyone can cook something and probably does every day is the root of why some of you think you can step onboard. This would be similar to telling a joke at work, getting some laughs, and thinking you’re ready for your first-hour stand-up special…just saying. There is a universe of things you need to consider before entering this world.

My first impression of the Pines kitchen was how confined it was. Not so much the floor space; anyone who has spent more than a shift in a professional kitchen knows you’re usually dealing with the square footage somewhere between a large tent and a small RV. No, the real worrying observation here was the fact that at 5’11”, I could place my palm flat on the ceiling with a bent elbow. It’s about 45 minutes before service really is set to go off and the temperature in the kitchen is already hovering around the 105º mark. This will only increase progressively through the night until the ill of health and spirit begin to tap out. It feels like a submarine, lathered in grease, travelling through one of the lower levels of Hell. An absolute furnace. OSHA has never and will never hold power here. Already sweating, I do one last line check, making sure all needed elements are ready and in their homes. The core menu offers around 30 different options, ranging anywhere from a ridiculously priced filet Diane and a roasted duck ragù to blackened mahi-mahi tacos and a lemon poached halibut. I write a weekly special menu with seven to ten more choices that are usually changed out on Friday, which today was. If lucky I could start a couple of the more difficult selections Thursday to give the staff a slower night to get more familiar, although this was a rarity. The new items were usually seafood-heavy in nature and what this particular establishment was known for. Most require several components and techniques to complete and must be done so at a highly consistent level. Being a pro, consistency is king. The best among us are craftsmen, not artists. Every brick you lay must be the same. It is also essential your ticket time does not exceed 14 or so minutes. If you find yourself eclipsing 20, you’re all but doomed. The tickets will begin to curl to the floor like some kind of 19th century stock ticker, the expediter will lose his rhythm, confusion will creep in as sweat begins to pour out of your face, and the darkness will consume you. This is what nightmares are made of. Mise en place is your religion and only path to salvation.

Overall it’s a dated menu, most items being relics of the past. This is not surprising being that the restaurant is located in Pittsburgh’s affluent north hills, where we primarily feed the dead and dying aristocratic class. These ancient bastards would be filing in soon. A long precession of Mercedes, BMWs, and Porsches would fill our lot. This was enough to make any underpaid cook enjoying his predinner smoke physically ill. Despite looking down the barrel of a five-hour marathon through the Gobi, any capable cook worth his recycled staff meal made from unsold scraps will gather his strength, stifle his resentment for the other half, and take his or her position. My group of misfits on this night was a more than capable bunch. No more or less eclectic than any other kitchen on this planet. A couple of dishers, one in his 50s, hitchhikes to work every day and looks like he wandered off the set of a Rob Zombie film. The other is in his late 80s just lucky to be alive. The garde managers (cold line) are a pair of stout, ginger brothers from the local high school. They possessed an actual work ethic, which was rare for children in the area. The kitchen’s nucleus was composed of my grille man, Jeff, who was new to me but not to the ranks of the damned. He wandered here after 15 or so years of drudgery, the last few of which he’d spent in the country club circuit, so he knows our clientele. He had a similar level of experience to myself, which led him to covet my position. He tries with limited success to hide his resentment. His overall unhappiness with life gives him the aura of a red-haired, humanoid Eeyore. Despite his shortcomings, his pride won’t allow him to be a sub-par cook on his grille and therefore is an asset. My runner/prep on the fly guy this evening was Joe. A 40-something eccentric and lovable Long Islander that looks more like a dock worker than a cook. I employed Joe at a previous location and, knowing his talents, plucked him from a night of Bud Light and conspiracy videos to give a hand after my original runner was too dope sick to handle his post and bailed. For his cowardness, he shall not be named. Then you have my sous chef and sauté man, Jared. It’s his first day back after the birth of his second child. He took two days off and was ridiculed without mercy for taking the second day. I gave Jared his first cooking job three years back on a prior vessel. I didn’t bother to commit his name to memory for weeks (as is custom) until I knew he’d last, and last he did. He was a quick learner and developed into one of the better cooks I’ve worked with, rivalling my abilities on the line. He officially became my sous and friend near the end of our time at that particular establishment. I would probably still be there if it weren’t for a longstanding feud between the bar manager and myself reaching its precipice. There was a regime change and I was forced out. Their misstep was assuming Jared would stay on under the new chef, the new chef whom I’ve had the displeasure of working with in the past. He was a spoiled, pasty, whiny, poor excuse for a cook. The walking definition of privilege. The only thing in the kitchen I had ever witnessed him do with any skill was to punt a sauté pan into the ceiling, effectively sticking the handle into the drop-down tile when he got overwhelmed by a four-ticket rush. The first day after the coup my loyal sous did not show up to help their transition. Neither did my gruff but lovable previously mentioned Long Island-born prep cook, Joe. This left the already unskilled chef with only fairly unskilled help. After a couple I’m sure disturbingly bad services, the restaurant was forced to close for a week to gain some kind of control. This was very satisfying to me.

After a few months of under-the-table work at locations that can only exist on the absolute fringe of society, the unemployment was drying up and it was time to take a legit gig. Now around a year into my Pines career, I’m fairly settled in my new white-tablecloth environment. On this night the rush came and went as it has a thousand times before. Overall a good service. We turned the two main dining rooms a couple of times, as well as the patio. It’s not a massive place so probably 220 covers, give or take. The only noteworthy complaint was from a decrepit old badger who brought in a hand-held gluten detector that must have registered a single flour molecule that floated by air to her gluten-free crab cake. I couldn’t help but be immediately envious of the cooks before me that did not worry about such technology being implemented. This also won’t be the last time I hear about the crab cake. Today’s professional culinary landscape isn’t complete without about three or four billion critics and I’m sure this gluten-related complaint will have a new incarnation online, where it shall live for all time. But still a good night overall.

Typically the final hour or so of a weekend service, I start the cleanup process with the guys for a few minutes then break off to have a meeting with the owner. I descend the stairs positioned by the back door that lead to the office. The temperature drops thirty degrees easy as I move underground. After a gruelling 12-hour day in the heat, this is most welcome. Passing through the dry storage I make mental notes of exhausted inventory. The quinoa is basically gone and with no order coming in until Tuesday, I’ll have to stop somewhere in the morning and buy out. There is about a pound of coconut flour but this will be more difficult to find at any kind of reasonable price. So in lieu of a retail raping, I’ll do my best to stretch it. One of the chef’s most important skills is the ability to stretch anything. Time, food, patience, income, all of these things need to be stretched sometimes. I proceed through the basement kitchen toward the office door in the back corner. This space was mostly used for catering orders for anybody from the Pirates to one of the many off-brand pharmaceutical companies that litter downtown. It was always a welcomed assignment pulling a few hours in this temperature-controlled environment.

In the office, I find the Pines proprietor Mike, sitting behind his desk peering over his glasses at his computer. The staff before my arrival had nicknamed him Paycheck. They called him by this mostly in secret but with my arrival and admittedly more loose style, I took to openly addressing him like this. He enjoyed the moniker, as he should have. Check was fairly tall, 6’3” or so, alabaster skin, snowy hair. He was polished with a deliberate opulence. A great communicator, you could tell every word he spoke was calculated. I’m not saying he was exactly how imagined Satan may appear, but close. He was a White House aide during the Carter administration and currently holds a high seat at Orchard Hill, an affluent North Hills church. I suspect this was more for optics than genuine spiritual conviction. I take a seat across from Check, residual trails of salt carving paths down my face from the night’s work. He pulls a sapphire-coloured bottle from behind the desk, pours a shot into a rocks glass, and hands it to me. I take the shot without hesitation. It’s a smooth, citrus-infused gin, easily the best I’ve ever had. “Wow, that’s delicious…gin?”

“Gunpowder gin…taste the grapefruit?” he inquired proudly, knowing he’s giving me something I never had.

“I do, it’s really good,” I said with the appreciation only a beaten chef could give.

“Isn’t it nice? You’re going to make a slush for the oysters tomorrow night with it, and reservations are already high, maybe you should call Spalata and try to get a few hundred more tomorrow if possible.”

“I added 300 more blue points….should be here by ten, he claims. He did his best to unload some barramundi from last week on us, but I shut it down, had to hang up on him.”

An overzealous salesman is the scourge of a busy chef. They typically show up in the middle of lunch, dripping with thirst. They come in all shapes and sizes, but if you look directly into any of their soulless eyes you can always see the depraved chase for the sale that connects them. It’s like crack to them. Paycheck nods in approval. He turns his attention to his computer with the month’s numbers displayed. We’re up on food sales and wine slightly. This is good for me, being that I’m only the third chef this illustrious restaurant has had in 40 years and the roughest around the edges, so the pressure is definitely on me to perform. A fact that wasn’t lost on Paycheck. Luckily for me, he enjoyed smoothing out rough edges. Something we both did know intimately about this business was it’s a true meritocracy. In a world where there are fewer and fewer of them, the fact is I would have never made it the several months I had running his business if I didn’t possess the necessary abilities. I’ve been war-tested long before I walked through the Pines doors. I never attended a traditional school of higher education in the culinary arts such as the prestigious CIA like many of my peers, but I did work under them for many years, absorbing every skill and technique displayed. Advancing myself only through victory on the line until I became their equal, and in many cases their superior. The kitchen doesn’t care if you are educated, illiterate, black, white, polka-dotted, striped, saint, or convicted murderer. It makes no difference if you’re gay, straight, male, female, or anything in between. Can you put out a decent reduction sauce on the fly while under constant fire from the unrelenting ticket machine and bitching wait staff and simultaneously keep an eye on your strung-out grille man? Then you’re in. I don’t care if you recently escaped from the local asylum, you will man your station until they drag your crazy ass back. No amount of tenure will save you; the position goes to the best person for the job, and many times that person has an electronic monitoring anklet. Because of our accepting nature and willingness to give anyone a shot, you absolutely have to weed through the garbage. During my career, only about 10% or so of all my hires have panned out. Work ethic is rare, call-offs are common. You just have to push through, poach when possible, and survive. If this description of who could be cooking your food is at all surprising to you, you never spent any real time in a kitchen and it shows.

During my 15 years of servitude, I’ve worked alongside many excellent cooks, but very few Gordon Ramseys or Bobby Flays. If I were forced to guess my place in the field of chefs and cooks out there, it would be not unlike my economic class, straddling that line between lower middle and middle middle. Even as a self-described lower-middle-class chef with a decade and a half of experience behind me, let me assure you, if you’ve never set foot in a professional kitchen, I am better than you. Every single cook on my level (and many below) are better than you. I don’t care how many quiches Rachel or Giada have walked you through, we are better. Better at sauteing, blanching, braising, searing, cutting, slicing, dicing, pickling, curing, sharpening, and so on. And these are just day one terms. Something Giada never told you about is the economy of motion. Your movement must be tight and never wasted. If you want to stay under that 14-minute ticket time, you must be fluid; there is no time for frantically searching for your next move. It’s also essential to possess the ability to think on the fly, improvisation to the non-kitchen ear. Unless you live in a repurposed gazebo with your acting troupe, we are better at this, too. This one is one of my strengths. I hate to 86 anything, ever. Once I blended up raw angel hair pasta when I ran out of pastini for wedding soup. I’ve used turkey in fricassee when chicken was unavailable; it was the best they ever had. And, of course, I’ve indiscriminately swapped out this fish for that fish, especially when it’s being blackened and put in a taco. These are skill traits all chefs and seasoned line cooks possess. All chefs are cooks, but not all cooks are chefs, but they’re all better than you.

Our superior skills are not only confined to the kitchen, oh no, our skills comprise a vast spectrum. The majority of us are better at the procurement and distribution of narcotics, although those days are all behind me, it’s still a practiced skill in much of the culinary world. We’re also very good at destroying relationships, capable of burning even the most soundly constructed bridges, both personally and professionally. Just ask the spouse or, most likely, ex-spouse of any chef. Definitely first aid on the fly. Any experienced cook can sever his finger to the bone and then, with the silence of a samurai, bandage it with whatever he or she has to work with. This can be rubber gloves, tape, rubber bands, paper towels, cellophane, basically anything that is not an actual Band-Aid. So if you’re a newbie, you happen to cut your pinkie finger, please don’t run crying to the chef, you won’t like his reaction. If you’re accustomed to a non-restaurant environment, It would suit you to get rid of any predispositions on how a superior should speak to you. This is something Gordon has communicated accurately. And you don’t have to worry about how to respond; “heard” is the only word you respond with. It’s one of the only words you’ll need at all. In a well-run kitchen all you will hear is one or two people using complex, expletive-filled sentences with the dexterity of a composer, and “heard” from everyone else. Occasionally “behind you,” “behind you hot,” “behind you sharp,” you get the idea. These phrases will be so beaten into you that they will extend to your daily lives conversations, confusing the ignorant masses at Walmart.

The bandaging process on the fly can also be made more difficult based on what libation the cook has been indulging in. If it’s after 7 p.m. he’s likely had at least one drink, thinning his blood. If it’s a Pines level arena, you easily could have spent the better part of an afternoon trying the new wine selection; the chef must be knowledgeable on this after all. Or maybe you’re in a less than scrupulous establishment, it’s Cinco De Mayo, and you made a science of smuggling Coronas to you and your men between the hundreds of “dollar tacos” you’re slanging. Easily 75 percent of the cooks I’ve worked with have essentially been functioning alcoholics for some time. That’s not to say every cook is drinking while making your quesadilla, but many are and nearly all are drinking two minutes after their shift. I’ve personally sent out some of my best plates with a moderate buzz. The drink for better or worse is in the kitchen like heard. Our capacity for the devil’s nectar may only be rivalled by war-scarred soldiers on leave, and even then we’re not turning down any challenges.

After we wrap up our review of the numbers and do a brief back and forth on special ideas for the upcoming week, I return topside to check on the crew’s progress. Jared has shifted to delegation at this point and is no longer doing any hands-on cleaning. Jeff generally gets visibly disgruntled around this time, knowing Jared and myself are basically out the door, even though we arrived five to six hours before him and would return in ten hours to do it again. This type of response from subordinates is not uncommon and I’ve dealt with far greater hate in the past. It’s not a problem, it’s the natural ebb and flow of things. It would be strange if he didn’t bitch.

Paycheck’s grooming was not subtle. Although I had experience successfully managing past venues, both financially and creatively, there were certainly holes in my education he planned on fixing if I was going to have such a hand in his enterprise. He also knew at the end of the day the restaurant’s energy had become a little old and as he would often say, most of his customers would be dead soon and he needed to attract a younger median age. While not as polished as his previous classically trained chefs, I brought a fresher and more modern take on food. He essentially was trading me his 40 years in the game worth of wisdom for my youth. So in continuing my education, there were after-dinner meetings, there was usually a before-work meeting, a midday meeting, sometimes an off-day phone meeting, and so on. Every other month or so we would take a field trip to attend a leadership seminar or maybe some kind of upsold entrepreneurial workshop. These were usually held downtown in some midlevel hotel. I mostly felt out of place at these, because I think I was the only one in attendance making less than 400k a year. It would start with an elevated continental breakfast where Paycheck would schmooze with his people, leaving me to fend for myself. Sometimes I find myself in a hurry trying to finish my cantaloupe and scrambled eggs before some multimillionaire, upon discovering I’m a chef, feels obligated to interact with me. They will usually ask some generic questions like do I have any kids, or what kind of fish I like to cook? This usually comes off how you might ask a toddler what his or her favourite colour is. Then we go into the main room where we listen to an author who wrote some 17-step book on success do his thing for a couple of hours. Everyone would get a free copy of said book, Paycheck plugs the Pines for a few, we get into his Mercedes and he barrels down the road around 90 to get me back in time to cook dinner.

At the end of the day, these excursions were a true blessing and a great change of pace from the typical owner/chef relationships in my past. Many restaurant owners come from backgrounds that couldn’t be further from food. They are seduced by romanticised fantasies of the industry and how exciting and cool it would be to own a restaurant. They look at it from a patron’s perspective. “I have fun going to cool new places. I can start one and it will be like that every day!” they tell themselves. This, of course, is a reality that only exists in their minds. By the time they realise they’re error, it’s too late and all the money they made being a personal injury lawyer is gone. I’ve had owners who in their 50s band rehearsal outweighed any restaurant responsibilities ’cause they just knew they’d be signed soon. Then, of course, I worked somewhere where you would routinely come into blood-stained sidewalks alongside broken windows from the night’s previous action. Here we would serve delicious food from scratch until 11 a.m., but after that, the bar served overpoured drinks until 2. This paired with the fact that it was against the rules to call the police, on the owner’s command, meant any given thing could happen from night to night. Stealing food, armed robbery, murder, it just didn’t matter what the offense was, everyone knew the owner’s hatred for the police and you’d be fired immediately for raising them. Certainly practiced what he preached. Once he got arrested for an unpaid $100 fine, refused to stand for the judge, and did a month. Sending money orders to the jail for gambling was then added to my responsibilities. Usually from the belligerence of the night, the front door would forget to get locked, once resulting in the cash register getting emptied of several thousand. Surely police were needed for this. Not quite. Always the do-it-yourselfer, he opted on sleeping in an inflatable kayak in a dark corner of the dining room for weeks, just hoping they would return. Less gunpowder gin here, and more boilermakers for breakfast. He didn’t care for business taxes either and did his best to go without paying them using an obscure 17th-century law he learned about on YouTube. It’s safe to say he was my favourite. Last and certainly least, you have the common absentee owner who allows his ship to drift aimlessly, its success completely dependent on the work and goodwill of the higher-end employees. These owners would have more kids every time you saw them so much time would pass between visits. These archetypes are closer to the norm in this industry, for better or worse, hence why my happiness with the change.

In the end, I crammed a bachelor’s degree worth of business management education into about a year, and I was fortunate I did because a year is all I had. Things can change very quickly in this world and on a crisp PA fall day upon our arrival to work for another day of drudgery, we were greeted with a bright orange sign stuck to the front window. It was detailing the liquor license change of hands. The always silver-tongued Paycheck explained how this just had to do with bureaucratic bullshit, how it originally was in his mother’s name and taxes, and so on and so on. He held a meeting explaining this to the kitchen and how there was nothing to worry about. He dodged every question from the staff like a seasoned politician, leaving them somehow comforted yet confused. My sous and I stayed silent through the inquiry from the rest, seeing through the hustle. He kept up the charade for a good month, I assume while paperwork was finished. The month of clarity was a gift, allowing Jared and myself to work out the details of the catering company we were going to start. Although he’s had many suitors for it over the years, in the end a pizzateur from the area made him an offer he could refuse and acquired the 40-year-old legacy restaurant.

The last couple of weeks were more than awkward with most of the staff stuck between unabridged anger for check as well as pure panic for their futures. It didn’t help that the new, very enthusiastic proprietor was busy in and out measuring for upcoming renovations. His concept, whatever that was going to be, wasn’t going to come to fruition for many months. This didn’t stop the staff from lobbying for future employment. Everyone except Jared and myself. I had already secured the majority of Paycheck’s catering equipment he wouldn’t have a need for, at a very generous markdown. We already had a website being built, found a kitchen to work out of, had all of our ducks in a row legally and creatively, and were eager to get going. It was November 2019, and I didn’t foresee anything getting in our way.

The final service was truly something to behold. The word was out that it was the last chance to eat at the Pines. The last day of a place that anyone 40 and older, living in the North Hills, had spent their entire lives going to. Busier than I’d ever seen it, with every elite in the area making an appearance. Service started without a hitch. We were all on point, and things were going smooth, every plate perfect. That’s until a bumbling bar manager built like a small bear bumped into my 80-plus-year-old dishwasher, knocking him to the ground. It was his heart-wrenching cries of pain that I still can’t seem to forget. I’ve never felt so helpless than being on that line, not able to leave for even a minute to help Pete. The ticket machine continued to spew paper as a waitress propped his head up with a throw pillow while he lay directly in front of us wailing. We all looked at each other with mutual disgust that we couldn’t help and could only continue to cook on through the rush accompanied by screams until the paramedics got there. I’ve cooked through many rushes with screaming from angry chefs and wait staff but never screams of pure agony from a disher. I have to think that in every other occupational setting, next to an actual battlefield, business would take a hiatus, you could help Pete, then continue. But not in the kitchen.

No after-dinner meetings that night. Paycheck was mostly drunk by the time we’d normally be sitting down. He was emotionally saying his goodbyes to customers he’s served for 30 or more years. I sat out at the bar that final night with Jared, having a Stella. I watched a drunk patron wearing butterfly wings cut down a square of the distinctive racehorse wallpaper with a box cutter for a souvenir. I distinctly remember her saying, “Look what you made me do, Dunlap,” in an almost cartoonishly wealthy-sounding voice. It was the richest thing I’d ever heard. The next morning we showed up one last time to get all the unopened stock ready for donation. The staff was also given the go-ahead to take any food unsuitable for donation they may want for themselves. I had my eye on a tin of saffron worth around $300, but it was already gone by the time I arrived. I did get an industrial-sized jug of garlic powder and enough star anise to last ten lifetimes. Believing this could be my severance pay, I also got a couple of utility knives and a steel mandolin. Watching the staff take every grain of rice or nearly empty bag of flour made me think of a sinking ship and the frantic accumulation of goods that would occur. Being optimistic about the catering prospects if this was the last time I was in a restaurant kitchen, it would somehow be a perfect end.

Long before the written word, there was someone, somewhere, that was designated the cook. Maybe he just had a knack for picking tasty plants to accompany your mammoth shoulder that also wouldn’t kill you. It is an ancient skill and one that anyone can learn fairly easy to be good, or even great at. But you can never learn everything. It’s been with us since the very beginning, in every corner of the world, and has had time to evolve innumerable different directions. You would have to live a hundred dedicated lives to even get close to seeing, tasting, and cooking all there is. James Beard himself never got close. As complex as it is, being a pro was never about the act of cooking. That’s the simple part. I can teach an accountant to make gazpacho, but you can’t teach someone to handle the surge of a full-blown Friday rush in a virtual Hellscape where anything and everything will go wrong. Then do it again, and again, until death or stroke in some instances. You also can’t teach someone to mesh well with literally every personality type under the sun, in a high-stress, extremely claustrophobic environment, while putting out a consistent and delicious product together. If you can imagine a human complete with flaws, interests, philosophies, and motivations, someone is cooking out there that fits the bill. The kitchen is easily one of the most diversely rich working environments that exist, which is my favourite part, and if this scares you more than the unrelenting heat, ticket machine, or venomous front of the house, then you could probably use some time in the kitchen, and not to get better at cooking. A few home cooks reading this probably think it’s bullshit and would be confident putting up their specialty against my version, and you should be, it definitely could blow mine out of the water. Especially when it was made in a central air-controlled, updated, modern colonial home kitchen. So quiet all you can hear is the click from your pilot light and the sound of Rachel’s voice walking you through that quiche. As I said before I applaud you for your culinary efforts; it’s just about so much more than the act of cooking. That being said, if you still want to give the big show a shot, track me down at whatever ex software programmers rusty barge of a broken dream I’ve been shanghaied to keep afloat, and I’ll give you that shot. I’m sure someone called off anyway.

cooking restaurants

Haiti Haitian Literature Literature in French translated fiction women women writers

BOOK REVIEW: BLUE: A NOVEL

by LILIAN PIZZICHINI • January 21, 2022January 21, 2022

The French original of Blue, entitled Le testament des solitudes, won the Grand Prix littéraire de l’Association française in 2009. Its author, Haitian journalist, poet and novelist Emmelie Prophète, was born in Port-au-Prince in 1971. Her other novels include Le reste du temps (2010) which tells the story of her relationship with murdered journalist Jean Dominique. Prophète has worked as a broadcast journalist, a cultural attaché and as the director of Haiti’s national library. As a writer, however, she occupies spaces that are abandoned, misrepresented and unseen, spaces that are inaccessible to the international literary elite, to her readers in Europe, to the government, the police, to anyone on the outside looking in.

Emmélie Prophète writes Port-au-Prince through the daily lives of its least visible inhabitants, simultaneously inviting and resisting voyeurism. In an interview with Thomas C. Spear for île-en-île, Prophète remarked, “I am fundamentally a city-dweller and port-au-princienne […] The city is my place, it is the city that inspired me. I really like being in the city, in this city of blackouts, this city that is always too dirty, this city of misery, but which I accept and love, despite everything.”

In Blue we don’t get so much of the dirt of the city, the tangled, jarring rhythms of the streets. Instead, Prophète places her narrator in the lounge of an airport. Travelling alone from Miami to Port-au-Prince, the narrator finds comfort in this liminal space. She feels free to ponder the silence that surrounds her homeland, her mother, her aunts, and her own inner thoughts. Between two places, she sees how living in poverty keeps women silent, forging their identities around practicalities and resilience. The airport lounge thus becomes a vulnerable and intimate space in which we lose sight of the representations that so often attach to Haitians in North Atlantic media. Equally importantly, we lose sight of the conventions that force the arc of a story onto a piece of narrative prose. Instead, images of a ravishing Caribbean island seep through the texture of the cloth that Prophète works with. The result is captivating. Equally, the voices she conjures emerge like a radio frequency tuning in and out, balancing pain and anger with the comfort women provide for each other.

It is an interior piece, but the outside world does intrude on this meditation on family and memory. Our narrator’s world is now ravaged by a void that has gripped all media outlets, all words and stories: 9/11. She is caught in the act of folding inwards, in order to collect within herself the last bits of hope that have scattered like rags in the wind in order to smooth them out on a table. This table is not set for a homecoming feast, but as a stage for her characters to act out the narrator’s childhood. The love with which Prophète stitches these rags together is conveyed by a style that embraces the moment. These moments are poems in which “blue” is a synonym for “home”, where “any voyage is possible”, and where she is walking a long, pebbled dirt path to school again. Profound psychological truths trip lightly off Prophète’s tongue. Her mother is burdened with household duties, as are the other women of her neighbourhood. The narrator as child looks on as they become hardened to their fate and fearsome to their children, or so soft that they are ineffectual and can offer no maternal presence.

This testament of solitudes explores the fate of family members who can only be considered as insignificant in the frame of geopolitics. However, the narrator, who never ceases to travel, to leave, and to come back again to her childhood home, manages to charge these characters with the universality of their lives. Snatches of reminiscence are recomposed, step by step, in which three sisters and their mother note their triumphs and regressions.

Prophète pulls off a tricky proposition. She listens to all the voices that reside in her mind, separating them out as mother, sister, aunt or remnant of her own younger self. None of these voices are her property, she does not lay claim to authorial omniscience. Instead, she searches for what has gone unnoticed: the substance of a woman’s life when it is lived in poverty. This heritage is none other than Haitian, but it is true to any life lived in hardship.

Her geographical distance works to make the writer in her feel as close as possible to this island in the Caribbean Sea, and these three sisters and their mother, “born between dead fields and sad rivers, the only dream they had inherited was that of leaving.” Women who experience different destinies and the tension that comes with growing apart. But what brings them together is their absence from public life, as if at the same time as they are trying to acquire the signs of affluence, the world is pushing them aside and they themselves are disinvesting from it; “mastering” neither the language, nor its meanings, still less its codes. It would be fair to say that Prophète’s characters are not fleshed out as recognisable protagonists. They remain stubbornly vague and shadowy, and it is sometimes hard to keep track of their individual stories. But this reluctance to emerge into the full light of the reader’s attention is appropriate for Prophète’s vision.

It is our narrator who finds places in the world in which she can be wholly true to herself. Prophète is fantastically funny about the processes and cliches of travel. She is uncompromisingly herself. In these moments, in this airport lounge, she holds the family together, while drinking a Starbucks cappuccino – “[It] doesn’t even have a scent anymore.” Whilst she drinks it, she remembers a ritual from her childhood:

“Each girl born into this family takes over this ritual, which stops only with death.”

The instruments of this daily rite consist of a pan of beans roasting on the fire. Then the process begins of grounding these beans:

“A young girl on either side of the mortar, each with a long and heavy stick, pounding the coffee forcefully by turns. Their clothes are completely black from the dark coffee powder afterward. The brew that is prepared from this and served to everyone is strong, full-bodied. I never pounded the coffee beans myself, but God, how I loved to watch.”

It is worth noting the three young girls in this scene. The two girls who are actively working the pestle and mortar become shaped by the process – their appearance, their musculature no doubt, their identities are formed by it. So, too, does the third girl find her shape, her role, her purpose. Hers is to watch, to love, to remember and to write.

Blue: A Novel
By Emmelie Prophète
Translated from the French by Tina Kover
Amazon Crossing, 128 pages

I KNOW IT SOUNDS FARFETCHED

by Louella Lester • January 21, 2022January 21, 2022

Well, at first I didn’t believe it when I saw it on my cousin Margret’s feed, but then my Uncle Ben posted it, and my friend Zack’s wife, and then it went viral, and I was thinking it’s pretty hard to fake a photo of a bunch of deer hanging around a work boot, and then my sister checked that site that checks facts and couldn’t find anything, so there you go, anyway it was about this farmer somewhere in western Canada, Alberta I think, where it was so hot and dry this summer you know, and because of the pandemic he couldn’t afford to hire help and was sweating it out every day on his own, while his wife worked at a care home in town, well, the wife kind of ran the show, you know, and during that heat wave she made it a rule that he took off his dirty sweaty clothes near the barn and hosed himself off before he came into the house at night, which he did, but the first time, when he went to collect the clothes the next morning, they were gone and he thought his wife must have moved them, then every day that week the same thing happened, then at the end of the week, when his wife went to do laundry, there were no work clothes, so they go out to check more closely and noticed deer hoof prints, then they got to thinking that the deer must’ve been using those clothes like salt licks, so the farmer stopped leaving the clothes out there, but you know how when wild animals get used to something, and then you take it away, it can get dangerous, well weeks later, after a double shift, the wife fell asleep before the farmer came in, the next morning he wasn’t there, so she looked for him outside and saw about 30 deer all round the side of the barn, now deer usually look so kind with those soft big eyes, she told the reporters later, but those deer squinted, she swore, and snarled, forcing her to back away, but she managed to grab a photo, the one that went viral, showing a bunch of deer and this one big buck licking a work boot, and she never saw her husband again.

Canada viral stories

GRANDMA’S HANDS

by Christine Breede • January 16, 2022January 16, 2022

He grew up in a family where every hand was needed to work. You washed them in the morning, you washed them at night, and in between there was ploughing and sowing, spraying crop and harvesting. The family’s farmhouse looked over flatland, frozen under snow three months of the year, cracked in July and August. Every day, his father’s big hands moved from before dawn to after dusk, with the calm intent of a man accustomed to keeping a steady pace.

When Gus was little, his parents’ farm was the earth, the sun and the moon, filled with the never-ending, unfailing growling of engines, the whiff of musty wallpaper and woolen blankets and the wind blowing dirt into his round face. There were slamming doors, the muffled sounds of his mother cooking and arguing from the kitchen, the deep smell of grain, soil and wood, and in the summer, the hunt for crickets. Gus gasped at their jumps, free as fire crackers, a carnival of random will.

His head, when he slept in grandma’s lap, rested between her hands. Her hands were even bigger than his father’s, bigger than his face when he was born. But just like his father’s they moved at a steady pace. When her swollen knuckles burned, she let hot water run over the pain while washing dishes. At night, he watched grandma knit in front of the fireplace. She sat in her wide-armed chair next to his older brother’s wheelchair. His brother held the skein of red yarn between his pale hands and let the thread slide through his long fingers over limp legs.

On Saturdays, Gus sat next to his brother in church for choir practice, one hand on his wheelchair. Grandma clapped for every song and slipped candy into their small palms on their way home. When Gus turned twelve, his father needed him at the farm and he could no longer join his brother at choir practice. You have a gift, the choir director said and handed him his old nylon string guitar. Accept it as your own. Six months later, Gus was playing Bach.

If it wasn’t too windy or cold, he played behind the old wooden shed filled with rusty tools. At first, his fingers didn’t listen. He allowed himself to not know what he was doing. He listened to songs on the radio and matched up the notes. He practiced seeing and hearing a piece without an image of the printed page. At night, he climbed up into the dust-filled attic over grandma’s room and played in the dark. A parade of laughing and weeping notes sprung from his fingertips. There his hands were in control over a carnival of his own. Perhaps grandma listened, perhaps her hands rested.

He stopped biting his nails. He needed them to grow over the end of his fingertips to assist in the attack of the note. He needed his right thumb nail to be longer than the others. When his nails broke while working in the fields or the garden, he felt like a bird without feathers. He tried to fix the breakage with glue but the glue stuck to his skin and made it worse. He became used to hiding his right thumb inside his fist. No one seemed to notice, as long as he kept working the land. One day, Grandma slipped him a nail file.

Gus and his dad started building a new wooden shed behind the house. He had to lift the wood planks onto the work bench and cut them in half with a hand saw. His brother watched from the dark window behind the outdoor peeling bench, where grandma sat and shelled fresh green peas, her hands flowing, the dog sleeping between her feet.

Sweat ran from his father’s forehead down his long face, as he tore apart the old shed. Then he stopped, eyes pinned on Gus. What’s the matter with you? he asked. Why are you holding the plank as if it could bite? Gus gripped the wood harder and felt the rough surface press against the soft of his palm. The air had filled with sawdust, salting his eyes. His knuckles turned white. When the work bench wobbled, his hands went limp. He dropped the saw and, with a loud clang, it hit the gravel.

His father let go of the jackhammer in one hand and the old wood in the other. He picked up the saw from the dirt and looked at it for a long time, his eyes narrowing in on the saw’s teeth. Gus’ brother wheeled himself out to the porch and craned his neck. The engines quieted. The dog made a low, whining sound. Grandma set the peas aside. His father turned toward the old shed, then half-way swiveled back and slapped Gus in the face hard.

He fell back, keeping his gaze on the gravel. When Gus looked back up, grandma stood before him and slapped his father just as hard. Perhaps even harder. His father’s face turned red, one cheek more than the other.

In two weeks, the shed was finished and in three months, grandma was dead. Gus didn’t dare to play at her funeral. He sat in church, his shoulders rounded and his hands wedged under his thighs. But he’d written a song, ‘Grandma’s Hands’. He had set down the score up in the unbroken seclusion of the attic before she died. He had already begun to climb higher into the shaking uncertainties of a world of his own.

Now he only had to add the lyrics and be brave enough to sing along.

guitar work

american football Cheerleaders cheerleading sports subcultures US Sports

RULES OF THE GAME

by Stefanie Fair-King • January 15, 2022January 15, 2022

As a kid, I knew football was on TV when I smelled Mom’s cheese dip cooking in the kitchen. In a pot on the stovetop, she’d melt a golden brick of Velveeta cheese and stir in a can of Rotel, a mild blend of tomatoes and green chilies. Sometimes before games, I’d help her make pigs in a blanket by wrapping cocktail weenies in little sheets of canned biscuit dough. We’d swaddle sausages in their own Pillsbury blankies and then bake them to a crisp buttery brown. When a big game was on, our coffee table doubled as a snack buffet. I’d be happily dunking a tortilla chip into my bowl of cheese dip when Mom would leap off the couch, throw her hands in the air and squeal, “Be there be there be there!” I’d snap my head around to watch her performance as she bounced around the living room. These moments of intense excitement happened when Troy Aikman threw a long pass to Michael Irvin. Mom’s display was like a prayer to help the receiver catch the ball. For my money, Mom put on the more entertaining show.

In the 1990s the Dallas Cowboys won three Super Bowls, two of them back to back. I was six for the first win, seven for the second, and one day shy of nine for the third. Growing up in North Texas, I’d walk through the bakery section of the grocery store and see cakes decorated with the players’ names spelled out in icing. I grew up with the understanding that the Cowboys were the greatest team, from the greatest state, from the greatest country on earth, and I believed wholeheartedly that I lived in the bull’s-eye of excellence. It did not cross my mind that that anyone would root for the other teams. Cheering for the Cowboys was an act of patriotism, and to cheer for a different team would be un-American.

I followed my best friend and her parents through a crowd of teenagers at the high school’s stadium. Students hung out in clusters under the bleachers where they drank canned sodas purchased from the concession stand. I didn’t recognise faces: These were high schoolers. My friend and I were in intermediate school, which was for students in the in-between years: We were too old for elementary school but not old enough for middle school.

When we emerged at the front of the stands, the field revealed a game in progress, played on real grass under high powered stadium lighting. As we clomped up the wooden bleachers to our seats, my eye was drawn to an army of sparkly costumes which twinkled under the artificial lights. Beautiful girls with bold red lips and glittery eyelids wore black cowgirl hats and polished cowgirl boots. They smiled bright white smiles and chatted with each other as they walked out of the bleachers toward the field.

In Texas everything is bigger, including the halftime show. The Lone Star State was the first to step up the pageantry of football games by adding dancing girls to the lineup of halftime entertainment. Regardless of the school’s mascot, this group of girls, called a drill team, usually wears a combination of Western wear which can include accessories like fringe, gauntlets, cowgirl hats and boots. A signature of the Texas-style drill team is a kickline, where girls stand in one long line, link arms, and kick high enough to bring their boots to the rim of their hats.

We found our seats in the stands, and the halftime show started. The band began to play and the pretty girls with the flashy costumes strutted to the centre of the field. As they danced, they shook pom-poms and changed formations with precision. I noticed that a few girls dancing in the front had uniforms that were different from the rest of the team. While the majority of the girls wore black uniforms laced with red sequins, the girls in front had silver sequins. “Why are the girls in front wearing silver?” I asked my friend. “Those are the officers,” she said. “They’re the special ones.” As I watched the team transition into a new formation, link arms and start high kicking, I formed an idea. I would be one of those special ones.

I was on drill team all four years of high school, and I did become one of the special ones. I made it all the way to the head position, front and centre for pep rallies and halftime performances. I was proud to wear a band of silver sequins around my black cowgirl hat. I took a special joy in high kicking on the 50-yard line, the centre of the field. I’d kick high enough and hard enough to blot my red lipstick on my beige tights. I wore those stains as a badge of honour, a symbol of flexibility and strength.

At the start of a game, the band would play while the drill team girls danced in two long lines, smiling to the stands and shaking our pom-poms, creating an aisle for the football boys to run through to get to the field. Their parents shook obscenely loud noisemakers which they had fashioned from giant cannisters filled with marbles and the like. Grown men were required for lifting and shaking these weighty rattling contraptions. Air horns rounded out the cacophony of noise meant to support the boys as they ran onto the field. The racket intensified when they scored touchdowns. It was so loud that during my drill team tenure, the homemade noisemakers and air horns were banned from games.

My first drill team director was in her 20s and had bleach-blonde hair that touched down just below her shoulders. She always had a pristinely powdered complexion, and she wore wine-coloured lipstick. We called her Coach, which was informal and more familiar than calling her Miss Last Name, which was standard in the drill team world. Calling her Coach belied the fact that everyone was intimidated by her, including our parents.

Coach would get irritated with us for coating ourselves in glitter. Once at a game, my teammates were in the stands in front of me, hosing each other down with spray-can glitter. We girls had established that gold glitter looked best in blonde hair, sliver looked great in dark hair, and multicolour was an all-around improvement for anything it would stick to. Coach turned around from her perch at the front of the stands and shouted, “You girls are sparkly enough!” She left her position after my first year on drill team to be a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader.

I tried to be a good Southern girl who pays attention to the game and cheers for the boys. I knew that in order to take a real interest in the game, I needed to understand its rules. I am going to learn football. I am going to learn football, I repeated over and over in my head like a mantra. The truth was that I couldn’t care less about the sport, and to make matters worse, there were layers of distractions between me and the players, and my natural inclination was to watch everything else. My attention was primarily drawn to the cheerleaders, who were often directly in front of us on the track around the field while we drill team girls sat in a block formation in the stands. Their cheers involved choreographed dance moves as well as jumps, tumbling, and stunts. How was I supposed to pay attention to guys knocking each other around when acrobatics were in progress right in front of me? My situation was like doing homework with the TV on: I couldn’t focus on studying while there was a good show on.

I’d also watch the people in the stands. Adults balancing trays loaded with hotdogs, nachos, and sodas carefully inched toward their seats, trying not to spill their concessions on a spectator’s head. Little kids, utterly uninterested in football, played a game of their own. They chased each other up and down the metal steps, their stomping creating a rumbling thunder as they played tag.

As the sun dipped behind the bleachers, the giant stadium lights would blink to life and create a stage for a variety of bugs that would swarm the lights, anxious for their moment in the spotlight. They were reckless, bumping into each other as they pirouetted around the light poles.

The whistle would blow. Oh crap. I was supposed to be studying the plays. I didn’t notice that my attention had wandered. You know something’s truly not for you when the competition is watching bugs buzz around a light pole and the bugs win.

I had a crush on number 99, a tight end, but that was a far as my interest in the game went. He had dark hair, pale blue eyes, and beautiful teeth, but these attributes were only visible with his helmet off, so you can see how his playing football got in the way of me admiring him. In his uniform and helmet, it was difficult to pick him out on the field, and I’d lose interest. I never did find out what a tight end does.

During my junior year, our captain would turn around to us in the stands and yell, “Ladies, we are a spirit organisation!” Upset whenever there was a lull in our cheering, she’d repeat this until I wanted to strangle her. I didn’t audition for the drill team with my spirit. I auditioned with turns, high kicks, and splits. I tried out so I could dance in front of an audience and wear sparkly costumes, not so I could feign interest in sports. But I came to understand that another aspect of the performance was to cheer for the boys, to clap, to yell, to congratulate them when they won, and to console them when they lost. Sometimes they would have tear-stained faces after a game. I thought it was weird that they cared so much. I didn’t.

The difference between football and drill team is that is the boys get to do their activity with no strings attached, while the drill team girls have to do theirs under the guise of supporting the boys. I can’t imagine them coming to one of our dance competitions, the quarterback standing up in front of the players yelling, “We are a spirit organisation!” and urging them again and again to yell louder for us. Football doesn’t pretend to care about drill team.

Once before a game, a football coach came barrelling out of my high school and whacked me with the door, which sliced through my boot and ignited a sharp pain along the side of my foot. He glanced at me but didn’t break stride. I’d been practicing a routine on the concrete outside the school because the dance space dedicated to the drill team was so small that we just used it as a dressing room. I hobbled for several steps and was able to more or less walk it off, but the gash in my boot remained. I danced in those boots all four years of high school, all the way through my senior year as captain. Every time I tried to polish my boots to a pristine, like-new white, I ran my fingers along the indentation, where the rubbery material had been cut open, revealing grey fabric underneath that would not take hold of the white shoe polish that I heaped upon it.

During my time on high school drill team, I joined a dance studio in a neighbouring city. My studio was invited to perform alongside the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders at a special holiday halftime performance at a Cowboys game. We watched the game from the sidelines while the players finished the second quarter. We’d be ready to hit our places as soon as halftime started. From a TV screen or the bleachers, even professional football games have always come off to me as small, insignificant. From the sidelines, it was a different game. The ground trembled in mini earthquakes under the enormous weight of the mammoth players tackling each other. If I could watch this close all the time, I’d stand a chance of learning the rules of the game. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders. They walked around the perimeter of the field in a single file line. I spotted Coach, and I watched a fan in the bleachers drape himself over the railing to lower his hand close enough for her to touch. She gave him a high five. She walked behind me, close enough for me to say hello, but I was too scared to do so.

In my high school every senior had to take a class called Destinations, a semester-long course that was supposed to help you figure out where you were going in life. In one assignment, we were supposed to shadow a person whose career matched what we wanted to be when we were older. Another girl who sat at my cluster of desks and I said we wanted to shadow a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader. My Destinations teacher, who was also a football coach at our school, gave us this are-you-kidding-me look. He said, “You know they only make $50 a game, right?” My friend and I shrugged it off. It was common knowledge that the cheerleaders were paid hardly anything at all. We knew what they earned was equivalent to a small gas stipend, but this tidbit of information was largely irrelevant to high school girls with no bills to pay. To wear an eye-catching uniform and dance in front of thousands of spectators seemed like payment enough. I ended up shadowing my high school drill team director for the class assignment. I was too afraid to even talk to my former drill team director, Coach, who was the only Dallas Cowboys cheerleader I knew.

I got talked into auditioning for the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders after I graduated from high school. Don’t get me wrong, I planned on trying out eventually, but I first wanted to try out for a prestigious college drill team. I saw my dance career going in a particular order: high school, college, professional. But then one of my friends said she was too scared to go to the audition alone, so I agreed to go. The morning of the audition, I called her multiple times, but she never answered the phone. I’d already borrowed a bedazzled royal blue tryout outfit from a girl who had previously auditioned for the team. I’d already had my mom take my head shot and a full body shot for my application. I’d already had my hair colour touched up. I’d already gotten up super early to straighten my hair and put on performance makeup. I decided to drive to the stadium and go through with the audition by myself. When I arrived, I was greeted with a waiver that I was supposed to sign, agreeing that I could be shown on TV. I wasn’t aware that my audition was going to be part of a show. As I was pacing around, waiting for the audition to start, a producer grouped me with some other girls, put a camera in the middle of our huddle, and gave the directive: Talk. A few girls giggled uncomfortably. We didn’t know what to say. “Uh, I have some Skittles,” one girl said, pulling out a bag. “Do y’all want some?” She poured colourful candies into the palm of her hand and offered them around the circle, and we discussed which flavours we liked best. Needless to say, this footage didn’t make it into the final cut.

After a few hours of everyone filtering into the audition and signing their waivers, we were led out to the field. There were hundreds of women auditioning, and it took a while to get that many people from point A to point B. When all 600 or so of us had made it into the arena and were walking toward the seats, we were told to turn around, walk right back out, and try it again. We were given the directive: Look more excited. So all 600 or so of us turned around, walked out, and came back in to try it again with more excitement. On this round, girls cheered and clapped as they entered the stadium and saw the field for the “first” time. We were permitted to sit down and listen to instruction about how the audition day would go.

Back inside, we freestyled in groups of five. I introduced myself to a tiered panel of judges, looking the director in the eye as I spoke, feeling shaky, straining under the pressure of so many eyes and cameras on me. When the music came on, I pulled out all the stops, showing my flexibility with jump splits and high kicks, whipping my freshly bleached hair around. I was cut after the first round.

I continued my drill team career in college, which meant I had to keep faking interest in football. On my college team, the rookies had the unsavoury task of cheering for the duration of the games. While the veterans chatted with each other in the bleachers, rookies had to keep their eyes fixed on the game and cheer continuously. There were obvious things you could shout. “Let’s go, offense! Come on, defence!” But you can only chant robotically for so long before things get sloppy. By the second quarter, many girls would have slipped into something more stream-of-conscious. “Alright, cloud! That’s right, you block that sun! Come on, wind!” And by the third or fourth quarter, I sometimes heard the likes of “Yay bananas!” and “I love Christmas!” With a choir of voices continuously cheering, you couldn’t make out what any one girl was saying unless you were sitting right next to her, and as long as it sounded like we were cheering for the boys, no one cared what we were actually saying.

Toward the end of my freshman year, my team was invited to take part in the Cotton Bowl Hall of Fame induction. Our charter bus was waiting to shuttle us to the Cotton Bowl Stadium, and I was sitting in a row by myself next to the window, looking past my reflection of glossy red lips and tight blonde curls to the overcast sky. One of my teammates slung a tote bag onto the floor by my feet and plopped down into the seat beside me. She held up a half-eaten banana nut muffin. “Do you want to finish this?” she asked. Then she held up a newspaper. “You can read this if you want. I’m done with it.” She would be auditioning for the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders in one month, so she was watching her weight (even though she was quite thin) and constantly brushing up on current events. A DCC is supposed to be the complete package: beauty and brains. I skimmed the newspaper and took bites of the muffin on our way to the Cotton Bowl Stadium.

It was an unusually cold April day at the stadium in Dallas. Unfortunately, the ceremony took place outside, and to make matters worse, I was one of the girls whose role was to stand at attention for the duration of the event, to be decoration behind the podium where inductees would give speeches after receiving their trophies. Wearing our traditional red shirts, white belts, and short blue skirts, we simultaneously symbolised both Texas and the United States. We carried red, white, and blue flags to further emphasise the patriotic colour scheme.

Usually we were cheering for the boys, but for this event we would be cheering for the men, men with distinguished careers as college football players or coaches. Normally we showed support by clapping and shouting from the stands, but today my group was showing support by doing our best impressions of statues. We gripped our flags and stared into the distance, smiling relentlessly. Raindrops began tapping our bare arms and legs. Audience members zipped up their jackets and pulled out umbrellas to shield themselves against the cold pellets that were intensifying. To fight the cold and to avoid passing out from standing still for so long, I began to focus on one body part at a time. I would crinkle my toes inside my boots, and then release them. Crinkle. Release. Repeat. Then I’d move up to my legs, tightening muscles in isolation, then releasing them. I would squeeze my fingers around the handle of my blue flag, then slacken my grip.

My teammate who passed me the muffin and newspaper on the bus was a trophy girl at the event. When an inductee was announced, she brought him his bronze statue. Since it had started to rain, her role changed slightly to include holding an umbrella over his head as he gave a speech.

Glued in place, still smiling in the cold rain, I began singing in my head, focusing on lyrics. Our school’s fight song became my own personal fight song. We’re all fighting Rangers . . . in rain or sunshine. I tried to keep the light in my eyes and resisted fading into a dull, mechanical smile.

It became a kind of side show to watch us girls stick it out in the cold rain. During his speech, a coach turned around to us and said, “We need to wrap up the ceremony so these girls don’t have to stand out here longer than they already have.” My muscles were exhausted, my hair was wet, and my makeup was sliding. I was thrilled to end the ceremony early. This Hall of Fame coach’s gesture came a long way from the high school coach who hadn’t apologised for hitting me with the door.

The next month the trophy girl became a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader. I’d catch glimpses of her on the televised show that follows the audition process. In one episode a young lady is asked to stand up in front her peers and some judges and answer a question about a player. When she is unable to answer the question, the director scolds her, saying there’s no excuse for meeting a player and then not knowing his name and his football background. No one auditioning counters with “I just want to wear the uniform and dance in front of thousands of people.”

One morning several years later, I turn on the news and see a panel of beautiful women, with perfect makeup and crisp professional attire, standing beside the famous women’s rights attorney Gloria Allred. The women, all former Houston Texans cheerleaders, sit before a microphone and read statements of allegations that range from not being paid for all the hours they worked, to being body shamed to being put in unsafe working conditions. One woman’s voice breaks as she describes being physically assaulted by a fan at a game. When the women finish their statements, Ms. Allred poses for a picture with the former cheerleaders. She holds up a tee-shirt with $7.25 printed on it, emphasising how much the women are paid per hour for their work. Minimum wage.

And it’s not just the Houston Texans cheerleaders. Several NFL cheerleaders from around the country have openly confronted football organisations about minimum wage violations. A former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader is among them.

I always had a half-assed dream of being an NFL cheerleader. It’s sobering to realise I grew up believing the epitome of success for a woman was to be exploited and undervalued, on the sidelines of the main event. I guess it worked out that I never made it all the way. I’d have had to make a living out of scraps and leftovers. I’d most likely have ended up like one of those women on the news, sitting beside Gloria Allred holding up the tee shirt with $7.25 printed on it.

exes marriage relationships Seperation

A SWIM

by Lydia Benson • January 14, 2022January 14, 2022

She awoke at dawn, light seeping in through the thin white curtain. Stretching out, she replayed the spectacular violence of her dream: volcanos erupting in the distance, and something else, what was it?

She got out of the bed and dressed quickly into swimwear and a simple yellow dress. After boiling the kettle, she prepared a flask of coffee and went out into the fresh morning.

She weaved down the paths toward the sea, passing over the promenade, down through the woodland and onto the empty shingle beach. She took off her shoes and dress and at the shore stepped into the depth of high tide. Cold surrounded her and her breath was taken. She swam out, past the rocks of the bay and into the open water.

Far out, she lay on her back and looked up at the sky, icy water licking her temples. There was no wind and the water’s surface was unbroken, reflecting the fiery dawn. Weightless, she moved gently up and down on the quiet swell.

Something was moving in her peripheral vision. She rolled off her back and tread water to scan the horizon.

It was him; she recognised his balding head.

He had spotted her and started a messy crawl over.

“Susannah! Hi!”

He shattered the distance with that tone.

She pretended she couldn’t quite hear him to delay the moment they’d have to talk, wondered if she could get back to shore in time.

He splashed closer.

“Susannah! Hi!”

“Hi, Jeff.”

“You look great! Well, a bit pale, but great. How have you been?”

“Jeff, I was enjoying the swim.”

“Sorry – crikey – yeah, I remember how much you like swimming here alone. It’s infectious, I mean, here I am.”

She regretted having taken him here.

“It’s glorious, so peaceful. Takes my mind off Mum and everything, you know?” he continued.

“Yeah. How is she?”

“Oh, alright. She misses you, always asking. Doesn’t really retain much now, so I’ve just stopped retelling her you left. Couldn’t keep doing it, having that same conversation.”

She took a deep breath. “Jeff, it’s been two years.”

Dawn settled as the sun grew brighter. She could make out dog walkers on the path and high above on the promenade.

“I think she struggles to understand it anyway, Susannah. So do I, to be honest.”

They had had this conversation countless times. She briefly considered how she might move away, geographically, avoid this in a more permanent way.

She started swimming out to the buoy between the two bays and heard him splashing alongside her.

“How’s work?”

“Jeff, I come out here to not think about work.”

She looked to his face: earnest and only a little injured.

“It’s okay, it’s what you might expect, not much changes except the leadership. Oh, and new lanyards and posters and everything that goes with that.”

“I read about that. Are you painting?”

“Not much.” She thought again of the volcanos in her dream, erupting fire, coughing out smoke.

“I love your paintings.”

She stopped swimming and lay on her back looking up at the sky, a few birds overhead. Wasn’t he just being nice?

“I still have the ones from that show. Mum loves them.”

Susannah dived down into the deep, swam a few blind strokes, and broke the surface a metre or so from him.

“Jeff, I’d rather you didn’t come here. I don’t want to have these conversations again and again.”

His face changed, as it always did, the facade slipping off.

“You can’t ban me from a beach.”

“I’m not banning you, I’m asking you.”

Wary of igniting him, she dived down again. Back above the surface, she returned alone to shore.

A FATHER’S WISH

by J. Malcolm Garcia • January 9, 2022January 9, 2022

My mobile phone rang. The voice of my good friend, Hafez Mohammad, shouted through the receiver asking, no, demanding that I meet him at his house.

It has been a long time, I said, since I’ve seen you.

He was in no mood for sentiment.

Just come to my house, he insisted. I need to speak to you.

Hafez and I have been friends since childhood. My daughter, Asal, married Hafez’s son, Raziah, a police officer. After the Americans defeated the Taliban and we were allowed to take photographs again, Hafez bought a small digital camera. Over the years he took so many pictures of Raziah. Too many. Raziah as a baby, Raziah playing fútbol, Raziah graduating from the police academy. Enough pictures, I would tell Hafez. I have known your son since he was born. I don’t need to see his pictures. Hafez would laugh. He is my only son, he would say. I am too proud of him. I love my three daughters but Raziah will carry my name and my father’s name. Do you not see me in his face? he would ask, showing me yet another photo.

Looking at all those pictures of Raziah, praise God, I have to admit I felt a little jealous. As Hafez knows, I have only Asal and my wife, Hamdiya. If Hamdiya could only have one child, inshallah, why not a boy? But it was not God’s will. Sometimes, Hafez would rest a hand on one of my shoulders as if to comfort me as he showed me pictures of Raziah. His touch burned and I would shrug him off. Other times I avoided him because I did not want to reminded my close friend had a son and I did not. I would stay home with Hamdiya and Asal feeling a missing part of me that I would never be able to realize.

Then four weeks ago, Raziah’s commander called Hafez while we were in Shar-e-Naw Park watching a quail fight. Your son has been injured, the commander said. He had been on a patrol near Jalalabad when American planes attacked Taliban forces in the Khūdrow mountains. One of the planes made a pass over the police patrol. Where is he? Hafez asked. I don’t know. Where is my son? Hafez insisted. Come to Kharkush Hospital, the commander told him. He spoke loudly and I heard every word. Hafez put his phone in his pocket and stood. I hurried after him.

Raziah was a spoiled boy and I never liked him and I felt a little bit guilty for that now seeing the worry on Hafez’s face. Still, I could not help my feelings. One afternoon when I asked Asal to stop at the bazaar for her mother, Raziah interrupted. She is my wife now, he said. I will tell her where to go and when. He always wore his police uniform. No matter how hot the day, he would have it buttoned to his neck. More than once I told him that when he came to my house he was in no position to tell my daughter what to do while she was under my roof. She was my daughter first, his wife second.

Despite my dislike for Raziah, when Hafez approached me last year about arranging a marriage between him and Asal, I saw an opportunity. Only a few months before Asal had been suffering horrible pain near her stomach. Down there, Hamdiya told me, when I asked her what was wrong, and she pointed down from her stomach and I asked no more questions. Hamdiya took her to a doctor. Two hours later she called me from Ali Abad Hospital. Our Asal has a big problem, she said, and needs surgery. What is wrong? I asked. A tumor, Hamdiya said.

I hurried through Kabul’s busy streets until I reached the hospital. Hamdiya sat on a bench outside. I stood beside her beneath a tree not far from where some men gathered in a circle, swatting at torn, plastic bags carried by the wind, and further away women stood beneath halos of flies trying to calm their children. We stayed in the shade and when the shade shrunk to nothing we moved inside to a waiting room and just as we sat down a secretary called our name. She led us into a small room with a desk and chair. The peeling blue paint curled on the walls. I let Hamdiya sit. In a short time, a doctor walked in. She wore a blue burqa but showed her face. I am Dr. Shukriya Dost, she said. She told us we could see Asal in one hour. The surgery was successful but she was still groggy from anesthesia. The tumor was not cancerous. However, Dr. Dost said, I have sad, difficult news. She paused and then said, Your daughter will never have children.

Hamdiya bowed her head and her shoulders began shaking. I listened to her cry. Dr. Dost placed a hand on her back and did not look at me. There was nothing she could say to me as a father who would never have grandchildren. I left the room and walked outside. I wanted someone to bump me, to say something insulting so I would have an excuse to beat them but I saw no one other than the same people who had been outside before and the black clouds of flies above the children, and I stood and did nothing, shivering with anger and helplessness and then I left for home, my hands clenched. Later, Hamdiya said nothing when she returned to the house. She went into our room and closed the door. When she came out to prepare dinner she told me she had sat with Asal. The doctor said she could come home in the morning. I nodded. I had no questions. What was left to ask? Asal could not have children. What was her purpose now? For that moment, she was as dead to me as if the tumor had killed her.

Hamdiya and I told no one about Asal’s misfortune. Our neighbors are superstitious. They would wonder what we had done wrong to have a daughter with such a problem. Hamdiya warned her not to discuss her condition even with her closest friends. I did not speak of it to anyone, even Hafez. Then last year, he asked me to his house for tea. He said we had been friends for so long it was time our families became one. He asked if I would agree to a marriage between Asal and Raziah. Of course under any other circumstance I would have been overjoyed. My friendship with Hafez meant more to me than my dislike for Raziah. Of course if I had I told him about Asal he would never have asked. What father would want a barren woman for a daughter-in-law? No man I know. Asal would spend her life with Hamdiya and me and when we died she would move in with an uncle and watch his children and be little more than a servant. I would be remembered as the father of an infertile girl. I knew I should tell Hafez. But what if I didn’t? What if I said nothing? I knew Asal would make a devoted wife. She was a good girl. She would care for Raziah, cook and clean and make a good home for him. Why say anything? Raziah would learn soon enough that she could not have children. He could then marry a second wife. He was young with a good job. It would be no problem for him. She would bear him sons and daughters. Our families would be joined and he could still have children and Asal’s condition would no longer be our burden. I agreed to the marriage.

When Hafez and I reached the hospital in Kharkush, a doctor told us seventeen officers had died in the bombing. He took us into a room and showed us a body that he said was Raziah. Hafez and I stared at the dead man. He’s not my son, Hafez said. Perhaps there were two Raziahs? the doctor suggested. Survivors, he said, were transferred to Sardar Mohammad Dawood Khan Hospital in Kabul.

We returned to Kabul but doctors at that hospital had no record of Raziah and would not let us in unless we could prove Raziah had been admitted. Hafez wrote a message for the administrator explaining what the doctor in Kharkush had told us. A secretary folded it in her hand and hurried down the hall and through a door. We waited. Hafez flipped through photographs of Raziah on his phone, his eyes red and unblinking.

Four hours later, a man walked up the hall with the secretary. She pointed at us. He wore a western suit and tie and the grit on his white Hafezt showed it had not been cleaned in many days. He told us to return in the morning and he would have information for us. Hafez looked at me. His eyes were so vacant I became lost in his stare. I want to be alone, he told me. I am sorry my friend, I said. I will see you tomorrow.

The next morning, I met Hafez at the hospital gate. He had not changed clothes and his drawn face told me he had not slept. He barely said hello. When he took my hand and kissed my check I felt the dead weight of his sorrow.

A security guard told us the hospital was closed to visitors. Hafez erupted like a lion, his dead eyes alive now with fury, and threw himself at the man, punching and kicking him until other security guards pulled him off. Two policemen ran up. One of them recognized Hafez because he had attended the academy with Raziah. He told us to go home. His son died in Kharkush, he explained to the guard Hafez had punched. Died? Hafez shouted. Is my son dead? No one has told me anything! Come back tomorrow, the officer told him. Is he dead? Hafez insisted. It’s not for me to say, the officer said. Come back tomorrow. Hafez turned to me, tears in his eyes. I embraced him, and I felt his body convulsing with rage and torment as if at any moment he might explode.

That evening I sat alone while Hamdiya tended to Asal in her room. I cannot imagine how Hafez feels. To lose a son, my God! A son is an impossible loss. My friends wonder why I never took a second wife who could give me more children and inshallah, a boy, but I am a poor man and have little to offer another man for his daughter. I content myself with the knowledge that Asal has my long nose and brown eyes and high forehead. I had once thought that these things she would pass on to her children and a small part of me would survive. It is too sad for me that did not happen. Nothing will be left of me and my father’s name.

At the hospital the next morning a different secretary called the administrator. I noticed he still wore the same tired clothes. The light switches in the waiting room did not work or perhaps the lights were dead. We moved through shadows following the administrator to a room where a young man wrapped in bloody bandages stared at us. He is not my son, Hafez said. The administrator took him to more rooms where more injured men lay in beds. Raziah was not among them.

We left and took a bus back to Kharkush and asked for the doctor who told us Raziah had been sent to Kabul. The doctor had gone home, the hospital administrator told us. Hafez showed him a photo of Raziah. We have looked everywhere, Hafez said. He must be here. The administrator passed the picture around and a nurse said, Yes, I went out with the ambulance and I pulled this man from a car. Where is he? Hafez asked. The nurse shook his head. Where is he? Hafez asked again. He was in pieces, the nurse said. Half of his body was burned. We buried him by the road. The nurse drove us to the spot. Hafez stared at the barren, pebble-strewn ground. I remembered when Raziah was a boy. One night, Hafez told him that long ago giants had roamed Afghanistan and played fútbol with boulders. When they got tired they left the boulder where they had rolled to a stop and that was why so many of them cluttered the mountains of Afghanistan. Boys believe anything their father’s tell them about power and strength and Raziah was delighted by the tale.

Do you want to take him to Kabul? the nurse asked. No, Hafez said in a low voice. He is already buried. Leave him. We prayed over the spot: Oh, God, forgive our living and our dead, those who are present among us and those who are absent, our young and our old, our males and our females. O God, whoever You keep alive, keep him alive in Islam, and whoever You cause to die, cause him to die with faith.

After a long moment of silence, we returned home. We did not talk. When we reached Kabul, Hafez turned to me and said, I have to tell my family. All they know is that Raziah is missing. I followed Hafez to his house. His wife, Azyan, opened the door, his three daughters stood behind her. Hafez said nothing. His family knew by the expression on his face. I bowed my head and clasped his hands. Azyab screamed and the girls, too. I could still hear them as I walked home.

For four weeks, I saw nothing of Hafez but Hamdiya told me disturbing stories Azyan had passed to her when they saw each other at the bazaar. She said he had drawn all the curtains and spent his days hanging Raziah’s photos everywhere in the house–––in the front hall, the bedrooms, even the kitchen and bathroom. Raziah’s still, unrelenting gaze stared upon Azyan no matter where she turned. Their daughters, who had adored their brother, now hid in their rooms, and when they ventured out they would hurry through the halls looking neither left or right at Raziah’s pictures until they came outside and raised their arms as if they had emerged from a cave. One daughter knocked down a photograph when she stumbled and fell and Hafez bellowed like a wounded animal and chased her from the house.

I think he has lost his mind, Hamdiya told me.

I did not know what to say. Sometimes when I wondered about Hafez I said to myself, Well, now you and I are the same. Neither of us have a son. I felt ashamed thinking this way and struck my head and prayed to God for forgiveness. Still, a part of me, a bad part, I know, was pleased. There would be no more talk about sons between us.

I was worried about Asal. Since Raziah’s death, she rarely came out of her room. Sometimes I would hear her weeping in the middle of the night. Hamdiya would get up and sit with her. I felt caught between them. In this situation she understood Asal. As a father, I was helpless to comfort her. When Hafez called me this morning I thanked God for the opportunity to leave the house.

He must have seen me walking up the street because I had not even reached to ring the bell when he opened the door. One look at him and I knew he had not slept for many days. His lined face, drooping mouth. Circles like ponds under his eyes. We embraced, his body slack in my arms. Kicking off my sandals, I stepped past him and stopped, unable to conceal my shock. Just as Hamdiya told me, photograph after photograph of Raziah covered the walls like a giant collage. Even the ceiling held pictures. His eyes followed me no matter where I turned. Hafez pointed at two boxes of framed photographs on the living room floor. Creases, small tears and water marks blemished some of them.

Help me with these, Hafez he said in a flat voice.

He tapped a nail in the wall with a small hammer, picked up a photo of Raziah playing soccer and hung it. He then selected a picture of Raziah in his blue police uniform. Unlike his father’s full beard, thin patches of hair dappled his young face.

This is the last room, Hafez said. Give me a picture. Any one.

I did not move. You have to stop this, I said.

Hafz ignored me. He took another photo. This one showed Raziah and Asal at their wedding. Hafez traced a finger around Asal’s face.

One of Hafez’s daughters, a black veil across her face, carried a tray with a pot of green tea, two glasses, a bowl of sugar and a plate of raisins. She bowed, set the tray on the floor and left. Hafez gestured for me to sit. He poured the tea. Setting the pot down, he picked up his glass and looked at me.

It’s too late for Azyan to have children, he said.

You’ll have grandchildren one day, I said.

They won’t have my family name.

Yes, I know this, I said. I face the same problem. Still, they will be your grandchildren. That is what I tell myself.

That may be fine for you but it is not fine for me.

It has never been fine for me, I said. Now you hurt but for too long I have carried the hurt you now have.

He gave me a contemptible look.

Wishing you had a son and losing one are two very different things my friend, Hafez said.

I said nothing. knew I should tell him Asal would never have given Raziah children but I was angry. For years he had boasted of Raziah and showed me his pictures in my face. Did he never once think of the pain he had caused me? The humiliation.

Asal should marry again into my family, Hafez said, setting down his cup. God tells us when there’s a widow, she has three months to sit in a house and mourn. After that, her family has the right to arrange for her to marry again. The Quran does not prohibit a man from marrying his brother’s widow.

But Raziah had no brothers, I said.

I want Asal as my second wife, Hafez said, sounding a little impatient. I’ve thought about it a long time. Asal is young. She and I would have a son and I would name him Raziah so the world will never forget my martyred boy.

I stared at Hafez, speechless. My palms got damp and I wiped them on my legs and my heart beat faster. I knew I should tell him Asal would never have given Raziah children but I did not. I could not imagine his fury. His whole family would turn against us and all of our neighbors, too. Asal was my daughter, my only child. All that matters to a father is what is best for their child even if she is a girl.

When she married Raziah she became your daughter, I managed to say. A man does not marry his daughter.

We both know she is not my daughter. Not in that way.

You would not be happy with her. I’m sure Raziah told you she can be difficult.

Raziah said no such thing.

God does not tell us if our daughters will have sons, I said finally. You might only have daughters again.

My friend, I am asking for my life, he said.

Your life? We are too old, Hafez, to marry again. Asal is young. You will die and leave her alone.

She will have our children to care for her.

No, I said, my throat tight. She will not.

Hafez looked at me for a long time.

What are you saying? he said.

You cannot marry her.

Hafez did not move. Then he stood and picked up a nail and pounded it into the wall and put up a picture. And then another and another.

You are the death of me, he said in a quiet voice.

He struck each nail harder and harder. Dust drifted to the floor. The pictures rattled in their frames, tilted against the wall. I thought they would fall.

Raziah is dead, I said.

Leave my house! he shouted, his back to me.

I hurried out. In the hall, Raziah’s blank gaze followed me to the door. When I stepped outside the bright mid-day sun froze me in place and I stood motionless, my hands raised to my forehead until my eyes adjusted. Once I could see, I walked away. There was no shade. I moved through the dry heat with the certainty I would never see Hafez again.

Another man may desire Asal when she finishes mourning and I may allow her a second marriage if he is young. I would ask Allah’s forgiveness and not tell him she was sterile. I would love him like a son and grieve with him once he understood her condition. He could marry again. If his second wife bore him sons, inshallah, perhaps he would honor me by giving one of them my name, the name of my father and his father and all of the fathers that have come before, but only Allah’s mercy is guaranteed in this life.

afghanistan gender

THE CITY CANDY SHOP

by Gresham Cash • January 8, 2022January 8, 2022

From her lair, a bleached blonde woman in Barcelona sells candy. Her store is coloured like a child’s toy: bright reds, rich blues, vibrant greens, halting yellows. She sells treats, the colours of which you wouldn’t wear day after day. Every evening, you may pass and find her staring out of the small space between gummy candies and animal crackers that act as a door onto the street. She is there with the same face as the night before, waiting to catch a passerby in her gaze. In her mind, she is the same woman who sat staring through this portal 10, 20, or 30 years prior. Yet, she has changed. Our bodies and characters evolve with time, but still, a whisper of ourselves, our inner voice remains the same. And in this way, she is the same; we are the same. But we can’t see the ways that we have changed; our view remains transfixed by the dramatic colours of the candy shops that we set ourselves within.

On some nights, she is joined by an older man who sits with her. In his muted colours – browns, blacks, greys that resemble filth amidst the tower of shining luminescence that is her store – he looks out of place. They are friends, nonetheless; they chat; they argue; on occasion, he turns his head to join her gaze as you pass by. This is their shallow effort at selling her products. Not once has a customer been spotted in this cavity of the city. This is not a business. This is a business front – not for drugs, nothing nefarious, only a medium by which she can stare at us while we stare at her. The muted man faces her from a coloured plastic chair, his back to the door. Another night that week, the same. The night after that, the man is gone.

During the day, the shop is shut, as if no one buys candy before dark. She makes no effort to entice tourists. After all, the shop is on a filthy alleyway opposite trash bins. This is a place for locals to ask her, the local, what she has seen. On occasion, I’m sure, someone sets down a euro for a bag of jelly beans or a sleeve of cookies after asking her opinion on a political matter: the increase of immigrants to the neighbourhood, the smell of the halal on the corner, or what the weather will be like tomorrow (wavering from mild to nice by any other standards).

The woman continues to bleach her hair and apply makeup as if she were 20 years old. She continues to entice men her age into the store as if she were 30 years old. The woman, only the woman, knows her own age.

Eight years ago, a Chilean friend led me to Avenue U – a subway station that doesn’t register to tourists in New York, let alone the stroller skiers of Park Slope or the gentrifiers of the better-known Brooklyn. It was late; the city draws a normal day into unprecedented hours. And so, my friend guided me to the 24-hour donut shop. It was manned by two Central Americans.

The same two men open and close the restaurant every day. Whether three in the morning or four in the afternoon, the orders are chorizo with eggs, two tacos with barbacoa, two eggs and toast. The same ritual unfolds: One man greets the customer at the counter, the other scrapes the grill, adds more meat, mutters something in Spanish that makes the other man grin. There is no unnecessary exchange with the customers. Perhaps you are tempted by a donut when you pay and leave. They grab one with a sheet of parchment paper, they give you what you want. Either way, the men know that you are a regular or you are lost. Regardless, a similar treatment is applied: Take the order, call it, make it, present it. Coffee is poured, coffee is topped. We like to think that we can sit in a diner and drink an indiscriminate amount of coffee, but we all have our limit. We feign that we are really overdoing it some days, that we are indulging in that extra cup. But, in reality, unless we have escaped the cycle of regularity in which we live, we are having our third cup. And we always pretend that we don’t need the hot topper on that last cup, but we take it, whether we drink it or not.

Wherever the two cooks came from, they don’t resemble it anymore. They are not Tegucigalpa city wanderers. They are not Oaxacan farmers. They are not Panamanian bus drivers. They are simply New Yorkers. They might not feel like Woody Allen or get treated like Michael Bloomberg, but the city corrodes them in the same way – money causes ulcers whether from too little or too much. The real difference is in how much you pay for those three cups of coffee.

In the entryway to the Institut d’Estudis Catalan in Barcelona, a man sits in an admission booth. It’s a calming atmosphere within the 600-year-old hospital, an appealing shortcut for my wife and me as we meander through El Raval. I can’t deny that I am sloughed from the tourist mass, but I feel relief in the escape. Orange blossoms fill the air with the aroma of bliss. Meanwhile, a man urinates on a wall in the corner. Change is ubiquitous. The floral fragrance is overtaken. Despite these variations, it’s the same thing every day in this ancient portal. Pass the imposing door under pointed, Gothic arches. Beyond it, the balding head of the attendant appears askew to the small sign with admission information. Until you cross the threshold, he remains the same. His head tilted, probably reading something. Whether he wished to or not, he has become a fixture. Regardless of his days off, he is there. No one sees the museum unless they see the attendant first. A closed gate is a denial. An ajar gate is an invitation. Approaching the attendant is a chance to realise that he answers the same three or four questions every day.

“How much?”

“What time?”

“How long?”

An expert Danish tourist comes to the city prepared. Knowing more than 10 phrases in Spanish and Catalan, the young tourist approaches this arched doorway ready to prove himself. He is repulsed by the worker, an employee, who answers his questions tersely or without enthusiasm. On another day, he might be blasted by an assault of Catalan resembling the most ancient of curses – a derivative of the truly vulgar. He wishes that the attendant congratulated him on his preemptive research revealed in his rhetorical questions. The audacious tourist wishes that the bald man grinned and affirmed his ability. And yet, this young tourist – you, if I dare, I – rarely considers that the attendant fields the few variants of human language that come in the interrogative form. An attendant’s available knowledge gradually becomes restricted to a museum, theatre, or exhibition’s admission fee and opening and closing times.

Similarly, anywhere in the world, a man on the way to work rushes into a chain restaurant and expects his request to be met. One day it’s Costa Coffee, another it’s Starbucks. The baristas are barraged with demands for personal variations on measured drinks. Likewise, at the New York City Library, the security guard helps to redefine what a handbag is as visitors enter and exit. And at London Heathrow, a short security guard attempts to teach by humiliation what constitutes a liquid in the eyes of travel authorities.

And so, the bald attendant at the Institut sits staring into the corner of his booth where he reads, or simply stares, waiting for his shift to end so that he may begin his shift at home and return again to do the same tomorrow.

Again, we board the train in Bushwick; a stranger asks us for a spare metro card. We board a train at Columbus Circle; a stranger asks us for a spare metro card. We see need without admitting our own – the role left to vagabonds and beggars. Yet, we line up in cities to pretend we are working towards some freedom that no one has seemed to find.

But in this city there is energy, there is life. Of this, we convince ourselves.

In the wilderness, we are offered unlimited freedom. In the countryside, we are offered liberty. In contrast, these small towns and pastoral places have job scarcity and money scarcity. But there is space; there is air; there is the opportunity to live. However, we flee to the cities and root our buildings in the very same soil. In these cities, we sit in the same window, walk the same alleyways, drink in the same bars, and eat at the same restaurants. We simply ignore passersby. We deny other dining options for something regular. We bypass the next grocery for the one closest and best-stocked. Within the city we have each created our own villages. And we stare through our windows wondering what is beyond the building edifice, just as the shepherd boy stares over the pasture wondering what is beyond the nearest hill. On occasion, we venture out, we explore. Any considerable break in our rhythm might render us obsolete, make us less useful to society. So, in both places, we trudge along, whistling at our sheep or greeting the butcher as we walk to our office.

Whether we deem the farm or the city preferable, both are swept by the same current, their challenges mirrored. There is no solitude in either without first finding it in yourself.

Most people will never explore the distant mountains and smallest islands; who among us can claim to be an authentic stowaway or explorer? We fear jumping from the machine that keeps moving forward. But people make do. In our walks down the road, there is ample wonder to behold. The parakeets torpedo down narrow streets in Barcelona, the plane trees grow tall in the broad avenues of London, creeks run over polished rocks in Medellin, the river rushes past Prague’s Old Town, and the ocean crashes into the shore of Los Angeles. In the city, the sun continues to rise and set, even if lost amidst the buildings, offices, and alleyways.

The city is the triumph of modernity and an homage to antiquity. It is where ideas spawn, where thought is questioned. And through this interrogation, we feel bold, novel, and positively urban.

Where is the Chilean, the short-order cook, the tourist, the attendant? Where am I – in a foreign city, a different grid, another familiar unknown. Perhaps, in what we think of as circular, as rhythmic, we should look for the errancies, the subdued tones of the man in the bright candy shop.

And there he sits; and there pass I; and the woman in her city candy shop remains, in some small way, the only one looking out.

urban life

APPELDORN

by Judith Turner-Yamamoto • January 7, 2022January 7, 2022

Sometimes unawares she found herself again in that sudden and cold spring drenching rain, in a garden outside Appeldorn, the two of them soaked beneath the sprawling gaping limbs of an ancient oak. That moment, so like all their time together, the torrent and the impossibility of comfort or shelter.

relationships

acting relationships television

THE ACTRESS WOULD LIKE EVERYONE TO KNOW SHE IS PERFECTLY FINE

by Abigail Oswald • January 2, 2022January 2, 2022

No, she doesn’t hate her former costar. In fact, she is perfectly fine – write that, actually, use those words, please – she is perfectly fine. Thriving, even! Thank you for asking.

Yes, it is true that her former costar departed the show over contract issues at a climactic moment in their shared storyline. It is also true that they spent five years together, delivering lines someone else had written for them. That she adjusted to this routine, even came to enjoy it. That she could spend a full minute describing the golden, honeyed hue of his eyes – no, she will not now, but thank you for asking.

Her former costar looked nice in a crisp white lab coat; they both do – you’ve seen the show, haven’t you? But this was her first starring role, after all, there was lots to enjoy, her happiness didn’t hinge on the fact of his presence. What an insinuation to make! Yes, she’s seen the tweets. And anyway there had been rumbles, rumours; the actress had known for some time that her costar’s future absence was a possibility.

No, he did not said goodbye. Yes, you should print that. It is the actress’ opinion that the viewers have a right to know.

Of course, in the end she mostly blames the writers. They knew her former costar’s exit was a possibility yet failed to equip her character to deal with the emotional fallout of the season’s climax on her own. She hated the PTSD subplot they gave her, thank you for asking – yes, they already know how she feels, go right ahead.

Specifically the actress felt there was not enough variety in the representation of trauma onscreen. What about the people who are PERFECTLY FINE, she asked the writers one afternoon. What about the people who carry on normally with their lives in the wake of a traumatic event? What about the people who don’t feel abandoned? What about them?

Yes, she has seen the media coverage. No, she did not yell at the writers on the day in question. She has never raised her voice on set, not once! Thank you for asking.

The actress does not want to be bogged down with grief; she just wants to save lives on television. And anyway, she has never personally cared that her former costar is gone. So her character shouldn’t either.

The writers kept assuring her it would be fine, that the storyline would develop her, give her mettle – as if she didn’t already have mettle in spades. Yet for the entirety of the following season, her character was mired in these childlike abandonment issues: crying stints at work, tearstains on her lab coat. Once, a guest star even died on her watch. The actress hated all of it. But the writers would not provide her with the words to let her former costar go.

The actress is giving this interview because she would like to move on. She has no interest in being eternally tied to someone with whom she once starred in a TV show. He was not her only costar, after all, and what he does with his career is his choice.

After the series concludes the actress would like to dip her toes into directing, or writing. She would like to be behind the scenes, control what is happening onscreen. She is sick of being subjected to the whims of others – wait, don’t print that; she knows what it sounds like.

No, she does not miss him. Yes, she is perfectly fine. Thank you for asking.

aging fantasy New York City

FROM YOUR LIPS TO GOD’S EARS

by Max Talley • January 2, 2022January 2, 2022

Alex Deckman had only turned forty recently, but for the past two years felt much older after waking. His features appeared odd in the bathroom mirror, which in itself was not unusual. Alex slept face-down and the weight of his head pressing against the mattress left lines, folds, and even trenches in his face. They would gradually smooth while he stood upright to shave and shower.

His mother claimed, “You were born with a heavy skull. Eleven pounds is average for an adult and your head must weigh fifteen at least.” A sad faraway look inhabited her eyes. “We made you wear foam wedge collars as a child for support.” She winced. “You inherited your poor father’s Neanderthal blood.”

Beverly was given to exaggeration and fabrication, so Alex disbelieved her, but somehow his sleep positioning did distress his features.

Today, Alex observed his brown hair nearly covering his ears. He first noticed an absence while rubbing shaving cream on. He washed the cream off in shock. His lips had disappeared. Gone. Vanished. Alex opened wide to see if his sleep posture had perhaps wedged them inside his mouth. Nothing there. Just his smelly teeth waiting to be brushed.

Had he chewed them off amid some bizarre dream then swallowed? Checking the pillow, no blood or remains lingered. He studied himself again in the bathroom mirror. Without lips, his mouth hung slightly open like a jerkwater yokel. But he lived in downtown Manhattan. Totally unacceptable.

A knock sounded outside. “Alex? Open up.” Damn, it was Beverly.

Due to a low-paying job, Alex had been forced to live at his widowed mother’s apartment. She had fashioned his old room into a studio, the entry door opening to their pantry and a back door leading outside, so they both could maintain a semblance of privacy.

“Shaving, Mom. I’m not dressed.” He felt disoriented. “Leave me a voicemail or come back later.”

“I saw you naked as a child, but if you insist, come talk when you’re done.” She made sighing and wheezing noises. “You haven’t paid your rent yet.”

Although $1,000 was dirt cheap for a studio in Manhattan, Beverly now raised the rent every year like any other greedy New York landlord.

“My friends Pam and Binky say I could easily get double from a quiet NYU student.”

“Okay, okay. Let me shave in peace.”

Beverly grumbled off.

Alex showered and dressed. He would sneak into his private office at work. With a scarf wrapped about his gaping mouth, if anyone asked, he’d claim to have gashed himself shaving.

He edged outside the studio’s door.

“There you are,” Beverly said, skulking in the unlit hallway. She dusted his coat collar. “Take off that absurd wrap and explain where my rent check is.” She yanked the scarf away then blanched before flushing. “You’ve gone…lipless.” Her eyes went wide.

“Calm down, Mother,” Alex said. “My lips got pressed into my mouth while sleeping. They’ll return by nightfall.”

Beverly crumpled against a wall, unsteady. “I had so much belief in you, in your promise. And now this.”

“No you didn’t,” Alex said. “You always favored Randall, and raved about his good looks.”

She showed a wounded expression. “I did admire your older brother, but his wife stole his looks from me, fattened him up on beer, cheese, and sausage. Now he’s forty-six, overweight and horribly bald.”

Beverly added damning adverbs to normal human conditions. Her best friend Ellen had looked “frightfully old” before she got a facelift and now appeared “dreadfully taut.”

“I’ll pay my rent tonight. It’s only December 2nd. Normal landlords give a grace period.”

“But I’m your mother.” She formed her about-to-cry face. “After everything I’ve done for you, I’m left with a circus freak for a son. Don’t come home until you fix your pie-hole.”

Alex refastened his scarf and darted out. Sometimes he wondered about his father, Jack, who went for a swim in the East River ten years ago and never returned. Assumed drowned. Insane, or driven to it by Beverly?

In the rush to escape, Alex had forgotten breakfast or coffee to power him. He slipped into Chelsea Cafe for a to-go order he could eat in Madison Square Park without being gawked at. Inside he saw Suzy, a barista he’d dated a week ago. He made a clumsy pass at her and she pushed him away. Suzy usually worked the afternoon shift, so he retreated toward the door, embarrassed. Unfortunately, she spotted him and bounded over.

“Alex, can we talk, in private?” Suzy trailed him outside.

He kept moving along 23rd Street, but seeing that she wouldn’t relent, he signaled toward an alleyway between Fifth and Sixth Avenue.

Suzy followed, mouth downturned, eyes sad. He waited for further admonishment regarding his oafish date moves.

“I just wanted to apologize for the other night,” she said. “I was confused and wasn’t ready, but you only wanted to kiss me. I so overreacted, dude.” She stared at the pavement. “Can you ever forgive me?”

“Uh, sure,” Alex replied, stunned.

“Let me make it up to you.” Suzy puckered her lips and unwrapped his scarf. “Oh my God!” She recoiled. “I mean, I wasn’t expecting that. I’m not judging.” She rested her head in a hand. “I guess I never noticed you didn’t have lips before.”

Alex gripped his scarf. “It’s temporary. They’re inverted now but will be back, I promise.”

Suzy looked dazed. “Yes, yes, why wouldn’t they…”

“Can I call you when they do?”

Lines formed on her thirty-year-old forehead he’d never witnessed before.

“I’m going up north for a while, far away…” Her voice drifted off. “But when I do get home, I’m sure I’ll see you at Chelsea Cafe.” She struggled to smile. “Until they, uh, return, use a little of this.” Suzy plucked a natural-colored lipstick from her purse, then inscribed it around the edges of his mouth. She tucked it into his overcoat’s breast pocket. “I’ve got to get back. Ciao.” She scurried away.

Alex checked his reflection in shop windows. From a distance, the lipstick created the illusion he still had lips. Flat lips. If any coworkers commented, Alex could claim his dermatologist had taken a biopsy and they should mind their own damn business.

Somehow he arrived without causing alarm and locked himself inside his office. When associates knocked, he said, “I’m busy,” then asked them to call or e-mail. That worked until floor manager Lonnie Begonza thumped on his door.

“Open up,” he demanded. “We don’t lock doors on my watch.”

Alex made sure the lipstick was thickly applied before unlocking. He retreated to the window beyond his desk, maintaining distance. “I have the super-flu. I don’t want anyone else to catch it.”

Begonza strode in and squinted at Alex. “Yeah, you look godawful, but I’m immune. Got a flu shot in the arm and a booster in my ass.” He circled around the desk. “Something’s really messed-up about you, Dickman.”

“It’s Deckman,” Alex said. “Just went to my dermatologist. I need privacy.”

“This is my world and you live in it.” Begonza frowned. “You sound funny.” Using a window drape, he wiped Alex’s face. “Jesus Christ, you’ve got no lips.” He stepped back. “Dermatologist? You flew down to Panama last weekend, went to one of those unlicensed plastic surgeons, like Mickey Rourke did.” Begonza slumped against the wall, breathing heavily.

“It’s temporary,” Alex said. “My lips inverted overnight. They’ll plump out by tomorrow. Just wait.” He had begun to believe the lie because nothing else made sense.

“No can do,” Begonza said. “Management from the Midwest is visiting today. They’ll be touring the offices to shake hands and give encouragement.” He paced the floor. “They can’t see you like that, no siree. We believe in facial diversity, because of company regulations, but not carnival sideshow stuff.” Begonza paused, thinking.

“I really need this job.”

“You think I want lawsuits and bad publicity? Hell no. We’re just going to relocate you.” Begonza slammed the door behind him. “Lock up till I get back.”

Alex waited until Begonza returned. “You know the building’s maintenance crew.”

“Sure,” Alex said through his scarf. “Good to see you Raul, Tevin, Luigi, and?”

“Hyman,” the elderly one said. He weighed around 120 pounds and didn’t seem long for the world.

The crew acted annoyed at being diverted from their routine of lazing about the lobby, eyeballing women, and waiting for their shifts to pass.

Begonza pointed. The three younger men unplugged lamps and devices, then grunted Alex’s desk through the door. Hyman worked a toothpick between his teeth and watched, his face contorting with the effort the others expended.

“What’s going on?” Alex asked.

“Follow us in a minute, the back corridor.” Begonza sauntered outside.

Alex never used the dim utility hallway. Reserved for food deliveries, packages, and maintenance staff. At the far end he saw Begonza beckoning impatiently.

“Is this for real?”

“Of course it’s for real.” Begonza nodded. “Your new office until that nasty condition heals.”

Alex’s desk was pressed to the rear corner of the spacious freight elevator. An elevator that had transported grand pianos when songwriters used to toil in upstairs offices decades ago.

“I, uh…”

“No need to thank me.” Begonza smiled in his menacing manner. “Got to run. Important folks are coming.”

Alex took his seat behind the desk as the maintenance men wandered away. The realization hit that Hyman was the service elevator operator and his new office mate. “This is quite the situation,” Alex said, trying to start on a good note.

Hyman coughed then spit. He muttered something under his breath like “ass-clown” before turning his back to work the iron levers of the manual gears.

Alex gasped when the elevator plunged eight floors and stopped abruptly, his guts rising into his chest.

“You’ll get used to it after a few years,” Hyman said.

“Years? I only intend to be here a day or two.”

Hyman’s laugh sounded hoarse. “The last one said that.” He raked a hand through his gray wedge of hair. “Listen, we’ll get along if you don’t talk or ever surprise me. I don’t need a heart attack. Might lose control of the spaceship. Ever seen anyone scraped out of an elevator that’s dropped twenty floors?”

“No. Have you?”

“That’s how I got my job. Replacing the previous guy. Looked more like a slab of pizza than anything human.”

Alex tried to adjust to his odd predicament the following morning. He sent e-mails while the elevator traversed lower floors. The WiFi weakened above the fifteenth floor so he transitioned to phone calls then. The sudden rises and long drops between floors aggravated lunch sandwiches loitering in Alex’s stomach.

He checked craigslist seeking a temporary solution. Postings showed for wax lips, rubber attachments, and even ling-cod fish lips. His body trembled. As an adolescent, bullies had teased Alex, calling him “liver lips.” Humiliating then, their dwelling on the features he hated most. But now Alex thought fondly of those vanished liver lips. How he missed them.

Midday, Hyman asked, “So what’s wrong with your kisser? That scarf hiding a rash?”

“No, no.” Alex sighed. “I’ve sort of misplaced my lips.”

“Either you’ve lost them or not.”

“Okay, they’re gone.”

Hyman halted the elevator. “You need to talk to the man upstairs.”

“But I’m an atheist…”

“No, Doc Feingoss. But I call him Dr. Fungus.”

“He has an office upstairs?”

“Top floor.”

Alex saw the 32nd floor light had been scratched out. “I thought management permanently closed it off, for safety reasons.”

Hyman grunted. “There’s a little asbestos behind the lead paint on the walls. A minor gas leak and structural damage to the support pillars, and the City gets their panties in a bunch.”

“You’re telling me this doctor still works there? And he can replace my — ”

“Not saying anything. I can take you up after hours or not. No skin off my lips.”

Alex’s laptop screen showed a No Internet message. He shuffled papers around the desk. “Yes, I want to go.”

Being December, cold and dark early, the building emptied out by 6:30.

“Ready?” Hyman asked after his dinner break. Alex nodded. The operator cranked the power lever to the right and the elevator surged upward.

Alex felt his ears pop but their progress slowed at the 30th floor. Gears squeaked and ground to a halt as they reached the 31st. Hyman yanked on a gearshift. The carriage vibrated violently as it rose at a crawl.

“Is this safe?”

“Hell, no,” Hyman shouted over the noise, amid the smell of burning rubber. “But as long as these cables hold, we won’t plummet to our doom.” He shrugged. “It’s the only way to the top. The fire stairwell is sealed.”

Finally, Hyman slid open the metal accordion gate. The 32nd floor resembled a war zone of toppled cabinets, broken glass, scattered pills, wrecked furniture. The walls were cracked and liquid pooled on the floor. Smoke issued from a back area where small furry things scampered about; overhead lights blinked on and off.

“Hey, Doc? You awake?”

Alex heard a ratcheting cough then a creaking sound approaching.

An ancient man worked his wheelchair forward over wadded papers and exposed wiring. He wore a spattered lab coat and had a medical reflector headbanded around his gaunt skull. “That you, Hyman?” He squinted through Coke bottle glasses, eyes distorted.

“Brought you a patient, Dr. Fungus.”

“Well, I’m not sure yet,” Alex said, alarmed by the surrounding chaos.

“Young fellow,” Fungus said. “I’m on my last legs, so spit it out. What’s your problem?”

Alex unwrapped his scarf as the doctor wheeled up close.

Fungus started laughing and Hyman cackled along with him.

“I’m glad you find this amusing. I’ll be going now.”

“Son,” Fungus said. “I’m the only specialist who can help.” He focused a bright lamp on Alex’s face. “Now, do you have your detached lips? That would make the operation a cinch.”

“Operation? No, I have no idea where my lips got to.”

“Were you treating them right, with respect?” Fungus asked.

“What?”

“Forget it.” Fungus rolled backward. “Okay, turn and pull down your pants.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Do you want me to fix your mouth or not?”

Alex slowly dropped his trousers. He felt unsettled as the doctor reached out then squeezed his ass.

“Enough.” Alex belted-up his pants, disgusted. He wanted to leave but remembered the stairway was sealed.

“Sit down.” Fungus pointed to a ravaged leather couch. “We can remove a small area of soft buttock flesh, microwave it for a minute to color it pinker, then transplant two carved pieces onto your mouth to serve as lips.”

“That’s preposterous.” Alex wanted to leave but remembered the stairway was sealed.

“No, he’s serious.” Hyman gripped the doctor’s wheelchair. “It’s the only body area that can approximate the softness and thickness of lips. Fat tissue.”

Alex shuddered. He felt horrified yet recognized their logic. The next time Lonnie Begonza called him “ass-face,” he realized it would be literal. “I don’t see any medical diplomas, doctor.”

“I served in South America.”

“At a clinic?”

“No, in the field.” Fungus lit a cigarette.

“Field?”

“The jungle. The only diploma you get is they let you crawl out alive.”

“I need to think this over,” Alex said. “I assume such surgery has risks.”

Again both older men laughed. “There’s a 50/50 chance that your mouth will reject transplanted tissue,” Fungus said. “But seriously, son, it’s the best option unless you find your missing lips.”

“And where would I locate them?” Alex exhaled with frustration.

“Try a bar called Odds & Ends,” Fungus said. “Bunch of freaky people congregate inside. If you don’t get a tip there, you may as well pay me to operate tomorrow.”

“So soon?”

“While I’m still steady.” He extended his hands and they shook wildly.

Alex returned home crestfallen. Both options seemed insane, but he might live to be eighty or ninety. Half a lifetime without lips, without the chance of ever kissing another person again seemed a bleak prison sentence.

He ate cold cuts at the kitchen table in the dark, the sounds of his teeth chewing amplified.

Beverly bustled in and switched on the lights. “Oh no, you’re back.”

“Yes, I live here. Remember?”

“Klaus Vanderhooven is coming.” She slapped an open palm against her face. “He cannot see you like that. He might think it’s genetic. Klaus arrives any minute.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“Remember, I’m your Aunt Beverly.”

Alex’s sixty-three-year-old mother dated men no older than fifty. A forty-year-old son did not fit the narrative that she was fifty-five. Beverly romanced the last vestiges of Manhattan Eurotrash. Their once abundant species had died out at the turn of the century. Dukes and Counts and Lords of total bullshit, hungry for what they considered a moneyed mate in exchange for access to their dubious titles.

“Can’t you spend the night elsewhere, or lock yourself in your studio?” Her voice became girlish. “I think Klaus is the one. He showed me his castle on the Rhine.” She proffered a photo.

“Uh, that’s a postcard, Aunt Bev.”

“You always crush my dreams.” She crouched down. “I say this with motherly love: Please leave — now. If Klaus mentions your condition, I could be finished in New York society.”

“Don’t worry. Going in five minutes. Keep him out of the kitchen at midnight so I can sneak back in.”

On 44th Street near 12th Avenue, sat Manhattan Mini Storage in the shadow of the raised West Side Highway. Though most of New York had been cleaned-up and turned into high rent apartments, a certain seediness lingered there. The area perfumed by a dead fish scent off the Hudson River, overhead car exhaust billowing down, and the sulfur gas odor from factories along the New Jersey Turnpike. Between small locksmiths and computer repair shops were squat windowless structures with padlocked metal doors.

Alex rapped on the door displaying a yellow skull and bones POISON sign.

A towering black man opened the door wearing a T-shirt in winter; his massive biceps expanded and contracted as if they were breathing.

Alex tried to peer around him. “Odds & Ends?”

“Need to see some identification.”

“You want to card me?”

Even the bouncer’s sigh sounded threatening. “No, I need proof that you belong.”

Alex noted a gouged wound on the man’s head.

“You see something funny?” he asked in a bass rumble.

“Not a thing.” Alex then exposed his lipless mouth.

The bouncer nodded. “Go on.”

Dark and smoky inside. A mixture of cigarettes, weed, and burning meat on a distant grill. Alex rubbed his eyes while heading toward an open barstool. The floor felt sticky, but with colored lights strobing and the haze, he could barely distinguish anything. The music sounded chaotic, a mixture of hip hop, heavy metal, and free jazz saxophone.

He climbed onto the stool and shouted a whiskey order to the Mr. Clean lookalike bartender. Around Alex were tall men, little people, extremely obese characters, and others on the brink of starvation.

“Never seen you here before.” An attractive woman with worn features swiveled her stool to face him. “You’re kind of cute. New meat always is.”

Alex reflexively cupped a hand around his mouth. “I — I’ve had a lip malfunction.”

“Joanna,” she said, and gently moved his arm. “Doesn’t bother me. I hate kissing. That’s where we eat and breathe.” She handed him the roach of a joint.

“Smoking inside is legal?”

The bartender cough-laughed, slamming his fist down on the bar top.

“Kissing is filthy,” Joanna said, “but I do miss sex.”

Alex didn’t question her assertion. “Why do people come here?”

“Some of us feel incomplete inside. We become whole at this bar.” She pointed west. “The docks are over there. Ships come from across the world, bringing the unimaginable. They send merchants in looking for rare items to export.”

The whiskey tasted rank and the smoke irritated Alex. He sensed a headache birthing. “I need to walk around.”

“Do as you please,” Joanna said. “I’ll be here. I never go anywhere.”

As Alex rose, he squinted in the darkness. It couldn’t be. Joanna had no lower-torso. Her entire being ended at the waist, which was propped on the barstool. Hallucination? Alex rushed away. Black cloth curtains hung down, separating the semicircular bar into different sections. He pushed through one, then another. Flat-faced men waved. Women pawed at him with their bare feet. He had to escape.

In the fourth section, Alex stopped. His lips sat atop the bar and smoked a cigarette, a vodka glass nearby.

“You’re here,” Alex said in disbelief.

“They, their, and them are our pronouns,” the lips replied.

“My life has fallen apart, my job. I can’t go home.” Alex stared at them. “I need you back.”

“We broke-up with you,” they said. “You considered us your worst feature.”

“I was wrong. I’ll be nicer.”

“You know, you used to bite us,” the lips said.

“I won’t anymore.” Alex’s voice trembled. “I’m begging, please.”

“Promise to take better care of us? Blistex, lip balm, oil, scrubs?”

“Yes.”

Will you floss and brush more? Your bad breath is legendary.”

“Yes, I swear.” His buzzing headache grew in intensity until Alex could only see a throbbing redness. Pressure immense, as if his brain might explode. Then Alex pitched forward, face-planting onto the drink-spattered bar.

“Wake up, buddy.” The bartender shook him into awareness. “Closing time.”

Alex noticed the man’s eye-patch for the first time. “How long have I — ”

“It’s 3 a.m. You do the math.”

Alex wiped his sweaty face with a bar napkin. And then he felt his lips, attached as before, no scars or wounds. “What’s the deal with this place?”

“People come looking for what they can’t find anywhere else.”

“Simple as that?”

“Well, it’s import/export,” the man said. “If you find something of value, then you trade something in return.”

“Did you?” Alex asked.

“Sure. I met the love of my life at Odds & Ends.”

“And the price?”

The bartender lifted his eye-patch to show a black empty void.

“Ugh.” Alex felt queasy. “I need to go home — now.”

“Get going, liver lips.”

Alex smiled at that. He pushed through the solid metal door and headed east until he could hail a cab on 11^th Avenue. Inside his apartment, he soon drifted off to sleep.

The next morning, Beverly acted delighted by his appearance and didn’t even mention rent. She kissed him on the lips. “Here, I’ve been saving these expensive sunglasses for you.”

Alex placed them on the bridge of his nose, but both stems swung loose and the sunglasses slid off. He touched the sides of his head in horror. “My ears!”

BLAME IT ON THE POMERANIAN

by Scott Laudati • December 27, 2021December 27, 2021

It had been twelve years, and I swore I would never work retail again. There was $11 left in my wallet. I had no food. I had a couple cigarettes. The plan wasn’t working. I went to the bar and found Kelly. I told her everything. That I smelled because a hair clog in the shower backed up all the filth water. I told her about the dog magazine paying me $75 per article. I told her about my parents and why I couldn’t move home.

“Write more dog articles,” she said.

“I’ve already written about every dog I know.”

“Write about my dog. She does this thing when I come home. It’s so cute.”

I asked Kelly what kind of dog she had. She clasped her hands together and held them to her heart. “I have a Pomeranian. She’s the best.”

“I can’t write about a Pomeranian,” I said. “I’m trying to build a reputation.”

“What’s wrong with Pomeranians?”

Pomeranians. Shit-poos. Schnoodles. The small dogs that crawl around all my ex-girlfriend’s apartments like evil hamsters.

“They are the perfect companion for the general idiocy of this country,” I said.

Kelly disagreed. She said I had to see “this thing” the dog did when she came home. I was out of beer. Out of friends. I said why not.

Kelly lived with her parents in one of the row houses close to the interstate. We drove out of downtown Frederick and got on Highway 40. They’d once called this stretch “The Golden Mile,” but that was long before I’d come to town. Now it was a globalization hell-hole broken up by speed traps and Mexican ghettos. We passed a Michael’s, a Best Buy, a PetsMart, and a Barnes & Noble. Kelly’s mouth dropped open and she started slapping my leg in excitement. “LOOK LOOK LOOK!” she said. “You want to be a writer. Why don’t you work at Barnes & Noble?”

“I wear clothes, too. Maybe I should get a job in a sweatshop.”

We got to Kelly’s and she parked her car in the driveway and we walked up to her house.

“Okay,” she said, “be really quiet. She’ll only do the thing if she thinks I’m alone.”

I stood to the left of the door. It was a glass door. I watched Kelly bend over and dig around in her pocketbook. We’d gotten drunk once and made-out but I hadn’t changed my underwear that week so I pretended to pass out before it went any further. Did she remember? Would I ever get another chance?

Kelly jingled her keys and opened the door. “Sophie,” she said. “Sophie. Mommy’s home.”

I could hear little feet tapping against a marble floor, heading toward us.

“Sophes,” Kelly said. “Come get mommy.”

A Pomeranian ran through Kelly’s legs and lunged at me. I jumped over it and climbed up one of the pillars supporting the porch like a bear cub. The dog wanted to kill me but it didn’t have much reach. It had heart, though. It bounced on its back legs and circled the pillar with endless stamina, growling like something you’d find living under a woodshed.

“Oh, damn,” Kelly said. “She never acts like this.”

Kelly got the dog in the house and came back. We sat on the porch and watched the police set up a speed trap on the interstate.

“What does the dog even do?” I asked.

“She gets really close to the ground, then she does a backflip.”

“A backflip?”

“Yeah. She lands it every time.”

I gave Kelly my cell phone and asked her to get a video of the dog doing a backflip.

“Are you going to write about it?” she asked.

“I don’t know. If the dog can do a backflip we’re definitely on to something.”

I paced around the porch waiting for Kelly. I thought about my fate. I looked up into the trees and said, “What is my fate?”

A blue Volkswagen pulled into the driveway. It was Kelly’s sister, Gina. She was twenty-one or twenty-two. She got most of the family’s looks. Jenny Lewis bangs. The sweet Appalachian drawl.

“Gina,” I said. “What’s up?”

“Same shit. Always the same shit.”

“You’re too young to say stuff like that.”

“I’m going back to college. I hate my job.”

“Where are you working?”

“Barnes & Noble.”

“Barnes & Noble?

“Yeah. On the interstate.”

I started rethinking my commitment to avoiding retail. Being locked up with Gina eight hours every day might not be so bad. “Kelly said I should get a job at Barnes & Noble,” I said. “Should I apply?”

“If you want to hate your life.”

“I already hate my life.”

“I know we’re hiring seasonal.”

It was September in western Maryland. There were only two seasons up in those hills. Either you were shoveling snow off your car or you were waiting in a sweaty line to swim in the mud-pit at the top of Mt. Catoctin.

“What season?” I asked.

“Christmas.”

Kelly came outside with my phone. She said she had recorded a perfect flip. We gathered around my phone and watched the video. Kelly held a biscuit in front of the dog’s face and taunted it. The dog whined and ran around in circles. Finally, it sort of crouched down and sprung up into a back-roll.

It wasn’t clean, but the dog landed the trick.

“Maybe I was wrong about Pomeranians,” I said.

Kelly told Gina she needed to get her car out of the driveway. They started to argue like sisters do. About stolen clothes. Something terrible Kelly had said after Gina’s new haircut.

“Your eyebrows are uneven, that’s why no one wants to date you,” Gina said to her. “I have to go back to Barnes & Noble anyway.”

“I’ll go with you,” I said. Then I looked at Kelly. “Might as well apply, right?”

“You’re such a dick,” Kelly said. She knew what I was up to.

We drove to the Barnes & Noble on the interstate. Gina went into an office to find Craig, the store manager. I walked through the fiction aisles. Fifty Shade of Grey had a special booth at the end caps.

It’s just a job, I thought. You’ve sold your soul before.

Gina came out with a man in a brown polo shirt tucked into brown khakis. She did the introductions.

“We’re only hiring seasonal,” Craig said to me. “But Gina says you’re a good worker. Maybe we can put you on full-time after Christmas.”

“That’s, like, five months from now,” I said.

“The economy is bad for everyone.”

“Not everyone, Craig. But definitely for us.”

I filled out seven pages of paperwork. Listed my college degree. Gave them three references who I knew wouldn’t pick up their phones.

“All right,” Craig said. “I’ll give you a call in the morning. If everything checks out we can start you tomorrow afternoon.”

The next day I got the call to come on in. “Oh good,” I said to Craig on the phone. “I’m really looking forward to joining the team.”

I hung up and loaded the video of the Pomeranian doing a backflip onto the internet. I named it “Pomeranian Doing A Backflip”. I clicked “Yes” to load the video with as many advertisements as could fit onto the screen. Then I checked my email. I looked around my room. I couldn’t think of any excuse not to show up.

Craig met me at the door. “We just have to get you set up in the computer,” he said.

I sat in the break room. A girl told me it was a good job and I was lucky to have found it. She told me we got a 10% discount on every book we purchased. Her mother worked there, too. She told me they were both at the community college and wanted to be English teachers.

Craig came back. He handed me a brochure that said it wasn’t illegal but severely unethical to ever put anything about this interview on the internet. Then I watched a video on corporate theft.

I fell asleep during a video about a “Membership Program” and had a dream about a big auditorium filled with people. Every exit had a sign above it so people could organize by their pronoun and rejoin the world with their preferred herd: “Friends – Exit here”, “Member’s – Exit here”, “Guests – Exit here”, “Family – Exit here”, “Loyalists – Exit here”.

I woke up and Craig was standing there staring at me. “Do you have any questions?” he asked.

“What’s the pay?”

“$7.25 an hour.”

I did some quick math. I would have to work eighty-two hours to even make my rent.

“I have a degree,” I said. “Can’t we up that a little?”

“Everyone here has a college degree.”

Craig paired me with Peggy for training. She was sort of new but understood the computer system. Every employee in the store was having a meltdown. The Barnes & Noble in the next town had sold more Membership Programs the previous quarter.

“What you really want to remember,” Peggy told me, “is push the Membership Program.”

Peggy had just moved to Maryland too. She had driven a Harley and lived in Taos, New Mexico before this. But her mother died and said her only wish was for Peggy to find God. Then the clocks and the dates and something about the amount of hairs on her cat all aligned and Peggy received a revelation which instructed her to start a church. So she gave up her Harley and hitchhiked east, like a Joseph Smith in reverse, and for some reason she stopped in this cesspool with no natural beauty and decided it was the perfect place to start her flock.

“Do you want to make a donation?” she asked.

“I’m getting paid $7.25 an hour,” I said. “Ask God to raise the minimum wage if he needs money.”

“You’re a Catholic, aren’t you?”

“From birth.”

“I can tell. That’s why you’re so angry.”

We went over the computer system again and again. It was impossible to screw up. You just scanned a book and the computer did the rest.

“Do I have to clock out for a bathroom break?” I asked her.

“No. Just tell someone you’re going.”

“I’m going.”

I grabbed a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey and went into the bathroom. I spent twenty minutes reading and had an issue with some of the grammar. In the next stall, a man was frantically babbling on a cellphone: “I’m never going to make my quota. I have to sell a hundred more Membership Programs by next month.”

I went back to the register and read more. An old lady asked me if I was enjoying the book. I said the writing was rotten but the descriptions were right on.

Peggy was watching me from another register. She coughed. I knew it was to get my attention so I ignored her. Then she walked over and flicked my shoulder. “You didn’t ask that woman if she was part of our Membership Program.”

“Oh yeah. I’ll get the next one.”

“We’re not supposed to be reading at work.”

“Look Peggy, how much of an incentive is there to sell these Membership Programs?”

“Incentive?”

“Yeah. Like, if you sell the most, do you get a pizza party?”

“No.”

“Do you get a free book?”

“No.”

“What is it then?”

“It’s just … what we’re supposed to do.”

The woman had a brain. And even if she’d forgotten how to use it, she at least had a heart. Where was her self-worth? But then I started to think that maybe it was me who was wrong. Peggy could’ve worked at Wal-mart, but she had chosen Barnes & Noble. Even if it was a major label soul-melting monster, it was still a book store – possibly the last home to literature. Between these four walls sat all the tomes written in basements and bloodshed and love and death. The carefully crafted words the world thought important enough to immortalize between bound pages.

That had to mean something.

I began to feel like an asshole. Peggy needed this job and she was following the rules. I decided to play her game. We were the ambassadors to these books, after all.

A family came up to the counter with a college chemistry book. “This is the wrong book,” the mother said.

“Do you have the receipt?” Peggy asked.

“No. I went online to barnesandnoble.com and they sent me the wrong book.”

“That’s not true.”

“Are you calling me a liar?” The woman looked at her husband. “Did she just call me a liar?”

“No,” Peggy said. “I’m calling you a thief.”

Peggy reached down and pulled the woman’s from out of her hand. Then she dropped it on the counter with a loud thud. The inside was lined with aluminum foil. Peggy pulled out two children’s books and said, “Ah ha! The smoking guns.”

The husband grabbed the kids and they all ran for the door.

“Stop them,” Peggy screamed. “Stop them. Robbers! Thieves!”

No one moved. Craig watched the family leave the store but he didn’t go after them. He came over and asked what happened.

“First they tried to return a book they didn’t buy,” Peggy said. “Then, they tried to shoplift.”

“What did you do?”

“I reached down and took the woman’s bag.”

“Did you put your hand on her?”

“I think I touched her arm. But, Craig …”

“Peggy, this is the third time I’m telling you this – you can’t touch a customer.”

“But they’re criminals.”

“Peggy, I told you this last time. You can’t touch a customer.”

“I’m sorry, Craig.”

“Peggy, I have to fire you.”

Peggy looked at me like I could make everything right. Like there was a simple explanation I could give to Craig that would restore some order. The poor woman. See what God did to her? Her life was fine without Him. And now that she’d found Him she was broke near the West Virginia border with no Harley, fired from a job that was just above can-collector on the shit ladder.

“It’s never going to get better for you,” I said to her.

Peggy ran out of the store crying. I worked one more hour by myself. Gina never stopped in to see how I was doing.

I saw Craig approaching my counter with a clipboard. “What’s good, Craig?” I asked.

“It says you didn’t sell any Membership Programs.”

“Bad economy, Craig.”

“Gina said you were a hard worker.”

“I am.”

“Day two of training tomorrow.”

I clocked out. Three and a half hours. $25 before taxes.

I went to sleep that night and had a dream. I was a box full of Barnes & Noble Membership Program cards. Thick plastic credit cards. All an expensive green color like new currency. But there was one card in the box that was different than the thousands of others just like it. It was always that cards turn to be next. To be sold. It was what all the other cards wanted. But every time the box opened that one would jump far back into the pile. And I’d watch it smile while all the other cards got plucked out by peasant hands.

I woke up ten minutes before I was supposed to be back at work. I went on the internet to see how my video was doing. “Pomeranian Doing a Backflip” was nearing 120,000 hits. I wrote down some numbers and figured my pay from the ads had to be about $25. I looked around my room. At the shirt I had picked out to wear to work. At the wrinkled pants I’d left in a heap. I went back to sleep.

dogs internet

THE SAME CANNOT BE SAID FOR OTHERS

by Ceci K. Bradley • December 27, 2021December 27, 2021

You stare at the razor. Water beats down on the back of your head. Curdling water shrouds thoughts, sounds – the world beyond the bathroom door regrettably oblivious.

Rising with the steam of each jet: the same words, tumbling flooding out. A circuitous spit – spittle from girls you thought were your friends. Insults powdered in drugstore makeup. Enticements leashed by a school bell. Unknown catalysts dressed as jokes.

It’s just a joke. Get over it.

You stare at the razor, set before so much dark.

And that’s what the girls laughed at. Pointed their chubby polished fingers at and howled to the ceiling of the seventh-grade classroom – your dark leg hair. The teacher didn’t notice the slap of their words against your blushed bathroom tiles. The other students didn’t notice your silvery tears as the bathtub overflowed. No one noticed and no one said a thing.

You said something to your mother, asked if you could do something about it. Asked for help.

You’re too young for that, and mother rolled over and went back to sleep.

You stare at the razor. What if

the body is a magnificent thing: molded by godscience; had the Renaissance on its knees; elicited fire dancing gifts when Man was little younger than the dirt swirling in the shower drain; brings lovers to a point, then hands and heaven and exhales that fall into sleep. creates destroys creates destroys until – until we don’t know when. the body is a perfect thing, every dive and curve set with precision. each blink planned. each breath calculated. each life meant to be. every hair with its place and purpose, despite the magazines and mothers and men with ideals and mean, immature friends. who gives a fuck? who said everything needs to be so pretty and clean? what if i dont want to be pretty? what if i want to be a mess? what if i want to be like a goddamn savage? what if i want to be like a man? there’s a difference between the two? what if i like my hair? who cares?

Fuck. Who cares?

You stare at the razor. You think your friends who aren’t really your friends care. You think your mother cares – probably your father too. You think the boy you like cares (and the next one too). You think that it matters and that everyone cares and that you need to fix it.

Luckily, you are sweet – naïve to unhappiness and what a sad soul can bring. You still hold that bubble of awe we are all born with. You don’t know what not to do.

So you stare at the razor one last time and then take it to your calves. You shave your legs and armpits – the dark hairs falling from your pale skin and disappearing down the shower drain – and, with blessed oblivion, you never think of your wrists.

The same cannot be said for others.

girlhood puberty

Daas Frrench Literature gay love translated fiction translated literature

BOOK REVIEW: THE LAST ONE

by Samantha Gordon • December 23, 2021December 23, 2021

She is Muslim, she is a sinner, a liar and a lesbian and in some ways she is all of us. In The Last One by Fatima Daas, the narrator declares to her mother that not every girl wants to be a princess, but girls all around the globe have been taught that this is a desire that they share and more importantly that it will be their salvation. Whilst most of us accept early on that this is false, others, like Daas, have the courage to actually say so.

The Last One draws you in, little by little, and before you know it you find yourself sitting by the narrator’s side on the train as she makes the hour’s long commute across Paris. Her descriptions of fellow commuters ring true, as does her reaction to them. Her observations are ones we have all experienced, and you can feel her frustration as she acknowledges her own imperfections and the struggle to overcome them. You learn how important being a Muslim is to her and that she finds great comfort in her faith, even though she has not fully understood just what place she occupies within it. For the doubt creeps in as it does with many of us; does God love me unconditionally or will he abandon me and leave me alone? Practicing her faith comes from an intense desire and love – not from obligation. Every day she convinces herself that she is living a double life as the acknowledgement of her sins plagues her thoughts. Yet she doesn’t give up, she continues to strive to be good and worthy of love.

These internal dialogues may sound familiar, the narrator weaving in and out of past and present so seamlessly, that the reader recalls the times that he or she has felt much the same way and a certain melancholy sets in. The more you read the more you become a part of it, but are you becoming a part of her life, or a part of a story that Daas has created for you take part in? The author brilliantly blurs the line between the two. The core of the story is in essence the core of everyone’s story: how do we find our place in the world and within our family? We ask ourselves: where do I fit in, if I fit in at all? Daas fears her father’s violent outbursts and begins to view him as a monster. She feels strains as their relationship withers away into nonexistence. She deeply admires her mother yet knows she can never be like her or live up to what her family expects of her. These already complicated relationships are compounded by an intense identity struggle that accompanies the narrator as she navigates a transition between adolescence and adulthood that leaves her feeling maladjusted. Yet what is encouraging is the solace she finds on the stage and in words. Scribbling away on the metro she confides, “I write stories so I don’t have to live my own,” exposing not only the heart-wrenching solitude of an existence that is too painful to confront, but also the vulnerability of not knowing if that existence will be met with love or hate. She writes about a character she seems in awe of named Lola. “Lola is a tomboy too, but not like me. Physically, she looks like a girl. She found the balance.” She is in awe because someone has found the illusive balance that she so intensely desires herself.

In this age of social media where attacks and criticism of all that’s different abound, a constant struggle for recognition and acceptance is apparent. Through her written words, Fatima Daas finds the liberation we all seek. In taking to her pen to publicly excavate the complex world of the self she stands tall, claiming her own inimitability so that others may find the courage to do the same.

As most of us view the world through our own lens of reality, not everyone will fully appreciate The Last One, not because of the writing, (the writing is inspired), but because for some certain religious and sexual elements may feel quite removed from their own experience. But isn’t this why we open books in the first place? For what Daas is offering us here is a unique chance to visit that other place, that place where the boundaries defining sexuality and race are fluid and porous, where ideas about the self are things that constantly change, revealing identities that are multi-faceted and incongruous. For whether or not people can see pieces of their own lives in Daas’s novel they will certainly understand its importance.

The Last One is not the genre I am typically drawn to, but I’m so glad I read it. Because in the end what the story so beautifully reminds us of, is that no matter where we came from or what our faith is, we are far more alike than we are different. We share our internal struggles and self-doubt. Reading The Last One will take you outside of yourself. It will allow you to see the others with the understanding and compassion we all deserve. Word by word Fatima Daas takes you by the hand and invites you on a journey you didn’t realize you needed to take.

The Last One
By Fatima Daas
Translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud
Other Press, 208 pages

HEAVY WATER

by Brianna Di Monda • December 19, 2021December 20, 2021 • 1 Comment

For a long time, I closed my eyes when I undressed and kept my eyes closed until bra straps secured my shoulders and underwear covered my vulva. I did this for years: revolted against my carnal condition, experienced a spontaneous embarrassment at seeing my swollen breasts. I shaved irregularly, wore no makeup, and preferred sports bras that flattened my chest. It wasn’t meant to be a political statement. I wanted to render my femininity invisible, pretend it wasn’t there, tell myself that it wasn’t something I had to maintain. The only time I renounced my body with intention, I took clippers to my scalp and watched my sixteen-inch hair fall to the ground. I was sick of being told how beautiful it was. As though it were the only feature that gave me worth. But even if I experienced bouts of nausea when confronted with my distending body, I always understood myself to be a girl. I was, for reasons I didn’t understand, attached to my womanhood.

And then I met Charlie, who proved to me that this nausea was false, misinformed. I had two memories juxtaposed as tokens of this lesson: his tongue, knotted, plunging, resuscitating my numb body, and a box of Plan B in my hand the next day because someone who was not a boy had gotten me pregnant.

We met at the lakeside in September. The sky was in its polychromatic in-between state, waiting for dusk to settle. I found myself in the Midwest once again, this time as a fellow studying under a classical composer with a small cohort of musicians. Someone planned a small gathering so we could meet each other. I arrived alone and saw him sitting on the dock. I offered him one of my beers. He complimented my MIT shirt.

A couple of girls grabbed the rope swing and jumped in, head first, feet first, plunging far below the surface. Their bodies turned into green algae when they descended. He saw me watching the water. He told me that the lake had special properties. That it could turn people into sirens if they were ready. If their body was willing to undergo the transformation.

I waited for the girls to resurface. Looked to see if they were transformed, disfigured, if their legs had turned to sea serpents. When they came up for air, they remained human.

I undressed and climbed down the dock’s ladder into the lake. He followed, much less comfortable in the water, but more at ease with his exposed body. I learned he’d been living in the area for a year already as an instrument repair technician, and that he’d been sexually assaulted by an ex-boyfriend over the summer. The two of them had spent a weekend together after the breakup, and when they got drunk, Charlie blacked out and woke up the next morning naked. They had agreed not to have sex. His boyfriend shrugged it off.

“Everyone assumes sex is easy for male-bodied people,” he told me. “They assume orgasms are easy. I haven’t been comfortable with penetrative sex for a while.”

I treaded water not two feet from him, not sure what to say, or how he had told me something so private so easily. I felt I ought to return the favor, to tell him a secret of my own to show that I trust him. But when I opened my mouth, I looked like a fish out of water, my mouth made a stupid “O” face, my lips opened and closed wordlessly as I tried to find a story. For a moment I thought the water on his lashes were tears.

Somehow, he invited me to his home. The wood floors were full of nicks and scrapes. He owned barely any furniture, but guitars cluttered a corner of the living room. I walked over to see their splintered necks, broken strings, peeling finishes, lifted bridges. And then, farther from the wall, the finished instruments. He took care in fixing each damaged body, and the new strings and frets marked his completed projects. I held one, traced the lines in the wood, and the secret came to me: I told him that I had never wanted the burden of being feminine. He admitted it was a label that would suit him better, that he often woke up wishing for new anatomy, that being a woman meant he could wear skirts and dresses and no one would question it.

I nodded, but could not fathom how he could be jealous of my sex, how he could desire to emulate its feminine characteristics when it was all I had ever tried to escape. He asked me to swim to the center with him one day, when he was ready, to see if the lake would give him the transformation he so wanted.

“Everyone experiences gender dysphoria, whether they’re cis or trans,” he told me. “But I think this could really help me.”

I agreed. We cooked pasta for dinner. When plated, the chunky tomato sauce stuck out between the penne like the exposed organs of a body in surgery. At the end of the night, he played “September Song” for me on the upright.

By the middle of December, most of the lake had frozen over and a foot of snow covered the ground. A harvest moon stained the clouds, warped the dark basilica sky with a jarring red hue. With Charlie next to me, the two of us protected by four layers of clothing, I marveled at how still the air was, how the pale paralysis of winter rendered the trees entirely alone. I leaped onto the bank, relished the fact that I could run across the ice and slide five feet without breaking the surface, and said that for the lake to survive this winter it had to cannibalize its surface. He nodded in agreement like I said something important.

“I should be seeing a therapist. I should have started a long time ago.”

I turned to him standing three feet above me, his hands in his pockets, his long hair falling over his shoulders, and hesitated before asking why.

“I thought it was my changing relationship with my father, or my possible breast cancer, or the fact that my career was about to change dramatically when in fact it was none of those.”

“What was it then?”

“The fact that I suffer from depression. Things have never been wonderful and I don’t think they ever will be.”

“It’s hard to accept that you’re depressed because the label feels so permanent.”

“Yes.”

“Like your gender.”

“If I have a gender, it’s not attached to my sex. Do you see me as a boy? Fundamentally?”

I considered his desire for femininity. At that moment, under the crimson sky, I thought it could only be his own naivety, the perverted myth of womanhood, that made him feel like anything other than a boy. So I told him: “If I were to sleep with you, I would assume your gender.”

He shook his head. “That’s not my relationship with my body.”

I did not have the maturity to understand the weight of that night. If I could do it again, I would have spoken differently. I would have told him . . . or perhaps it had to happen that way. Perhaps I could not have possibly understood sooner.

It was at a show of his that I first saw it. I ordered a beer and made my way to the side of the room, where I stood with my back against the wall. I still didn’t know many people in town besides Charlie. When he went on, he took center stage with his guitar, holding the neck tenderly, smiling bashfully at the audience, swinging his body in an awkward, girlish manner. When he addressed the crowd, he did so in his raw, quiet way. And I knew then that his hopeless honesty had never been reserved especially for me, but was a way of being that permeated all his relationships. And almost imperceptibly, I saw what he had been trying to tell me for nearly half a year. I saw it in his languid movements on stage, in each tender note he plucked from the strings.

I was terrible with words, always trying to pack numerous strands of thought into condensed space, but I pulled him aside after the set and stammered that I had been wrong and that it was not fair that he was referred to in the masculine gender. That even if I was attached to my womanhood, and not my femininity, I could see him and love him as a feminine being.

“And beyond that, beyond all of that and anything to do with me, the presence of ‘he’ when speaking of you reveals an absence.”

Charlie squeezed my hand and drew short, ragged breaths. For a moment we were outside in a foot of snow again as everything around us muted, stilled.

I sat on their bed — two twin mattresses pushed together on the floor. Coffee mugs and sheet music cluttered their desk, and their guitar leaned against the bare wall.I wanted to kiss them, but it was they who kissed me. Their mouth open, their tongue plunged down, labored, restored, their tongue was my tongue. I thought of something I had always known but never vocalized: I’ve only ever been taught how to love men.

Yet their touch commanded my attention. I inhaled sharply when they grabbed the side of my stomach between their thumb and forefinger. It was not a question of simple desire or passion; rather, I was prompted by necessity to kiss them. I had to reproduce their kiss, whose meaning I did not understand, but which caught me in the form of need. We kissed in order to breathe life into each other, it became necessary in order to live. Their body, long, thin, gaunt, olive-black, became indiscernible traits, at once feminine and masculine. My body trembled in fear and from the effort.

Some women can churn children into this world like butter. That day, it was me. Next time, maybe, it could be them.

gender dysphoria

EVERYONE SAYS HI

by robert o turner • December 10, 2021December 10, 2021

Everyone says Hi, but not many mean it, he thought. The girl at the counter said it and just looked at him, his face with his lines on it, hers with a set smile right out of a training manual. They always say Hi; the predictive tongue and lips and the word so common it’s automatic and banal.

My wife said that her family called and the usual. They were sorry that they couldn’t have stayed longer and they wished us well and if we needed anything and they’re only a phone call away. And they said Hi.

I’m off work for a while, and they might be tempted to call and check up and say Hi but they won’t, because there’s not much more to say once the Hi and How are you? are out of the way.

Everyone says Hi, and everyone means well, and some try to do well, too, but it’s really best if people just leave me alone. They must have enough practise by now.

In the park, there are kids playing football, literally in front of one man and his dog, and there’s a couple more on the swings; a teenage boy looking bored sits in one seat and a younger girl with a baby doll that speaks when you press a button. I hear its voice that seems disjointed to reality, but I can’t go near them to hear more even if I wanted to. I walk around the edge of the park, past bins and drying trees, in a long semicircle that stops as I approach the busy climbing frame. I turn away and go back to the brick archway entrance and out.

I hope it rains for some reason and it will, given long enough, and I eat something on the walk back to the house and the front door, which for some reason I feel won’t let me in, but it does.

She’s getting in the shower as she probably slept in late, though the TV is on without the sound, next to the cards on the shelf and the silent clock. I watch pictures of people’s heads as they flap their mouths. There is the smell of food in the kitchen and the small bedroom’s unopened door upstairs.

We were planning to go down the library to get some books out and discuss things in a quiet place. I go to the pub as the shower upstairs gets turned off, gently saying Bye from downstairs. I waste another evening, another chance. I say Bye when everyone says Hi.

It was getting dark, the night here to end the day. He went to the car. He opened its back door and unbuckled the small plastic seat that was there and took it out, and he took it to the bins, leaving it out for the dustmen to collect. He went back into his house in the cold, pausing only to look up briefly at the stars and then the different bedroom windows facing out from the brick work. He got into bed without waking her, and when it was dark and enough time had elapsed he stopped himself thinking, crying, and over-thinking and held her sleeping hip gently with his hand and wondered what was going to happen next. This fragile life now, with the days like splintered glass on rice paper and so much self-pity drawn from the love of another. The days and weeks would come, and he wondered about their personality and nature, but the future is unspoken.

family grief

THE BIRTH OF DEATH

by Ayo Deforge • December 5, 2021December 6, 2021

Stillbirth means that you did not miscarry. It means that your baby died after 24 weeks in your womb. Whether it was classified as early, late, or term stillbirth, it still means that your baby didn’t get a chance at life.

You were elated when hCG was found in your urine and in your blood. You got into your highest heels and danced without music, chanting thanksgiving prayers to God who had answered your prayers after a decade of supplication. When the pregnancy sickness started, people comforted you, telling you it was “good sickness.” “After nine months, you will not remember any of the suffering,” they said in an attempt to console you. As the weeks turned to months, there was a placenta and an amniotic sac. Then a heartbeat and brain waves. Then the embryo made it into a fetus and the hands, fingers, feet and toes formed fully.

The first trimester screening came and passed. The results were positive. Your precious baby was healthy. Soon after, your uterus and the skin of your belly began to stretch as your baby grew. Then you began to feel the flutters. Later on, the kicks. Your little one was very active. You couldn’t wait to meet the love of your life. You shopped for baby supplies. You read books and articles online to learn about newborns. You noted tips, pieces of advice and strategies from older moms.

One day, you noticed no movement. You drank cups and cups of cold orange juice while you waited for signs of life. After a long night spent casting nets, you rushed to the hospital and demanded a scan. “Your baby has no heartbeat”, the technician said confirming that which you had feared the most. Your world came tumbling down. Just like that, without any forewarning, your expectations were cut off. The new life you had envisioned with your beautiful baby will not manifest. The future that might have been will never come to pass.

Stillbirth means that dilation and evacuation is not possible. It means that you had to give birth to your baby. Whether through a vaginal or cesarean delivery, it still means that your baby will never go home with you.

You accepted natural birth when it was recommended to you but you refused an epidural when it was offered to you. You needed to feel the pain. You needed to suffer for her. You needed to go through it. Labour was induced to ripen your cervix. Your contractions started as the medications took effect. They wheeled you into a room at the far end of the ward, away from tired joyful mothers and crying newborns. Because there was no risk to your baby, her heartbeat was not monitored, and help did not come right away when you used the call button. The longer your labour lasted, the more pain you had to endure and the more your baby’s condition deteriorated in your womb.

Finally, your cervix opened up enough for your waters to be broken. You wept relentlessly during those two long days you labored in vain and pushed forth a dead baby in the same ward where others were giving birth to live babies. As they rejoiced, holding and creating a bond with their baby for the first time, you were crying and holding yours for the last time. As joy superseded their labour pains, emotional pain overtook yours. When the midwife asked you if you wanted a picture with your baby, you shook your head. In later days, month and years to come, you will be angry with yourself for not taking a picture of her in your hands, and for not washing and dressing her by yourself. The baby clothes you bought were too big for your little angel so the hospital offered you small clothes donated by associations. “They are specially made for prematures.” The midwife told you. You cried all through the night because you hadn’t thought to bring a blanket for her to be wrapped in. You were angry with yourself because neither her clothes nor her blanket was bought by you.

Sadly, stillbirth means that you’ll still need postpartum care. It means that you’ll still have postpartum bleeding, uterine cramping, and perineal pain.

Before you left the hospital, you had to make decisions about autopsy, about funeral and about registration of a stillbirth. They were the hardest decisions you had ever had to make. Ones you wish you didn’t have to make. As other women were leaving the hospital with their healthy babies, you left with your baby’s photos, hospital name tag and footprints. Upon arriving home from the hospital, flowers, plants and chocolates from loved ones had taken up space on your kitchen counter. Instantly, you were drawn to the peace lily so you picked it up and began looking for a home for it. When you noticed a small white bloom in the middle of the green leaves you broke down and cried, apologizing to the daughter you will never meet.

Just when you thought that it was all over, it really was not because your milk then came in. So, in the following days, you had to express your swollen breasts to relieve the pain. Daily, you would bind and ice them to stop them from producing milk. The pregnancy apps that you had downloaded continued to send you notifications about your baby’s growth rate so you deleted them. Targeted ads put ‘everything baby’ everywhere you went on the internet so you cleared your cookies. The baby registry you had started kept sending you “a gift is on its way” emails so you cancelled it.

You have stretch marks to live with, muscles to tone and extra kilos to get rid of. Many nights you found it difficult to fall asleep and when you finally did, you had nightmares and woke up on soaked sheets. You wondered what to do to the cot you had bought and the room you had decorated, to the toys that will not be touched and the clothes that will not be worn. Finally, in spite of yourself, you made a shrine of it.

motherhood stillbirth

NEW TOURISTS OF HONG KONG

by Paul Ruta • December 4, 2021December 4, 2021

“Are you a tourist?” he asked, setting down a huge bowl of steaming broth in front of me. The base of noodles was topped with bok choy, fish balls, tofu, and a few oblong items I can only describe as Chinese cocktail weenies. Eat like a local: That’s my motto, for better or worse.

It would’ve been a perfectly fair question a couple years ago. I am, after all, a big old white guy – a gweilo – with a sweaty brow and a camera that has more buttons than I know what to do with. To complete the cliché, I have a non-regional American accent, though strictly speaking I’m not American. This is a secret get-out-of-jail-free card for us Canadians. Whenever we offend people on our travels, the locals shake their heads and say, Bloody rude Americans! No one ever thinks to blame Canadians.

The question was asked by the pop of a mom and pop shop where I went for lunch in Kennedy Town, an area of Hong Kong that seldom blips on the tourist radar except for those on a pilgrimage to the semifamous wall of trees along Forbes Street. I gave Pop a sideways look, and we both laughed as he saw the absurdity of his question. I didn’t even need to answer: No, of course I’m not a tourist.

That’s because, during this pandemic, there are no tourists in Hong Kong – not the usual kind, anyway. Although crowds have certainly thinned since early 2020, Hong Kong never became a lockdown ghost town along the lines of London or New York. Public transit continued to run, major shopping districts such as Causeway Bay and Kowloon’s Nathan Road never really stopped buzzing, and restaurants have returned to near-full capacity.

But call it an early night because bars and nightclubs remain shuttered, notably in popular Lan Kwai Fong – shortened to LKF by local expats, especially after they’ve had a few – an area where packed-in partiers would mingle more intimately into the wee hours than health officials were willing to tolerate.

With minimal social restrictions blocking the way, the ever-industrious Hong Kongers have responded to the lack of imported tourists by becoming rather active tourists here themselves. Domestic tourism is not a new idea, of course, but in pandemic times it’s often the only idea, and the Hong Kong Tourism Board ran ad campaigns promoting it.

While Hong Kongers are encouraged to explore locally, they are equally discouraged from traveling abroad. In addition to global travel restrictions, there’s a daunting quarantine for returning residents. As of this writing, it’s three weeks wearing a wristband monitor and pacing the floor in a government approved hotel at one’s own expense – assuming you had tested negative upon arrival at the airport.

It may be presumptuous to include myself among the homegrown tourists, but I am a visa holder and I like to find the time to explore. Whenever I’m in the mood for an inspiring urban wander, I’ll hop on a bus to Sheung Wan or Sai Ying Pun. These two connected neighbourhoods overflow with achingly Instagrammable coffee shops and tiny boutiques along with a dose of vintage grit. Joined at the hipster, as it were.

Like much of Hong Kong Island, Sheung Wan and Sai Ying Pun are built on a serious hillside strewn with gleaming (and not-so-gleaming) high-rises, with broad stone staircases going in all directions like an Escher drawing. In contrast, the architecture of the older, low-rise buildings runs the gamut from bland to godawful.

This is a gift to street artists, who treat these exterior walls as free canvases, turning the area’s maze of one-way streets and alleyways into a meandering open-air gallery. The most ambitious work is created during annual festivals by well-known artists from around the world. In other locations, colourful family-friendly murals commissioned by restaurants and businesses enliven entire sides of indifferent buildings and create instant landmarks.

Aging hipster that I am, I like to go beyond the official street art and Disneyfied installations and venture farther into the alleys where the wild things are. This is the breeding ground for politically and sexually charged stuff along with weird, dashed-off pieces, often with graffiti scrawled around the edges like encroaching weeds. Here I find the work of locally famous artists such as Lousy – Hong Kong’s answer to Keith Haring – and others whose instantly recognisable images inhabit the clever nooks and dark spaces.

Each time I visit, my mental sketch of the area fills in more detail. I’ll notice the funky sign over an abandoned print shop, the gnarled roots of banyan trees by an elementary school, a new chai latte place, community gardens with outdoor exercise equipment and a mural I could’ve sworn wasn’t there last week.

While I puff up and down stairs taking pictures of painted walls, many of Hong Kong’s other 7.5 million inhabitants embark on their own missions of discovery and rediscovery, seeing their city as if through the fresh, fascinated eyes of newcomers. Hikers roam scenic mountain trails for free. And for the price of a ferry ticket they can spend an idyllic day at the beaches and seafood bars on the many outlying islands.

The irony is that popular nature trails such as Dragon’s Back have become clogged with local hikers, forcing more people to veer off pathways and damage the fragile environment. Littering has increased, and discarded face masks have been seen clinging to shrubbery like strange aqua-blue flowers.

Having more locals out and about enjoying fresh air and seafood is wonderful but does little to address the devastation brought on by the collapse of international travel. The effects are magnified in a dot of a place like Hong Kong, a place defined by global business. One result is that it took massive government action to bail out Cathay Pacific, an airline with no such thing as a domestic flight.

Meanwhile, upscale hotels with spectacular city and harbour views, now mostly emptied of lucrative business travellers, hang onto economic life by offering staycation packages at prices most locals could not otherwise afford.
The economic squeeze has been felt at ground level, too, especially among small retailers already reeling from the disruption caused by 2019’s pro-democracy protests. During one of my Sheung Wan wanders, I happened upon a leather-goods boutique. They’d been operating on razor-thin margins and were now forced to close down, saying they simply could not withstand a year filled with protests followed by a year or more of COVID-19.

One positive outcome of this pandemic is that more Hong Kongers are strapping on hiking shoes and discovering their own backyard; meanwhile, others won’t venture much beyond the escalators at glitzy shopping centres. I’m somewhere in the middle, exploring the urban wilds while remaining within striking distance of cosy coffee shops with free Wi-Fi.

Perhaps I ought to return to that Kennedy Town noodle shop one day soon – and I’ll order something without wieners next time. Then I’ll give Pop a different answer when he asks, “Are you a tourist?”

“Why, yes I am,” I’ll say. “Are you?”

COVID Hong Kong travel

corruption cosmology nature

TASSILI

by Emilia Súnico • December 3, 2021December 3, 2021

Year 2320 of our era. Logbook. It’s been years since we crossed the far reaches of the Milky Way. We return after a prior successful exploration. Several black holes discovered. Unable to reduce the propulsion speed without shutting down the engines causing them. We exceed programmed speed. We break the time barrier. Fuel in short supply. End of crew hibernation. Earth is finally in sight. It is recognisable, but the poles are not visible. We enter the atmosphere. The temperature is high and humid. Unknown seas and rivers. Impossible to select a landing point. We avoid wooded areas. We spot a rocky platform at high altitude where we land. The coordinates indicate Sahara, but everything is green, lush, and full of water. We leave behind the eerie, eternal, and empty channel that has brought us to life. At dawn, we are surrounded by slender people with skin made reddish by clays and clothes of geometric patterns and striking headdresses. We keep helmets and gloves on. We avoid disease transmission. An imposing shaman threatens the village. We have found a way to understand each other. They guide us through their strange city on rocks aligned in streets and avenues made infinite by the effect of the mists. Children’s cries splash in the pools. Flowers, fruits, fauna. The light, a bubble of gold under rainbows by nearby waterfalls. It is a happy village. Days pass. Unconsciously, we plant the seed of evil: We teach them how to perfect their hunting weapons. Now they are superior to neighbouring villages. Grateful, at night, rhythmic footsteps and polyphonies make us vibrate, eagerly. In homage, some young people paint us in their cave-house. I appear in my helmet, scarf, and boots. Amazed, I recognise the 8,000-year-old drawing. We are now born as gods and will suffer for it.

Arts & Culture, Editor's Pick, Literature, Reviews

BOOK REVIEW: THE WOMAN FROM URUGUAY

by Alexandra Panic • December 3, 2021December 3, 2021

The Woman from Uruguay, the latest novella by Pedro Mairal, has left me with mixed feelings. Although I enjoyed some aspects of the prose, it failed to meet the high expectations built up around it prior to its translation into English. In fact, until I had relieved myself of all I had heard about it before it came into my hands, I was quite unable to find the proper perspective to review it.

The Woman from Uruguay was first published in Argentina in 2016 and quickly became a best seller in Latin America. It tells the story of Lucas Pereya, a middle-aged writer from Buenos Aires, who, “defeated,” as the narrator confesses early on, and wretched with how his life has unfolded, falls into the trap of a sexual fantasy. As the story opens, Pereya is embarking on a ferry to Montevideo to cash out a book advance he has finally obtained. He hopes the money will buy him time to write a new book and settle his debts. The funds would also make his wife happier and ultimately fix his marriage. On the way to Montevideo, Lucas confesses about Guerra, a Uruguayan woman he met a year before and has fantasized about ever since. Unfortunately, his intentions to save his marriage are instantly clouded by his desire for this woman he knows little about. His desire becomes increasingly powerful as the day progresses, not only obscuring his mind, but his senses too. When he does finally meet up with Guerra, he loses control over his ability to reason. The narrator confesses the affair to his wife in the form of a letter in which he lies to her repeatedly. Both women in the story are objectified and never given a proper space in which to grow as characters.

The central themes are a bag of money representing salvation, liberation from the claws of marriage and childcare, and the sexual freedom of a middle-aged man. Put them all in a pot, and you get a sour taste of patriarchy.

Fifty pages in, and we already know that the money and the fantasy girl will be gone on the very same day, perhaps even together. Mairal skillfully creates urgency in the prose that keeps his readers engaged, but the way the story unfolds is entirely foreseen. The narrator moves through a continuous stream of events that happen to him but don’t change him nor move him forward. The way the concept of desire is treated in this work reads as banal and predigested. It is only through hard work that I uncovered a second layer of the work, a kind of a meta-text that has nothing to do with the failing marriage or the flat love affair, but which represents a discourse on writing. This is the only aspect of Mairal’s work I was drawn to and engaged with. I read it as autofiction, as the author’s confessions about his own writing life. Lucas Pereya is a writer who hasn’t been writing. The complex marital situation and the fact he has been raising a child are excuses for the depression the narrator has been struggling with. He has been short on ideas, at war with critics and unable to process rejection – a topic that will appeal to thousands, especially writers. Haven’t we all found ourselves in a similar thought pattern? Haven’t we all reached for excuses?

As the book reaches its climax, the narrator finds his old writing mentor in Montevideo, to whom he confesses the true meaning of the money: “It wasn’t a debt, it was time, the money was time to write without having to take another shitty job,” to which his mentor replies: “The books have to be written, that’s the first step, and then you decide how much they’re worth.” But Lucas continues his repetitive lament: “How am I supposed to write with my kid dangling from my balls, reading ten thousand students at once, teaching classes? How the fuck am I supposed to write like that?” And this is the crux of this novel. I thought for days about Mairal’s authorial intention. Is this supposed to be a well-versed criticism of the figure of a privileged male writer who believes that his God-given talent is enough for success? Or does the author himself feel sorry for Pereyra’s “struggles”? If the first thought applies (as I hope), then I am relieved. Yet I closed the book disappointed to see Pereya unchanged and even more despicable than he was to begin with. I closed the book having skipped over the narrator’s (or the author’s) dull macho ramblings about Pereya’s newest sexual pleasures. The concept of the alpha male and the objectification of women simply worsened towards the end. Pereya’s wife leaves with another woman (God-forbid that another man be allowed to touch her!), and Guerra ends up with a child in a polyamorous marriage. Does this choice of setup make the narrator less of a loser?

It is two weeks now since I read the book and I am still wondering: What if this was a story about a woman writer? Would she even be allowed to fantasize about money to “buy herself time”?

By Aleksandra Panic

The Woman From Uruguay
by Pedro Mairal
Translated from the Spanish by Jennifer Croft
Bloomsbury Publishing, 160 pages

Argentinian literature Pedro Mairal

EGGS

by Marcus Ong • November 27, 2021November 27, 2021

Clearly, she’d rather not return. She still has friends there, some of whom were generous enough to pay for movers to transport her belongings back: two luggage bags filled with clothes, a minifridge, a lava lamp, a Pushkin cat plushie, portable cube-speakers, folders, and variously sized boxes of gifts she doesn’t have the heart to throw away. Living in the university hostel ruined my sister’s health, and now she’s back with more stuff than she left with three years ago. Now her hair has a smell—not unlike the smell of warm eggs soaked in mayonnaise—and every day we find loose strands scattered around the house, especially by the corner next to the TV cabinet, which she has turned into her personal storage space.

We’re shocked when she tells us her appendix had been removed. She shows us the scar and adds that she can no longer stomach crustaceans. She says she has adopted a Christian name—Chris—to aid the non-Chinese. As for the abrasions she sports on both kneecaps, she doesn’t elaborate. The abrasions never seem to heal, even though we count that she sleeps an average of fourteen hours a day. We’ve reminded her time and again to rinse her wounds with iodine solution, but she never listens. Twice a week, usually right after dinner, she does calisthenics. And right after her workout, she lies prone on the sofa and taps away at her phone for hours instead of taking a shower.

Makeup’s her saviour, she says. She needs it to conceal her eye bags. She’s proud, and chock-full of confidence, but accompanying that is much, much casual use of foul language. She’s not shy to point out that this is what makes her stand out from other girls—she has started dating this dashing, strapping twenty-five year-old from a well-to-do family; a fellow classmate who rides fast motorcycles and no doubt does the occasional bicep curl. This boyfriend of hers is very tall, at least two heads taller than her. Because he is so much taller, he has to position his hand down low to give her high-fives. We assume they’ve already had sex, seeing how casually she farts and burps in his presence, nights when he comes over for dinner. She makes no apology for this. She also doesn’t see a problem with eating her meals at irregular hours or making us wait until she’s hungry enough before dinner can be served. Still, we’re delighted to see her.

At the moment, she’s looking for a job. She hunts for one on her MacBook, mostly during the dark wee hours when the weather is cooler, and everyone in the house is asleep. She devotes hours to perfecting her portfolio and résumé while she snacks in bed. Most nights, she washes her hair right before she sleeps, sometimes falling asleep with her hair wet, her fingers wrapped around her phone, and the lights on. She’s weak when it comes to potato chips. And she admits that she can no longer read books. Or rather, any reading she does has to be done on a screen. She also claims to leave her contact lenses in when she sleeps—“Seriously?” is our reply to that and to the used sanitary napkins accumulated in her wastebasket, which give her room a smell. There are other things we find: uncapped milk-tea bottles, half-eaten bags of mildly-salted Lays, long-expired Haribo gummy bears, and ants. Once, we found a cockroach nesting in her makeup kit.

We pull our blankets over our heads when we hear her digging for food in the kitchen—to resist checking the clock. And when we look through the cabinets the following morning, we picture the item we’re searching for moving down her digestive tract. The smell of alcohol and cigarette smoke on her breath makes us wonder if we should email her medical insurance company to revise her health records.

Once, we heard her scurry to the bathroom to throw up in the sink: Blaargh! We swallowed and drew extreme conclusions in our heads. Later, Chris saw our faces and grinned; she pointed to the bad eggs on the tray inside the fridge. So we threw out the eggs and filed a complaint with the supermarket. When the dust had settled, we told her to take a shower. But she said she would rather take one at night.

Chris doesn’t shower as often as we think she does, as often as we think she should. When she does, she takes her phone into the bathroom. And we hear her favourite sitcoms over the sound of running water from the other side of the door. Some Fridays her boyfriend stays over. He, too, showers late, slams the bathroom door when it’s his turn, and wakes everyone up. We can hear them watching silly shows in the bedroom, behind closed doors. Something is always going on in the night. And in the day, we have deliverymen leaving parcels outside our door. When nobody is looking, I shake the boxes and wonder to myself: Sex toys? Fishnets? Edible panties?

This boyfriend of hers came out of nowhere, and he’s different from the men in our family. The men in our family are soft-spoken and sensitive. He speaks his mind, and thus far, he hasn’t brought us gifts for the hospitality we’ve extended to him. Wine? Nougats? Strawberries? Where are his manners? The men in our house also blush more often than we’d like to admit. We’re afraid to look people in the eyes when we realise that we’ve somehow accidentally uttered an unkind word. We didn’t voice our displeasure the time he took apart our Toshiba microwave oven or our Phillips Viva Collection juicer after he’d insisted that he was good at fixing things.

The men in our home are also strict about keeping up routines. We pick up positive habits very quickly. Flossing, for instance. Reading the newspaper. Two hard-boiled eggs and a glass of celery juice for breakfast. We offered the boyfriend breakfast once, but he doesn’t have a habit of eating early in the morning. Does he then say bye-bye before hanging up the phone? We note that he doesn’t wash his cup after use. The men in our family are also self-conscious of our bodies. That’s not to say we hate ourselves; however, we don’t like to be reminded of the too-many moles on our back, or our kneecaps tiny like golf balls, or our thighs brittle like toothpicks, or our inability to grow a beard. So when the boyfriend joins us outside for dinner, say, at a coffee shop, he rarely gets mistaken for a ‘son’ of the family.

Also, he’s too good looking and we find it difficult to trust him. In fact, we’re afraid of him. He carries around a jet-black motorcycle helmet and speaks with an unidentifiable accent. He tells us that his grandmother’s Portuguese, that he has six older brothers, and that his parents run a canning factory. They live in a four-storey bungalow with two maids, a personal bathroom in every bedroom. Because his family is wealthy, it’s hard to know if he can be serious about anything. Once he gave away fifty dollars to a woman who approached us at the coffee shop, who drew dollar signs in the air. She’d claimed deafness in one ear.

“So which ear was it?” we asked him later.

We rub our hands together and count the days till he messes up; we think he might cheat on Chris. So we stock up ice-cream in the fridge. In the meantime, we pretend everything’s swell and continue to invite him over for dinner, extend our hospitality, smile and ask him about his day. We don’t say a word about the shaving razor he parks in our bathroom. Where the hell’s the toothbrush?

We might seem harsh, but we think Chris deserves better. So what if he’s the handsome heir to a multi-million dollar company? If you consider what we value: every member of our family knows how to patch a hole in a pair of trousers, and we greet our neighbours in the lift. Plus, we do not slouch. We make our beds in the morning, and we set our watches and clocks to run ten minutes ahead so we’re never late for our appointments. We’ve observed none of these intangibles in the boyfriend and, come to think of it now, there’s no reason why we should feel inferior to him.

We’ve lost track of how long this has been going on. But we’ve noticed our utility bills costing more and our toilet rolls depleting faster than usual—these changes have been tolerated. It seems that the boyfriend enjoys squeezing with us in our tiny apartment—he has practically moved in. He and Chris now share a blanket, and a savings account. They’ve both found jobs in the same office, and they feel optimistic about the future—they leave for work together. Chris uses a smaller, white motorcycle helmet. And we shake our heads when we see them leave the house at nine, holding hands. Work, to our knowledge, starts at nine. We assume they speed, and so we expect a call from the hospital someday. But they look so happy, even as Chris’s health continues to deteriorate. Her sinuses have grown worse; she blows her nose until it bleeds.

“Leave him,” we want to say to her.

But we can’t. It’s too late.

The thing is, several months ago, Chris suffered from a heat rash and had to scrub her back with sea salt; the boyfriend volunteered.

He whistled Friends when he massaged Chris’s shoulders in the living room. “You’re hard as a rock,” he said to her.

I was sitting by the dining table. He caught me rolling my eyes.

I quickly looked away.

I couldn’t sleep after that, and the next morning, I left the bed with a fever. In the bathroom, I spat greenish phlegm into the sink. I managed to put the right amount of toothpaste on the bristles but did a poor job cleaning my teeth since I could hardly move my arms; my joints were aching.

I needed breakfast.

So I walked into the kitchen and stared at the new eggs that sat in the fridge, uncooked. And when I finally gathered enough strength to look for the pot, I felt a tap on my shoulder.

It was the boyfriend.

“It’s broken,” he said to me. “It just fell out of my hand, you know? Last night. Chris was hungry.”

“I need my eggs,” I said, wanting very much to punch him in the face.

I went to lie down on the sofa instead. I closed my eyes. Then I heard the microwave oven beeping.

“What are you doing?” I said, propping myself up.

“Is three enough?” I heard him say from the kitchen. I was confused.

Did I know the eggs would explode, melt his beautiful face, and rob him an eye?

The thing is, I wouldn’t have touched the eggs myself.

Chris wasn’t pleased, of course. She cried for nights and took unpaid leave from work and served her time by his bedside. She even quit smoking so her fingers wouldn’t stink when he let her touch his face.

At first, we wanted to offer him money. But he said he wanted a hug instead. We thought it was the anesthetics, but then he spread his arms out, and he got all emotional and told us that we’re the closest he has ever had to a family.

We smiled and sighed—out of relief, knowing in our hearts that there wouldn’t be a lawsuit, bankruptcy.

But I look at him now: he wears an eye-patch; he looks just like a—no, I’m not going to say it. This’s it. We’ve decided never to speak of this again. We’ll go on as if nothing ever happened. And we won’t talk about how he continues to ride a motorcycle with Chris sitting close behind and hugging him tight to herself. How, with the scars on his face, he still manages to grow a beard.

disagreement family

NOTHING ELSE ON MY END

by Marissa Flaxbart • November 27, 2021November 27, 2021

I don’t remember where or when the conversation happened, but I’m pretty sure it was my dad’s idea. Casually, like a doctor suggesting his patient try eating more fresh fruit: that was how he proposed our daily phone call. I agreed readily and every bit as casually – sure thing, doctor, I love fruit – never dreaming that I was signing on to a ritual that would become more reliable than nearly any other detail of my life. But on any given day, regardless of the other vicissitudes of existence, these three things are true: I will eat, I will sleep, and I will call my father.

The impetus for my dad’s suggestion (“Why don’t we try talking once a day?”) was the end of an era that had lasted longer than either of us expected. Just as I prepared to graduate from college in Chicago, my dad was just across the state line, emptying and selling the house where I’d done most of my growing up. He and my mother had made the aged yellow-brick bungalow their own throughout the ’90s, but a rare cancer, a quick, heartless thief, stole her away toward the end of that decade. A few years later, I’d left for college. My dad rattled around in that oversized mausoleum for four years then decided that was long enough. He moved into what might generously be called a two-bedroom condominium on the 30th floor of the middle-of-everything (of the skyline, of Chicago, of the nation) and I came along with him – 22, overeducated, and underemployed, with nowhere else to go. If he’d stayed in Indiana, I doubt I’d have lasted more than a year before launching out of my childhood home and into the wild unknown. But in this new arrangement, I lived rent-free, two blocks from my new retail job, 30 floors above the middle of everything. I stayed for seven years.

Then I moved to Los Angeles.

In an attempt to find access to a brutally inaccessible industry – film and television writing – I elected to become a Master of Fine Arts. TV writing had been a career dream of mine for a long time, predating the move to the 30th floor, with roots in a girlhood fantasy of the California I watched over TV-tray dinners from our living room. So I packed up those of my belongings that had survived the previous move, as well as the various paraphernalia I’d been saving up for life on my own (a collection of vintage Collins glasses, a screen-printed poster of various kitchen whisks) and headed across the country, alone. Leaving my father alone. For the first time in our lives, we would live more than an hour apart. Agreeing to touch base by phone each day was easy, obvious even.

In those initial daily calls, I talked up the exotic flora of my new home, expressing my astonishment at the birds-of-paradise that filled strip mall medians as if it were no big deal. I told him about the short film exercises we were assigned, the mixers we were expected to attend, about my professors’ screen credits. I did not tell him how I hauled my new mattress up the stairs to my second-floor apartment all by myself because I didn’t know anyone well enough to ask for help. I told him about how I agonised over the mysteries of screenplay structure. I didn’t tell him how terrified I was of defending my ideas in class, day after day. In retrospect, I can see how I was editing my day-to-day for him, wanting to tell him only the things that I was proud of. I needed him to feel excited about this wild, expensive risk I was taking. As long as he could be excited, it didn’t matter how lonely I felt or how afraid I was of failing. I told him about how I struggled to write, and I heard myself becoming a writer.

My dad, meanwhile, was closing in on his 20th year working for the same company. As retirement loomed, he found himself constantly being asked to do more work with fewer workers, fighting off the sensation that the powers-that-be would prefer if his whole division could be replaced with tireless robots. And even in his happiest years at the job, he’d given the unfailing impression that going into the details of his work would deliver a fatal dose of boredom and/or confusion to the hearer. His days started early and ended late, but he didn’t want to talk about work. So unless he’d eaten an exciting meal or been to Orchestra Hall or the theatre, his daily recap was over in a sentence. By contrast, my art school hijinks – crying in front of my feature-writing professor, being screwed over by directing students, winning over my feature-writing professor – must have seemed like serialised coming-of-age episodes of This American Life.

For most of my early childhood, my father had himself been an adult graduate student. That’s partly why I hadn’t expected, at 29, to be one of the most senior members of my grad school cohort. In almost every way, my extra five-to-seven years were a boon to me, endowing me with a depth of experience and emotional maturity that many of my peers lacked. Even so, the age difference sometimes made me feel sheepish about my daily calls home. I quickly noticed that no one else talked to their parents as much as I talked to mine. Was I weird? I wondered. But even as my schedule got busier and I made more friends, I never skipped my daily call.

I began to see that my insecurity wasn’t about the calls, not really. It was about the difference between 23-year-old Marissa and these intrepid Middle-Millennials around me. I had spent seven years looking for the same answer to the question they’d addressed straight out of college: What now? I’d spent those years living in the spare bedroom of my father’s new condo. Part of me was eager to put the whole post-college era in a box labelled Wasted Time; the phone calls were one small testament to that label’s inaccuracy. I hadn’t just gained life experience and stories to retell. I’d also learned how to be friends with my lone surviving parent.

My thesis was a screenplay about a father and daughter who were best friends and lived in a Chicago high rise. Over the course of the script, my characters were forced into new situations, until eventually they learned they’d been holding each other back from growing as individuals. Finishing the screenplay was a requirement for my degree, but I was wary of sending it to my favourite reader. I knew this story came from somewhere true, but I didn’t want my dad to think I saw our relationship as fundamentally flawed in the way my characters’ relationship was. The daughter in my movie was, critically, still in that apartment. I was 2,000 miles away, pursuing my dream.

Eventually, I graduated. At a post-graduation party, one professor advised me to wait until I landed a job before settling into a new apartment. That way, I could cut back on the soul-sucking commute that was the quintessential Angeleno’s lament. Of course, both jobs and apartments are hard to come by in LA. I got a part-time job in Beverly Hills; my apartment, lease signed the same week, was eight miles away in Silver Lake.

While I’d been a graduate student, my schedule had shifted with the semesters. Now, the rhythms of working life thrust my father and me into a far more predictable era of telecommunication. He began to memorise my social schedule: Thursday night was choir practice, Trivia was on Tuesdays. The routine in both of our lives made it possible to distil the conversations into what had been different from the day before. Since we last spoke, what had we eaten? What had we read? What had we watched? My father is a well-read, culturally-engaged, food-obsessed generalist, and he raised me to be one as well. Even at our busiest, three questions could easily fill a twenty-minute conversation.

I’d often call my dad as I was leaving work, dialling so fast that my phone would get tripped up because it hadn’t disconnected from the office Wi-Fi as I walked away. My urgency was part duty, part ritual, and part respite. I knew my dad expected me to call, and I hate to disappoint; I relied on the consistency of the call as a part of my routine in a chaotic, unpredictable world; and I looked forward to escaping to the other realm that the calls represented, neither there nor here.

Or, at least, that was the idea. If I called my dad on my way out of the office, our conversation coincided with my half-mile trek to the underground city lot where my car was parked. As the years went on, I spoke first on wired headphones, then Bluetooth, but regardless of their wiring, all headphones seemed to have preternatural capacity to amplify random sounds around me. Someone in a Mercedes would lay on their horn from a block away, and my dad would assume I’d just been in a near-miss accident. Christmas music would tinkle out of a speaker in a nearby tree, and he’d ask if I’d arrived at a party. A family of European tourists or a horde of moody Beverly Hills High teens would approach the crosswalk, and Dad would say, “Oh, sounds like you’re with a bunch of kids” before I even noticed them standing there. All this interference (not to mention the mere challenge of walking down the sidewalk in central Beverly Hills) could make it hard to concentrate on the content of the conversation, to leave this plane for that middle one.

Occasionally I’d wait and call my dad from the car. During the evening rush hour, the eight miles of surface streets from Central-West LA to Central-East LA took about an hour to traverse. On commute calls, I would often ramble on about nothing in particular – after all, I had nowhere to go but forward, at the speed traffic allowed. But as much as commuters attempt to pretend otherwise, driving while talking on the phone is, in fact, attempting to do two complicated things at once. I often sensed an unease on my dad’s part when I called from the car. Midway through a sentence about feeding sourdough starter, I’d suddenly interject, “GIVE ME A FUCKING BREAK, DUDE!” – a perfectly normal thing to shout toward drivers who speed up to prevent you from merging into their lane, but not a great thing to say to your father over the phone. My shitty old car didn’t have Bluetooth, so honks, motorcycles, and passing ambulances were amplified by my trusty headphone mic, inducing further panic in my father, who could only listen from across the country and hope for the best.

And so, most frequently, I would try to squeeze in the call before the commute home began. I’d make my way from the office to the parking garage, trying to stay present and focus on what I wanted to report. More often than not, I’d get to the garage and still there would be more to say. I couldn’t even step into the elevator without losing cell service, so I’d walk a longer route than necessary or just continue circling the block until we wrapped up our conversation. Sometimes, I’d lean against the low stucco wall of the nursing home next door, staring at the pink hibiscus bushes outside the garage. When had I started taking all this impossible flora for granted?

My dad retired, and our conversations opened up a bit. They still covered the same topics, but the lists of things he’d read, cooked, and watched were getting ever-longer. Sometimes we could compare notes on things we’d both consumed. But increasingly, he’d tell me about shows that he’d started but I had never seen. He gushed about HBO’s The Leftovers, for example; I had only listened to the audiobook the show was adapted from. He retold jokes from these shows, setting them up by explaining the characters, the setting, the plot. “Well, I thought it was funny,” he’d sigh when I inevitably failed to laugh at the recounted punchline. Then I’d try and steer the conversation back to recipes, or family gossip.

Truthfully, though I’d travelled across the country with dreams of writing television shows, I’d entered a phase of my life where I could barely bring myself to sit in front of my beloved TV for more than 30 minutes at a time. Every time the topic came up, on the phone with my dad or out with friends, I would complain bitterly about “not having the time” to watch the shows everyone was telling me about. It felt almost pathological. I had become afraid of anything that didn’t look like work, sleep, or socialisation. Year after year, no matter what progress I’d made, I felt no closer to achieving the career goals I’d followed to California. Now, I was falling prey to the popular fallacy that I was the only thing standing in my way. Watching TV, which had once felt like entertainment or research, was now, at worst, a waste of the time I should be spending getting my career in order and, at best, a reminder of what I had not yet achieved.

In March of 2020, I got a job as an assistant in my first TV writers’ room. The very day that I was hired, Los Angeles entered lockdown. The job went forward, but the office and the commute ceased to exist. Choir practice was cancelled. Trivia was cancelled. But my dad and I kept up our well-established rhythm. Now I never called from the car; if I was walking, it was only around the block, with no motorcycles or tourists or teens in sight.

We started watching TV together. “Together” means we arrange a start time and each press play on our respective screens. Our first show was The Leftovers; it felt somehow appropriate to watch this fictional humanity cope with the aftermath of losing two percent of the population. The characters’ dilemmas were simultaneously familiar and so much more dire than the trauma our real-life world was – is – coping with. I finally understood the jokes he’d been trying to retell me over the phone. We could finally laugh at them together.

The surreal circumstance of the pandemic lockdown period (and the largely work-from-home era that has followed) has changed our calls somewhat: Sometimes the calls are short because we look back at the day and can’t recall when it began or what happened. Sometimes they get really long, as we have more material to draw from in our primary areas of discussion: what we read, what we watched, what we cooked. But the best, longest conversations happen when we veer off the unofficial outline. Like when Dad (who is always reading four books at once) attempts to explain the philosophy of Anthony Giddens to me before he forgets it again. Or when his daily hour of Spanish practice (a new fascination) has unearthed a thrilling new irregular verb conjugation. Or when, after months of feeling like I couldn’t write, I bounce a new idea off of him, hoping it will get me excited enough to pick up a pencil and commit it to paper.

As I write this, we’ve held up our daily call tradition for over nine years. When we get to the end of any given call, my dad will often utter a now-familiar phrase. “Well,” he says, “nothing else on my end.” I’ve lived my own life in California for longer than I lived with him, lost, on the 30th floor. And I know more about my father’s days than at any other time in my life.

Every time we have been together in person for the past few years, my dad has made the same joke on the first evening of our reunion: “It’s time for our call, but you’re right here! I don’t know what to do with myself!” It is, of course, one of those jokes that really isn’t one. Our phone calls are our shared diary. As we talk, we are recording our experiences into the other person, making them somehow both more real and less fearsome. Over the years our lives have changed, sometimes drastically. But the practice of recounting them, day by day, makes each day into something manageable.

If I’m feeling masochistic, I can consider the question: Who will I call when my dad is no longer available to pick up the phone? But one beautiful thing about the daily calls is that they don’t demand that kind of thought. There is no future, and the past all blends into one script, one tradition. There is just today’s call. We’ll say hello, we’ll unfold the story of the day until, on either end, there is nothing else that needs to be said.

family

STUDY OF A MAN ON A LADDER

by Richard George • November 27, 2021November 27, 2021

I wasn’t backing down. I descended the ladder like a staircase, a flight between floors. That’s what I told myself. I suspected the boys already done with their descents watched me, the last man, and wondered, though they might have had other things on their minds: “I am in the ocean dropped from a ladder that will not stoop to me…that I could not reach even if it offered me a hand.” “I do not know how long I can tread the water that alternates between kindness and cruelty.” “There is the dead man’s float, and there is the dead man’s float.” If they weren’t having these thoughts, what then? I knew these boys, and they knew me; we saw eye to eye, and I would do a better job of it if I had an audience. This was not a diving board, and I was not a diver. I was a man on a ladder. I winced from one rung to the next braving the pain, the stab of the spartan bar against the bare, tender foot. As I alternated among arches and balls and heels on the metal and slid my hands down the rails, I saw sharks in the water with the boys. They were good boys, and so I figured they must be good sharks to leave them alone, at least thus far.

climbing

THE BIRTH OF HARRISON DEARBORN

by Jonathan Face • November 22, 2021November 22, 2021 • 1 Comment

They get past Chattanooga before 6 a.m., the boy asleep in the passenger seat, the man driving cautiously, creeping along like a man on a suspended license. It’s still dark enough for headlights.

The boy’s head is against the window, and in the velvet predawn his father thinks how much he looks like his mother from that angle. The curve of the mouth. The shape of the jaw. It’s uncanny, and he’s never noticed before.

He turns on the radio at a low volume. The boy doesn’t stir. The man tunes to public radio, hoping to catch a news report, but there’s nothing. Classical music and a hushed overnight guy narrating. He flips it back off.

By 6:30 they’re on the interstate, tiptoeing through a convoy of big rigs. The Sentra is twelve years old and needs a steering belt. Among the big trucks they’re a goldfish blundering through a hover of steelheads.

The boy feels the change in speed and opens his eyes. He looks disinterestedly at the passing semis through ringed and puffy eyes. All his father can think is how much he used to love these trucks just four years ago. Big twuck! he would shout from the foot of their driveway, pointing and hopping as though incensed by their presence. Big twuck! Big twuck!

“Are we there?” the boy asks, entranced as they creep past the turbine spin of a Freightliner’s tire.

“No.”

“Soon?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m hungry.”

His father doesn’t reply because he’s not sure what they’ll do about food. He’s got better than $600 in his wallet, but they’ve got to make it last. He’s got two credit cards and a debit card, but he doesn’t dare use them. None of that matters, though, because the boy is already back asleep.

They drive on. The only sound is the drone of tires on asphalt. The man muses about the boy’s mother, his ex-wife. What she must be feeling right now.

In a few hours they’re in Arkansas, and the boy wakes up and says again, “I’m hungry.”

“Drink some water.”

The boy repeats himself uncomprehendingly. He’s encountered a broken elevator and his only recourse is to mash the call button again. “I’m hungry.”

“Okay,” the man says. “We’ll get something soon.”

“Okay,” the boy agrees, and smiles at him, and that smile melts his father into a slop sink of sad, melted butter.

They exit at a town called Wiggins. There’s a gas station and a BBQ chicken place with a dusty ceramic rooster on the roof. A police car is at the gas pump across the street, and they wait in the restaurant’s dirt parking lot for it to leave. A stray hound noses around the car. The boy wants to get out and pet it, but his father says no.

The gas station they’re looking at has a pillbox minimart, and there’s a bum propped against the cinderblock wall by the door. Probably the town bum, in a who-cares little place like this, the man thinks. A local institution. Everyone in Wiggins, Arkansas must know him. His jeans are filthy, and he lolls back against the wall as though holding it up. His torn T-shirt has a Razorbacks logo.

“Daddy, what’s wrong with that man?”

His father keeps watching. The police car is gliding away from the gas pumps now, and the unsteady bum gives it a look that is cartoonishly wary.

“He’s drunk,” the man says.

“From beer?”

“Could be, maybe.” Except he thinks it’s probably more than a couple of Budweisers. Whiskey and pills, maybe. Something imbibed in rapid-fire combination in the loading area behind a Piggly Wiggly.

“Keith drinks beer, but it doesn’t make him look like that.”

“It might someday, if he drinks too much.”

“Keith’s beer is Coors.”

“Don’t talk about Keith.”

A minute passes. Crows root through a dumpster near the car, looking to cannibalize the scrap meats of distant cousins. The police car merges with traffic and rolls away. The bum abruptly pushes off the minimart wall and starts across the street in their direction. He sways and lists like a tall ship on a rough sea.

“How much beer makes you look like that?” his son asks.

The man recognizes the dark curiosity in the boy’s eyes. “A lot,” he says slowly, carefully. “I think it’s more about how long a time, than how much.”

The boy squints his eyes at the bum and says, “He’s old. Older than you.”

The man thinks the bum is actually a few years younger than him, that a boozy life has made 35ish look more like 55ish, but he doesn’t answer.

“He’s almost as tall as you. He kind of looks like you, daddy.”

“Yes,” the man says, and now he’s really looking at the bum, trying to visualize who he is, or was, under the mange and the clouded eyes and the addict’s misty grin. What he might look like today if he’d grown up to be a farmer, or a utility lineman, or a corporate attorney instead of a derelict. He thinks his son is correct. There is a faint resemblance beneath it all. Something around the eyes, maybe. The angle of the nose.

His mind is on the cusp of something important, but he can’t tell what. His son has handed him the blueprints of an idea, but he’s no draftsman. He struggles to make sense of it.

“Daddy?”

He hesitates, still grasping at the short hairs of whatever it was that made his brain tickle. He watches the bum now like a Fall hunter watches a strutting tom turkey cross an open field, watches as he stagger-walks across traffic, ambles past the Sentra without seeing his audience, and collapses by the dumpster behind them. The man looks in the side mirror and sees him pluck something wrapped in a paper bag from his back pocket and take a long pull.

“Let’s eat,” the man says.

The chicken place is called Dot’s Bar-Bee-Q Shack. The waitress is young and pretty, the sour woman minding the register is last generation’s model. The man asks for a seat by the window, and the girl brings them to a table in checked red-and-white formica. They sit across from each other and the boy asks for a chocolate milkshake straight away. The waitress looks skeptically at the man, who gives a slight, grudging nod.

They order eggs and toast, and the boy looks around at the knotted wood walls of the Bar-Bee-Q Shack, which are adorned with old relics. Gas station signs from extinct corporations, rust-colored farm implements, old-time kitsch from the Coca-Cola company. There’s a boy’s slingshot sitting on a fireplace mantel. A platoon of nutcracker soldiers with furry eyebrows and stern lockjaw mouths muster around the hearth.

“What’s that?” the boy asks suddenly.

The man looks back from the window, prepared to explain what a rotary phone is, or a thresher’s scythe, or a snowshoe, but instead the boy’s looking at him.

“What’s what?”

“There.”

His son points. There’s a stain on the man’s sleeve. Something almost brown. A color not far removed from the stained cherry wood walls of the chicken shack.

“Oh,” the man says. “That’s nothing. I spilled ketchup last night.”

But his boy isn’t dumb. He’s six, and the man can see that he wants very much to believe his father, but his eyes are set on the stain.

“Is it blood?” he asks tentatively. He looks quiet and ashamed.

“No. I told you what it was.”

“Is it Keith’s?”

“No. Be quiet.” He looks around warily but the matron at the register is watching a morning show on TV. Three old biddies chat around a TV set living room while headlines and stock prices scroll past their knees.

“It is,” the boy says, and his eyes well immediately. “Oh, daddy, it is.”

The waitress comes back with their plates, and the man watches the boy closely but he doesn’t say a word. The tears are gone like a brief rain in the desert. He picks at his eggs in silence.

When she’s gone the man says, “It’s not Keith’s.”

His son sniffs, and in a low, miserable voice asks, “Is it mommy’s?”

It kills him. A white-hot dagger sliding between his ribs. He blinks. “No. Jesus, no. Do you think I would hurt your mother?”

“I- I…”

“Your mom is fine. But we’ll talk about it later, okay? In the car. Is that a deal?”

“Okay,” his son says.

They eat in silence, and when they’re through the girl asks if they want pie. They don’t. The man pays with cash and leaves a forgettable tip, and they slink away like thieves.

Outside, the boy gets in the Sentra, but the man stops and looks to his right. The bum is still there, but now he’s flat on his back by the dumpster, legs going sideways and one cheek eating gravel. The bottle in the paper bag stands a quiet watch at his elbow. Something in the man’s head moves again, and he pauses and scratches it, aware it makes him look something like a country yokel in Times Square.

He holds up a finger to the boy, a wait for me gesture. The boy nods. He looks tired. The man hopes he’ll go back to sleep.

He walks back toward the bum, shoes crunching around discarded plastic bottles and curled cellophane cigarette wrappers. He hunkers down on his knees, inches from the sleeping bum, and takes a closer look.

His son was right, there is a passing resemblance. Underneath the grime and the gin blossom cheeks he can see it. The jawline strong, the eyebrows thick and arching. They’re like brothers raised by wildly different parents, he and this sot on the ground. A little tremor of hope skitters over his heart.

There’s a rectangular bulge in the bum’s hip pocket, and the man pokes at it through the soiled denim. He thinks, If this guy wakes up he’ll think I’m molesting him. He hopes the bum is as out as he appears. He leans closer at an angle so he can get his thumb and forefinger over the lip of the bum’s pocket. He feels the wallet inside, and starts to work it gently back and forth, easing it up to freedom. It’s like priming a water pump. The wallet slowly gives.

The bum’s lips part, and he mutters something that sounds like beluga. His eyes flutter, then set on him, dim and watering. The man freezes and looks back at him. There’s a decent-sized rock on the ground over there, and he quietly claws for it with his other hand.

“Whassagan?” the bum says. “Whosagan?”

“Go to sleep,” the man says softly, and he draws the rock back and gets ready.

“Yessa, yessaman,” the bum murmurs. The eyes go heavy and slide shut, and his lips part in the peaceful smile of a napping infant. When his head falls back against the ground, the man gets the wallet the rest of the way out. He sets down the rock, rises from his crouch, and returns to the car.

His son has gone back to sleep. He wonders if he should be worried. He’s sleeping a lot today, even for a kid.

He flips open the bum’s wallet. There’s no money in it. He finds crumpled business cards, a VA card, an EBT card, and a Georgia driver’s license six months expired. He looks at the photo in the corner. The bum in the picture is markedly less bummed out. The salt-and-pepper whiskers are gone, the eyes clear and set. The resemblance is undeniable. It wouldn’t be enough to fool a suspicious cop, but it would be enough to get a job, or apply for food stamps, or rent a room. It would be enough to start over.

The man in the photo is grinning, just a little, almost slyly. And there’s no reason he shouldn’t be, he’s no bum, he’s no truck stop wino. He’s… he’s…

The man reads it aloud. “Harrison Dearborn.” He frowns down at the card in his hands. “Harrison Dearborn,” he says again, dismayed because it sounds like an alias, which is precisely what it will be.

“I’m Harry,” he tries again, adding a clipped little northerner accent, for no real reason. “Harry Dearborn, nicetameetcha.”

His son opens his eyes, blinking and stupid as only naps in a hot car can make you. “What?”

“I’m Harry Dearborn,” his father says to him. “Harry Dearborn, from Decatur.”

“No you’re not,” his son says. “You’re-“

“Yes I am. I’m Harry Dearborn and you’re my son. My son Joel.”

“Joel?” The boy’s eyes go wide a moment.

“Joel Dearborn.”

“Okay.” His son sits up straight. “We’re still here,” he says.

“Not for long. Wait.”

The man exits the car, goes back to where the bum lies on his back. He picks the Georgia driver’s license out of the wallet and closes it. He’s about to drop the wallet, but he pauses, thinks about it, and gets his own wallet out of his pocket and takes out a $20. He shouldn’t do this, he thinks, they need the money. But then again maybe he ought to. Maybe it’s owed.

He stuffs the bill into the bum’s wallet and drops it on the ground beside him. Then he extracts all the IDs, all the credit cards, his own business card, and the health insurance card from his own. He fans them out in his hand, his whole life in laminated number sequences.There’s a drainage culvert by the roadside and he drops everything in half a foot of scummy rainwater and throws dead leaves over it.

The man smiles. His wallet is clean. He’s got cash and an expired Georgia license with a picture that looks close enough, and that, he thinks, is a start.

Harrison Dearborn, Harry to his friends, of Decatur, Georgia returns to the Sentra.

“Where we going, daddy?” his son asks, and he just says you’ll see.

He’ll see too.

Before they get back on the freeway he remembers his cell phone and knows he should ditch it. He pulls over to the shoulder and fishes it out of his pants. There are text messages and dozens of missed calls. The last text is an amber alert. A father wanted in connection with a murder and the kidnapping of his own son, to be considered armed and extremely dangerous. Possibly driving a maroon Nissan Sentra.

Some guy from Chattanooga.

Harrison Dearborn powers down the stranger’s phone and tosses it in the bushes on the side of a dusty highway in Wiggins, Arkansas. In ten minutes, they’re southbound again.

crime family

TO RUTH

by Margarita Barresi • November 20, 2021November 20, 2021

The invitation was hand-delivered to our mailbox two years ago. The retired couple who’d recently moved in toward the top of our street was hosting a neighbourhood get-together. My family had moved to town 20 years prior, when a bevy of young kids roamed from yard to yard, facilitating parental interaction that led to effortless friendships. Children are the greatest little icebreakers, and through school and community involvement, we steadily grew our tribe of friends in town. But as children grew and families moved out of the neighbourhood, a new influx of homeowners remained strangers. Their kids were either much younger than ours or had long since flown the nest. We had no natural commonality.

Then the invite came. I thought it both brilliant and brave. Part of me was apprehensive. What if these people were odd, but not in a good way? Or differed significantly in their political beliefs from our progressive views? I had a hard enough time keeping up with my current friends. Did I want more? My husband, however, being a kinder person than I, convinced me we should attend. “How will they meet anyone in town if they don’t have kids? What if it was us?” He guilted me into it.

On the prescribed evening, we headed up the street with a bottle of wine and appetizer in hand. I’m normally an extrovert, but entering a house full of strangers is not my idea of a good time. Yet from the moment we arrived, our hosts put us at ease. The vibe was friendly, welcoming, and chill. Not everyone they invited came, but we met some new folks from “the other end of the street” and everyone stayed significantly past the time noted on the invitation.

That evening the group agreed to get together regularly and decided on the first Wednesday of each month. We created new bonds and renewed ties to old friends. Two of us connected as writers. My husband found a kindred soul with whom to discuss poetry at a café down the street and another who’s sharing her knowledge of meditation with him.

We began inviting others and our little tree of neighbours quickly grew branches into adjacent streets. I now walk my neighbourhood delighted to know the people living in these homes, glad that I care about them and their families, and genuinely enjoy spending time with them. We take turns hosting our soirees, and there’s never pressure to attend. Come if you can, and don’t worry if you can’t. Come late, come for an hour, come for the evening. Some of us bring drinks and others food. Some just bring themselves. It’s casual. It’s fun. It’s easy.

Early on, our original hostess explained the genesis for her invitation when she told us a story about her mother, Ruth. Ruth and her husband would enjoy a drink at 5:00 each evening. She was 89 when her husband died but continued the tradition by driving down the hill to her neighbour’s house every day for cocktail hour. She’d take her own bottle of cheap bourbon (she was a child of the Depression), have one drink, stay an hour, and go home. Often several others joined the two women for a little revelry. Ruth did that for five years, until she fell and had to go to an assisted living facility. I guess obtaining bourbon was more difficult there.

At each party, as soon as one of us starts to head home, we get into a circle, raise our glasses, and toast, “To Ruth!”

I’d been looking forward to hosting the April 2020 party. It was cancelled, as was every subsequent gathering, consequences of social distancing. But we’ve kept in touch by social media and email, as well as waving to each other from the sidewalk. This collective embrace has provided tremendous comfort during this difficult time. We might be separated, but we’re connected. Thank you, Ruth!

community neighbors

CARRIAGE

by Daniel Bird • November 19, 2021November 19, 2021

I had just caught the last train out of the city. I could not have afforded a taxi, and it was dark and cold. There was a loud clattering sound as it passed under a bridge. The lights dimmed and then flickered back on again. It was then that I noticed my empty carriage had gained another three passengers: a trio of bulky teenage boys with shaved heads and tight T-shirts packed with muscle and tattoos. Although there were plenty of other seats, they sat around me in such a way that getting out instantly became a problem.

The tallest one leaned forward, placing his elbows on his knees. He stared at me and then casually asked for my wallet as if he wanted to know the time or what the next stop was. I shuddered at the horror of my situation. There was no guard, no alarm to pull, and certainly no way I could fight my way out of this. I stayed silent and after a few moments he repeated himself more gruffly. “I said, Mate, give us your wallet.” I glanced at the other two boys; they had shoulders that could lift a car. The other was completely bald with biceps like grapefruit covered in foreign scripture. I remained silent as the train swayed. Suddenly the leader stood up and shouted. “I said, give me your fucking money.”

I replied in the most fluent fake Russian I could.

“Da, ik chin kring goski da stravinka na da.” My accent was strong, even though what I had said had been complete nonsense. I knew that everybody was slightly scared of Russian people, even the skinny bookish ones; they have a hardness about them no other nationality can muster. The leader sat down, confused. “What’s that you’re saying? English, do you speak English?” I knew I couldn’t get away with not knowing any of my mother tongue so I said “Russian” like an old general with a mouthful gravel and whisky.

The leader chuckled loudly then shook his head as if giving up. I felt a small rush of relief, but then he turned to his bald companion, “Kristov, tell him to hand over his money.” Kristov stood up and eyed me before saying, “Janovich mit Brita das niki vlad von ming ka.” I stared back having no idea what he had said but knowing full well what he had meant. I noticed a bead of sweat form on the side of his forehead. His inky arms seemed to vibrate. I saw nothing else I could do so I stood up too and yelled back at him waving my arms like I’d had a litre of vodka already. “Nacht macht bacht ving vlad blad Natashca Volga.” His boys became alarmed by the tone our conversation had taken.

Then he shouted back at me, “Kak vas boot mit vishka.”

So I said “Kak vas moot vit mishka.”

And he whispered, “Da…?”

and I said, “Na…”

and he sat down.

There was a long silence interrupted only by the announcement of my station. “Well, Kristov, what the fuck did he say?” asked the leader. Kristov’s confidence returned.

“He said that his Uncle in London would have our throats cut if we touch him. I asked him which gang, and he told me. We’d better leave this.”

I kept a steady gaze on the leader who tried to stifle a gulp before beckoning his troop to the next vestibule. Kristov hung back a little. Before his wrinkly skull passed out of sight, he nodded at me with moist eyes and smiled. I smiled right back and then waited for the train to stop.

robbery Russian

Cees Nooteboom Dutch literature translated fiction translated literature

BOOK REVIEW: 533: A BOOK OF DAYS

by LILIAN PIZZICHINI • November 18, 2021November 18, 2021

Cees Nooteboom is the author of 14 novels, 14 collections of poetry and, because symmetries and parallels run throughout his work, 14 travel books. Then there are the four anthologies of essays and reportage, the 18 literary prizes and two honorary doctorates. By this point it must be clear that Nooteboom is hugely popular and highly thought of in northern Europe.

Yet the Dutch-born Nooteboom wonders if he is paying enough attention to the world. In 533: A book of days, the 88-year-old author recalls reading an article by a Flemish reviewer in which the reviewer complains that Nooteboom “pondered too much.” This could be right, Nooteboom admits. It is probably a condition of age. He wonders if the reviewer is young. He wonders this because he did not meet the reviewer in Budapest in 1956, or in Bolivia in 1968, or in Tehran in 1976, or in Berlin in 1989, or in fact, at any point in history when Nooteboom was fully present in the world, observing and recording events that shaped “the world.”

He then wonders if his young critic ever looks at cacti, because he himself spends an awful lot of time pondering the life force of his prickly friends in his Menorcan garden. Finally, he wonders what the Flemish critic might mean when he speaks about the “world.” “Which world?” The world he has been watching for sixty years, or the world the critic has been reading about or perhaps writing about more recently for his newspaper?

To read Cees Nooteboom is to be introduced to a rarefied and stately European sensibility: classically educated, receptive, lyrical, a little wounded by contemporary mores, definitively masculine, privileged and rooted in literature and history. This is a book that sits oddly on the shelf alongside other books seeking answers on pronouns, protocols and shifts in power, or books that offer alternatives to the status quo. At the same time, although 533 was composed before the outbreak of covid-19, Nooteboom has given us a meditation that would read perfectly in lockdown.

It is a Book of Days – 533 days – in which passages of time move both quickly and pass slowly, when Nooteboom’s world is consumed by absurd details and his mind is engaged in entering the deepest of spiritual spaces. If any of us should have the luxury to be in this position, we would hope to be sitting by a mountain lake or a pool in a forest, our attention riveted and simultaneously free-floating. Unfortunately, for most of us, we will be in a crowded apartment or on the tenth floor of a tower block, where trees are a distant memory and the weather is something that happens outside.

In Cees Nooteboom’s case, he is in his garden on the Spanish island of Menorca. It is five o’clock in the morning. Above him, and to the left of the palm trees, Orion and Sirius sparkle. He sits on the terrace, listening to nothing. Over the next hour, it begins: the morning concert that comprises roosters, dogs, pigeons, geese, goats, and with the most “unrelenting pathos,” a neighbour’s donkey. This same donkey will reappear at 8pm, braying for a carrot. But this re-appearance takes place a hundred days later when Nooteboom has considered all the dissonant notes and lonely singers, the rooster with “a breath-taking Neapolitan tenor,” and the sudden silences. One hundred days later, Nooteboom tells us, he will take the sound of a donkey chomping on a carrot to his grave. In the meantime, “words are his profession” and on day 23 he brings our attention to Marcel Proust. More specifically, he is reminded of his French publisher who asked him in which language he had read Proust.

“French, of course,” Nooteboom responded.

“But that’s ridiculous,” his editor says. In French, he points out, Proust’s style is outdated, “with all those antiquarian forms of the subjonctif.” Since Proust’s death, the English have had three new translations, and each one reflects the movement of style away from the original. What Nooteboom is constructing is passage between written conservation and historical erasure. Those shifts away from the original; changes in time; the days turn over like the leaves of the book we are reading. Fast forward, summer lurches by in a month.

The heat presses down from the mountains, ironing the landscape, the drought bearing down hard on his garden. Details emblazon a paragraph, multiplying meanings that fly out of his study like a moth. This is a book to read in the long shadows of an afternoon fading into evening. At which point, Nooteboom picks up his Van Dale Dutch dictionary. It is newly restored by a local bookbinder. The first word he looks up is a species of mot, “moth,” because the Oruga barrenadora is threatening his palm trees.

“Van Dale knows him,” says Nooteboom. One of the features of his life in Menorca is that books, insects and plants become characters, anthropomorphised by Nooteboom’s persistent gaze. This persistence allows him to drift between poetry and prose, moments of being and periods of boredom. Each day is personal, intimate and revealing to a point because it is Cees Nooteboom the author who is composing this Book of Days. He confides the simple events, daily routines, inspiring and uninspiring conversations with neighbours or with himself, private feelings – for example, with the young Flemish reviewer – fears and worries – usually about his garden in his absence. It is as if we become his dependable friend always read to lend an ear. But we are not bothered with the workings of his conscience or the committal of his soul, if only because “shame and/or calculation” would undermine the book’s authenticity. Mostly we get the rhythm of an elderly writer’s life.

It revolves around books. At least five days are devoted to the study of Hungarian modernist novelists. We venture into the territory of “a man who wanted to write a book about everything and who, in a room in Budapest, took his heroic quest to the bitter end.” The parallels exist in almost everything Nooteboom states because, if only by sheer dint of time, he has accrued so many impressions that meanings proliferate whenever he puts pen to page. The novelist Miklόs Szentkuthy appears in Hapsburgian profile in one of the photographs that dot Nooteboom’s pages. They are mostly of cacti so Szentkuthy must be pretty special to gain his place in the parade. He is, in fact, “a magician, who will surprise you again and again with … a manner of thinking you have encountered nowhere before, one that will not let you go.” Once more, the parallel is noted.

There are many unexpected insights provoked by the spine of a forgotten book, or associations that spiral from a series published by Actes Sud, arranged alphabetically by concept. It is as though by capturing ideas for a moment he wants to catch language as it moves away from him. He also wants to commune with his cacti, namely The Soldier, The Mexican and The Martyr. But they are enigmas. His contemporaries have Facebook and Twitter, but Nooteboom’s companions stand still and say nothing.

The old Dutch dictionary, however, has plenty to say. When an old Dutchman has lived outside his country for a long time, his mother tongue can become a puzzle. Filled with doubt, he will head for Van Dale and find answers that trigger memories that unfurl into stories and out of the chaos comes what Simone Weil called “the development of attention.” Nooteboom forces his readers to reflect on what is being said, and to take up their part in the work: for him, literature is a collaborative effort.

The reader as well as the author becomes observer: of landscapes, of perplexing behaviour, of insects and flowers, and of, in my case, a pet cat, the sound of rain, and the reddening leaves of autumn. The pace is slow and memories pile up, most especially the suggestive memory of photographs. Close-ups of the Mexican, the Soldier and the dastardly moth, as well as a view of Mahon’s port, provide a sepia strain of melancholy. Occasionally current events come clashing in: the soft-soaping of government and the protests of unruly parliamentarians. They sing their arias, lamenting sovereignty and heralding a possible Grexit (at the time of writing). The cracks that run through Europe must be heard. The loss of a real community is the true lament.

“Il faut cultiver notre jardin” is the theme of this book, says Nooteboom, quoting Voltaire’s Candide. This reference to an 18^th-century philosophical recommendation to revolutionize philosophy and transform it from abstraction to a world-encountering enterprise, is the rallying cry that that hums through Nooteboom’s days. He is a verbal colourist with a yen for the stillness of landscape. In all his wanderings, from the Cold War divisions of Germany, the canals of Venice to the edge of the Sahara, he manages to bring back to us epiphanic moments in companionable prose. He brings with him the assurance that he rests on a bedrock of tradition. I would suggest this tradition has an earlier flowering in H. D. Thoreau who says in his 1854 Walden: or, Life in the Woods:

“There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers…. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.”

In his modest way, with this book, this is precisely what Nooteboom does.

533: A Book of Days
By Cees Nooteboom
Translated from the Dutch by Laura Watkinson
Quercus Publishing. 224 pages

THE PARROT

by Chelsea Asher • November 14, 2021November 14, 2021

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is parrot_BernardSpragg-300x202.jpg — Photo Credit: Bernard Spragg

It was the Monday morning when Polly decided to kill her sister’s parrot.

Polly sat down on the couch and held a mug of the good coffee, the one she wasn’t supposed to drink – the fancy one made from rhino liver or cat pee. The little bag of beans cost her sister Summer forty bucks from the organic food store on Mulberry, but it tasted like the description. Polly had only made this cup for it to go cold between her hands.

When Summer asked Polly to house sit for her over a long weekend, she wanted to want to say yes. Moreover, she wanted to sit in Summer’s one-bedroom apartment, and forget her own five roommates with one bathroom and her ten-an-hour salary job, where she was not invited to staff retreats in Massachusetts.

“No wild parties, please,” Summer said and winked.

Polly winked back and said, “I don’t make promises I can’t keep,” even though they both knew that when they went places, Summer would leave Polly in lieu of her friends, wearing mom jeans and crop tops with bubblegum voices. And whenever someone would see Polly, they would hug her and say, “Oh, great, Summer’s here!”

It was the Monday morning, sitting with the lukewarm cup between her fingers in this silence, when Polly heard the voice for the first time.

“God, yes, GOD, give it to me! Yes! Just like that!”

The word twin plucks a certain kind of linguistic string. The twah of the noise twangs inside your mind, like the solitary off fiddle, the uncanny, the psychotic twins in a browning hotel hallway. But really everything was much more wholesome than that, at a time.

In the delivery room, Polly’s sister glided out of their mom, pink and plump and cooing. She was a loaf of bread from a beginner’s kitchen, just perfect by accident. Their dad held her close and they named her Summer, because she was to be a season of sunshine in their lives.

Polly was born five hours later, with a lot of labor and panic by the doctor, covered in placenta and vaginal residue, crying until she passed out.

When twins are in the womb, they touch each other, handle each other’s delicate eye areas as gently as their own. In the womb, they form this unbreakable bond, deciding the nature of their relationship before they can even open their mouth to breathe. Kind of like a window painted shut.

It was the Monday morning twenty-odd years later and Polly had just heard a disembodied erotic exclamation from somewhere in her sister’s Pottery Barn apartment.

“Yes, yes, god Michael!” The chirpy-edged words echoed against the ecru walls. “Just like that.” Crow.

Adrenaline began to crick its fingers, pinch Polly’s shoulders. A stir from down the hall. Michael rising. But it couldn’t be Michael making the noise – the noise that sounded uncannily like her own voice, reverberated through a tinier doll throat.

A prehistoric scream shuddered, rickety and piercing, from a guttural corner of Summer’s reading nook. Polly turned, and there she saw him against the bookshelf, between Oprah’s autobiography and a pristine copy of Practical Magic. Just like that, it clicked into place.

Summer’s parrot. Oscar.

Did you know parrots blush when they’re in love? Well, Oscar loved Summer like a clipped wing – unmoving, irreversible, debilitating love.

When Polly was small, she looked up facts about parrots in an amateur stunt to somehow trick the bird into loving her best. The smartest living parrot knows more than 1,700 words. The oldest living parrot was eighty-two when he died. The heaviest parrot in the world, dead or alive, weighs five pounds and cannot fly, even in the wild. It’s too fat.

Oscar the parrot was old and fat. He always had a slightly droopy, discerning look about him – the kind of facial structure that typically graced politicians and mail office clerks. Each side of his pink and red plumage sagged over his perch. He had a sprig of an orange feather that shot upwards from his beak through the center of his head, like the one firework let off prematurely on the Fourth of July.

When the twins were children, Oscar learned every name except Polly’s. Friends would come over and be delighted by his ability to pull accents out of the puff of his chest, like a person from a hat. Their mother always whistled while she made pancakes on Sundays and Oscar would whistle too. Their father said Oscar had clearly lived many lives. But really, the bird just mimicked the sounds of the television. Polly knew this. He had the ability to pick up tones of voices as soon as he heard them. Except, that is, whenever Polly wanted him to.

Sometimes, when Summer and Polly first got Oscar, Polly would leave her bedroom in the night. She would sneak, feet light and creaking down the carpet of the stairs, into the living room and up to his cage. She’d unzip the pink cloth of his night cover, and crouch between the nesting tables and the smaller television by his cage. She would whisper to him. “Polly, Polly, Polly,” she’d say, slow and calculated, as though she were trying to summon herself in a bathroom mirror.

Oscar’s black eyes would flutter open, immobile, his head twitching this way and that in the quiet of the shadows.

“Polly, Polly, Polly,” she’d repeat, with more zeal.

And the bird would say nothing. Silence.

“Michael,” the bird teased Polly. She stared at him. He cocked his head and opened his beak. His tongue rolled around his mouth like a shriveled snail inside its shell.

Polly lowered her eyelids into a shrewd squint. She placed her hands on her knees and looked into Oscar’s black eyes. He, in turn, scratched the side of his candy floss neck with his gnarled claw and returned to stillness.

“Why are you staring at Oscar like that?” Michael asked.

Polly jumped and turned to face him. He’d appeared around the corner from the bedroom, in Summer’s favorite pink bathrobe. Polly felt the familiar prickle of satisfaction that overtook her whenever she looked at Summer’s boyfriend. Summer and Michael had been dating for just shy of two years.

He looked her up and down and licked his dry lips. She tried to ignore the furls of pink, the satisfied smirk on his face that always reminded her of the expression of a baby being fed by a spoon. She tried to ignore the way satisfaction gave way to the wave of sweet, sickly shame of having an affair with her twin sister’s boyfriend. “Michael,” she said.

A guttural crescendo rang from Oscar’s beak. “Michael! Michael! Give it to me, fucker!” Whistle.

In the light of day, here in Summer’s apartment more than a decade later, Oscar finally learned a name Polly had taught him.

The twins’ mother would say that Polly had been an early bloomer, but really, she’d just been fat. Eventually Polly learned, after many days at the mall with her mother selecting clothes to flatter Polly and to fit Summer, that even identical twins can be different sizes. The doctor claimed, as they grew, the girls were actually likely fraternal, but just very similar looking. Summer’s delicate skin fell like butter across her bones, whereas Polly’s swarthed in dips and bulges across her thighs and arms. Summer’s cheekbones were high and pert, whereas Polly’s were full and opulent.

What’s interesting about being a fat kid is that you’re getting bigger and people see you less. Double that when you have a mirror image that is more beautiful, affable and intelligent than you. And even though Polly was no longer the fat girl as an adult, there was still a shadow cast against her self-image, like the dark side of the moon. Polly had developed a coping mechanism or two over the years.

Coping mechanisms named Michael, who she’d met at Summer’s Christmas party at her place of employment. Summer had been too preoccupied assuring the bows on all the fake presents were just so, and did not notice the ominous swaying of the tinsel tree in the office’s far corner.

Coping mechanisms named Steve, Brandon, Kevin, Justin, Christian. Coping mechanisms in bathroom stalls, hands against the softness of her, pushing her flesh against walls, into pillows.

If Polly couldn’t be loved best, she could cheapen the love her sister received, like an echo that cuts off the end of each and every word, and interrupts thought before it can grow.

Polly couldn’t figure out how she had forgotten the stupid bird.

“What are we going to do?” Michael said.

“I don’t know.” Polly considered Oscar. He twitched his head and then relaxed into perfect stillness. It was easy to forget about the parrot. Amid Summer’s vintage boxes of potpourri or collection of unique rose bottles, he just felt like another decorative feature. Sometimes, even after all these years, Polly wondered how Summer even remembered to feed him and didn’t polish him instead.

Polly lifted a finger to Oscar’s feathered face. A crescendo of her moaning erupted from the plump bird.

“It really sounds exactly like you,” Michael said.

Oscar malted as he flapped his wings and emitted a mating call with feminine flourish. Polly winced. Michael placed an awkward hand on her shoulder. It felt like a movement to be comforting, but then Michael just let his hand hang there, and Polly shrugged it off.

“Summer’s going to be back in a few hours,” Michael said. “The bird can’t be here.”

“Like how?” Polly asked.

“Maybe we could hide him.”

“Oscar’s a living thing, Michael, not a broken vase.”

“Maybe we can open the window? Set him free and say he flew out?” he said.

“Oscar’s wings are clipped. Even if I threw him out the window, he’d probably just fall and die.”

Polly and Michael’s eyes met.

“No,” he said. He laughed.

Polly laughed. They couldn’t kill the parrot. They were hysterical. He stopped. She stopped. They looked into each other’s eyes, knowing and unknowing every nuance of the stare. But they suddenly realized that Polly’s laugh had continued, disembodied from herself.

They turned to face the bird, shivering with laughter not his own.

“Oscar, stop it. Stop laughing,” Michael said to the bird.

It was Polly and Summer’s sweet sixteen. They had a shared birthday cake, Summer’s favorite yellow cake with white icing, with Summer’s name first.

“I can’t believe my little girl is sixteen,” their father said to Summer. His muscles twitched in his face as he noticed Polly beside him and extended an arm around her shoulders too. “Both of them.”

Summer was unusually quiet. Her boyfriend at the time, a senior named Brett, pulled her into his lap at the table. He tickled her ribs with his calloused fingers and Summer squirmed away from him. Those same calloused fingers had been inside Polly’s mouth that morning as she and Brett tried to be quiet in the bathroom, and she tried not to think about it as Brett’s fingers cupped Summer’s jaw and kissed Summer’s peachy lips.

“Make a wish sweetie,” their mother urged. She poked both Polly and Summer toward the cake. Summer’s friends all crowded on the other side, flip phones in candle light.

Summer leaned down. Her face was grey against the pink fondant roses nestled into the thick lashings of buttercream. Did she know? Polly wondered. Summer looked at Polly for a brief moment. She knew, Polly was sure of it. Summer took a deep inhale in, turning back to the cake. She opened her mouth to blow out the candles, then promptly vomited.

Everyone gasped. Hands flurried into hair, pulling it back from the offending scene. Summer’s guts clenched and unclenched beneath the thin fabric of her dress. Brett scoffed and leapt backward, brushing imaginary puke from his front. And it took Polly a moment, a single moment in all of this, to realize she was laughing with relief instead of panicking, before she stopped.

“Oh my God, Polly,” one of Summer’s friends said through a simpering grimace. “Are you seriously laughing right now?”

“Cut that shit out, Polly,” her mother snapped.

But the laughing didn’t stop.

“Stop laughing, God damn it,” their mother said, her back to Polly, her arms around Summer. “Your sister is in pain. Is this a joke to you?”

The laughing continued.

“Your mother said stop,” their father yelled.

Everyone looked at Polly, still as a painting. “I’m not laughing,” she said.

But still it continued. In the pink corner of the room, lit only in the flow of the streetlights outside the window against the lines of his cage, Oscar trilled and trembled with her laughter.

“What the fuck does it matter, Polly? Let’s kill this thing and get it over with.”

Polly stepped between Michael and the perch. She felt the twitchy scratch of Oscar’s claws on the wooden bar beneath him. Oscar’s beating little heart, the size of a marble, inside the pink puff of his chest. She had never wished anything in her life dead more times than the parrot. She once looked it up; its brain was the size of an unshelled walnut. An unshelled walnut which met both sisters at the same time, and still felt Polly’s desperation to be seen and shunned it, at least inside Polly’s mind. But that walnut brain had also, after so many years of neglecting Polly’s voice, learned something. Really, she knew now a parrot’s attachment is as random as the hands we are ever dealt in life, and if she had fucked enough of her sister’s boyfriends that even the parrot was repeating her fake climaxes, maybe she had done so enough.

Michael clearly, for his part, did not agree. He lunged past Polly to grab the bird. Polly snatched the parrot off its perch and sheltered him in her arms. Oscar’s wings beat against her. His beak clicked. “Yes, yes, Michael!” he yelped, his character breaking and Polly’s tone leaving his voice. He clacked his beak over and over, wildly swinging his body over Polly’s wrists, squawking. A sharp, ripping pinch tore through the skin of her thumb. Without thought, in the face of this pain, Michael’s grabbing hands, his wide frame overwhelming her, she threw Oscar.

The blood from his beak showered in a perfect, arcing splatter across Summer’s framed photographs on the window sill. The twins’ grandparents’ wedding photo, one of Summer and Michael at the beach, and one of Polly and her, teenagers, on prom night, Oscar on Polly’s shoulder. The parrot slapped the bookshelf with a sickening smack, his wings twitching. Michael grabbed Polly’s hand and tore the robe from his naked body. He staunched the bleeding from her thumb and panted. The silence came up to meet her with a resounding thump of adrenaline to her heart.

“Michael? Michael, is he dead?” she asked him.

“God, I hope so,” Michael said. He pressed the robe harder into Polly’s hand, the pink soaking with burgundy. The parrot lay still, a feather dangling off the edge of his wing. Polly wasn’t sure, but in that moment, she could almost hear something crack, like a walnut shell, into many pieces.

Summer’s prom date Brett arrived at the house with a corsage made from lilies. Summer’s dress was black, velvet, long. She was as gently curved and unconsciously beautiful as a dusky rose bud. She grinned and place her lips against his cheek. “Thanks, Brett,” she said.

“Hey, no problem,” he whispered.

They kissed again. They pulled back.

Framed in their love, Polly yanked the hem of her purple fit and flare from the plus girls section and itched the strap that Oscar clung to. Summer had placed him there a half hour ago and his death grip had never released.

“Just one second,” she said now to Brett, and took Polly’s hand. Summer guided Polly back up the stairs. Polly obliged without question, as was always the dynamic. They slipped through the door and entered their shared bedroom. Summer sat down on her bed and turned to Polly. Polly and Oscar stood in the doorway and stared at her, a pirate duo on prom night.

Summer patted the bed. “Can we talk?” she said.

Polly nodded and moved to the bed. She shifted her weight uncomfortably onto the duvet.

“So, tonight is prom night,” Summer said.

“I know,” Polly answered.

“So, you know what happens on prom night.”

“Prom?”

Summer laughed, her laughter chimed like bells, the kind your neighbor hangs on their porch and they make you want to murder them every time the wind blows. “No, I mean, Brett got us a hotel room.”

Polly felt the pink in her cheeks equalize against the parrot beside them. She nodded. “Oh,” she said.

“So,” Summer said. “What do you think? Do you think we’re both ready to do this?”

Polly didn’t want to say that she already knew Brett was ready, because he already had. Twice. Instead she moved her head from side to side. She tried to smile in a way that was encouraging and not plastic. “Why are you talking to me about this?”

“You’re my sister,” Summer said. She took Polly’s hand in hers and looked off to the side. “Plus, all my friends have had their firsts already, and I know you’re the only one who would understand.”

“Why would I understand?” Polly said. Her hand began to sweat inside Summer’s palms. She shook, imperceptibly rustling the lilies of Summer’s corsage.

“Because you’re obviously a virgin too,” Summer said. Obviously, she plucked the word like a weed in a flower bed.

Polly nodded, slowly, and collected her thoughts. “I think you should do it,” Polly said. “Make it special.”

Summer hugged Polly. Her arms expanded over Polly’s wide shoulders. She sniffed, in that emotional heady way of pretty girls. “Thanks, Polly. You always tell me just what I’m thinking anyway.” As Summer hugged her sister, Oscar’s wings flapped and his claws tightened against Polly’s skin.

When the girls came back downstairs, Oscar still gripped Polly’s shoulder strap. Summer reunited with Brett and took his hand in hers.

“Say cheese!” their mother said, appearing on the other side of the happy couple with the flash of a camera. It popped and whizzed and Oscar flapped his wings offensively, letting out a guttural screech.

“This is the young man we have heard so much about.” Their father appeared from behind their mother. “Put it there.” He held out his hand to Brett.

They shared a strong two-pump handshake and released. “Good to finally meet you, sir,” he said.

“We’re so pleased Summer found such a handsome date. Polly is a bit of a wallflower,” their mother said. She whispered this like how people whisper that someone has a terminal illness, or an obvious disfigurement. “Let’s get a picture all together. Brett in the middle!”

The kids shuffled in. Polly placed a hand against Oscar. She attempted to scoot him off. She felt the string of her strap begin to give.

“Funny,” Brett muttered in Polly’s ear. Flash, pop whizz. “You don’t seem like a wall flower to me.” He brushed his hand lightly over the line of Polly’s ass.

Anxiety seized her gut and Polly yanked at Oscar who chomped indignantly onto her ear lobe. She felt a piercing, sharp, fleshy rip, a knife against apple, and warmth gushed down her neck. Polly screamed.

“Oh, gosh, just one second,” their mother said. A flash, a pop, a whizz.

Michael stood there that Monday morning, naked, and flitted the bird, with pinched fingers, out the window into the breeze. Polly squeezed her eyes shut. She tried to remember when this had all started, when her desperation to be seen and heard had gone so far.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Michael said. But his name could have been Brett, Steven, Justin, Brandon. It could have been a plethora of names and people, standing naked in Summer’s apartment, while Polly bled into her favorite bath robe and their pink parrot of their childhood lay probably dead on the sidewalk four stories down. There are only so many equations and swirling sums you can pull, before you realize the only indispensable part of a problem is yourself.

Polly thought to say something, but they both heard it. The key in the door.

“Hello?” Summer called from the entry hall. They heard the thump of the door closing. The wheels of her bag roll across the Cherrywood floorboards. The clack of her heeled brogues. “It’s cold in here, is a window open?”

Summer rounded the corner. The grin on her face slid off and dripped unpleasantly onto the ottoman. She took in the room. The blood across the window sill, her family photos. The empty stand where Oscar once was, tumbled on the floor. Her boyfriend, naked. Her twin sister, in his tee shirt. For the first time, Summer seemed to really see Polly, and she seemed to nod and shake her head at the same time as she took it all in.

Summer shifted, her eyes shrewd and discerning. Then, she spotted the bloodied pink bathrobe in Polly’s hands.

“Is that my bath robe?” she said.

When Summer and Polly first got Oscar at the pet store, it was the first time Polly’s parents had ever listened to her over her sister. Summer could only see the kittens, the guinea pigs, the puppies. Everything cute and girly, anything you could sanely name Fluffy. Their parents had told them they would share a pet and the responsibility for it.

Polly saw Oscar in some dusty corner, in a cage. It looked as though no one had even so much as noticed him in years. She thought the mail clerk expression on his face, this tiny Winston Churchill in this pink body, was so endearing. She pointed him out to Summer and Summer wrinkled her nose at him. “Ew gross,” she’d said.

And yet he’d still loved her best.

Summer and Michael did not last, and neither did spring, or the spring after that.

Polly and Summer have enjoyed separate birthdays and cordial family dinners. Their parents relay regards. Polly goes to parties where people are happy to see her. No body asks where Summer is.

But then at a party recently, Polly hears a story. A story of a parrot, who speaks in British accents and holds tea in the den of a friend of a friend’s family home. Recently, they discovered it can also croon merrily along to half of Taxi Driver. It also seems to continuously laugh, in this shrill, familiar sort of cackle. “You laugh like her parrot,” a drunk girl tells Polly on the sticky couch.

Polly smiles politely and sips her beer.

“Hey, guys,” the drunk girl cries. “You gotta hear this. Isn’t it funny? Laugh, come on. Laugh, Polly.”

But Polly does not. “I can’t just laugh whenever the fuck you want,” she tells them.

Polly does not tell them, however, that sometimes when she walks home, along certain side streets or in certain neighborhoods, she is gripped with the sound of her own laughter. It eeks out of the marrow of her bones, vibrates through the crevices and somehow escapes disparate of her voice and breath into the air of the night. Sometimes when this happens, she looks into the black emptiness of darker corners and strains to see something within it. She taps the volume button on the side of her phone, she lowers the music to just a hum and she waits for the croons, the shrill reptile shriek that might accompany, only to find the silence of the world meets her just as surely as the shadows of her feet meet the ground.

children jealousy parrot

fathers and daughters fires nature

THE HEAT OF THE MOUNTAIN

by Mackenzie Oliff • November 13, 2021November 13, 2021

When I burned the inside of my middle finger on the steel-iron stovetop in my kitchen last Tuesday, my baby hair sizzled in the purple-blue light, and I thought, almost instantly, of my father. I heard his voice in my head; lucid, like soft thunder: “Doodle. I’m heading out.”

I open my eyes to find the soft curve of my ceiling blending into my closet, my father’s eyes just below. I wonder, in this moment, if he built it to look this way on purpose. “Where?” I say as I stretch.

“There was a fire at Wolf Gap.” He stands from my side, his hunting boots squeaking in the dark. I imagine him minutes earlier tying them on the side of his bed, his eyes creasing at the corners, his lips drawn tight like a shoelace. “I’m just going to help out.” He backs out of my room, closing the door.

This most recent burn is small, already stretching pink like a caterpillar of raw skin between my knuckles. I cross the tile to the bathroom and sift under the sink for a bandage.

Heeding my father’s instructions, I hear, once again, his Jupiter-like voice as if he’s standing beside me now holding my palm under the running water.

“Not cold. Warm. Cold water on a burn like this will damage the nerves and you’ll scar. Do you understand?” He wraps my eight-year-old finger in cloth, sticky with astringent, and adheres it to my skin with soft tape. “From now on, how about you wait until your mother is awake to use the burner.” He lifts me off the sink top.

“Why do you say your mother like that, like you don’t know her?” I ask.

He is dressed for work. He has shaved the weekend from his face with a silver blade and wears a tricky smile, perhaps already having said goodbye to me in his head. It’s still a dark morning. Cold, Monday light creeps into the bathroom, and we both look out the window at the red cardinal on the feeder, chirping.

“I’ve got an early flight, Doodle.” He checks his wristwatch. “Feed the horses and leave them in their stalls for the week, okay? It’s gonna be a cold one.” He winks at me.

Heading west, he beeps the horn at the bay laurel just past the property line, and after he’s disappeared into the crest of a new week, I crawl into his bed, next to my mother, and study my swathe.

I fall back asleep and have a dream that he and I sit inside the barn in the early morning while he wraps what looks like a human heart in layers of gauze.

Years after I wake up I will remember putting my hands on his face and pressing my bones hard into his bones, hoping to get so close that I would become him.

I will remember asking him, as he tried to teach me how to fire my first shotgun, if the recoil would hurt me. At this, he crossed his arms, a small smile pulling the lines on his lips tight. He ran his hand over the top of his head, considering my question.

He never said, “Yes, it will hurt you. Yes, it might surprise you, or change your mind about some things.” He never said, “The kick? Don’t think about that, just focus on your aim.” But I recognized the thought in him, shifting like the splint in his left ankle and haunting him in the woods each morning and in his sleep each night.

Instead, he took back the .22 and said, “We’ll try another day.”

Satisfied with this response, we headed back to the house and he held my hand as we walked through the yard together.

One morning, before he left for work, he showed me how to water his plants. His Italian cognac shoes looked out of place in the dirt as he tended to the bleeding hearts around the pond, his two worlds slow-danced with one another. He held the base of the spout away from his gold-threaded suit, and I sat watching him in the glade. I revelled in his secret music. No one could see him like I could: We were always hidden from the rest.

Our time waned. Now, it becomes almost impossible to distinguish my memories of my father from my dreams of him. In any case, he is always much taller than me, built like Apollo. Crows fly around us, a syrupy lightning storm brews in the early, pitch-black morning. “Heat lightning,” he whispers now, holding the well-watered world in his hands. “Heat lightning,” I whisper back.

I wake up in college, cold. Far away from the heat of my father. Far from his Arizona hands, his silver crossbows, and the smell of his cigars. I look at the place on my palm that he once covered. The burn is long gone. Still, our hands once lived in the same house; were once so close that they were, perhaps, one set of hands, attached to one body.

I wish to return to that clearing again sometimes, to fire the Remington into the trees, and to hear it echo in his step. To burn myself on the heat of a gun, to make the proof of him visible in a scar.

The night Wolf Gap caught fire, my father was the first to know. I dressed quickly in the dark and followed him like a shadow to the side of the house where he was already climbing into his truck. The night settled around my eyes. “I’m coming with you!” I yelled from the porch.

He crank-rolled his window down and shook his head. Sometimes I can still see his eyes through the dark, as blue as stars. He didn’t need to yell; his voice was loud enough to reach me, even still, shroomed with the cadence of a gale.

“No, you’re not. It’s not gonna be fun, I’m just going to make sure it doesn’t get any bigger, that’s all.”

He closes his door and peels up the drive, heading into the heart of our burning mountain.

I retreat to the front porch and sit in my father’s rocking chair. On the side table next to me lies his ashtray, with one half-smoked Madura perched in the divot. I move it to my mouth and pretend that it’s lit.

I can’t see or smell the fire from our home, but I imagine what it looks like when my eyes are closed. I drift off in his imprint and have a dream that he comes home and wakes me to see the world burn with him. We fly to Wolf Gap in his golden chariot, and when we get there, he holds my hand and leads me into the campground.

He stares into this forest fire in the same way one might stare into a mirror. He is searching for something – a clue, maybe? A hand to pull him through the flame? His gaze shifts to mine, and I smile at him, expectantly.

The fire swells around us in a smoky brume, but we don’t struggle for air. We stay like this forever, looking at each other in the crimson dark.

Our eyes are locked in time, and nothing breaks our view. We don’t look away.

We don’t even blink.

childhood Minnesota nature

YEAR OF THE LIZARD

by Brett Biebel • November 12, 2021November 12, 2021

Dead of Minnesota winter, and my sister finds an iguana in a snowbank. Thing’s frozen solid. We put it in a pillowcase, and the tail sticks out the top, and then we bike all the way out to Moorhead and keep hitting these ice chunks. The iguana goes flying. We have to collect it all over again.

When we get to campus, we find the biology department. Some woman’s there. She looks younger than you’d think, and she takes the thing into this back office, and I imagine she’s got a microscope. A scalpel. My sister’s sitting on a bench in the hallway, leaning against a glass case, and there’s plants in there or something. Fungus. It all looks fake or calcified or I don’t know what, and when the woman comes back out she says it’s real. What do you mean? I say, and she says, The iguana, and it’s clinical. All fucking business. We look at her like she’s got four heads because of course it’s real, and we can tell dead from plastic, and then she tells us it was a girl. Female, she says. Just laid eggs. I don’t know how she knows that. Don’t ask neither. It’s only later I think like maybe she’s fucking with us, and maybe she isn’t even a biologist, or at least not a very good one anyway, but my sister, she’s never been happier. Spends the whole ride back smiling off into space, and we leave the iguana there, and I get phone calls. Years later. Mom and Dad die, and we sell the farm, and she puts a rider on the purchase agreement that says anybody finds an iguana anywhere on the property it’s got to be reported to this email she sets up just solely for that specific purpose, and the buyers, they find this whole thing charming if you can believe it. They let her onto the property whenever she’s in town, two, three times a year, and I’ve only been with her the once, but there she is, digging in the dirt. Got binoculars. Looks real serious. Brings a camera and documents every search, year by year and visit by visit, and she says how iguanas are adaptable and invasive and communicative, and I try to tell her about pet stores and practical jokes, but she sticks with it firm. Thorough. On her knees and combing the ground and telling anyone who’ll listen oh, they’re there alright. All you have to do is keep your eyes on the road.

Almada Argentinian litertaure translated fiction translated literature

BOOK REVIEW: BRICKMAKERS

by Robert Montero • November 12, 2021November 12, 2021

A story about rivalry between families that blasts through the decades, a tale of revenge and murder that will not let up, a case of hatred that runs so deep it’s hard to say when it really began. Such a story could be an epic, with its ambitious time frame and explosive subject matter. But, at least at first glance, Brickmakers, the second novel from Argentine writer Selva Almada, does not look like one. The book is relatively short, at 197 pages. And each chapter is usually quite brief. Originally published in Spanish, Annie McDermott’s translation lends a robust brutality to the story, a tone that at times transfixes and, occasionally, transcends the story’s emotional limitations.

These limitations might well be inevitable, given the characters who populate Brickmakers. Hardened by the realities of life in a working-class town where money is not easy to come by, people must labour with their hands, and status is determined by the little things. In a description that highlights this fine line, one of the main characters, the dying Pájaro ‘Pajarito’ Tamai, remembers his ten-year old self, about to have his photograph taken. His mother has made sure he’s in his best clothes: a new flannel shirt, and the “blue pants from his communion that are now too tight . . . the hem hovering above his ankles even though his mom’s let it out all the way.” This mismatch is the consequence of there being “enough money for a new shirt, but not for pants.” Later on, his mother recalls how she’d earned her father’s scorn for going with Pajarito’s father, “some lousy, dirt-poor cotton-picker, a half Indio with no family to speak of, and who was cocky as hell to top it off” – it’s a cockiness that will ultimately contribute to the family’s downfall.

The novel begins with the ending – the Tamais have been brought down, along with their great rivals, the Mirandas. The single event that signifies their downfall acts as the story’s catalyst. Pájaro and Marciano Miranda, who is of a similarly young age, have got into a fight at a deserted amusement park, for reasons the reader does not yet know. The outcome of this fight is that they have both stabbed each other: Pájaro watches his stomach deflate like a balloon (“fffshshshhhh”) as Marciano pulls out the knife, able to take comfort in the fact that he’d also “managed to stab him a couple of times.” The two boys had been with friends, but now Pájaro wonders: “Cardozo, Nango, and Josecito? Where’ve they all gone?” And more importantly, “Why didn’t the police come, or the ambulance?” Because Pájaro and Marciano are dying. “Pajarito coughs and that soft warm sweet whatever leaves his mouth.”

The story of the Tamai-Miranda rivalry is then relayed, told through the lens of this single tragic event. There is a Shakespearean air to the dramatic set piece at the heart of Brickmakers. As Marciano lays stabbed on the ground, his father, Miranda, appears to him. Soon, Miranda is on his knees, “supporting his son in his lap, Marciano’s head resting on one of his father’s legs . . . Around his neck, his father has the same silk scarf he was buried in.” That Marciano is a Hamletesque figure becomes apparent at the start of the book: “His father had been killed and he, the eldest of the children, would have to avenge him.”

This desire for vengeance feeds into one of the story’s chief preoccupations. On every page, this book addresses, directly or otherwise, a particular form of primitive, performative masculinity. Marciano suspects that Pájaro has encouraged Marciano’s brother’s homosexual tendencies. His solution is to “force the kid to eat pussy all day long . . . till he got over his obsession with sucking dick.” Marciano’s father “was always getting drunk and disorderly in the bars,” and Tamai “was always picking fights with someone or other.” The overtly masculine energy is so fierce that even the women sometimes sound like extensions of Miranda and Tamai, embracing a forthright tone that, in another context, might sound liberating, but in this one seems tainted with the same crassness that grips the men: “[Tamai] had made [Celina] an addict and she couldn’t sleep at night if he didn’t satisfy her. Even when he came home drunk, she made sure he got hard enough for her to ride.” Nevertheless, on the rare occasions when divergent voices break through, they come from the women: At age four, Miranda would take Marciano to “bars, card tables, and the dog track, despite his mother’s protests.” When Tamai tells Miranda’s wife that he doesn’t want his children hanging out in her house, she says, “They’re kids . . . They’ve got nothing to do with whatever problems you have with my husband.” Tamai doesn’t change his position. Later, after Miranda’s death, Tamai’s wife questions whether her husband might be “capable of killing someone.”

But to what extent is this primitive masculinity rooted in the hearts of its practitioners, or the socio-economic conditions of their town? Tamai is infamous for his brutish ways, but his “insolence” is what sets him apart from “the other migrant workers, men worn down by poverty and hard manual labor, mostly indigenous, silent, and ashamed.” Is Tamai a villain, or a victim of circumstance – “a rough hand,” yes, but one “ravaged by work?” Although his actions appear petty and even self-destructive, are they not also motivated by self-preservation? The novel raises the question, but doesn’t necessarily give an answer. Some readers might be left uninspired by the relentless harshness of Almada’s world, the prose that often seems to claw at subject matter without fully catching it. But this relentlessness also gives the novel its powerful sense of place. How can the characters convincingly break through their destructive tendencies when the very fabric of their lives imparts the germs of discontent, want and alienation?

This tension – between nature and nurture – provides the narrative with an ambiguity that grows slowly but steadily as the rivalry is mapped out. Later, it is revealed that “There was a time when Pajarito Tamai and Marciano Miranda were friends.” This was before Marciano’s father introduced him to new faces, and binaries were erected, a clear distinction between “us” and “them” scarring the blank slate. Perhaps this is the answer to the question, then, that nurture is the culprit. But nature isn’t necessarily let off the hook, as the forces that underpin this mode of nurturing might themselves be rooted in nature. The reader is therefore kept in an ambiguous state until this increasingly fragile masculinity – born out of nature, or nurture, or both – is disrupted yet again, by the revelation of homosexuality. Without giving too much away, it is this disruption that causes the dam to burst.

On the surface, Brickmakers is about a rivalry between two families that ends in tragedy. But it’s also about performance. The rivalry is neither grand nor, in itself, compelling, but it isn’t supposed to be. The Tamais and the Mirandas are not the Capulets and the Montagues. Marciano is no Hamlet. This is because Brickmakers isn’t, fundamentally, about people. It’s about the landscapes they inhabit – gendered, classist, sexual. Yes, this novel is a tragedy, but not in the Shakespearean sense, because that would require the characters to have agency. And these characters, although possessing free will, are ultimately no match for the structures that bind them to their prejudices. If there is a ray of hope, it comes from those small moments when the women question the rightness of their sons’ “initiations” into the world of their fathers, or when the sons themselves dare to depart from the path that was laid out for them before they were even born. These blips may come to nothing, crashed like a cigarette underfoot. But they show something more important: that an alternative exists, waiting for the brickmakers to build it.

Brickmakers
by Selva Almada
Translated from the Spanish by Annie McDermott
Graywolf Press, 192 pages

UNTAMED

by Mish Harris • November 7, 2021November 7, 2021

You like to walk. It’s a beautiful evening. Home is only a mile away and the streets are still busy so you walk even though it’s one in the morning. You leave the bar and head up towards the High Street where night buses pass you every few minutes. You could easily take one, but there are other people inside, people you don’t trust not to ruin your private glow of whisky and laughter. It’s been a good night. You’re happy and grateful.

You like to walk and so you let yourself – up the high street, under the bridge, past that long string of Vietnamese restaurants. You’re walking along, breathing it all in, but part of you is still in the bar and part of you is at home already. It’s this talent for being in different places at once that means it takes longer than it should to notice: no-one’s around and the streetlights are dimmer.

Fear never waits to be invited. Outside you’re the same, but inside you’ve shrunk to the size of a pinhead. Blood roaring, heart clawing, running up the street as fast as you’re able except that your legs are hardly moving, it’s your eyes that are sprinting – darting from doorway to doorway, checking every bush, bus stop and railing for what feels like must be an inevitable danger.

Breathe, you say, but your body won’t listen.

You’re safe, you say, but the animal in you knows better because while your eyes have been racing your ears have picked up on a noise that’s unmistakable:

Footsteps. The heart-sinking sound of a person behind you.

You were thirteen the first time you were mugged at knife point. Other things had happened before that, but thirteen was the first time you were alone and old enough to understand what was happening. Wet hair hanging down your back after swimming practice. His angry eyes and darkening sweat pits. You were walking alone then too – how have you still not learnt that lesson?

Do what they say. Don’t fight back. Give them whatever they ask for. Those are the rules of survival you’ve always had drilled into you. Don’t scream, stay very still, wait until it’s over. It’s those rules as much as the violence that have left you fully grown, but with blurry edges.

Do nothing.

A complicated message, especially for a woman.

The footsteps behind you are getting closer.

You keep walking, keep walking. You like to walk. You have always liked walking. You could walk across the road but then he’ll know that you’re frightened and you don’t want him to know anything at all about you so you pretend that you’re okay, you pretend that this isn’t happening, and pretending is how you turn yourself invisible.

Do nothing.

Easier for some than for others. You are not a good girl. You weren’t built for obedience. You feel a surging dizziness and the sharp taste of raw instinct. All he sees is a woman, quietly walking. He doesn’t know that you’re wild. He can’t see that you’re animal.

“Wild is wild,” is what a friend always says to you.

You visited her once at her family home in Namibia and she told you about how her uncle had been killed by a lion that he’d raised from a baby. At first the animal was tame and obedient. Loving even, according to how the family tells it. Then one day, all of a sudden, the fully grown lion attacked and killed him.

Her family killed the lion because that’s how it goes with these things, but you silently wished it could’ve been different. No one should lose their life for being true to their nature.

Part woman, part beast, animal ears hearing everything. Keys stuffed like claws between your fingers. You try to remember your sporadic Krav Maga and self-defence classes, but it’s all theoretical. You’ve never been brave enough to do any of the things you learnt in an actual real life situation. It scares you to think you might have to. It scares you to think you might want to.

Fight, flight or freeze – the flavours of fear you’ve already tasted. Once you fought, but mostly you’ve felt frozen. Flight doesn’t work anymore because it implies somewhere safe to run to and the truth is you’re always scared, you just don’t always admit it.

It’s okay. You’re alright. The private mantra you’re never not repeating.

And then you hear it – the low hum of a tune that’s so well-known even you can recognise it. And even though you’re terrified, you’re doing the kind of thing that makes you blame yourself for so much of your long history with violence:

You’re turning around. You’re making yourself look at him.

You’re sizing him up just long enough for your voice to pivot from frightened to friendly

– about your height, not too well built, long dreads that might mean he’s a bona fide Rasta.

Animals don’t smile, but that’s exactly what you’re doing.

“I love that song” is what you hear yourself saying to him.

The man keeps pace and pretends to be nice to you.

You pretend too even though you suspect he knows what you’re up to.

At first, he returns your small talk about music but it doesn’t take long for him to figure out that that one song is the extent of your knowledge of reggae. Words taper off into silence. When he goes back to singing you tell yourself everything’s going to be alright, that if there’s a soundtrack to violence it probably isn’t Bob Marley.

The man tells you he’s a DJ who’s just finished a set at a club in Hoxton. He’s on his way to meet friends at a bar you know in Dalston.

It’s good to have something simple in common.

He won’t hurt you if he knows you. Fuck the statistics.

He talks about music in general and reggae in particular and you’re so grateful he hasn’t hurt you yet, you’re practically floating.

The English language is full of empty phrases: Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t; time heals all things; choose to be happy. As if violence is something that doesn’t always stay with you. Burrowing into your spine and restricting your movements.

People who say those things have never had anything meaningful forcefully taken from them.

A male therapist once suggested that you ask yourself:

‘What’s the worst that can happen?’

He realised his mistake as soon as he said it. The way you shrank back in your chair, eyes wide, looking at him like he was crazy.

You’ve got yourself this far.

The man carries on next to you and part of you marvels at how easy the night is for him – small talk, singing, the simple luxury of being authentic.

The more he talks the more you think he probably is a good person and all that authenticity starts to wear you down a little. You tell him about your night and that you’re heading home now.

“Where do you live?”

His words physically hurt you.

You wave vaguely in the wrong direction.

He asks if you want to come to the bar.

You say no thank you.

Once upon a time bad things happened every six months like clockwork. You were thinking exactly that when a man cut off your jogging route around the reservoir. He demanded your phone and pointed a rusted knife in your direction and all you could think was how small he was and how, if you grabbed his wrist just right, you could twist it and make him stab himself before he realised what was happening.

The man you’re walking with keeps trying to persuade you.

You say no again. No. No, thank you.

You don’t like to repeat yourself.

You don’t like to risk what confrontation brings up in you.

He doesn’t have that worry. He doesn’t have to worry about anything.

“Wild is wild,” you hear your friend saying.

You cross the road and turn left. The man carries on and doesn’t follow you. You know because you check and check again, then again just to be certain.

You’ve turned two blocks before you needed to and the route ahead is even darker than the road that first scared you.

You tell yourself you’re okay.

You remind yourself that nothing’s actually happened.

He didn’t do anything to you, but there’s something in the nothingness that’s still upsetting. Nothingness stacked so deep you can barely keep walking because violence is always physical unless it’s soft and seeping and dank and insidious.

Even nice guys only have to be nice for as long as they choose to.

Sometimes you fantasise about being an ass-kicking assassin. Uma Thurman in Kill Bill or Angelina Jolie in just about everything. You’d slice through violence as if it was nothing. You’d flick flack through a room full of men who won’t listen and use their language of force to teach them a lesson.

And even though you know it’s not real, even though you know it’s all lights, camera and action, you like to see women fighting men and winning. Seeing is believing and you need to believe that somewhere, women are winning.

The street you’re on has opened into a dark square of rippling shadows. You don’t want to be there so you use the only superpower you have – disassociation. You walk, you keep walking, you have to keep walking, but you’re not there anymore, you’re back with your friend, deep in the desert in Namibia.

The desert is like the dark in that it’s so vast it takes time for your eyes to get used to it. You might think you’re looking at the horizon, but look again and you’ll find that the end of the world has stretched itself out even further.

The sun slices clear lines between lightness and darkness and it’s too hot for anyone to do anything except exist very gently.

You concentrate on that unbreathable hotness. The feeling of letting go, giving in, the simple act of enduring. Mind shutting down. Body taking over. This is how you’ve always soothed yourself – by taking yourself away, by sinking into your memories.

There’s no desert to be found here in the city. Hardly any nature at all or at least, nothing wild and unmanicured.

And that’s when you see it: A fox.

Moving down the middle of the road just ahead of you.

Eye contact isn’t a thing people do in London, but the fox looks over his shoulder and stares squarely at you and its animal gaze takes you back to how good you felt when you first started out walking.

You remember being happy. You remember feeling grateful.

It’s not the route you would have taken but you follow the fox and its civilising rhythm – passed the church then right for two blocks, across the road and up the diagonal. It makes you feel safe. Not just safe from fear, but safe from pretending.

The fox walks in the middle of the road, you walk on the pavement. You walk together, sharing looks, one survivor to another and there are no words because the fox already knows everything the desert has taught you:

That time isn’t linear; that you’ll never not be a young girl with a man looming over you; that you’re not as weak as the world likes to tell you; that you have your own stubborn rhythm that carries on despite everything; that it’s possible to be both wild and civilised; that you’re barely human at all, but rather animal and grateful.

You walk with the fox all the way to your doorstep, through the city and over desert, sharing a night that is only that night but also all the other nights that came before it.

fear

competition friendship women

CHATHAM

by Cora Waring • November 6, 2021November 6, 2021 • 1 Comment

We had dinner at your house in Chatham, in the formal dining room that your decorator said you’d cheapened with too casual a chandelier. When you hired her, you purchased a three-hundred-dollar serving tray as compensation for the shoddy fixture. Every summer birthday and barbecue after, you hauled that damn wooden rectangle around the backyard – laden with chips and packet dips and napkins – to justify the expense to your husband. Then you replaced the chandelier too.

We’d met in Hoboken the year prior when our stroller laps near the pier kept intersecting. The friendship caught on in an instant. Our husbands both worked in finance. Our daughters were close in age. I’d recently had a second baby and yours was nearly due.

You moved from Hoboken to Chatham a few months later and begged me to visit. You were lonely, stuck in that big house with small children all summer, waiting for preschool and your new suburban life to start. For nearly a year, I drove the 20 miles out to see you a few times a week, and you fed and entertained the lot of us in return. I had a third baby during that time, and you came to the hospital to exclaim what a doll she was.

When our get-togethers lasted through dinner, my husband rode back from New York City with yours, their business casual wear limp from the press of skyscrapers. My spouse had a big job, and yours had a bigger one. Mine was our age, and yours 10 years older. Sometimes our men aimed these differences at each other like they were boys with BB guns. They desired not to kill but to maim, because who really could say which counted for less: success already acquired or youth with upward potential?

You and I had our own versions of BB guns. For pellets, we used our children’s looks and genders, their intelligence and potential talents, our own appearances and desirability, and what the other possessed or didn’t yet.

Your parents were visiting the night we fought. They drove in from Ohio and joined our happy assortment around the table, our preschoolers and toddlers intermittently plunked along its edges like icing flowers on a cake. I vibrated the baby on my lap as we pretended to be more grown-up than we felt. We drank wine and forked noodles into waiting mouths. We demanded three bites more, two bites, one.

My husband mentioned life insurance to me in passing, murmuring over the baby’s head. His improved policy, which we upped after the birth of each new dependent, had finally taken hold. When overheard and queried, he spoke the number across the table and I imagined all its zeroes stringing themselves along the metal bars of the new light fixture, so we might better scrutinise their empty middles. I glared at my husband as heat crept into my cheeks.

You scoffed at the realisation that our husbands’ numbers matched; the wet catch in your throat holding back everything unsaid but lashing beneath.

Surely, you deserved more. Your husband’s life should be worthier than mine.

Your mother laid down her silverware, said quietly, “Sarah, I raised you better,” as the children gurgled and squirmed, oblivious to the minutiae of adults and their made-up skirmishes.

A few months from that moment, our friendship will end. I’ll despise your new friends with tiny whales stitched onto their polo shirts and their older husbands wearing shiny loafers without socks. You’ll be dismayed when we don’t choose Chatham for our new home, opting for more square footage in a lesser town nearby. We’ll both be miffed when I don’t RSVP to your birthday celebration thrown by your new pals, and then I’ll be forever unsure an invitation even existed after checking my phone bill. I’ll make a new friend in my new town, and you’ll phone the moment I arrive at her home, demanding that I come watch your children, but I’ll refuse.

In the end, you’ll send an email detailing my lack of appreciation for the feeding and entertaining, the toddler bed we borrowed, and the childcare while we shopped for houses. My husband will read the email and summarise it to extract the sting. You’ll get pregnant again despite your husband’s worsening back pain because he still needs a son. We’ll settle into our new home in a town that lacks all of Chatham’s gleam, while I tell myself that I never wanted Chatham at all. For a year, my oldest child will cry for yours until she mercifully forgets.

But that night at the table, to remedy the quiet, we reached for our wineglasses and slurped. I laughed in a horrid way and wondered if my face appeared witchy when I did. Then, whatever force that was holding all of us loosened, and I envisioned the zeroes overhead dropping from the light with a plink, plink, plink. I leaned forward to replace my glass and the baby’s face banged against the table.

OUT OF THE WOODS

by Kelly Q Anderson • November 5, 2021November 5, 2021

There is no air conditioning. And no Wi-Fi. If that hasn’t scared you away, then walk in through the screen door and let it slam shut. In the silver blue porch room, step past the ugly black bear coffee table that remains very unpopular but extremely useful. Kick off your shoes because you won’t need them, ever. The greatest compliment, at the end of the day, is dirty feet.

You’ll enter the great room with its soaring wood ceilings the colour of caramel. The beams are filled in with decorative oars, the souvenirs of summer camps from long ago. Cousins who were campers went on to become counsellors and the world of bonfire songs, lunch bells, and canoeing at midnight are all wrapped up in those oars.

There are old board games covered in tears and decks of cards on the mantel in fresh cellophane. Lamps pepper every surface so there is always a spot that glows. Chairs are placed in social circles and, thoughtfully, the darkened corners as well. Wherever you want to go, you’ll go. Wrap up in a fleece or just lounge in a swimsuit with spiky, sun-dried hair.

Let your eyes travel to the gray and lavender stacked stones of the fireplace but note the time capsule of the room – the great grandfather’s ukulele perched on the wall, antique candlesticks on the credenza, the collection of records under the side table (no record player to be found), and the tiny, plastic-boxed games that involve swishing metal ball bearings in patterns. Wilted paperback books with broken spines are perfect for flopping in antique wooden chairs with woven cushions that have been stuffed and restuffed and restuffed again.

When your feet pad into the kitchen on thin cotton rugs, you will grab a heavy stoneware mug in cornflower blue. Stand at the sage green countertop while the crispest water spills from the tap and courses coldly down your throat. Cities don’t know water like this.

Golden ribbons of corn in their stalks fill the countertops. Packages of hot dogs and brats from a tiny butcher shop, only accessible by boat, are getting prepped for the grill. Little dishes of thick red and yellow sauces, along with chopped pickles and purple onion, pepper the space. Don’t forget the celery salt with the red cap. Someone will have to run back up for the citronella candle. Someone else will have run back up to retrieve the silly hats.

In the morning there are sounds of loons and a gentle urging of fishing boats. Rise whenever. Brush your teeth half asleep. Keep your hairbrush packed away. Wiggle your flesh into a swimsuit and walk languid down the stairs, through the kitchen, and toward the dock. Your feet will awake with the chill of the stone steps and errant pine needles will attach to your heels. Sit in the swaying chair and breathe in the air of August as waves seek your feet.

The water will figure everything out for you.

nature relaxation

Germany Hilbig translated literature translation

BOOK REVIEW: THE INTERIM

by Stephen Newton • November 4, 2021November 4, 2021

In Wolfgang Hilbig’s novel The Interim, the protagonist C. is an East German writer who spent decades stoking boilers in the labyrinthine bowels of an industrial complex – working nights so he could be alone to write. When he escapes to the West in the mid-1980s at the age of 44, it is not by scaling the Wall, or evading the border guards. Vilified and unpublished at home, C. is discovered by a West German publisher who invites him to spend a year in the free and opulent West, all expenses paid. And so, armed with only a visa, he departs Leipzig by train, leaving behind his mother and Mona, his long-time partner.

What follows is Hilbig’s harrowing account of C.’s moral disintegration. Instead of rejoicing in his good fortune, he becomes shipwrecked and stranded in an interim state of mind, where he is perpetually arriving and departing, lost in a sea of train stations with no real destination, and no country he can claim as his own.

From the moment the novel opens until its final paragraph, Hilbig’s tormented protagonist seems never to eat or sleep. Instead, he is always moving, quenching his loneliness with alcohol, which only increases his self-loathing and alienation, causing him to drink even more. When he is not lurching lost and intoxicated through the streets of Nuremberg, Munich, and Berlin, he takes refuge in their cavernous train stations, which he prefers over the cities themselves. “For some unknown time now he had experienced the world only in train stations. He moved from station to station with rare interruptions; all that lingered in his mind were the images of stations; they had become the sole points of reference for his consciousness.” For C., train stations are interim havens that reinforce his spiritual paralysis and his growing unwillingness to commit to his writing, to his lovers, and perhaps to life itself.

Hilbig imbues The Interim with an unrelenting dissonance that, at times, threatens to overwhelm, but in the end, serves to make C.’s self-loathing all the more palpable. The words are so filled with tension and dread that there is no choice but to continue reading until the end. The novel unfolds during a decade that itself is an interim period in history. As C. departs for the West, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) is losing its grip on East Germany. By 1989, the Wall that had severed a nation since 1961 is pulled down. But while it still stands, the Wall and everything that it represents haunts C. “You looked out the closed window at a smooth pale gray concrete wall with no beginning and no end, longer than the entire train and interrupted only by its supporting columns.” C. is all too aware that the Wall, which was built to keep the world out of East Germany, has become a barricade to keep its citizens from leaving – its design and construction, “Siberian gulag architecture, concocted by pale gray brains out of sheer contempt for mankind….”

In C.’s interim world, even the color yellow, traditionally a symbol of hope and radiant joy, becomes noxious. A Nuremberg admirer gifts him a yellow leather jacket that he wears constantly like a second skin: “The jacket was a garment of soft smooth leather, almost weightless, that just grazed his belt, and it seemed so perfectly tailored to his body that he felt it was made from his very own substance. Mona insisted on seeing it as a sheath protecting him from her.” Later, in yet another train station, yellow exudes the smell of chloroform, “…yet the hall seemed to have a strange smell of chloroform. Its repulsive yellow paint seemed to transpire the smell, it was a dull oily paint with a pungent salty tang, the smell of old stations that could never be heated properly.”

Unlike the middle-aged misanthropic Harry Haller in Hesse’s Steppenwolf, who is alienated because he believes he is half-wolf and therefore not wholly human, C. has no such delusions; he suffers because he is all too human. Whereas Haller’s mystical journey leads him out of the abyss toward his likely redemption and self-realization, C is incapable of such a journey. Like one obsessed, he pursues love, sex and the myriad pleasures available to him in the decadent West, only to reject them at the last minute. Among literature’s gallery of anti-heroes, C. is solely responsible for his own torment, while Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, and Camus’s Meursault, are the random casualties of a chaotic, meaningless world.

Like one of C.’s trains speeding down the track to the next city, the next country, it is Hilbig’s powerful language that propels the story steadily forward to its conclusion. Throughout the novel there are transcendent passages where Hilbig’s language sparks a panoply of vivid images. As C. nurses his coffee in a cafe, he loses himself in the view of the street outside the window: “For a few seconds all the lanes of the street were swept clear; flickering colors played on the moisture of the December night as it sank wearily onto the asphalt. The sad sky was Jackson Pollock, painting the street with multicolored tears and magical daubs.”

The Interim may not have been intended to be a prescient novel like Orwell’s 1984, but thanks to Isabel Fargo Cole’s brilliant translation from the German, the novel’s release in English on November 2, 2021, is eerily timely. Much of C.’s reality in the divided Germany of the 1980s feels surprisingly relevant in a chaotic and unstable 21st century beleaguered by global divisiveness.

Hilbig wrote more than twenty books before he died at the age of 66 in West Germany and was awarded Germany’s major literary prizes, including its highest, the 2002 Georg Büchner Prize.

A sobering, brutally honest work, The Interim may stand as one of Hilbig’s greatest literary contributions.

The Interim
By Wolfgang Hilbig
Translated from the German by Isabel Fargo Cole
Two Lines Press, 256 pages

cohabitation New York partners

THAT APARTMENT

by S.S. Mandani • October 31, 2021October 31, 2021

We, Alisha and I, found our dream apartment and signed the lease. A few weeks later, we were in a new neighborhood. Moving in with a partner is a new phase of life, I told everyone.

I sat by the window, nodding off to the city breeze.

I tried to silence the alarm on my phone, but it slid off the edge. I peered down the edifice.

On the sidewalk: a beige ant. I was an upset stomach, pulsating. Consumed with concern, had I hit the person? Quickly to the elevator bank. Flying down thirty-five floors in eight seconds, I counted each nervous Mississippi. I ran outside to the exact spot where my phone connected to concrete.

The woman was still. The phone, technology shards splayed on the sidewalk.

“Is this yours?”

No words.

“You almost killed me!”

Stuttering, “Are—are you all right?” Her scowl said everything.

She massaged her palms with her thumbs. “It missed me.”

“So you’re okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“That’s good. We’re good then.”

Going through her purse, she took out some chapstick. “You should be more careful. I would’ve sued you.” She thought for a second. “If I didn’t die, I would’ve sued you.”

“I know.”

“I would’ve ruined your life.”

“I know.”

She turned away. “Figure out your shit, man.”

“Wait!”

“What?”

“Can I do anything? I feel bad.”

“No.” She couldn’t be bothered. “Stop throwing phones off buildings.”

“Anything.”

“I was going to get some coffee.”

“I can do that. I can get you a coffee.”

She seemed hesitant then proposed a third wave shop.

Soon, we were sitting in a café drinking single-origin coffee from Burundi.

We talked. Work, friends, family. She owned a private security company. I asked her where she lived, and I couldn’t believe it. It just doesn’t compute.

“I’m on the corner of 20th and 1st,” she said.

“20th street?”

“Yeah dumbo, is there a 20th avenue?”

“I guess not.”

“Well, not in Manhattan, at least. Queens’ and Brooklyn’s got all sorts of avenues.”

“That’s where I used to live.”

“Queens?”

“No, 20th street and 1st avenue. The city. Manhattan.”

“Get out.”

“Yessir.”

“Queens and Brooklyn are still the city. What are ya doing down here?”

“I moved in with my girlfriend.”

“Girlfriend?”

“Yup.”

“What was your address?”

I told her, and it was just one of those things. She lived in the same place. A corner street. The neighborhood where no one thought to rent. Close enough to everything that mattered, but far enough away to enjoy some quiet. To come home and feel relaxed, but walk five blocks to all the dives, jazz bars, and sidewalk cafés. “This is weird,” I said.

“Well yeah, I mean this whole thing is weird.”

“No, I mean, I lived in that apartment. Your apartment.”

“Get out.”

“I’m not kidding.”

“You don’t kid about these things.”

“I am not kidding.”

We sat there at the high-ceilinged coffee shop in NoHo, taking long sips. I opened my mouth to say something, while not being sure what I was about to say. She spoke. “Let’s go then. You must want to see the place again.”

She could sense my loss.

“Lana, my name’s Lana.” She was Lana. Warm, articulate, seemingly pure of heart.

“Are you sure? I mean, I don’t want to—”

“Take the coffee to go.”

I didn’t move. I wasn’t sure of the proper etiquette.

“Pretty sure I could kick your ass anyway. I’m trained in three martial arts styles.”

I looked down at my skinny frame, letting out a half-hearted laugh. “I don’t disagree.”

“I used to ‘intern’ at a government agency. Catch my drift?”

I could be in and out. We didn’t take the subway. We walked the twenty or so blocks north, meandering through familiar city streets. The street that split into two diagonals, lined with canopies of trees. The avenue corner that smelled of Italian baked goods. The antique shop I promised myself I’d explore. The coffee shop where I was deemed a “regular.” The liquor store where Jay and G, two brothers, warmed me with gin straight before I stepped outside into the city cold.

At the long stoop of my old apartment building. Worn bricks rising up beneath a clean sky. I stood there looking up at the window I knew to be once mine and now not. At max, a memory. I stumbled on the first step.

“Don’t worry. It’ll be fine.” She jiggled the old keys—the same bronze teeth I used to slide my thumb across. She jimmied them into the keyhole, a portal of brass, and I was in.

It was different. She had throw pillows. A distressed navy blue couch. Paintings, abstract, I think. The floors—the floors were how I remembered them. Dark parquet hardwood. A dining table born for Thanksgiving affairs. Love. There was love. A fruit bowl. I had never thought of a fruit bowl.

She ushered me in. I stood in the living room I no longer lived in. Six years in this spatial arrangement. That’s an especially long time in city living. I moved precariously. Then without asking, I walked the long hallway to my old bedroom, the Master. It had been converted into an office. A dreadful cubicle of work. The view. That view of the Empire State wasted on economics.

I couldn’t control my ducts and wept. I felt Lana’s presence between the doorjambs.

She consoled me. Maybe she knew what it felt like. “Don’t worry, this is home. This is home, too.”

I tried to push her away.

“You can visit whenever you’d like.”

I pulled away from her, deciding she was villainous. Lana, who had stolen my apartment, turning my Master Bedroom into an office space. I left the apartment. My apartment. I dashed out onto the stoop and around the corner to the shitty sushi bar I had never tried: Kano Sushi. I ordered hot sake, water for the soul. The warm elixir soothed me.

The fall sidewalks were brimming. Cosmopolitan offerings abound. Afghan kebabs, Sichuan stir-fry, Soup Dumplings, Xian style hand-stretched noodles. Tapas from the Basque Wine Bar, and so on, down the line. Anything was possible. A shoe repair store that doubled as a locksmith. The man with the driving cap who sat outside his corner bodega. I had never said one word to him.

A community in wait. I could have participated. This was a neighborhood, but it was never my neighborhood. I didn’t have the awareness. An urban nomad, I worked all day, rushing to my next meeting, my next project, my next outing. On the weekends, I wanted to be anywhere but an apartment unit.

Lana found my corner seat on the intersection. She pulled out the wiry chair across from me and sat down.

I was about to say something, but she spoke first.

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Thanks.”

“Do you want to come back up?”

“No, that’s all right.”

“It’s really okay. You can come up.”

“It’s yours now, okay?”

“Your new place just needs to be broken in.”

Then I realized I didn’t have my phone, and that Alisha and I had made dinner plans. “I forgot. I have to go. It’s date night.” I looked at her, paralyzed, waiting for her to say something.

“Well, get up. It’s date night!

In a string of quick motions, we said our goodbyes and thank yous. This was all a funny little story of coincidence. Like in the movies, we decided.

I hailed a taxi. Heaving the sliding door open, “Downtown, and step on it.” He accelerated straight down FDR Drive. I paid the man and hopped out of the yellow cab onto the spot on the sidewalk outside my new building. Not a shard of my phone in sight. In awe of the city’s perpetual self-maintenance, I sighed, “New York.”

Taking the elevators up, that apartment faded. Evanescent, but not gone. I opened the door to the new place, and, as if stepping through a portal, the haze lifted.

Everything was bright.

Alisha had ordered our favorite dishes. She laid out the spread on a red-checkered picnic blanket in the middle of our living room. It was authentically us.

The softness of creamy clove moonlight from a bouquet of fresh lilies filled the air. It was the same apartment I had left, but outlined pristine. And new, and not, it was ours.

Alisha was dressed for a Central Park stroll. Lilac forget-me-nots floated above her hemline. Coyly, “Hey you. Where’d ya go?” I stared blankly. “Never mind that. I ordered from the place downstairs. Come sit, let’s eat.”

PRAISE FOR AN UNOPINIONATED INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY

by M. A. Istvan Jr. • October 30, 2021October 30, 2021

The most reader-friendly textbook ever conceived. Dolores Umbridge has won the day! – New Guard Media

No other textbook is as pro-student. It is essential for any instructor who cares to protect all students (rather than merely those arbitrarily deemed to be worthy of protection). Dr. Istvan says it all. “The days of being exclusionary in our protection of students are done. . . Just imagine the horror of seeing your classmate allowed to skip the Greek mythology readings because of their incest-references whereas you must push on through repeated mentions of hair, glorious heads of curly hair, that leave you sobbing in desperate struggle not to let your hair-pulling disorder reawaken. Just imagine being in a law class where your professor has cut discussion of rape law as a courtesy to those sensitive to rape and yet has the audacity to go on to discuss food law even when there are students in the room who know people, loved ones even, who have developed cancers from certain additives.” – The Emancipated Student

A straightforward answer to what has proven to be the most abusive trigger for students in recent decades: that merely some of them were being granted protection from triggers! – The New Academy

A one-stop-shop textbook sensitive to the fact that the aggrieved are entitled to recompense and that no aggression is small enough to fail to be macro-aggression. – Counselor Riot

However diligent one is at padding table corners, the only way to ensure no one gets hurt is to remove the tables! Thanks to Safe Space Press we can now say, “If you’re not happy, you’re not paying attention.” – Cancel

Until now I would have said that no single-volume could ever be a one-size-fits-all college textbook. Had I such a textbook when I was in school, a blankness of subtle and soothing cream, my therapist would be out of a job. – Mercy Ott, English professor at Joliet College

The excellence of the fourth edition, which includes a bonus chapter on how to report your professor to authorities, is summarised in the following lines from Dr. Istvan’s moving introduction: “To expose students, in the very safe space of the classroom, to what they might find displeasing is, point blank, for teachers to be unfaithful to their academic obligations. . . A student triggered, triggered in any way, is a student whose attention is being harassed away from learning and reflective thinking.” What is novel about this new edition from Safe Space Press, a press that prioritises inviting students rather than challenging them, is that it honours an obvious truth that for so many decades educators have lacked the courage to honour: that students deserve to be protected from all triggers if they deserve to be protected from some. – Bipartisan Correctness

I had to report my professor. Hearing the word “scatological” in the classroom, especially from a heterosexual cis-gendered man in red, made me feel unsafe. Traumatised as I was by the word (and not to mention by being made out to feel like officer Karen of the PC police when I found myself so affected by hearing it), I was able to craft an effective letter to administration thanks to the advice laid out in the much-appreciated bonus chapter “Turn Them In NOW.” Let’s just say that my “professor” will no longer be spreading his “teachings.” – Devona Zing, business student at Scarsdale College

My teacher is, or I should say, was a rape-apologist. After I told her how much her classroom environment triggered me, she suggested I was being overly sensitive (or even manipulative). When I kept complaining (out of personal dignity and self-care), she asked me why I continue to stay in the class if it is such a violent place. When I told her that was my business, she suggested that I might be secretly enjoying it. “Some of the most traumatised do stay in the class despite the trigger warnings,” she had the audacity to write, “because – much like the rough-sex penchant some develop from early abuse – they are subconsciously turned on by, and seeking out ways to relive, the trauma.” Dr. Istvan’s textbook gave me the voice to report my professor. More importantly, it reminds us all that, personal as triggers are, we should never let trigger-warning professors say that our peculiar triggers do not count. Unless it is just a flagrant ploy to enforce certain norms and values over others – if person A is allowed to opt out of coursework because its talk of Islam triggers person A, then person B is also allowed to opt out of coursework because its sheer difficulty triggers person B. – Anne C., student at McGovern Academy

Dinosaur professors who enabled systemic abuse to continue under the banner of “exposing students to what unnerves them” and of “changing the victimising language of ‘safe space’ into the empowering language of ‘brave space’” turned out to be right about one thing: Censoring offensiveness is a slippery slope. And in the fourth-edition textbook from Safe Space Press, which has slid down all the way to the bottom, students have finally been put first. The only potential negative about the book is that it will undercut so many livelihoods. I am not just talking about the livelihoods of abusive professors (go to michaelistvan.com to see a growing list of such professors, by the way). A book like this purges so many members of the victim category, and so severely bars entrance to the victim category, that those who have been profiting for so long on victim culture – litigators, university officials, and so on – are going to be facing some tough times. – The Invalidated

For decades academic institutions have failed to honour the precedent that students are to be sheltered from what unsettles them. Yes, some textbooks were censored just as some speakers were cancelled. The keyword here is “some.” The exclusionary practice of doing away with merely some textbooks and with merely some speakers, which we have tolerated long enough, is insensitive to the fact that what survives such halfhearted censorship is bound to unsettle someone. The new release from Safe Space Press, a ray of light that boldly strips away practically all course content, is a giant leap toward cancelling the unjustly exclusionary practice of sheltering merely some students. One can only hope that those in positions to invite speakers to campus will get the hint! – Aggrieved Daily

Rocketing beyond all competitors with a mere 100-page textbook that removes virtually all possible sources of trauma, Safe Space Press has brought into reality the full implications of coursework-opt-out practices. And with its bonus chapter, “Turn Them In NOW,” the latest edition goes beyond simply protecting students: It arms them! Providing both a sample letter of grievance as well as a pep talk for those under the misimpression that their grievances are too mild to be worthy of retribution, the bonus chapter will help ensure the termination of all professors failing to prioritise students (not just the adjuncts). The chickens have come home to roost. – Higher Education Network For Welcoming Climates

Never stand for someone trying to invalidate your experience. Your trauma is a trauma. No one has to sanction it as worthy enough for it to count as trauma or for you to be entitled to retaliation. “Fragility is grounds not for embarrassment but for entitlement.” That is the message of the fourth edition. As professor Istvan makes clear in the bold and therapeutic chapter “Turn them in NOW,” “Your professor does not have to defend Palestine . . . or show you the secret parts of the human anatomy to be destroying your life! Just as the freshman who was raped a few weeks ago is not ready to face course readings that mention rape, the freshman who witnessed her mother on the deathbed a few weeks ago groaning ‘and and and and and and’ is not ready to face course readings where the word ‘and’ is thrown about as if no big deal (insensitively appearing almost in every sentence).” We are ready for the message. We have been ready for a long time. – Me Too, You Too

This year has proven to be the twilight of dysfunction. First, we learned that Pennsylvania will rename its offensively named cities (Blue Ball, Intercourse, Climax, Virginville, Moreheadville, Reamstown, Coon Hunter, Honey Hole, Honey Pot, Nazareth). Second, we learned that both New York’s Museum of Sex and Los Angeles’s Museum of Death have been shut down. Third, we learned that Lego, notorious for its insensitivities to various groups, has stopped production of pretty much all sets. Fourth, we learned that even the medical writings of white supremacist John Locke have been banned from higher education along with the disgusting likes of Twain and Melville. Fifth, we learned of a new amendment that will repeal the due process clauses in earlier amendments and so allow more immediate cancelation of offenders. And now the cherry on top: a college textbook from Safe Space Press that leaves nothing to offend our future world leaders. Nothing upsetting is safe from cancellation, even the most entrenched aspects of our cultural legacy! – Margin Wise

Stickering everything with trigger warnings not only failed to protect students (for various reasons expressed in Dr. Istvan’s introduction), it became too cumbersome for professors. How are professors, to give just one example, to warn those students who are triggered by trigger warnings themselves? I do not doubt that there are ways: staging a scenario, for instance, where such students can overhear the professor tell someone else how traumatic some found the course content. But surely that is just too much work for professors, work that is unnecessary with thoroughgoing censorship. Besides, how are professors even to know which students are triggered by trigger warnings? The new textbook from Safe Space Press, which goes so far as to blunt the borders of each page so that no one gets cut, streamlines everything. – Susan DeMann, author of Accusations and Perceived Wrongs Spell G.U.I.L.T.: Gutless Uncaring Intellectuals Loving Trauma

The left tried to cancel this. The right tried to cancel that. What was excusable for students to opt out of according to one faction was not excusable for students to opt out of according to the other faction. The result? Like bawling children in urine-leaden pampers clutching stuffed animals while their parents warred about how best to raise them, students were forgotten in the middle of enraged disputes concerning how best to shelter them from classroom trauma. Still vulnerable to so many harms and not to mention further traumatised by all the warring taking place “on their behalf,” it was students who lost in the end. That was until a social-worker voice of reason swooped in. “Enough,” Dr. Istvan yelled, directing the factions to look down at their feet to the little child now so desperate to be picked up that its raised arms have let the teddy bear fall to the floor – neglect breeding neglect. But Dr. Istvan does not simply implore us, “Think of the child!” Backed by Safe Space Press, he also supplies the antidote – the very motto of Safe Space Press: censoring, silencing, shaming (taken to the limit)! – Rated Never

Some of us are old enough to remember the days when the efforts to protect students failed to go beyond using euphemism to cover over the unpleasantness of certain realities: “assembly centres” instead of “extermination camps,” or “innovative love” instead of “child abuse,” or “material liberation” instead of “looting,” or “the x in your care” instead of “the x in your possession,” or “manifold glazing” instead of “bukkake,” or “self-loving and self-respecting and self-caring” instead of “sissy and hypersensitive and prudish.” These proved insufficient, of course. Euphemism – as in using the innocuous term “depression” to describe an extreme mental state of destructive darkness, or as in simply calling the ready-to-strike scorpion “buddy” – can make a horror stand out even more forcefully. After pressures to recognise that “student” is a protected category, trigger warnings entered the picture. But these, too, even when they successfully alerted students to material that might not be aligned with their own values and ways of speaking, proved to be insufficient. These proved to be insufficient, mere bandages on a deeper problem, since even trauma for which one is prepared is still trauma, and since there are bound to be triggers for which trigger warnings fail to prepare students, and since there would have to be a trigger warning for everything since everything is a potential trigger. Things drastically improved by allowing students to opt out of triggering material (instead of being merely notified of it beforehand). Opt-out practices, of course, also proved insufficient at protecting students. After all, students were not allowed to opt out of everything and, besides, mere description of the material that students were allowed to opt out of, even when augmented with the evasive tool of euphemism, still exposed students at least to the abstract idea of what they were allowed to opt out of, which was traumatic enough. Professor Istvan’s new textbook, cocooned with the blessings of Safe Space Press, is the fourth step: elimination of almost anything that could offend students. To be sure, there is still room for offense. Istvan himself admits that this textbook is not a cure all. “Short of the ‘final solution’ of altogether snuffing out . . . humans,” the textbook must be coupled, so he tells us, with the appropriate painkillers and antidepressants to be thoroughly effective. – Offense Culture

Understanding that even competent revision of materials would leave something offensive in its wake, Safe Space Press has effectively burned it all. – Moral High Ground

A true safe space, which only Dr. Istvan’s textbook makes possible, is a safe space for humans, not for ideas and speech. Dr. Istvan has brought us miles ahead to realising the beyond-mere-lip-service empathetic classroom environment that bell hooks envisioned so long ago in Teaching to Transgress. “Any radical pedagogy must insist that everyone’s presence is acknowledged. That insistence cannot be simply stated. It has to be demonstrated through pedagogical practices. To begin, the professor must genuinely value every one’s presence. There must be an ongoing recognition that everyone influences the classroom dynamic, that everyone contributes. . . To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin.” – Sue Beatty, author of The Infinite Risks of Higher Learning

Serious emotional reactions to course content is not a signal that the student needs to go to therapy or prioritise “getting mentally tougher” over “getting an education.” It is a signal that something is wrong with the course content! Thank you, Dr. Istvan. – Juan Campbell, student at Northsouthern College

Just as a jogger is prone to take routes other than her preferred one if she is frequently catcalled by construction workers, students harassed in class are prone to avoid participating – or even coming altogether! And guess what such exclusion allows? It allows business to go on as usual: The classroom policy of abuse remains unchallenged when the abused keep their heads low. Dr. Istvan, however, has eliminated all the construction workers and thereby even the mere threat of catcalls! – Humanity Confirmed

Professor Istvan does an excellent job at ridding the classroom of as much mental discomfort as possible. Comfort, however, is not just a mental-emotional matter, but also a physical-spatial matter. In light of the fact that students are not pure spirits, we still have much work to do when it comes to the physicality of the classroom. How can there be just one style of chair for every student, for example? A chair that is comfy for you may be unfit for me: too small, too big, too unsupportive, too supportive, or so on. In a classroom setting, students should not be paying attention to their bodies above everything else. And yet when the chair does not fit, when I keep squirming to ease the sciatica pain the chair is causing me, guess what? My body comes to the fore in its awkwardness, backgrounding any educational information. Just as much as an uncomfortable course topic, an uncomfortable physical space not only distracts from learning, but also sends the wrong message to students. It sends the message that they are unworthy of being recognised and protected. It sends the message that they are being merely tolerated rather than truly wanted. It sends the message that they are the ones who should be grateful to be there. – Dominant Spaces Down

Thinking it would be impossible to remove all threats of challenge in the classroom, I figured it would be best to call my classroom a “brave space” instead of a “safe space.” The hope in shifting the language was that (1) students would be less on the lookout for what might offend them and (2) that they would be inspired to rise to the challenges that could not be removed. Unfortunately, this strategy backfired. Those who could not handle the topics in the classroom, and the conversations with diverse peers, ended up feeling doubly bad. For according to how I had set things up, they were not only threatened by the learning environment, they were now also not brave – they were now also not good enough. Istvan’s textbook made clear to me that my presumption about it being impossible to remove discomfort from the equation was terribly wrong. The textbook alerted me, furthermore, to the fact that the language of “brave space,” as well intentioned as it was in my case, simply allowed me to hide from myself that I was abusing students. It was a moving experience to hear Istvan describe, in his wonderful introduction, how he too was an inadvertent (although, like me, chronic) abuser. It made me feel that my journey as an educator was not doomed. We can all change. – Anonymous teacher at a community college in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania

satire trigger warnings

fiction gay love Korean literature Sang Young Park Translations

FOREST FIRE

by Yehezkiel Faoma • October 29, 2021October 29, 2021

Last night I dreamt about the forest fire again. The red glow was beaming deep behind the treeline and set the sky ablaze. A pillar of smoke. The crisp smell of blackened wood. I bumped and scraped my bicycle past the unmoving traffic, my glasses once more fogged red with sweat and tears and taillights.

A faceless fireman stood between me and the flames. Get out, he said. Back up. Go home, boy. I wanted to scream. The flames licked the wood and spat out crackling twigs, laughed and bellowed in a heat wave that burned my cheeks like a backhand slap. I have my cat, I tried to say, to shout at him. She’s lost and she’s so old.

In my sleep I gritted my teeth and heaved from a dry throat.

The fireman levelled his facelessness to mine. Go. Home. My ears rang. He grabbed my shoulders and shoved me, sending me tumbling down to where my bicycle fell. She’s afraid of noises. I thought about how the bursting wood must’ve scared her, eyes bulging, hairs standing, cornered by the vacuum cleaner, how she sunk her head and ears into my armpit, the hummingbird beating of her chest as I carried her away from the room. I felt her soft fur in my hands – the rubber handles pulled and grazed the skin of my palm.

Today, my wife taught me how to crush animal bone to make fertilizer.

nature pets

Arts & Culture, Books, Reviews

BOOK REVIEW: LOVE IN THE BIG CITY

by Katy Ward • October 28, 2021October 28, 2021

From its opening sentences, Sang Young Park’s bestselling novel Love in the Big City had me engrossed. As the narrator attends the wedding of his university best friend and former partner-in-crime Jaehee, he is casually informed of a rumour that he has died and notices how all the thirtysomething guests are “aging at different speeds.” These passages evoke a very peculiar kind of loneliness; it’s the wistfulness people in their thirties feel when they encounter anyone they knew in their teenage years and early twenties, no matter how self-destructive these years may have been. It’s a feeling I know well. This is where Love in the Big City excels: in the witty and measured depiction of emotions most of us know well.

Told in four parts and translated into English by Anton Hur, the novel explores the formative life of a young gay man in Korea who is only ever referred to as “Mr. Young” or “Mr. Park.” Each section focuses on a major relationship in the character’s life: from Jaehee to a string of romantic dalliances. What unites each of Park’s characters is a sense of alienation as they never quite manage to form meaningful connections. “I […] got drunk and slept with a new man every night. And every morning, I realized anew that the world was filled with lonely people,” the narrator says of his university days.

From its first part, which is named after Jaehee, the novel’s pervading themes are clear in the youthful vigour of the two best friends: “The world was just not ready for the boundless energy of poor, promiscuous twenty-year-olds. We met whatever men we wanted without putting much effort into it, drank ourselves torpid, and in the morning met in each other’s rooms to apply cosmetic masks to our swollen faces and exchange titbits about the men we had been with the night before.”

There is something equally intoxicating and unsettling about the characters’ rebelliousness as Jaehee “could toss societal norms aside like a used Kleenex.” When the pair eventually move in together, it leads to a rumour that they are a couple and she often acts as a shield for the narrator’s sexuality, posing as his girlfriend as he is called for military service. When Jaehee meets and finally marries an engineer, Park poses a question that is at the centre of the novel: what happens to those of us who are left behind when our friends move on?

In the case of Park’s narrator, he finds solace in a number of relationships, with varying success. The first is with an impossibly handsome older man he meets in an adult education class, which is ironically titled “the philosophy of emotions.” Immediately, the relationship is unhealthy and obsessive. “Concentrating on the heat of his skin and the sound of his breathing whispering in my ear made me completely lose sense of who I was. I became something not me, not anything, just another part of the world that was him,” the narrator comments.

After this relationship ends, he meets Gyu-ho and begins what we assume will be one of the most significant relationships of his life. In these scenes, Park is unflinchingly honest about every aspect of romantic love, including the realities of erectile dysfunction, with the narrator complaining that Viagra causes the pair to suffer from indigestion and blocked noses.

Despite this, even the most cynical reader will be affected by scenes in which the two walk in the rain. “When I saw his face – Gyu-ho, who always seemed more at peace than anyone else I knew – my heart melted a little.” As is characteristic of his style, the writer manages to take a scene that has the potential to be riddled with cliché and create a genuinely touching moment between two damaged characters.

Through this relationship, Park also points toward one of my favourite themes of the book. Although the narrator perpetually views himself an outsider, Gyu-ho makes numerous attempts to form a deeper connection, but the protagonist is too broken to respond. Although not always likeable, the characters are undoubtedly relatable.

While Park justifiably has a reputation as a rising star of queer fiction, he never takes a didactic tone when it comes to the theme of sexuality, despite the heart-breaking challenges the narrators faces as a gay man. Rather than preaching to his reader, he skillfully makes his point though the events of the plot. When the narrator visits a sexual health clinic, he overhears two workers describe him and his boyfriend as “faggots.” “I finally realized this was something I should’ve been angry about from the beginning, and that I had a tendency to laugh loudly in situations where I should be angry.”

Without revealing too much of the plot, the most horrific response to his sexuality comes from his mother who walks in on him kissing another boy at the age of 16. Coming midway through the novel, this revelation helps justify – or at least explain – some of the seemingly self-indulgent behaviour we’ve previously observed in the narrator.

While Love in the Big City is unfailingly honest in its depiction of family dysfunction, abortion and cancer, there is also a lyricism to many of its passages, which is a real testament to the skill of its translator, Anton Hur. There is, for example, a poetic quality to descriptions such as: “My sentences formed like lines coming out of my fingertips. They kept on coming without my thinking about them, as if they had a mind of their own.” The narrator’s loneliness following a breakup permeates simple, bleak sentences such as “it enraged me to hear people talking about love. Especially when it had to do with love between gay people.”

Likewise, the novel is often genuinely hilarious with absurd moments punctuating even the most painful episodes in the narrator’s life. It’s difficult not to laugh when, during one of the most emotionally excruciating points in his relationship with his older boyfriend, a stranger dressed as a zombie for Halloween asks for a photograph, or when Jaehee steals a model uterus from an abortion clinic.

Another of the book’s strengths is its ability to ground both its characters and reader in a moment and a place in time. “The moon and streetlamps and neon signs of the whole world seemed to be shining their lights just for me, and I could still hear the strains of a Kylie Minogue remix in my ear.” At this point, the sense of place is dizzying, although it was as easy for me to remember my own youth in noughties London as to imagine myself in Korea during a similar era.

Was there anything I disliked about the Love in the Big City? While not a criticism, the book’s four-part structure is often non-chronological, which does mean the reader needs to stay alert to which events occur in which time period. Ironically, another characteristic I initially found a little jarring – the narrator’s tendency towards introspection – became one of my favourite aspects of the book as I read on.

Readers of the early sections may be tempted to dismiss the protagonist as a Millennial snowflake as he makes statements such as “I was too busy getting trampled on by life to remember a lot of the little things of daily existence.” However, Park meticulously develops the arc of his protagonist, drip feeding key, and often brutal, biographical details. As we slowly learn more about our main character, we grow to understand, and empathise with, some of his less-than-heroic traits. And, although the novel is never overt or heavy handed in its social commentary, it does deliver one of the most painfully astute observations I’ve read in a long time, as the narrator and Jaehee discuss sexual freedoms. “[She] learned that living as a gay was sometimes truly shitty, and I learned that living as a woman wasn’t much better.”

Read my Interview with Anton Hur here.

L ove in The Big City
by Sang Young Park
Tilted Axis Press, 240 pages

CHRYSALIS

by Ross West • October 28, 2021October 28, 2021

The roar of the engine filled the small cabin of SunVista’s sleek propeller-driven airplane. My hand rested on the porthole while puffy cotton-ball clouds drifted past, well spaced in a bright blue sky. I was barrelling at great speed toward what I could only think of as my future.

After I’d been assigned to gather data from the Rocas Caliente job site, the HR department sent me a prep packet for the trip, full of tips about heat exhaustion and scorpions. I thought it might be a good idea to talk to Eddie Vanvactor, an engineer with a cubicle near mine at SunVista headquarters; he’d been on the original Pier Design Team and done on-site testing and specification work in the project’s early days.

“Way different back then,” he’d said, happy to share what he knew. With a few clicks on his keyboard, he brought up photos of what looked like a Wild West mining camp. “Those were the tents we stayed in – on cots, hot as hell. Now I hear they’ve got modular housing, AC, everything.”

I wanted to do my field assignment as well as possible, and to me that included figuring out the who’s-who and what’s-what of a place. So I asked Vanvactor, “Any dirt about Rocas Caliente I ought to know?”

He stiffened and rotated his office chair back to his computer, closed the photo app, and said over his shoulder, “I gotta get back to work.”

The pitch of the airplane’s engine noise changed; the cabin tilted downward into a descent. Once the tires touched the dirt runway, I didn’t breathe until we rattled to a stop. Waiting for me when I got off the plane was a company man with a company SUV offering me a company swag bag.

“Richie Simms, autonomous construction coordinator and welcoming committee,” he said, extending his hand. It was a big hand and he was a big friendly guy, a few years older than me but probably still under 30. We got in the SUV and tore over the dirt and gravel of the straight desert road, past miles of sagebrush, juniper, and cactus. Unable to resist, I dug into the bulging tote bag on my lap.

“Coffee cup, T-shirt, hat, water bottle, key chain, letter opener, binder, pen and pencil set.” Richie spoke in a funny voice that sounded like he was hawking something on QVC. “Each emblazoned with SunVista’s distinctive sunburst logo. As fine an assortment of corporate crap as you’ll ever find – at least on this side of the landfill.”

I laughed. “You’d never make it in the PR department.”

He shuddered. “Fairy dust and bull puckey.”

“How did you end up out here?” I asked.

“Worked in robotics and autonomous machines for a couple of years at a start-up. When this job posted, I jumped on it.Thirty-six arrays in North America, each bigger than anything ever built – our own frickin’ Manhattan Project.”

“You don’t mind the isolation?”

His face screwed up like, Are you crazy? He reached into the back seat and retrieved a magazine. “Hot off the press,” he said, handing me the copy of Engineering Weekly. I opened it to the page marked with a yellow stickie note and read the headline: Rocas Caliente: They’re Fabbing the Future. Rickie’s grinning head rocked up and down as if to a favourite song.

I saw my opening. “Did you ever know a guy named Vanvactor? Eddie Vanvactor – they sent him out from Palo Alto probably 18 months ago.”

“Just before my time. What about him?”

“Odd guy. When he talked about being out here, he acted kind of, I don’t know . . . funny.”

“No shortage of weird shit in this desert. Pardon my French.”

A security checkpoint appeared up ahead, a small structure with a long yellow barricade arm extended from its side to block the road.

“You’ll need your ID,” Richie said. “It’s in with the trinkets.”

I found the laminated tag and slipped its lanyard around my neck as we came to a stop. A uniformed guard wearing mirrored sunglasses and a US Department of Energy patch on his shirt approached Richie’s window. They exchanged a few words, and the guard looked my way. I smiled and held out the plastic badge.

He touched two fingers to his brow. “Welcome to Rocas Caliente, ma’am.”

Up went the barricade and in we drove. After a mile or so, the left side of the road changed abruptly from a wild rugged wasteland into a manicured, state-of-the-art solar energy installation. Thousands of sturdy, precisely spaced concrete piers rose up 20 feet tall, each topped with one of SunVista’s dual-axis heliotrackers, a photovoltaic panel the size of half a tennis court.

The structures were identical, every panel angled toward the sun at exactly the same inclination. Row after row after row, like some alien robot army standing at attention.

As suddenly as the desert had bloomed into a well-tended solar farm, the farm now gave way to several acres of messy chaos where gigantic machines roared and clanked and belched dark smoke. Bulldozers, graders, excavators, pile borers – and not a single human operator in sight.

“They’re finishing up Phase I,” Richie said. “Next week we start in on the south side of the road.”

“All fully autonomous?” I asked.

“Run ’em 24/7 – or until something breaks.”

We sped past the machines and were now back alongside more elevated PV panels that we skirted all the way to the base of the eastern hills. The road ascended the craggy slope, hugging the twisting contours up the rimrock. When we’d gained a good deal of elevation, we pulled to a stop at a turnabout.

“It’s not far,” Richie said, getting out of the SUV and leading the way to a trail that disappeared behind a bulky outcrop. “Keep your eye out for snakes.”

I followed him closely. The badge around my neck swung back and forth with each step up the steep rocky staircase. Heat radiated from south-facing boulders and sheer walls baking in the late-afternoon sun. I wondered how much farther, and if maybe we should have brought water. We rounded a corner and the trail broadened onto a flat overlook.

Richie walked to the edge of the high cliff, sweat blotching the back of his shirt. “This is the best view,” he said.

Breathing hard from the climb, I joined him, and we gaped out over the vast frying pan of the desert, a broad valley extending to a range of hills in the west. Bisecting our view was the thin line of the road. On the south side of this incongruous geometry, a barren wilderness that looked as if it hadn’t changed since time began; to the north, the solar towers, an architect’s vision imposed on the landscape with the precise angularity of a checkerboard. The rows of gleaming heliotrackers receded toward the horizon in converging perspective lines.

“See over there,” Richie said, pointing at the construction site we’d driven past, where 20 or so bright yellow earthmoving machines crawled with the coordinated industry of ants. He had the satisfied look of a father watching his kids playing soccer.

I took in the whole of the project spread before us, one of 300 being constructed around the world as part of the UN’s Comprehensive Climate Emergency Initiative. We were finally taking responsibility for our impact on the planet, finally repairing rather than destroying. I remembered the upwelling pride I’d felt when telling my parents I had landed the SunVista job. And now, gazing down on the sea of shiny panels, I felt that same joy but even more intensely.

“Four months ago I was in grad school,” I said, trying to keep my voice from quavering. “Now I’m part of this.”

Richie nodded like he understood. “For so long it was all this gloom and doom shit. The planet’s dying! The planet’s dying! But nobody was doing dick about it. Pardon my French.” He reached to the ground and picked up a rock, hauled back, and chucked it like he’d played some baseball. “Those days are gone.” The rock sailed in a long, lazy arc and landed far below with a little puff of dust. “Well, if you’ve seen enough . . . the VIP tour will conclude with a visit to the Cantina del Mar for a tall cold one.” He flashed a quitting-time smile.

We hiked back down to the SUV and drove 10 miles to a crossroads where a minimart, a gas station, a boarded-up Quonset hut, and our destination occupied the four corners, each in its own way losing the battle with dust and dilapidation.

The cantina was half full and quietly murmuring. Three workmen in yellow reflector vests with SunVista logos were sharing a pitcher and watching a baseball game on the big screen TV.

“Hey, Rich,” one of them called out.

Richie bobbed his chin. “Hey, Stan. Guys.”

We settled into seats at one of the tables and a grizzled waiter with a Willie Nelson ponytail and a faded Metallica T-shirt came our way, rising and falling on uneven steps. He took our order and limped off.

The walls were adorned with fishing nets and starfish, a captain’s wheel, life preservers, a pair of crossed oars, a hideous velvet tapestry of Noah’s ark with animal pairs lined up to get on board, and, arched above the liquor bottles behind the bar, a stuffed marlin.

Richie noticed me checking out the décor. “What’s up with the nautical theme, huh?”

“Maybe they know their geology,” I said. “A hundred million years ago this desert was under half a mile of saltwater.”

The waiter brought two pints. After the exertion of our hike, the cold beer tasted good and went down easy.

Setting his glass on the table, Richie leaned toward me and in a low voice said, “See that guy over there?” He made a slight nod, his eyes aimed behind my left shoulder. With a stealthy turn of my head, I spied a gangly older man slumped alone at a table for four – rumpled shirt, dirty pants, dusty worn boots, and a week’s worth of gray stubble.

“Looks like my crazy uncle,” I said.

“Professor Carlton Maddox, the world’s expert on the desert pygmy blue dot butterfly.”

“Okay . . . and?”

“He’s a big deal out here – or was. People wanted to build a wind farm in this valley since back in the ’90s and he fought it.” Richie let out a little laugh. “He was stubborn as a mule and fiercely anti-windmill – which got him the nickname Donkey Hotey.”

I smiled and sipped my beer. “He stopped the windmills?”

“For decades.”

“But Rocas Caliente . . . ?”

“Maddox and his Sierra Club buddies used the Endangered Species Act – installing wind towers would destroy butterfly habitat. But then along came the Clean Earth Act with its ‘emergency superseding authority’ and poof, with those three magic words everything changed.”

“So, what’s up with the butterflies now?”

I wasn’t sure if Richie heard my question – he lurched up from his seat, pointed toward the restrooms, and walked in that direction. When he passed the bar, he caught the waiter’s eye and gestured for him to bring us another round. One would have been fine with me, but apparently that isn’t how they roll at Rocas Caliente.

I thought of the Clean Earth Act and remembered the famous video clip we’d all seen a hundred times, of the senator from Mississippi pounding her fist into the podium as she delivered her impassioned speech in a heavy Southern drawl – If we don’t pass this Act to protect the Earth, there isn’t going to be any Earth left to protect.

I swirled what was left of my beer and finished it off. Richie’s exit had been so sudden – maybe he had heard my question. His strange behaviour brought to mind Eddie Vanvactor and how he froze up when I asked about his experiences out here.

It’s better not to turn over rocks – I recalled my mother’s voice, talking to one of her friends when I was a five or six. She was a woman who liked things tidy and always avoided trouble; but as a little kid, I took the phrase literally and, being a smarty-pants, started turning over every rock I could find. Under most of them wriggled a freaky menagerie of creepy-crawlies, my very own circus of tiny dinosaurs.

The waiter brought over our pints. Richie wasn’t far behind. He sat and took a pull on his beer and brushed a finger across his lips. “As far as the butterflies are concerned,” he said, picking up the conversation as if he’d never left, “we’re operating in full compliance with all applicable regulations and controlling legal authorities.”

Huh? Did he get a law degree from one of those little machines in the bathroom?

“How does that play out?” I asked. “I mean, specifically?”

“Full compliance.” He shrugged like, What else can I say? “Everything’s by the book.”

“That sounds pretty corporate.” I knew immediately it was the wrong thing to say.

His face flushed. “You want to know about the butterflies,” he said, strangling his glass with both hands, “specifically?”

The last thing I wanted to do was set him off, but yes, I did want to know. So as unthreateningly as I could, I raised my eyebrows and gave a little nod.

He didn’t move for some time, just blinked his eyes and made little huffing sounds as he breathed – I could almost hear him counting to 10. The tension left his fingers first, then his face. “Okay, screw it,” he said and shifted his weight in the chair. “When the dozers go in to prep the lots for the panels, it’s kind of like . . . well, bye-bye habitat.”

“You mean here, right, just here in the valley?”

He cleared his throat. “This is the only place they breed.”

I stared, waiting for the rest of the story – eager to hear the clever way the problem had been solved. But he just sat there, a sheepish look on his face. “There’s gotta be more to it than that.”

He shook his head. “All I can say is we’re in full compliance. All the Ts are crossed.”

Not satisfactory. Not satisfactory at all.

I glanced over my shoulder and saw that Professor Maddox was still there. “I want to talk to him.”

Richie sucked in a breath and ran his hand over the back of his head. “He can be a little . . . prickly.”

“I’m a good talker,” I said with the confidence that comes when I drink. I took up my glass, rose, and marched to Maddox’s table, planting myself opposite him.

With his gray eyes fixed on his glass, he said in a deep voice, “What do you want?”

“I heard about your work. I’m interested – ”

“I don’t have any work,” he snapped. He hoisted his beer and drained it. “Not anymore.” He slammed the glass hard against the tabletop twice. The waiter looked over and Maddox gave a nod.

Richie walked up as I tried again. “The butterflies – ”

“Who told you about me?”

“He did. He works – ”

“Oh, I know him.” Maddox cocked an eyebrow and squinted at Richie. “The exterminating angel.” He turned his gaze back to me. “But who are you?”

The waiter lumbered up, removed the empty glass, and set a frothy pint on the table.

“Kayla. I do geology, geoengineering – the dynamics of foundation piers and soil substrates. My team is tasked with – ”

“Oh Christ.” He snatched the glass and drank. “Sit down. Sit down.” He swept his free hand toward the unoccupied chairs. “At least while you’re here you aren’t doing any killing.”

As we sat, Maddox’s eyes were daggers aimed at Richie. “You and your damn machines.” He drank and then worked his lips like he wanted to spit.

“The fact is, Professor,” Richie said, “what me and my damn machines are doing is part of the solution, the global solution – in case you missed the news flash.”

“You’re right, you’re right,” Maddox answered, slathering on the mock contrition. “In all their infinite wisdom, Congress hath declared your work to be more important than mine. Has more val-ue.” He lifted his pint, took two great swallows, and dragged the back of his hand across his lips. “With a stroke of a pen . . . .” He emitted the low growl of an angry dog. “Emergency circumstances. Extraordinary necessity. Just like when we locked up the Japanese during the war.” He sank lower in his chair and rubbed at his forehead. “Stroke of a goddamn pen.”

“But isn’t there’s some provision in the Act,” I said, “some exception, some way to challenge – ”

Maddox snorted. “No, young lady, there is no such provision. The pendulum has swung. As pendula will. The day the Clean Earth Act passed the whole country celebrated – marches, parades – and you know what I did? I sat right here, right at this table, and I got drunk. Drunk, drunk, duh-runk. I saw the handwriting.”

“There are always trade-offs,” Richie said. “That’s how things work. In a perfect world – ”

“Of course, of course. You’re saving the planet. I get it, really, I do.” Maddox said in a conciliatory tone that disappeared when he thundered, “All hail the great god Sus-tain-ability! In whose name no wrong can be done.” He made a sloppy sign of the cross and threw down the last of his beer. “But this glorious new world of yours, it’s not a place I want to live.” He burped.

“So, over and out, adios amigos.” He frowned and squeezed his eyes shut.

I looked to Richie, who put his hands on the arms of his chair and gave a little jerk of his head toward our table.

It couldn’t end like this; I couldn’t let it. Then it struck me. “Show us one,” I blurted. “Show us one of your butterflies.”

Maddox’s eyes sprang open.

“One of the blue dots – in the wild.” The words poured out. “I want to see one. Right now. Will you?”

He considered this for a moment, then his bony body shook with a weary little laugh. “Off limits, I’m afraid. Roadblocks and drones and that gentleman in the guard shack – he might not understand.”

I grabbed the ID hanging around my neck and thrust it toward him. “We have credentials.”

Maddox eyed the badge, blinked several times, then rolled his head toward Richie. “What do you say, boss?”

Richie picked at a callus on his hand.

“C’mon,” Maddox pleaded. “I worked with those butterflies 36 years.”

Richie ignored Maddox and looked at me. “You really want to do this?”

“Don’t you think we should? We could be the last people ever to see them alive.”

We finished the beers and paid our tabs. Maddox had his keys out, but Richie shook his head.

“I’m driving.”

No one spoke all the way to the security checkpoint. The guard with the mirrored sunglasses recognised Richie and me. When he saw the passenger, he made a circling motion with his finger and Maddox rolled down the back window. The guard leaned in and gave Maddox a careful once-over.

“He’s with you?” he said to Richie without turning his head.

“That’s right.”

The guard shifted his jaw back and forth. He leaned in a little farther, sniffed, and recoiled. Noticing the safety belt dangling unused, he hooked his finger around the nylon strap, and gave a tug. “You ought to be wearing this.”

Maddox made a show of pulling the harness across his chest and clicking the buckle. The barricade arm swung up, and we eased forward.

“A ways up there on the right there’s a turn out,” Maddox said, unfastening the buckle and flinging the restraint aside. “The blue dots are stubbornly resistant to transplantation,” he said in a way that reminded me of my Bio 101 lecturer, which, it occurred to me, is more or less what he was. “There’s something that allows them to thrive on this plain, at this elevation – some micronutrient, some symbiotic relationship we have yet to identify. As soon as the plans for your project were announced, we focused all our attention on answering this question, but . . .”

“You ran out of time,” I said.

“When the feds tell you, ‘restricted area, do not enter,’ it’s generally a good idea to listen.” He sighed. “I passed the lab to my post-doc, retired, moved to the cabin I always kept out here.” A sullen shadow darkened his face – maybe sadness, maybe shame. “I tell people I’m writing a book.”

The high wall of solar towers rose on our left. Maddox pressed himself against the window and gawked up at them, curious and horrified, as if glimpsing in broad daylight the monsters that haunted his nightmares. A hiccup broke this trance, and his eyes returned to the road ahead.

“That’s the turn,” he said.

Richie steered us onto two pitted tracks, and we slowly bounced through gullies and washouts.

Maddox craned his neck at the landscape outside the windows, getting his bearings. “At my old lab they maintain a temperature- and humidity-controlled propagation chamber. But that’s only a stopgap, hardly adequate.”

The rough trail became no trail at all. Richie braked to a stop and cut the motor. “End of the line.”

We stepped from the air-conditioned SUV into the hot, still air. The sun was halfway below the line of western hills and coloured our harsh surroundings in mellow orange light. Maddox meandered with unsure steps first one way then another, his eyes sweeping the terrain.

“Is this the right place?” Richie asked.

“To develop a viable reintroduction protocol, we need to be out here,” Maddox said, now ambling in an aimless arc. “Without studying them in situ . . .” His words trailed off; something had his attention. “There,” he said. “I think over there.”

He thrashed through the brush and trudged up a rise topped with jagged rocks and spindly plants. We followed, thorns grabbing at my pantlegs.

“We pass idiot legislation like the Clean Earth Act, rushing forward before counting the costs,” he groused, scanning the low hilltop. “The great human pastime: saving the world from the last joker’s effort to save the world.” He stopped and listened, panning his head slowly left then right. “Collateral damage, acceptable losses.” He turned to stare Richie in the face. “Trade-offs, as you people so delicately put it. Oh, the sublime hubris of the exculpatory euphemism.”

“Look,” Richie said, chest out, hands dug in his back pockets, “I’m not seeing a whole lot of butterflies, doc. Fact is, I’m not seeing a damn one.”

Maddox glared at Richie, and Richie glared right back.

When I had asked to see the blue dots, I’d imagined a happy little field trip to a big green bush shimmering with a hundred bright butterflies. Instead, here we were, in the middle the desert, traipsing after a drunk Donkey Hotey through a thicket of nettles going nowhere.

“Let’s get out of here,” Richie said.

“Shhh,” Maddox held up his hand. He listened, swivelled his head, listened some more while looking hard into the scraggy brush. He whistled a bird call, whit-whit-whit and stood motionless. Whit-whit-whit . . . whit-whit-whit.

A small brown bird appeared and alighted on a boulder. Its head jerked from side to side. Maddox whispered, “Don’t move.”

The bird hopped to the ground and pecked at the sand. It pushed a twig with its beak and clawed at a small rock. Spooked by something, it flew off.

Richie and I relaxed, but Maddox held up his hand for us to remain still. He whistled again, whit-whit-whit . . . whit-whit-whit. The bird glided back onto the same boulder. It flitted to a small cactus and from there to the ground near a low leafy vine with a white trumpeting flower. The bird looked left and right then hopped closer to the vine and after glancing nervously around once more, ducked under a large flat leaf. The leaf quivered as the bird pecked at it from below.

“Byah!” Maddox called out, clapping his hands to shoo the bird away. He dropped to his knees beside the plant. “That little fellow likes a gnat that lives on some of these vines – but only some of these vines.” He turned over one leaf after another, searching along midribs and veins.

“There’s an association between those gnats and where the butterflies prefer – ” He bent closer.

“Aha!” With a pinch of his fingers, he removed a bit of the leaf, stood, and walked toward us, his discovery held before him. Dangling from the green swatch by the thinnest of threads was a tiny pod the size and colour of a coffee bean.

“Put out your hand,” Maddox said, his face aglow.

He placed the chrysalis on my outstretched palm and all three of us leaned in close.

“Behold,” he said, “Brephidium bolanderii.”

It weighed at most a gram or two – but what if this fragile little thing was, after millions of years of evolution, the species terminus, the blue dot’s last incarnation, its last hope?

“Put that in a jar, outside, in the shade. Punch some holes in the lid, and in a few days,” Maddox said, “the most beautiful creature on Earth. If you’re lucky, you’ll be there to watch it emerge.”

We climbed back into the SUV. Richie executed a series of manoeuvres to turn us around and got us back on the main road. He accelerated, and we travelled alongside the PV panels. From ahead of us came the beep-beep-beep of the machines’ warning horns, soon joined by the noise of clanking treads and gunning engines. The sound rose to a crescendo as we passed the behemoth earthmovers, hydraulic shovels, and dump trucks carving relentlessly into the soil – driverless, guided by some invisible plan. As we left the construction site and the din faded, I heard soft snores coming from the back seat and saw Maddox, leaned against the door, asleep.

I looked down at my hand, open, palm up. On it, the bean.

butterflies nature

SEEING GHOSTS

by Heidi Lasher • October 28, 2021October 28, 2021

The Spokane River slinks away from the northern tip of Lake Coeur d’Alene like an introverted guest at a party. Until I looked for it on a map, I hadn’t known exactly where it began. From shore, standing at the northwest corner of Lake Coeur d’Alene in Idaho, there is no perceptible difference in how the water moves on the lake versus the river: It’s all flat and still. The only indication of change is a subtle narrowing of the shore on both sides, squeezing the lake into a lane the size of a suburban street. In this way, the river travels west for 13 miles, reaching a cul de sac at Post Falls Dam. Only once it is past the dam does the Spokane assume the likeness of a river.

I canoed this upper section of the river last spring with my friend Marit, who grew up in Spokane and returned to the city recently with her husband and daughter. She’s a former marketing executive who now works as a spiritual-regression therapist and spirit-release specialist. What I understand this to mean is that she helps people release difficult emotions by examining past lives and by clearing energy from physical spaces. In other words, she’s a ghostbuster.

Talking with her about this work has made me, at times, profoundly uncomfortable, as it requires me to accept as possible something that my mind considers delusional: that past lives are a thing, that we can communicate with some remanent of our past selves, and that we should. I have no reason to doubt that she considers her work real and beneficial. She is not a charlatan, nor does she take money for services unrendered. Her clients seek her out because they’re desperate to untether themselves from troubling emotional trauma, trauma that extends beyond their lifetime, and they cannot do it alone. They need a guide. I understand that this may be her clients’ truth, but nothing in my experience makes it true to me. What’s interesting is that she knows this. She knows her line of work freaks some people out. She knows that many people are sceptical of her beliefs and abilities, and as far as I can tell, she is able to joyfully live among people who aren’t sure what to think of her. And I kind of love her for that.

Still, it feels disingenuous to ask questions about her work when I’ve already closed my mind to it. We find plenty of other things to discuss. When we launched our canoe on the upper Spokane River that day, we talked about goose poop (there was a lot of it on the beach) and regional growth.

The north bank of the upper Spokane River (the bank to our right as we paddled downstream) has experienced a recent surge in commercial and residential development. In 2018, the City of Coeur d’Alene purchased 47-acres of waterfront from an old lumber mill and sold it to developers to build new houses (which, on that day, were in various stages of construction), restaurants, a marina, and a public park. Despite zoning laws that require a 25-foot setback to maintain riparian habitat on the riverbank or lakeshore, this development, like many others, appeared to be exempt from the law. Each of the new houses features a mown and fertilised lawn shored up by concrete bulwarks and a dock.

The south bank of the river, which we passed on our left, looks completely different. Because it’s harder to access, requiring a long drive downriver to a bridge and a long drive back upriver on a winding road, the left bank appears to be set in a different historical time period. On this bank we passed ramshackle cabins with big front porches and rocking chairs. Overgrown tea roses and gnarled cherry trees sat back from the bank where old rowboats and canoes hid behind the tall grass.

We paddled quietly down the middle of this rift in time, looking left at the past and right at the future. It gave me an eerie feeling to wander so freely in time. Between one set of ideals and another. The two sides of the river seemed at odds with each other, and paddling between them, they tugged at two sides of myself: the still and the strident; the listless and the ambitious; the has-been and the could-be.

Forgetting Marit’s career, I once asked whether she would rather spend seven days visiting a specific time in the past or in the future. It was a question I’d asked my kids at the dinner table, and I was thinking about my own response. I had said that I’d like to go backward in time. I was interested in revisiting a particularly hard time in my life, wondering if I could reframe it and potentially move past it. Predictably, Marit said she spends a lot of time in the past and would prefer to visit the future. She said it’s often hard to go back in time, painful even, and that the future might be more exciting.

It’s not that I think the past is so great. Rather, I find so much of the past unresolved. In the not-too-distant past, for example, the Coeur d’Alene area struggled to fend off a reputation as a haven for white supremacists. In the late 1980s, Richard Butler, an aerospace engineer and aspiring neo-Nazi, arrived in the area to build a “whites only” homeland, which he called the Aryan Nation. After two decades of nefarious activity, his property was seized and sold and demolished.

Randy Weaver, himself a white separatist, lived a bit further north in the Idaho panhandle in his Ruby Ridge compound, which was seized by Federal Marshals who ended up killing his wife and son in an 11-day standoff in 1992. For a while it seemed as if the white separatist movement left the area. But then Washington State representative Matt Shea carried the neo-Nazi baton over the state line into Washington. His presence suggests that intolerance is not disappearing from North Idaho, but spreading. It’s not a part of the country to get lost in the woods.

The thing is, North Idaho is composed almost entirely of woods. Except for a few populated areas, the landscape is beautiful: lower-elevation pine forests, wetlands, and lakes of all sizes give way to higher elevation larch and fir forests, granite peaks, and tumbling mountain streams. It’s the kind of place you want to get lost in, or fish, or hike, or just sit quietly in a camp chair by a lake. Camping options abound, as most of the land is designated national forest or managed by the Bureau of Land Management, which makes it a haven for anyone with a four-wheel-drive vehicle and a tent. While the area attracts its share of motorheads who shoot rounds of ammunition through highway signs and leave beer cans in parking pullouts, it also hosts an astounding number of summer camps (of the Bible variety), backpackers, and wilderness lovers.

Lake Coeur d’Alene is considered one of the gems of North Idaho. It is a natural lake, kept unnaturally full in summer by the Post Falls Dam. The lake is surrounded on all sides by rich green forests that rise toward a big open sky. Because of all the intricate folds of land around it, the lake is pleated into 135 miles of shoreline. A boat can travel 25 miles south from the city of Coeur d’Alene and not quite reach the end of it.

At the end of the lake is Indian Country. The Salish-speaking people who first considered the lake home were named Coeur d’Alene by French fur traders who thought highly of the tribe’s aptitude for trading. These natives once occupied about five million acres of lands surrounding the lake, where the still water, forests, and rivers would have provided bountiful food sources. White settlers arrived in the area in the early 1800s and began encroaching on tribal land along the Spokane River corridor to the west. The tribe negotiated a treaty with the US Army in 1873, which ceded all but 600,000 of the more than five million acres of traditional Coeur d’Alene territory to the United States. Included in the 600,000 acres was all of Lake Coeur d’Alene.

The US government reneged on the treaty by refusing to sign it until 1885, at which time silver had been discovered in the Coeur d’Alene river valley upstream from the lake, and the northern half of the lake was seized for development. The Post Falls Dam, originally built to power a lumber mill, was repurposed to support the mining enterprise. Decades of loosely regulated mining and smelting ensued, cursing the lake and the river valley below with environmental damage that continues to this day. Now, a thick blanket of heavy metals covers the bottom of the lake – some 75 million tons of sediment laced with lead, zinc, and cadmium. And every day still the Silver Valley, now a federally-designated Superfund Site, leaches trace metals into the Coeur d’Alene River, where they tumble down the river, into the lake, and out the Spokane River.

When the metals settle into the lake and river floor, they remain more-or-less inert, like ticking time bombs. One must be careful not to stir them. Signage all along the lake warns visitors not to stray off the paved trails or dig in the sand or dirt along the lake unless the soil has been remediated, but some of us are better than others at reading signs. Migrating tundra swans who dip their long necks in the sediment to feed inadvertently poison themselves by the hundreds every April and May.

Early on in our friendship, I asked Marit to describe exactly what it means to “clear” a physical space. As if describing something as routine and mysterious as installing a cable modem and router, she told me what a “clearing” involves and then walked me through a recent job she was asked to do. Most of what she explained challenged my grip on reality, but the gist was something like this: A person had moved into a house and discovered that it was haunted. I can’t remember if she explained how her client knew the house was haunted, but in my memory, the haunting was conventional: flickering lights, moving furniture, unusual noises. The homeowners consulted the internet, where they found Marit’s website and phone number. Over the phone, Marit assured her client she would do her best to expel the ghost. And, at some appointed date, Marit made herself into what she calls a Lightbody – which she said is difficult because she has to scramble her signal so the spirit cannot trace her back to her current life – and asked the spirit (very nicely) to leave. (Marit says she believes it is important to be kind to spirits because they are almost always suffering, and one of the things that makes her good at her job is the compassion she brings to it. This part rings true to me. Marit is a very kind and compassionate person.) As the gears in my brain tried to make sense of the information she had just told me, Marit carried on with the story. Something about how the spirit was unable to leave because it was being manipulated by a dark force that had infiltrated the space, making this job particularly complicated. To clear the space, she had to wipe the dark energy from phone lines, electrical outlets, and cable internet (which, after all, are a home’s energy conductors). The clearing took a long time. Addressing the past and healing the space was exhausting, but ultimately cathartic. The spirit was allowed to leave, released from its own suffering and the suffering it was causing.

When she finished, I could not think of a single thing to say.

On the river, we passed a guy on the right bank, mowing his lawn. It was a nice lawn, free of weeds, well-trimmed. Michael Pollan, who once wrote an essay about our country’s tyrannical obsession over lawns, would have called it an American lawn. The carpet of grass made me think of phosphorus, which is an ingredient in lawn fertiliser and which derives from the Greek word phosphoros meaning bringer of light. Its Latin equivalent is lucifer. It is a chemical element, invisible, and glows faintly green when exposed to oxygen. Phosphorus is abundantly available in soil and a common ingredient in many household items like pesticides, detergents, and (as mentioned) fertilisers. What many people fail to realise or accept is that phosphorus can wreak havoc on aquatic ecosystems.

Phosphorus levels in Lake Coeur d’Alene have doubled since the 1990s, trickling in from upstream logging and agricultural operations, leaching out of septic tanks and fertilised lawns, and seeping in from soils disturbed by new development. I wondered if the guy mowing his lawn knew this. And, if he did, whether it bothered him.

Lakes that absorb phosphorus tend to grow algae, floating green stuff, which can cover the lake in unappealing muck. This is a bad enough outcome for swimmers who want to cool off in clean water. But it is only the first domino. Algae blocks sunlight from reaching the lake floor, which in turn makes it impossible for native underwater plants to photosynthesise and make oxygen. When algae die at the end of the summer and sink to the lake floor, they are decomposed by bacteria that require oxygen to live. But because of the native plants that failed to photosynthesise and because of the longer and hotter summers we’ve been having, the average level of dissolved oxygen in Lake Coeur d’Alene has been dropping steadily since the 1990s. It is currently somewhere in the range of six to eight milligrams per litre. When dissolved oxygen drops below about two milligrams per litre, water can become hypoxic, causing organisms living in the water to suffocate. Eventually, water can become anoxic, devoid of oxygen, which is actually happening in some small parts of Lake Coeur d’Alene.

Oxygen, so essential to life, plays a critical secondary role in the lake. It covers the heavy metals sitting on the lake floor. Like a blanket, oxygen keeps the lead and cadmium and zinc from floating up and circulating in the water column. When and if oxygen levels drop low enough, the cover will come off the metals. And the metals will rise, zombie-like, from the lake bottom, slowly poisoning everything in the lake and river outlet: plankton, fish, birds, humans, and all.

On the day of the paddle, it was hard to imagine any of this happening. It seemed far-fetched to believe that one person’s building project or lawn fertiliser could change the chemistry of a huge, shimmering lake, surrounded by woods, in the middle of Idaho. But I remember looking up at the blue sky from the unnaturally placid river and feeling a humming tension between the two sides of the river, between the past and the future. It felt that the present moment could snap.

We arrive in the world already tainted by the actions of our ancestors. We are not to blame for their errors, but we are not without responsibility for them either. Go to any river and you will find rainwater and spring water mixed with effluent from sewage treatment plants, agricultural run-off, stormwater, and/or street runoff in a single hydrologic composition. No river is entirely pure. My generation did not build the mines that polluted this lake, but we continue to use the copper and silver they extract. We did not start polluting Lake Coeur d’Alene, but we have not found a way to stop either. We haven’t even considered reparations for native peoples.

What our history forgets, the earth remembers.

The wind picked up, and the sky went dark. We had to fight hard to make headway. We settled into an unsteady rhythm, each of us making contingency plans in our heads in case we were late to pick up our kids from school.

Just as my shoulder began to ache, still several miles from our takeout, we came around a corner and beheld a mansion on the bank to the right. This was a house that looked like it ate and swallowed at least ten of the neighbouring houses, squeezed itself into a poufy party dress and set out a swimming pool, tennis court, pond, and putting green for dinner. So unsettled were we by the mansion’s otherworldly existence, especially there in North Idaho, we gawked in mute wonder as it came into view. What is that? we murmured to each other, so as not to awaken it. Internet research informed us later that the house indeed contains 28,000 square feet of living space with 13 bedrooms and 13 bathrooms and a 10-car garage and two boat slips. It had been built by a founder of Amway, the cleaning-supply pyramid scheme, and was on sale for $8.5 million (down from $16 million, in a part of the country where the median home price is $332,000). But what made our experience of the house even more surreal was that just as we feasted on the spectacle of the mansion on our right, our ears picked up the mournful note of a tenor saxophone coming from our left. Tearing our eyes off the mansion, we found on the opposite shore a man about our age wearing a black cowboy hat, sitting on an old cantilevered wooden deck in front of a ramshackle cabin. He was pouring his soul into a brass saxophone, which had been hooked into an amplifier that itself was plugged into a long extension cord that draped over the decking and disappeared inside the cabin. The wind began to howl and carry away the desperate notes.

The music seemed to summon the past from the water below us, a past that muted the birds and the distant rumble of the highway and spilled like fog into the present. The mansion hovered like a dystopian future, an inescapable beckoning I had no desire to follow. The water grew choppier and we dug with our paddles to make forward progress. For the last two miles, we said nothing.

We pulled out of the river just above the south channel of the Post Falls Dam where we’d left Marit’s car. There, we left the canoe on a patch of grass and drove back to the start of our paddle in Coeur d’Alene to fetch my truck. I wondered to myself if it would be possible for Marit to reconcile us with our collective past, to leave the ghosts that haunt us behind, bid them farewell and Godspeed. But then I remembered that she can’t release ghosts who still have work to do, and I also remembered that I didn’t believe in ghosts.

We are taught to leave the past behind, to let it go, move on. But sometimes the past won’t leave us alone; sometimes it prevents us from moving forward. Damages from the previous century’s mining activity continue to harm wildlife and threaten the lake’s health. But the two parties assigned with the task of avoiding a possible water quality disaster in the lake: The Coeur d’Alene Tribe and the state of Idaho disagree over possible solutions, timelines, and funding. They’ve reached an impasse. Rather, they’ve reached some unresolved place in the past. The State doesn’t want to stop logging, agriculture, or development. The tribe doesn’t trust the state.

They can’t escape the past. And they can’t envision the future.

Ghosts are embedded in the landscape. They are carved into riverbank, they sit at the bottom of the lake, they hover in the air over difficult meetings between the state and the tribe. I don’t need past-life regression analysis to see this. I only need to pay attention. Sometimes we are so careful not to stir up the past that we fail to acknowledge it; we forget it exists or relegate it to another lifetime. But this is our mistake. The past and the future will forever be at odds until we know the past and take responsibility for it in the present, even if it’s painful, even if it’s not our fault. I think it’s the only way to envision a different future. I wish, for the sake of Lake Coeur d’Alene, we had someone to guide us, some Marit-equivalent, who is kind and compassionate and knows how to turn herself into a Lightbody to remove heavy metals and phosphorus from the lake, to release us from our suffering. But we don’t. Instead we have each other, our shared past, and our collective urge to move forward.

Idaho nature pollution travel

A LANDSCAPE OF WINGS

by Orman Day • October 25, 2021October 25, 2021

Ducks – Glendale, California

My older sister wins a couple of ducklings at the city’s annual carnival in the early 1950s, and my two younger sisters and I wear our swimsuits when we play with them on the grass in front of our small rented home. Mom brings out a large bowl of water, and we splash each other and the ducks. Quack-Quack and Ducky rummage through leftover peas and corn, and pull up worms and slugs. They’re our first pets. Later will come Tillie, an orphaned tortoise found in the road, and Chop-Chop the parakeet. We laugh hugging our ducks as they shake the water from their wings. We’re not like the Perry boys next door. They’re mean to the two ducks they won at that same carnival, and they say nasty words and think it’s funny to chase me with a knife. They don’t go to the Methodist Church and learn about the innocence of doves and the soaring of eagles. A few months after their arrival, Quack-Quack and Ducky disappear. About that same time, the Perry boys wave bloody feathers in our horrified faces and say they killed their ducks and are going to eat them. Mom tells us our ducks needed to be set free because they’re grown up. She’s vague about where they were sent, so every time we see a lake or visit the children’s area at the Griffith Park Zoo, we ask our parents if those are our ducks. Decades later, my sisters and I are dismayed to learn that Mom wasn’t raising our ducks for freedom but fattening them for a “chicken” dinner at which I asked for seconds.

Jays and Woodpeckers – San Bernardino Mountains, California

From my grandparents’ isolated, ramshackle cabin, I trailblaze in homemade moccasins through ferns and other foliage, pretending to be Davy Crockett, who first appeared on our black-and-white TV in 1954, exalted by a song that hailed him as “king of the wild frontier.” I’m armed with a harmless plastic pistol because I have no interest in knocking a jay or a woodpecker off a pine tree with a sling shot or a Red Ryder BB gun. My hero is Abraham Lincoln, who turned our February 12th birthday into a state holiday. I know that, at seven, Abe felt guilt-ridden after shooting a turkey and gave up hunting. Years later, on a country road, he came across two baby birds blown from their nest and was troubled until he placed them back with their mother. As President, he pardoned Jack, a turkey destined for Christmas dinner, and laughed watching his son Tad lead it around the White House on a leash. And so I leave the jays and woodpeckers in peace. The cabin has neither phone nor working TV nor radio. Sometimes my sisters and I crank up the Victrola and play scratched records from the ‘30s and ‘40s. But the steady soundtrack of those summer days…of our water fights, card games, watermelon feasts…is an orchestration of chittering insects, the shreeka shreeka and gleep gleep of jays, and the cackling, chirping, drumming of woodpeckers.

Parrots – Glendale, California

Grampa Phil keeps Oscar the cantankerous parrot in a rusty cage in the cramped kitchen of his teetering house. In back is a three-room shack in which he upholsters car seats and canes wicker chairs. In addition to helping him with his work and fixing meals for him and friends who just happen to drop in at lunchtime or supper, grandma cleans and feeds her mother who’s senile and bound to a wheelchair. Grandma’s forced to keep her short, round body in constant motion to meet all the demands on her, including keeping Oscar in sunflower seeds and changing the cage’s messy newspaper. Often Great-Grandma Keese cries out from the back bedroom, “Maud-ie! Maud-ie!” Oscar echoes, “Maud-ie! Maud-ie!” Disturbed by the racket, Gramps shouts, “Maud-ie! Maud-ie!” Grandma shuffles from the front room or kitchen. “Maud-ie!” from Great-Grandma. “Maud-ie!” from Oscar. “Maud-ie!” from Gramps. Years after Oscar and Great-Grandma Keese die, when she’s in her 90s, Grandma pretty much spends all day in bed. When she wants a glass of ice water or a change of diapers, it’s her time to cry, “Phil-l-l! Phil-l-l!” By then, I want nothing to do with parrots.

Plovers – South Africa

I’m composing a farewell poem for Carlie, my Australian lover during an overland truck safari from Cairo to Jo-burg, South Africa, in 1973–74, and I want to include the image of a bird from our journey. I consider stilts and storks, flamingos and flycatchers, cormorants and cuckoos, ostriches and oxpeckers. Then I remember a long-legged, long-billed bird with a gray back and chestnut-coloured breast, nape and forehead, and write…When we were at the equator line, / when the moon and sun shared the same sky, / did you know a plover bird flew across your face, / hesitating in the shadow of your lashes, / following the dip in the line of your lips, / taking a tear from your cheek in its beak to a cloud, / finally leaving its wings for you to wear / as a bow in your hair, giving you flight? Aboard a plane on its way to Nairobi, I imagine Carlie crying when she finds the poem under her pillow.

Pigeons – Cuernavaca, Mexico

I’ve been traveling for a few weeks on my way to Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America by bus and train. At night, I can’t seem to strike up a conversation with any of the American students and tourists dining on tamales and enchiladas in different cafés. I shift my search to the plaza, where I sit on a bench watching the circling parade of lovestruck couples. Mentally I list my problems, including an unsettled stomach and the thousands and thousands of bowel-jarring miles that lie ahead of me during the next 10 months or so. Even if I want to, I can’t go home because I quit my newspaper job, moved out of my apartment and, worse of all, promised readers in a final article that I was going to reach my destination or die trying. As I envy the flirtatious couples, I tell myself, “It can’t get any more miserable than this, can it?” And then a pitiless pigeon on a bombing mission eyeballs the top of my head.

Bats – Brazil

On a bus going north from Rio, an Austrian backpacker named Johan lifts his pantleg to expose two slits above his ankle. He says that lying in his hammock one night in the inexpensive seaside village of Canoa Quebrada, he felt something lapping at his leg. He knocked it away and went back to sleep. In the morning, he finds not mosquito welts but incisions left by a vampire bat. On public television once, I watched bats siphon blood from cattle and household pets, but I don’t remember the narrator saying anything about human victims. I’m afraid of needles, but I’m petrified of fangs. I finger my beard and tell Johan that I’m going to Canoa Quebrada, but I’ll be sleeping with one eye open.

Chickens – rural China

In 1985, not long after Chinese officials opened up parts of their country to independent travellers, a Canadian named Jean and I hitch a ride in a truck carrying a load of hides. The driver parks beside a stream watering rice paddies and uses a pail to wash the windows and fill the radiator. To save gas, he coasts at every opportunity, even uphill, so we average 15 kilometres an hour. At night, the driver stops at a rustic restaurant, where we celebrate Jean’s birthday with beer. As a dinner suggestion, the woman proprietor holds up a live chicken. After we nod, we’re aghast when she turns the chicken upside down, slits its throat, and lets the blood spill into a pan. Then she pours boiling water over the bird and takes it outside for plucking. Hacked into small pieces and fried, the chicken sits on our plates a half hour after its demise. The cook’s family crowds around our table to watch us rare foreigners manoeuvre our chopsticks. For less than 50 cents each, we sleep upstairs under netting which keeps out mosquitoes and the rats that scurry across our room all night. We’re awakened at five by a rooster crowing sorrowfully outside our door. I worry he’s lamenting the masticated fate of his feathered friend.

Vultures – Lhasa, Tibet

On the flight to Lhasa, several of us backpackers decide that if our plane crashes into a Himalayan peak – preferably Mount Everest – we want a sky burial, which we envision as a sacred and natural disposal of our bodies, our husks. One morning, chilled by a cold, dusty wind, we join five Tibetan workers sitting around a fire sipping yak butter tea, honing their knives. The men are a rowdy, lewd lot. One holds Rose’s leg, and another fingers the water bag around Betsy’s neck. I’m wearing cutoffs, and still another strokes the hair on my bare legs. I study the men’s hands and they’re covered with large, black, hideous warts of suspicious origin. After the workers share their cookies, they walk onto the huge burial rock where two female bodies are lying. The two butchers put on blood-spotted white jumpsuits. One butcher shifts the position of a young woman by rudely yanking her leg. With that gesture, we realize this is not going to be a religious experience. Apparently the Buddhist ceremony was conducted the day before. First the bodies are skinned from the neck to the ankle. No blood to speak of. The legs are cut, the rib cage broken. The black hair is scalped and tossed from the rock. After the butchers carve the bodies and the three others pound the bones into powder and mix it with barley flour, hundreds of vultures swoop onto the rock and eat the pieces of flesh, tugging for control of intestines, stirring the blood scent into the breeze blowing our way. The flapping of the vultures’ huge wings floats feathers into the air. Small birds devour the powder. During a pause, a few of the large birds – their beaks blood-stained – stare at us as if to ask, “Who’s next?” Afterward, as our group hikes beneath the rock toward a monastery, vultures leap into flight just above our heads. When I camped on the African savanna, I thought it great fun to lie on the ground motionless and watch the carrion birds circle overhead. I don’t repeat my prank.

Bald Eagles – Mississippi River

I agree with many of Ben Franklin’s ruminations, but not this one: “I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country; he is a bird of bad moral character; like those among men who live by sharping and robbing, he is generally poor, and often very lousy.” I beg to differ because one of the cherished memories of the two months I spent canoeing the Mississippi from St. Paul to New Orleans at age 56 is this: On a misty morning, on a silent river empty of barges and motorboats, my young poet friend Paige and I are paddling to our own inner music while majestic bald eagles rest atop tall trees, gazing down at us, offering their benediction.

Hummingbirds – Durham, North Carolina

Manny the Praying Mantis, I figure, isn’t much different from the squirrels who regularly steal seed from the squirrel-proof bird feeder hanging from the roof over our apartment balcony. He likely loiters on the red rim of our hummingbird feeder because he wants to pilfer the tasty nectar of red water and sugar. We always welcome hummingbirds, smile at the hum of their wingbeats and the sight of their lapping, long tongues. I’m afraid Manny’s going to scare them away, so I occasionally lift him off his favourite perch and catapult him over the railing toward grass two floors below. This free fall doesn’t seem to maim his mandibles or diminish his persistence because two or three days later, he’s reclimbed the side of the building and is reclining on the feeder again. I tell friends about Manny’s humorous exploits, and one of them warns me that behind the bulging eyes of his triangular head is a cunning assassin. When I express astonishment, I’m told to check it out on the internet. On YouTube, I type, praying mantis hummingbird. I watch a clip. I’m shocked and sickened. While I don’t crush Manny after that, I’m going to turn him into an insect version of Sisyphus, pushing his elongated body up the apartment walls, forever finding himself tumbling to the grass. Before he can ensnare one of our beloved hummingbirds, I can only hope, he’ll be cannibalized by his mate during an act of lovemaking.

Seagulls – Outer Banks, North Carolina

On a moonless night, our beachfront hotel suddenly casts a bar of bright light upon the breaking waves, trying no doubt to create a romantic setting for couples like us, kissing and handholding on their balconies. And then arises the manic shrieking and wing flapping of seagulls drawn to an endless buffet of silver mullets blindly leaping into illuminated talons and beaks, victims of phototaxis. Though they only follow their natural instincts during these hours of gluttony and gore, I can never again think poetic thoughts about seagulls gliding across a cerulean sky. I pity children who playfully chased the birds across the sand in sunlight and now watch them entangled in a riptide of shadow and bloodlust.

Puffins – Iceland

As children, my sisters and I would’ve adored goofy-looking puffins, the web-footed birds with triangular beaks of many colours. The cuddly clowns of the sea who can fly and swim…whose colonies I watch while touring the island. I wince when I learn Icelanders consider puffin hearts a delicacy. In China, I ate snake. In Colombia, guinea pig. While in Iceland, I might eat fermented shark or cod tongue, but a puffin heart? I’d rather be set adrift on an iceberg in a glacial lagoon.

Different Birds – Laurel, Maryland

Now that I’ve managed to survive into my mid-70s, I mostly travel in the past. I don’t bird watch so much as remember birds watched: emus and bustards in Australia, barn owls and gray partridges in Britain, albatrosses and penguins in New Zealand, lapwings and bee-eaters in India, peacocks and peahens at Flannery O’Connor’s rustic farm in Milledgeville, Georgia. I won’t tramp again through the Amazon or ride a creaky dhow on the Nile or hitchhike in the Andes, with its condors and coots. So, I need birds to come to me…to our patio…to the feeder and flowers from the forest beyond a swath of grass. Cardinals, starlings, orioles, crows, all of them special in their own way. Always I remember the words of naturalist Lyanda Haupt: “Birds will give you a window, if you allow them. They will show you secrets from another world…”

nature travel

Art, Arts & Culture, EssaySaturday

TWELVE IMAGES OF CENTRAL PARK ON OLD POSTCARDS

by Jim Ross • October 22, 2021October 22, 2021

New York City postcards

conservation museums nature

BIRTH

by Claire O'Connor • October 22, 2021October 22, 2021

I used to frequent the museum of natural history – to see animals that existed ages ago, before we resembled who we are now, but also to see current specimens: a continuum. During every visit I decided to take one memory home with me. Once it was the enormous antlers of the extinct Irish elk, two palms facing outwards with mismatched fingers. Once it was the armoured husk of an earwig, splaying tendrils of pincers and antennae. Once it was the skeleton of a plesiosaur swimming through an invisible sea.

One day I decided on a clutch of speckled eggs. The faded label read: Barn Swallow. I imagined cradling an egg in my hand, enjoying its calcium contour. I imagined air filtering through microscopic pores to reach the lungs of an infant bird.

Only later, walking home, did I ask myself how the eggs ended up at the museum. The great elk antlers were discovered, the dinosaur bones chiselled from stone. Presumably the earwig met an untimely end, but at least the insect had the chance to grow to maturity. But the eggs? They must have been stolen, the insides drained. What did the mother swallow think when she returned to an empty nest? How long did she mourn, cry out for unborn chicks who could not respond? Who determined these eggs belonged to him? The thief was surely a man. No woman would rob another of her children like so.

If the museum could reward such depravity, what other crimes or misinformation might such an institution convey? How did I know the eggs even belonged to a barn swallow? They had the appearance of barn swallow eggs, but appearances can deceive. No one could see inside. I was suddenly haunted by the idea that the eggs had borne another type of young. A swift or a martin. A hoopoe or an Andean cock-of-the-rock. Even a crocodile or a cobra, or one of those mammalian oddities: a platypus, an echidna.

The next morning when I woke, I couldn’t shake the memory of the eggs. I felt certain that they were not the eggs of a swallow or any species I knew. They belonged to a creature we humans didn’t yet know or understand. And the eggs were not empty – this unknown creature still lay inside – something dormant, something waiting for the right moment to emerge.

I began to visit the museum after work, then during my lunch hour. I fantasised about breaking the glass case, slipping the eggs into my pocket, taking them home. And then what? Put them on the radiator? Or tuck them into my skin? Could I fashion a suit of feathers, or was it scales I would need?

Before long I was staying at the museum after lunch, all afternoon. When my boss found out and threatened me, I gave my notice on the spot. Then I spent all day wandering the museum’s halls, trying to trace a pattern from antlers and pincers to flippers and wings. The speckled eggs still lay in the case, but now they were also inside of me. Each evening when the museum closed, I carried them home. At night I hardly slept, tossing and turning, consumed by waking dreams, imagining the day I would give birth to a miracle only Nature could bestow: uncatalogued, unclassifiable, free.

Arts & Culture, Editor's Pick, Reviews

BOOK REVIEW: EMPTY WARDROBES

by Monica Cardenas • October 21, 2021October 21, 2021

Originally published in 1966, Empty Wardrobes is a novel by Portuguese writer Maria Judite de Carvalho. Translated into English this year by Margaret Jull Costa, its timeliness is both enlightening and depressing. In this brilliantly simple story, de Carvalho shows us how the actions of two men upend the lives of three generations of women due to long-standing patriarchal constructs.

Dora Rosario is a widow and mother to Lisa, whose late husband left her with no money or prospects. Dora, with the support of some friends, manages to find work running an antique shop, which Lisa refers to as the “Museum.” In order to make ends meet, Dora spends her days feeling old, surrounded by old things. The shop is filled with “glass domes covering beautiful clocks that had long since stopped, images from the eighteenth century, ornate boxes, exquisite, elegant ivory figurines,” and Dora dresses as “Salvation Army Dora” – that is, in drab clothing meant to mourn her husband. But after 10 years of grieving, Dora’s mother-in-law Ana drops a bombshell: Dora’s husband Duarte had been planning to leave her for another woman. Armed with the awareness of many years wasted, Dora seizes on an opportunity to remake herself.

Kate Zambreno notes in the introduction: “This is a hilarious and devastating novel of a traditional Catholic widow’s consciousness, encased like ambered resin in the ambient cruelty of patriarchy, an oppression even more severe in the God, Fatherland, and Family authoritarianism of the Salazar regime in Portugal. A work like this, set in the regime of a dictator who weaponised Catholicism and ‘family values,’ is by its very nature deeply political.”

It is political because it starkly paints the fallout of women in a society that expects strict adherence to traditional roles. Dora’s husband, like most husbands in post-war Western society, expected her to remain at home and raise their daughter. Dora abides, but her husband does not follow the rules for men. Instead of providing for his family, he prefers to get by doing things he enjoys and avoiding hard work: “This was perhaps the sole activity, if you can call it that, to which he had gladly devoted his life – to being nothing.” The lesson Lisa takes from Dora’s life is that she must marry a rich man while she’s young and beautiful. She tells her mother, “We young people know that youth doesn’t last very long, and you have to make the most of it because, by the time you’re thirty, it’s all over.”

The novel traces Dora’s transformation from lifeless widow to adulteress. Dora does not so much pursue Ernesto as she allows herself to be in the right place at the right time. It is a test – of her attractiveness and of her own audaciousness. After all, she had just overheard her teenage daughter describe her as “both ageless and hopeless.” It is Lisa’s brutal assessment of her mother’s life choices that prompts her down a new path.

While the novel centers on Dora’s life and family, it is Manuela who arguably suffers the most. An apparently peripheral character, she narrates the novel and ultimately takes centre stage. She also knows Dora’s story intimately, with the benefit of objectivity: “Some people got religion or killed themselves after losing someone, whether that person died or just left them. Dora Rosario, however, didn’t blame anyone else for her misfortune. Only herself. She loathed herself, but not enough to seek relief in death. No, she simply disliked herself, a more modest sentiment. And when, for example, she was standing before the mirror to apply her lipstick at the very moment Ernesto Laje came into the shop, doing so had given her no pleasure; indeed, what she felt was a degree of discreet rage.” Could that rage have been some version of The Feminine Mystique, the 1963 book by Betty Friedan that exposed the unhappiness of housewives? Here is the moment, deftly drawn by de Carvalho, when Dora sees her life with disturbing clarity – a wasted decade, a wasted marriage, and now, at 38 years old, her options have dwindled from limited to nonexistent.

Manuela incisively recounts the events that lead to her partner Ernesto’s desertion, noting: “It seemed to me that the name of the problem wasn’t Manuela, but he’d found a way of making me the problem. He was unhappy because I’d failed to bear him any children, so he was obliged to look for compensations elsewhere.” Manuela does not quite adhere to the rules of the Western world at that time; she is not married to Ernesto, and she never had children: “The truth is, it had never really bothered me, not having children, I mean. And would it have changed things if it had, I wonder.”

Manuela is a wise narrator with the clarity of hindsight. We don’t detect bitterness so much as apathy – she has probably wasted as many years as Dora had with Duarte, and what are these women left with, for all their sacrifices and willingness to look the other way? Dora is “a gray woman, slightly bent, lost in a plundered city deserted after the plague” while Manuela views the “old and ailing sky, bleary-eyed and weary with life.”

A call to arms for second-wave feminism, this novel shows us women who see their restraints but struggle to reach beyond the men and political institutions that uphold them. A timely translation, for although the “happy housewife” roles demanded of women in Empty Wardrobes may seem out of date, the need to break down patriarchal control remains.

Empty Wardrobes
by Maria Judite de Carvalho
Two Lines Press, 208 pages

feminism Portuguese literature

CROONER

by J. T. Townley • October 20, 2021October 20, 2021

But Iggy ambushes me before I can even set foot on deck. “Glad you could make it, Beretta.”

I almost slip off the gangway into the inky blackness below. It’s a long way down. I grip the cable railing, hunched and wary.

Now a cigar stub glows in the shadows. He steps into the floodlights, his lizard face all scowl. “Do you have any idea what time it is?”

I straighten my jacket and step down to the deck. He throws a skinny arm over my shoulder and leads me along the starboard gunwale toward the lounge.

“You missed sound check,” he says, scanning my face in the jaundiced light. “You look like hell, Rick.”

I want to tell him that I’m not feeling myself tonight, but he’d just give me his lecher’s grin and say, “Then who are you feeling, heh heh?” Only it’s the truth. I haven’t been right since Finny took off. Maybe the isolation’s getting to me. It’s not easy being the last man standing.

I take a deep breath and say, “I feel okay.”

Iggy guides me through the back entrance and into the dressing room. He sucks at his wet cigar, bug eyes squinting against the smoke. An inch of ash dangles from the tip, and I wonder when it will fall onto the matted puke-green carpet. The whole ship might go up in flames. The L’Héritage hasn’t sailed on nightly dinner cruises since before the Cataclysm, anyway, propeller dissolved by toxic chemicals, hull caked with morph-barnacles. Iggy flicks the switch, and the fluorescents blink to life.

“Have you seen yourself?” says Iggy, smoking. “You’re green around the gills.” He flings open his locker and digs around for a moment, emerging with a pair of hangers shrouded in plastic. “This oughta make you feel better.”

The light pulses. Iggy gives me his scaly grin. Murmurs and clinking waft in from the lounge.

I clutch the hangers and pull the bag up. “Oh, come on, Iggy.”

“She’s a beauty, right?”

“Pale pink?”

“Special for tonight,” he says.

I get the bag off and hold the tuxedo up in the light. “I’ll look like a, I don’t know – ”

“Stud, Rick. Smooth operator. Rico Suave.”

Scepticism mingles with fresh nausea. Something’s definitely off. “I was thinking more like a – ”

“Wait till you see the shirt.” He grabs the other hanger from me and rips through the plastic bag with one of his claws. “Check it out.”

I goggle. “Ruffles?”

“Try it on.”

“You’ve gotta be kidding.”

He crushes his cigar in a chipped plastic ashtray. “I’m not asking, Rick. Let’s go.”

So I wriggle into the thing. It’s a snug fit, but that’s the cut. A satiny stripe accents the legs. The jacket’s boxy with enormous lapels.

Iggy gives me an admiring head-to-toe. “What’d I tell you?” he says.

Against my better judgement, I glance in the mirror. “There’s no way I’m going out there like this, Iggy.”

He studies me, still as a stone, for a long moment. Light rain patters on the skylight above. A glass breaks in the bar. Now he forces a smile. “That’s why you need me, kid.”

I feel my face pucker.

“You’ve got no style.”

“This shirt’s completely ridiculous.”

“In my heyday, pre-morph, I would’ve knocked ’em dead in that thing.” He gets this faraway, misty look in his eyes. “Seriously.”

I gawk at my reflection. “I look like a swashbuckling pig.”

“You should be so lucky,” says Iggy. “Now get your head on straight. We’re on in ten.”

Alone in the dressing room, I try to work myself into the right mood for the show. The house is filling up. They’re here for me, mostly. Iggy always puts together a top-notch gourmet set menu, not so easy to find these days, but still, I’m the entertainment. It’s my job to make everyone feel good, even when I’m under the weather. Or wearing a ridiculous, ill-fitting vintage pink tuxedo with a ruffled shirt. That’s what I signed on for: I’m the crooner.

Anyway, I owe Iggy bigtime, so I’d probably go on if I were hacking up a lung. My most recent gig on the L’Héritage didn’t exactly end well. I was already deep into the hooch when Iggy introduced me. Somehow, I made it through the first set without any trouble. But at the set break, I knocked back a couple more at the bar when Iggy wasn’t looking, and the situation deteriorated fairly quickly from there.

That was three weeks ago. I didn’t think Iggy would ever want me back, but he’s been advertising this show for months, and maybe he couldn’t find another crooner. Not a pre-morph freak like me, a hundred percent homo sapiens.

Far as I know, I’m the only one left.

Iggy’s voice through the microphone rouses me from my stupor. “And now,” he says over a piano intro I’ve heard a hundred times before, “please give a warm welcome to the incredible, the unforgettable, Mr. Rick Beretta!”

Applause roars. Now the rhythm section comes in, bass line walking, high-hat snapping. The three of them play a few bars together before the horns slide in, blowing three-part harmony. I peek out from backstage. The place is packed. The heavy smell of martinis drowns the lingering scent of the prix fixe menu: quiche with haricots verts and potatoes au gratin, mixed greens with raspberry vinaigrette, and red velvet cake.

I stand there, studying the audience, though I really can’t make out any faces. Even if I could, I wouldn’t spot the one I’m looking for. Finny’s not out there, sipping tonic water and lime, waiting to hear the lilting melody of my song, the lyrics for her alone. She can’t be. It’s just not possible. Even if she were, it’s not as if the other morphs would let me get anywhere near her. Not at this late date. Still, I can’t help but imagine her seated at a table right up front, emerald sequins of her skintight dress glittering in the low light, thick brown curls piled up on top of her head, an unlit clove cigarette between her fingers.

I’m so lost in my daydream, I miss my cue. Iggy glares at me, and I quickly mouth, “Sorry!” In order to get back around to the opening, the band has to play through twelve full bars. Iggy never stops glaring the whole time, even during his short solo.

But enough’s enough, so I make my entrance a little early this time. I slide-step into the beam of the spotlight, my face lit up with my best cheesy grin. Applause swells. Now I amble a couple more steps, in time with the downbeat, and take a sip from my full glass of hooch. Laughter. I groove to the rhythm for a moment, offering appreciative nods to each member of the band. They wink bulbous eyes, wave scaly claws, and grin from mouths overstuffed with teeth. Just before I make it to the microphone stand, I do a quick spin move, without even spilling a drop of my drink, then point at the audience and cheese up my grin a couple notches.

The set starts off okay. I work through the first few numbers, including “Let’s Fall in Love,” “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby,” and “Come Fly with Me” without any real trouble. I can’t seem to get my voice warmed up though, so I flub a couple of high notes before I opt to go low instead. Iggy’s face is an angry question mark, but the crowd seems clueless as usual. I don’t have my lungs tonight either, so I can’t hold the dramatic finales to save my life. My breath comes in ragged gasps. I unknot my bowtie and unbutton my collar, then struggle through another number. It’s not pretty. When it’s over, Iggy announces a set break. We’ve only played a half a dozen tunes.

Soon as we’re offstage, Iggy rounds on me. “What is with you tonight, Beretta?”

The rest of the band shuffles off to share a joint and nip from a flask.

He backs me up against the cold steel wall. “You think this is karaoke or what?”

“Like you said, Iggy, maybe I’m coming down with something.” I stare at the chipping paint over his left shoulder.

He makes a show of lighting a stogie.

“This crazy getup you made me wear isn’t helping anything. Must be some pre-Cataclysm synthetic. It’s terrible.”

“Right,” he says through a blue cloud, “it’s the suit’s fault.”

I wipe sweat off my forehead, then scratch my left arm. “The thing’s hot and itchy. I can’t focus.” I make a move toward the dressing room, but Iggy grabs me by the ruffles and slams me back up against the wall. He’s a lizardy little guy, but he’s stronger than he looks. Meaner, too. His bluish tongue flicks at the damp air.

“I hired you back against my better judgement, Beretta. Don’t make me regret it.”

“I’m doing the best I can.”

Iggy glares at me, tightening his grip on my ruffled shirt. His nostrils flare. “That’s not good enough,” he says. After a long moment, he gives me another shove, then disappears down the hall.

We open the next set with “I Can’t Believe That You’re in Love with Me,” and the band’s tight. As for me, I manage to hit all the right notes. Despite Iggy’s sceptical glances, I don’t stumble or falter a single time. When I pull off “La Vie en Rose” without a hitch, Iggy stops glaring at me. Then we play knockout versions of “Moon River” and “L-O-V-E.” I’m having fun, almost feeling like myself again. The tension leaks out of Iggy’s bony shoulders, and, at last, the whole band relaxes into the performance. Still, I can’t say my voice is everything I want it to be. There’s a strange froggy quality to it, and I’m still having trouble breathing. Maybe it is the flu, after all – or, who knows, something worse.

When we break again, there’s a different vibe. I pass the flask around with the horn players, and I don’t even think about my restricted breathing. I forget about my hot, uncomfortable tux – though I notice that the colour’s all mottled now, the pale pink splotched green where I’ve sweat on it. No one mentions what happened during the first set. All Iggy says is, “Nice job, kid,” and we leave it at that.

A few minutes later, I say, “Hey, Iggy, let’s do something new for the last set.”

The band perks up. Iggy takes a slug from the flask, then nods and says, “What you got in mind, kid?”

“It’s Valentine’s Day, right?” I say.

The horn section mumbles. The drummer and bass player disappear in a fog of weed smoke.

“Not sure I like where this is going,” says Iggy.

Clinking glasses punctuate the low drone of conversation out in the lounge. I’m overwhelmed with a savage thirst. I reach for the flask but think better of it and grab a bottle of water. It’s the same water that used to come out of the taps back when they still worked, only it’s packaged in sealed plastic and a pretence of decontamination. I uncap it and take a long guzzle. Then I wipe my mouth and say, “How about an open-air set for our grande finale?”

Mumblings from the band: “Oh, man.” “Come on.” “I knew it.”

Iggy gives me his best world-weary look. “You realise it’s still raining, right?”

“That’s what awnings are for,” I say.

The rest of the band chuckles silently. Iggy, too. It’s this thing that morphs can do: Their eyes fill with laughter.

“Anyway,” I say, “I don’t mind getting a little wet.”

“Listen to Mr. Amphibian here,” says Iggy. Everyone laughs, scales dancing in the fluorescent light like sequins. “Who, by the way, still looks like death warmed-over.”

I take another guzzle of water. “I’m bouncing back, Iggy. I feel like a million bucks.”

Iggy sneers and shakes his lizard head. “I know exactly why you want to play out there,” he says.

“Finny’s gone,” say the band. “You wasn’t right for her anyway.” “Let her go, man.”

“You’re hopeless,” Iggy says, exhaling cigar smoke. “We play inside. End of story.”

The bartender Sal’s been keeping the martinis flowing, so the whole crowd’s pretty boozy when we take the stage again. The air’s saturated with the stink of hooch and stale cigarette smoke. Through the footlights, couples nuzzle and smooch. Hands wander under tables. Inebriated giggles erupt and are quickly quelled with muted, boozy shushes.

We open the last set with “Strangers in the Night.” Don’t ask me why. It’s never been one of my favourites. But it’s one we play well, and it’s a crowd-pleaser, too. As soon as I belt out that first line, I can’t stop thinking about Finny. She always loved that song.

But I don’t get bogged down in might-have-beens this time. We sail through our next few numbers, including “Unforgettable,” “Cheek to Cheek,” and “Memories Are Made of This.” I’m flying high – and then I’m not. That’s how quickly it happens. All at once, I feel green, but it’s not just in my gut, it’s more of an all-over nausea. My head throbs, throwing me off-balance.

Most of the band pretends not to notice my rapid decline at centre stage. Except Iggy. When I stammer and stumble through this verse or that chorus, he pounds a heavy, syncopated chord and glares at me. Even in my state, I catch his drift. Not that there’s anything I can do. I’m losing it, right here in front of everyone.

Forget shimmying and gyrating to the beat, much less snapping. By now, it’s all I can do to cling to the mike stand and spit out the lyrics more or less in time. My head’s swimming. I’m sweating through my tuxedo – which has now turned completely green, head to toe. My voice is growing hoarser by the line, so all the lovebirds in the audience might prefer that I forget the lyrics rather than massacre another tune with my croaking.

I clench my teeth, struggling to stay upright, even as I feel like I might puke and pass out. Talk about a buzzkill: It would ruin everyone’s night. But I’m doing everything I can to make it through this gig. (I can barely think that barbed word, much less say it.) My tux is saturated by now, its green deepening. My breath comes shallow and wheezy. Iggy fingers an intricate segue into our next number, trying to buy me some time so I can get my act together. And I appreciate it. Really, I do. But it’s no use.

So I stumble off the stage, careening past the bar and out to the deck. I stagger toward the railing. I think I’m going to barf into the river, but the night air cools me off, and my nausea subsides. Not that I feel normal. Not by a long shot. But at least I’m no longer on the verge of collapsing into a puddle of my own sweat and vomit.

I take one deep breath after another. My skin tingles. I feel myself relax. That’s when I realise I’m standing right where I spotted Finny for the first time. The way the evening sunlight played off her iridescent dress and her brown locks danced in the cool breeze, I thought she might be a fairy. Seriously. After the Cataclysm and all the mutations, anything was possible.

Now Sal, unsmiling, crosses the deck and hands me a cordless mike. Music flows through the outdoor speakers. I try to wave him off, but he sets the mike in my hand and closes my fingers around it. “You’re the crooner,” he says. “So croon.”

An oily chemical stink wafts off the river. I consider chucking the mike into the water with all the corroded car bodies, three-eyed eels, and bioluminescent fish-people. I have my arm cocked when I hear them: frogs. In this weather? I wonder, though everything’s changed since the Cataclysm. Some of them croak, while others chirrup. There’s something beautiful about it I’ve never noticed before.

I take a deep breath and flip the on switch, listening to the changes through the speakers, puzzling out my cue. But then something emerald and phosphorescent catches my eye. A splash. Another. Laughter drifting toward me.

“Finny?” I yell. The mike is live, so my voice echoes back to me through the speakers. I’m sure Iggy’s fuming.

More splashing and laughter, closer now.

I study the water around the L’Héritage. “Finny!” I yell, more loudly this time. I’m too close to the microphone: It distorts everything coming through the sound system. Now I know I’m in for it. I stride across the deck and lean into the doorway. I make eye contact with Iggy, twirling my index finger in a tight circle. He understands. Not four bars later, I launch into the tune, singing, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”

Between lines comes more laughter from the water. Without losing the beat, I ease back to the railing and gaze into the darkness. She must be out there, watching, listening. I sniff for her fragrance of lavender and honey, but all I get is the dank stench of algae, bleach, and heavy metals.

By the time I’m through the first verse, some of those lovebirds begin drifting outside, despite the damp chill. They crowd through the door, drinks in hand, and gather on the deck in the drizzle. Forget Iggy’s misgivings. They don’t even seem to notice the weather, lighting cigarettes, sipping martinis, swaying to the rhythm. This is our last number – the way I’m feeling, it has to be – so I dig deep and give it all I’ve got, making my melody as soulful as I can manage.

It happens during the instrumental break. The morphing, I mean. Though more likely it’s been happening all night, and some time before then, but now’s when the process makes itself known. Not that I understand what’s going on exactly, though I feel the changes. My headache disappears, and that all-over achy feeling vanishes. The only trouble is my voice. As I work my way into the final verse, it’s getting hoarse and croaky again. I try to push my way past it, to no avail. In fact, it gets worse. There’s no way I’ll be able to climb the ladder for the dramatic finale.

But that’s really the least of my worries right now. I can see it in the crowd’s faces. They gasp, point, and laugh – though not in a mocking way. After all, everyone here has already experienced a similar, if less dramatic, transformation. Because now my neck grows thicker, my head rounder and more bulbous. My chest expands, and I rip right through the ruffled shirt and green jacket. I seem to get taller with each breath, my legs sprouting so my tuxedo pants are highwaters, then clamdiggers, then shorts. I feel stronger than I’ve ever been.

Still, I make one last effort to finish the tune. “I would sacrifice anything come what might,” I croon, but what comes out is, “Grrribbit!” By now, the music’s stopped anyway. Iggy and the rest of the band crowd out to see what’s going on. When he spots me, Iggy’s lizard eyes go blank. He tastes the air with his bluish tongue, and a grin fans across his face. “Atta boy, Rick!” he says. Then to the crowd he shouts, “I didn’t think he had it in him. He went all the way, too. Drinks on the house!” It doesn’t take long before the hooch is flowing, and Iggy’s leading the hip-hip-hoorays.

I guess you could say I’m happy they’re happy. Maybe everyone will go home inspired and lovey-dovey and ready to procreate. Maybe they’ll people (if that’s the word) this ragged, post-Cataclysmic world with a new breed of resilient morph-children who are ready to clean things up and start anew. Right now, I really don’t care. I scan the dark waters below, intent on movement and sound like never before. Splashing, laughter. Mainly, though, it’s those frogs. I can’t not listen to them, and soon their croaking chorus swells until it’s all I can hear.

“Down here,” they croon.

“Come join us.”

“We’ll be waiting.”

With a quick hop, I’m up on the railing.

“Don’t leave now, Beretta,” hollers Iggy around his smouldering cigar. “The party’s just getting started.”

I don’t know what I’m doing until it’s done. “Thanks for everything,” I say over my shoulder, uncertain he’ll understand a word of it. “And sorry about tonight.” I give the crowd a quick wave. “Grrribbit!” I sing. Then I take a deep breath of damp air and, swollen with hope, I leap out into the night.

cataclysm nature

families nature Philippines

DISTANCE

by Litro • October 19, 2021October 20, 2021

The van sped through the provinces, past cement houses and bungalows sinking in the dust. Droopy roadside markets flashed in the headlights and vanished in the rearview mirror. Our tires kicked loose gravel down the road’s narrow edges as men emerged like apparitions around sharp curves, wandering on the side of the road or urinating in ditches at four and five a.m.

Next to the hired driver, my uncle Francisco sat with his seat reclined and arms folded behind his head, unfazed by the sudden turns and shifts in acceleration. It seemed that no matter where we were, my uncle found a way to relax. He had a job; he was the head policeman of the barrio, but I had never seen him in uniform. “Corrupt,” my husband Sam said after spending hours on the porch with him drinking San Miguel beer. “Your uncle’s a corrupt cop.”

In the van’s middle seat, my mother jabbered in Tagalog with Francisco’s girlfriend, Chesa. As usual since we’d arrived, my mother was doing most of the talking, her short body jumping and swaying with wild gesticulations. Chesa was taller and more slender than my mother, but they had the same round face, wide nose, and broad shoulders. The two women could have been sisters, my mother the smart one, Chesa the pretty one.

The women’s shrieks and screams made my muscles tense. Since our arrival at my uncle’s house, I’d awoken each morning to my mother’s laughter and the cocks crowing, and I couldn’t tell the difference when their voices mixed.

It was a side of my mother I had never seen before. My mother, who would hide from her neighbours in the grocery store. My mother, who would scrub the dishes most thoroughly when her American in-laws were visiting, busying herself in the kitchen to avoid conversation.

When I had a moment alone with her, I’d asked about it. She was gathering laundry to wash at the well. “How come you never laughed like this at home?” I asked.

Her accent was as thick as the day she immigrated to America with me, her infant daughter, in her arms. “Because there was nothing to laugh.”

Outside it was still dark. At the horizon, the sky lightened from black to faded-jean blue, the only trace of the sun that loomed just beneath it. In the back seat beside me, Sam was asleep or pretending to be. I swept a blond strand of hair off his forehead.

He’d reluctantly agreed to a trip to the Philippines with my mother in lieu of a honeymoon. With our wedding money, we could have gone wherever we wanted. His suggestions of Costa Rica and Barcelona were tempting, but I couldn’t blow the only opportunity I’d ever had to meet my mother’s family and to reunite her with her parents, whom she hadn’t seen in twenty years. “My grandparents are old,” I’d told Sam. “What if I never have a chance to meet them?” I warmed him up to the idea with photos of white, sandy beaches and coconut trees. He could go snorkelling, try real Filipino cuisine. But he didn’t agree until he saw the book 1000 Places to See Before You Die. He wanted to climb Taal Volcano and see its famous crater lake – a lake within a volcano within a lake.

The road grew windier and wrapped around the mountainside as we approached Tagaytay, the city overlooking Taal Volcano. As day broke, rays of sunlight revealed hills lush with pineapple crop. Roadside vendors sold fruit in thatched huts with tiny bananas strung along the roofs.

The driver pulled over so that we could look at the fruit. So many colours and shapes, so many things I had never seen before. “What’s this?” I asked my mother.

“Try it,” she said. So we bought star apples, jackfruit, mangosteen, calamansi. We ate bananas in the van and threw the peels out the window.

Tagaytay’s cliffside mansions were the most lavish homes I’d seen in the Philippines. Many were vacation homes built by Manila’s rich and famous, Chesa explained. Unlike my uncle’s dreary cement home, these houses were brightly painted, dotting the mountain like giant gumdrops.

We stopped at a cliff overlooking Taal Lake. The water was so deep and opaque, it looked black. Whitecapped waves glared like diamonds. Canoe-shaped bancas transported passengers to an island that stretched for miles. Hills ascended gradually toward the centre then swept stiffly into the volcano’s summit. In the crater was another large lake, obscured by patches of fog. Although we couldn’t see it from the ridge, Chesa said that inside the crater lake was another, smaller island.

“No, no, no,” my mother said when I asked if we could take a banca to the island. “You are not going in a boat.”

“Mom,” I smiled down at my mother, amused by her perpetual fearfulness of life. “Why not?”

“Because I said so.”

My mother had used those words against me in every argument we’d ever had, and I was surprised to find that time had not changed things.

“Look, Luz,” Sam said. “The boats are safe. The outriggers keep them from capsizing.

See?” He pointed at a banca rocking gently.

“No,” my mom said again. “One time our boat tip over and we almost drown. Never again,” she said. “Never again.”

“When did that happen?” I asked.

“When I went to Capones Island.”

“You never told me about that.”

“I went to Capones Island with the American lady I work for. She was pregnant, boy she was huge! But she was fat to start with.” My mom laughed. Sam raised his eyebrows.

“The boatman took us there. The ride was nice, but when we went home, it was windy, the boat was shaking. When we are very close to shore, the engine does not work anymore. We were scared, we screamed, ‘Help, help, help!’ No one heard us. So the boatman finally got out and push the boat to shore. My heart was pounding, I almost have anxiety attack! I tell you Emily, if you don’t know how to swim, the current will take you away till you get to the middle and drown!”

It took Sam a moment to process the information. “So your boat didn’t actually tip over?”

“No,” she finally said in her pouty way when someone used logic against her. “But we got stuck there so we almost drown.”

“You said you were close to shore,” Sam said.

My mom looked at my uncle for help.

“The waves are not uniform.” His tone was of a proclamation. “Look at those boats, how they rock! The wind comes from all directions. You cannot tell where it comes.”

Sam ignored him. “You’re telling me you won’t allow us to go in a boat because one time you were in one and the boatman had to push you a little ways to the shore?”

She didn’t say anything but stared at me with her black eyes. It was a look I had seen a million times, and always at the first sight of it, I looked away. But this time I kept my gaze locked on my mother’s. I’m sorry, I said silently, noticing for the first time a filmy quality in my mother’s eyes. Their black irises were fading at the edges, forming a thin blue ring. Had they always been like that, or was it a sign of age? I felt my mom’s eyes boring through me, as if she could see through to my soul everything that I was, and she did not like what she saw.

My face grew hot. “What?” I asked. My voice was coarse. My mother turned and began walking toward the van.

I watched her back, her almost-five-foot-tall figure bent low as she made her way up the incline. Sam put his arm around me. “Can’t argue with that logic,” he said under his breath.

I shrugged him off and followed my mother.

Our hotel room had no windows and no hot water. The toilet leaked, and the TV got spotty reception. But Sam and I had a room to ourselves. At my uncle’s house, our bedroom door didn’t lock, and the windows were unprotected by screens or glass. Anyone could stick their hand through the window, pull the curtains back, and peek at us at any moment, and they did.

For the first time in days, privacy. Sam reached across the bed and started to pull off my shirt. “Come here, my Island Princess.” His pet name drove me mad.

“I can’t. My stomach hurts.”

“Take some Imodium.”

“I did, but it’s not helping.”

I grabbed a magazine from the nightstand – an eleven-year-old issue of Time – and pulled the bathroom door closed. I was still angry from the previous night, when my cousins took us to a club on Subic Bay Naval Base. It was where my parents had met when my father was stationed in the Philippines with the US Navy. A band played rock covers from the ’80s and we ordered a bucket of San Miguel beer.

I was ready to leave before Sam was.

“You don’t have to come,” I said. “Just give me the key.”

“What are you going to do? Go back to the hotel and sit there alone? Don’t you know this is the last time you’re going to see these people?”

“I’m going to see them again. I’ll come back.”

“Really, Emily? In 24 years, how many times did you come back?”

My face grew hot, but I stayed quiet.

“C’mon,” he said. “Let’s just finish our drinks.”

His bottle was half empty, but he nursed it to stretch out our stay. I took a sip of my beer. It had warmed in the heat, but the wetness felt good against my dry throat. I kept drinking.

I took the magazine out of the bathroom and showed it to Sam. “Look,” I said. “When this volcano erupted, the hospital I was born in got crushed by volcanic ash.”

“That’s wild,” he said, but his eyes stayed fixed on the TV.

Instead of hiking Taal Volcano, we went to a nearby casino to placate my mother. Tagaytay’s Casino Filipino was one of the largest casinos in the Philippines. It had 150 slot machines, 20 poker tables, and a red Corvette offered as a jackpot.

A sign at the entrance prohibited patrons from using a slot machine until the previous user had been absent 15 minutes. I had never seen anything like it.

“See,” I whispered to Sam. “They’re so superstitious. They believe they have the power to influence things.”

As many times as I had tried to explain to my mother the laws of probability, the unlikely odds of her ever “winning the lottery,” nothing could convince her that it would not happen. When I win the lottery, Emily, I will buy you a big house. When I win the lottery, I’m gonna buy your dad a nice car. I’d asked her a million times while growing up, When will we go to the Philippines? The answer was always the same: When I win the lottery.

Marry a rich man, she’d say, with a playful pinch that didn’t feel so playful.

My mother handed a handful of cash to Chesa and Francisco. They wandered through the beeping machines, weighing their options. Sam and I split off and headed up a wide staircase.

On the second floor were a Chinese restaurant and several rooms set up for table play. Besides a few people eating in the restaurant, most of the rooms were empty. The door to one was propped open. Inside were dozens of rows of pews. Burning candles lined an altar, a fake wreath hung on a podium.

I had not been in a church in years.

“Wow,” Sam said. “Unbelievable.”

It was absurd. If I told my mother, would she come upstairs to pray for a jackpot? I slid into a pew and knelt. I clasped my hands under my chin and closed my eyes. It was a position once so familiar, now so unnatural and strange. What would I pray for? I could think of nothing but the redness of my eyelids, the dark spots and flashes of light that appeared on them, how they played before me like a blank film.

My family ate lunch at a restaurant overlooking Taal Lake, discussing our plans for the day. On the table was a plate of sisig, pigs’ ear. We squeezed lemon over the shredded meat and ate it with rice.

“It’s just shredded pork.” Sam said. But I refused to try it. He ate all the strange food my relatives placed before him: squid, sashimi, tiny crabs. He even ate the balut, a delicacy in the Philippines – a boiled egg with a partially formed chick embryo inside.

I avoided the strange food, yet I was the one who got stomach cramps after only a few days.

My mom suggested shopping, Chesa the zoo.

I looked out the window. “We want to climb the volcano,” I said.

“Ay anak,” my mom said. “I said no.”

“But why?” I felt as if I were eight years old again, begging my mother to take me on the Ferris wheel.

“It’s dangerous,” my uncle said. He was taking over resistance efforts this time.

“Francisco, we’ll be fine. Sam’s a good swimmer. I’ll wear a life vest.”

My uncle narrowed his eyes at me and said, “You don’t know how life is like here. I am a policeman. I see reports. Someone’s gonna kill you.”

At this, Sam and I burst out laughing. “I’m sure driving to work every day in Chicago is more dangerous,” Sam said.

“No,” Francisco argued, “You don’t believe. You don’t know the NPA.”

“What is that?” I asked.

“The New People’s Army,” Chesa explained. “They don’t like Americans.”

“They live in the mountains,” my uncle went on. “Just like the Huk.”

“The Huk? Didn’t they help the Americans in World War II?” I asked.

“Noooo!” my mom cried. “They’re the enemy, silly! The Hukbo, that’s what they call it!”

My mother exploded in a fury of Tagalog. I could not understand a word, but her voice was high and pleading, fast and slow, syllables enunciated and drawn out. I could see the frustration and anger exiting her body through swinging arm movements. When she was done, the restaurant was silent and people had begun to stare. Sam and I were the only ones who hadn’t understood.

“So basically, you’re saying we can’t hike up the volcano because some guerrilla fighters on it are going to kill us,” Sam said.

My mother ignored him and locked eyes with me. It was a piercing glare – and misdirected. Sam was the one being difficult.

Chesa sighed. “Ah, Luz. Let them go. I will go with them.”

My mother’s face looked tired and puffy. “Sige, sige,” she said. Ok, ok. It was more of a surrender than an agreement.

The handmade banca was sky blue on the outside, yellow on the inside. The bancero, a small man with a smiling face, stood with his bare feet in the water and helped me into the boat. Chesa crawled in after, holding the sides of the boat with both hands. Sam climbed in unassisted and distributed the life vests that were under his seat. We waved goodbye to my mother and Francisco as the bancero pushed us off shore, jumped in, and pull-started the engine like a lawnmower.

The breeze was cool against our skin, and wisps of hair swatted our faces. The sun was high in the sky, and I regretted that we had not brought sunscreen. Sam’s nose was already pink.

I watched the water for signs of life, but save for a few dark shadows found nothing. Sam photographed my fingers dipping in the water. We hit a rocky patch, and water shot up and pooled inside the boat. Sam tucked away his phone.

We were in the banca a long time, heading slowly toward the volcano. It was farther away than I had realised. When we finally reached the sandy beach, the mountains stretched so high above us I could no longer locate the volcano’s summit.

“Maybe we should just go back,” I said. “I don’t want to keep them waiting.”

“They can wait two hours. We’re already here,” Sam said.

Tourists were gathered at the base of the mountain, some just arriving and others on their way back. We followed a stream of people along a gravel path to a corral, where we rented a pony and guide.

The pony was an emaciated palomino with a mane that stood on end. Our guide was a woman in her 70s in flip-flops and a straw hat. She had a dark, wrinkled face, and her feet and legs were covered in dust. I felt guilty climbing into the saddle.

“Do you want to ride double?” I asked.

But the guide took the lead rope and began walking. “Boyfriend?” she asked.

“Husband.”

“Just married? Honeymoon?”

“Mm-hm.”

As we made our way along the path, I watched the guide’s back, the movement of her shapeless but brightly coloured sarong. The woman’s agility surprised me, the way she manoeuvred around the ruts and the loose rocks.

The horse trudged after her, head bent low, speeding up at the crack of the whip before falling back to a snail’s pace. I wondered when it had last had a drink. I imagined the horse collapsing beneath me at any moment.

Sam called for us to stop. When he caught up, he said that Chesa was done, she was going back down and would wait for us at the corral.

“Why doesn’t she ride the pony?”

“She didn’t want to.”

We decided to trade. Sam crawled on the horse and convinced the guide to get on behind him. I photographed the two of them on the back of the horse, their bodies swaying as the horse stumbled.

We had countless photographs and hours of video, but still we documented the hike up the mountain. Whoever was not on horseback would photograph the other, shooting from behind or running ahead to capture the riders head-on.

We’d recorded meeting my family at the airport, my uncles butchering the cow, my little cousins feeding mango leaves to the goat, Sam riding the carabao in the yard, and photograph after photograph of our welcome home party, family and strangers dancing, eating, singing, laughing.

Only once had I been asked to put our phones away, and that was when Sam recorded the chocolate meat. My mom had pulled me aside, into the bedroom, and asked me to make Sam stop.

“You don’t care that he recorded them slaughtering the cow, but you don’t want us to record people eating meat?”

“It’s gross,” my mom said. “He’ll show it to his mom.”

“He’s not going to show it to his mom! Besides, you can’t even tell what it is. It just looks like ground beef!”

And it was ground beef. Ground beef mixed with the blood and entrails and bits for which there was no other use. One bite had made me dry heave. But it was my mother’s favourite dish.

The hike was treacherous at the top. The rocks there were larger, jagged, and loose, the path steep. Lava flow had carved out deep ruts I had to pick my way around. My feet sent rocks careening down the mountainside. I picked up a black piece of hardened lava. It was too big to fit in my pocket, so I carried it in my free hand.

When we got to the top, Sam bought the guide a Pepsi, and we left her and the horse to rest. We walked over to the rim, where a line of tourists looked down into the crater of the volcano. The lake inside was so green and clear that I could see the white sand beneath the shallow water. Little foam bubbles formed and burst at the water’s edges, and in a couple of places steam was rising. It felt warmer to her there, watching the steam, and I wondered whether the heat was from the volcano or if I was imagining it. In the centre of the lake was a tiny green island.

The sky was dark by the time we made it back to the boat. Clouds loomed dense and low, obscuring the sun and sky. The wind had picked up and the cold air off the lake brought goosebumps to my arms.

I watched a banca running parallel to them, its rise and fall matching our own boat’s. The bow crashed on a wave and the stern lifted, then the stern crashed down and the bow lifted. The engine buzzed as we rocked along.

Waves splattered and a puddle accumulated in the boat. My lava rock drifted from one end to the other, swept along by the moving water.

We reached the halfway point soaked and windblown. I tied my life vest tighter and double-knotted it. I looked at Chesa but didn’t know her well enough to tell whether she was scared. Chesa was watching the waves with her arms crossed over her chest.

I reached for Sam’s hand.

The boat began rocked harder and leaned from side to side. With each gust, the outriggers plunged beneath the water. The bancero directed the boat with the oars but struggled to keep it pointed toward the shore. He closed his eyes against the sea spray and tightened his lips.

“Are we going to tip over?” I asked Sam.

He squeezed my hand.

I had never been in a boat that tipped over. Would it be a gentle plunge, or would there be a struggle? Would my head hit the boat? Would I get trapped underneath?

I could see the shore now. My mom would be there waiting with my uncle, their faces creased with worry, watching for our arrival. Over the boat’s motor, I imagined my mother’s voice. How loudly she would yell when she saw me, soaked and scared. How she would say I told you so.

A gale attacked the boat and did not relent. I closed my eyes and felt the boat lifting.

It was a gentle plunge, no time even to think about banging into the boat. The icy water stung. It was at once over my head and in my shoes and in the weight of my clothes clinging to my body. The shore, I knew, was not far off, but I sensed it growing farther.

I rose to the surface and located the shore. There was the sand, the water that separated me from it. With each wave I was losing ground. I swam toward the capsized boat, buoyed by my life jacket. A wave poured over my head and I coughed out the salty liquid. I was almost to the boat, and so was Sam. He moved quickly with broad strokes and reached the boat before me. He clung to an outrigger and waved his arm.

“C’mon!” Sam’s voice sounded far away.

I kicked and paddled and struggled against the waves after wave that poured over me. My arms and legs were tired. Chesa and the bancero reached the boat and were struggling to tip it over.

“What are you doing? C’mon!” Sam called, louder, and my legs stopped. My stomach was in stitches. Suspended in the water, a wave struck and carried me. I felt the distance growing wider. Miles wider every second.

By Elizabeth Iversen

climate change fear nature wildfires

THE SMOKE ECLIPSE

by Thomas Lee • October 18, 2021January 24, 2022 • 1 Comment

In 1983, my heart froze as I watched a movie about nuclear war while I sat in between my parents on a lumpy futon in our New Jersey apartment. Though I was only eight years old, my parents let me stay up to watch it because they thought I was old enough to learn about what was going on in the world. The mushroom clouds in the beginning didn’t scare me as I had seen plenty of explosions in my Saturday morning robot cartoons. But I felt a chill go through me as I watched a nice white family sit sequestered in the basement of their house, unable to go outside because of something they called radiation, which would seep through their skin and kill them slowly and quietly.

TV was both my babysitter and English tutor in those days, as we had immigrated from Korea a few years before and my parents spent most of their time running their deli in the city. American TV had taught me that with a bit of courage and technology, I could speed away from bad guys and destroy monsters, but radiation was something entirely different.

My mother put her hand on my arm, and said with alarm to my father, “He’s shaking.”

My father held me close in a bear hug and whispered in my ear, “Why are you scared? There’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s just a silly movie.”

What he said didn’t make any sense to me. It wasn’t just a movie. Every day on the news, there was something about nuclear missiles, the Cold War and the arms race. A war with the Soviet Union could happen any day, and if it did, how could Mommy and Daddy stop radiation? We lived in an apartment, since we were too poor for a house. Unlike that white family, we didn’t even have a basement we could hide in to give ourselves a fighting chance for a few weeks.

I panicked, thinking there was nothing I could do, nowhere I could go, and no one who could help against radiation. I cried in halting sobs, though I tried to stop myself because my father had told me that I was getting too big for tears. My mother turned the movie off, and, for the last time in my life, my parents let me sleep in their bed that night. I kept them both up though, as I tossed around wondering if I would die before I got a chance to grow up.

I didn’t die. Thirty-seven years later, I was a law firm partner who lived in Napa with my wife Lisa and son Johnny. COVID had kept me home for months, but I had found ways to keep myself safe and sane. In the dry, windy hills far from any urban crowds, I drafted deal terms from my three-bedroom house, and spent the evenings playing video games with my son and watching old movies with Lisa. Lisa’s website design business boomed during shelter-in-place, and our son’s school managed to keep him busy a few hours a day with distance learning materials. Our lives weren’t exciting as we couldn’t travel or visit the wineries, but we were healthy and doing okay financially, so we considered ourselves lucky in a world that seemed to be heading toward the final chapter of Revelation.

Not knowing how long this pandemic could go, I surrounded myself with some security blankets that gave me comfort whenever I felt a tinge of uncertainty at night.

Guns. I kept an over-under shotgun in the closet of our master bedroom. I secured it in a padlocked metal case that I kept in a rack too high for my son to reach. Lisa, a lifelong Democrat, didn’t like that I had brought a gun into the house but grudgingly admitted that in 2020, one might be a necessary evil. Korean like me, she was shaken by the news about Asian people being attacked because of COVID-triggered racism or having their businesses burned down in protests about police shootings. She told me a shotgun was okay for now, as long as our son didn’t know about it.

There was also an AR-15 she didn’t know about in a closet behind some old appliances in the attic. I was ROTC before law school, so I knew how to use that rapid-fire killing machine. If some racist mob came for us, I didn’t think they would break in two at a time, which was all a shotgun could handle. After I moved here from New Jersey, I learned that Koreans in California had a reputation for being armed and trigger happy, willing to sit on the rooftops of their businesses and homes with guns aimed at all comers. I found the “rooftop Korean” stereotype to be funny, and I embraced it.

Dog. I could not be around my wife and son at all times, so two-months into the pandemic, I adopted a year-old German shepherd that I found online. Johnny named it Destro, after the bad ass in the GI Joe cartoons that I had introduced him to on YouTube. After a few weeks of training, we managed to make him a loyal member of the family. Destro would try to tear off the face of anyone who spoke harshly to Lisa or Johnny, and in another year, he would be full-grown and fearsome enough to scare off most threats by himself.

Money. I always kept $10,000 in cash in a duffel bag in a safe in the den. To make sure the bills didn’t rot, I spent the oldest cash I had in the bag at the market and replaced it with newer bills each time I went to the ATM.

Face protection. Doctors were suggesting we all wear masks outside, but on Reddit I saw that people in some Asian countries had taken things to another level. They wore n95 masks over their mouths and noses, and plexiglass shields over their entire faces for double protection. Johnny had asthma, which some doctors warned could be a comorbidity, so I hoarded boxes of shields and masks in our garage to get us through the pandemic without ever getting hit by a speck of COVID. I wasn’t going to take any chances with this new disease, even if I had to look like a freak out of a sci-fi movie each time I went to town.

Some people count sheep to fall asleep. I counted my security blankets: bills, shields, masks, and bullets. I slept fairly well for the most part, thinking I had made myself as safe as I reasonably could under the circumstances.

One night in August, about five months into the COVID pandemic, I awoke at 3 a.m. to the crackling sound of thunder ripping through my house. The earth-shaking peals were so frequent and felt so close that I knew this wasn’t a normal thunderstorm. It sounded like a war in the heavens. I looked out the window and saw an absolutely gorgeous phosphorescent light show dance across the hills. Destro barked incessantly, like he was warning of us of coming hellfire, while Lisa covered her head with pillows, futilely trying to drown out the fury. Soon, Johnny stormed into our room and hid under the blankets next to her.

I was mesmerised by the pulsating lightning for 20 minutes. When I finally went back to bed, I couldn’t sleep, because I kept listening for rain and heard none. I shuddered as a chill went through my chest, much like what I had felt when I was a kid watching a movie about nuclear war. Dry lightning during the summer could only mean wildfires. My security blankets could not help with that.

After a sleepless night, I saw reports of brush fires popping up all around the Bay Area. They were still miles away from our home but were slowly encroaching into the parched grasslands in our part of Napa. I didn’t know what to do if we were told to evacuate in the middle of COVID. Over the past few years, some of our friends in other parts of the county had been forced to live on canned goods for days in makeshift shelters in school gymnasiums crammed with displaced families. During a pandemic, those shelters would likely be where mass-spreading events began. Our nearest relatives were my parents who lived in New Jersey. Since I didn’t want us taking a plane to get to them, I would have to take my duffle bag full of cash and drive my family 3,000 miles through states that had extremely high infection rates due to maskless douches. We seemed better off at home praying for the fires to be contained or veer off course, until the flames were literally licking at our backs.

Every day, I checked websites for an order to evacuate, but it didn’t come. Though we had become accustomed to being stuck on our property all day and night, we could no longer even go outside to our lawn, because wildfire smoke had turned the air into a tactile danger. We closed all of our windows and kept air purifiers running constantly because of my son’s asthma, but he still had to use his inhalers multiple times a day. Even so, my son did not seem scared by world events. He had questions but optimistic ones like, “When is this going to be over?”

All we could do during the day was sweat, work, and play aimless games on our phones and tablets. I could tell Lisa was nearly unhinged, because she started turning to wine by 2 p.m. each day. Though barely a 100 pounds, she would drink at least an entire bottle on her own before collapsing into bed at night. Under any other circumstances, I might’ve said something to her about drinking that much around the kid, but we needed something to keep ourselves from thinking about where we were. After all, I had started downing edibles like I was a kid with a pile of gummy bears on Halloween night.

I awoke as Johnny stormed into the master bedroom clutching his inhaler in his right hand. I thought it was the middle of the night because it was still nearly pitch black, except for the digital clock which blared in red 7:30. Those numbers made no sense to my groggy mind. At this time of year, sunlight from the bedroom window usually woke me at 7 a.m. every day without need for an alarm. It was too dark for 7:30.

“Daddy, you didn’t tell me there was an eclipse coming,” he said, his voice an octave higher than normal.

“There isn’t an eclipse,” I replied getting out of bed. Lisa had gone way beyond one bottle the night before, so she still had not stirred.

“Then where is the sun hiding?” He had a point. I looked out the window, and I could barely see anything in our dim backyard.

I walked outside barefoot in my shorts and T-shirt, and saw that the sky wasn’t black as it would be at night but filled with murky orangish clouds that seemed to darken everything that should be bright. The entire world had been pulled into an old movie camera and transposed onto film negative.

My son followed me outside and pointed upward to those bizarrely burnt clouds. “You see? Where is the sun?”

I would’ve known about an eclipse, since I checked the internet religiously every 10 minutes for updates about COVID and the fires.

“The smoke must be blocking out the sun,” I told him.

“So it’s a smoke eclipse?” he asked, still holding his inhaler.

“Kinda like that,” I said. I tried to reassure him by adding, “But it’s from fires that are still far away. We don’t have anything to worry about.”

My son didn’t seem satisfied by my response, “Daddy, are we going to die?”

“Not today, and not for a long, long time,” I replied, though truthfully I didn’t know and I had less confidence that morning than I did the night before.

I walked him inside to his room, and I gave him his tablet. As soon as I heard the beeps of his favourite game, I turned on my laptop and checked the weather reports. I read that fires from near the Oregon border had flooded the atmosphere with so much smoke that we were experiencing, “…a glimpse of nuclear winter.” The words transported me back to my old futon, terrified of radiation, though my parents vainly tried to assure me that I was safe. We had already lost travel, restaurants, get-togethers, and the outdoors, and now we didn’t even have daylight to give us comfort.

Throughout that day, my wife drank plenty of Napa’s finest, so she fell dead asleep right after dinner. After I put our son to bed, I stayed up with my laptop in the living room, entering into online rabbit holes that tried to forecast the end of these strange times.

As I read through a thread about an Oxford vaccine, I heard little footsteps scrambling in the hallway. I got up and saw Johnny running aimlessly from one end of the hallway to the other. I grabbed him by the arm so he would stop wandering, and he looked up at me with unfocused, dazed eyes.

“Are you okay?” I asked. He didn’t respond and seemed to look through me. I guessed he was sleepwalking, though he had never done that before.

As I picked him up and carried him to his room, I felt his pitter-pattering heart against me, frantically racing like he was scared for his life. He had sweat through his dinosaur pyjamas, and, as I lowered him into his bed, I could feel that his race car sheets and blankets were also wet.

I lay down next to him in his twin bed, and he looked directly into my eyes and cried, “Where are we going to go? What are we going to do?”

I held him tightly and whispered in his ear, “It’s okay to be scared. I’m scared too.”

BURGLARIZING

by Elena Ender • October 16, 2021October 17, 2021 • 1 Comment

I woke up in a panic realizing I forgot to brush my teeth. I’ve always been bad about it, but when I remember, I have to commit. It was 2 a.m. and I turned on my bathroom light. My face scrunched up with the abrupt flick of the switch, then I heard a rustling in the living room. I squeezed the Colgate onto my damp toothbrush and headed to the living room to see what my cat Fernando had gotten into.

Stepping into my living room, I was taken aback. Fernando was sleeping silently on the couch, but a tall man in a ski mask was crouched over my coffee table with a duffel bag. I knew I should have gotten a dog instead.

“Excuse me, sir, are you burglaring me?”

“Burglaring?”

“Wait, no, that’s not a word… burglarizing? No. Thieving?”

“I mean, I think that last one’s a word, but I don’t think that’s the one you’re looking for,” he answered.

“I’m so tired, I don’t know…”

“Stealing?” he offered.

“No, it’s something bigger, more professional.”

“Professional? I’m robbing you.”

“Robbing! That’s the one! Yeah, you’re robbing me. Shit, what do I do?”

“Back up, stay quiet,” he hushed.

I put my toothbrush down and my hands up, and backed against the wall. “Please don’t shoot me. Or stab me. I don’t know what type of weapon you usually carry with you.”

“I could shoot you,” the burglar said. There was an inflection in his voice that made me instantly know he was lying.

“Sir, I just want you to know that I’m an INFJ, so I’m a little bit psychic. I know you don’t have a gun.”

“What does that mean?” he shook his head. “How do you know that?”

“Sir, can we please talk for a second? I don’t want any trouble. I was just wondering if I could keep some of the stuff in my purse you won’t need.”

“What?”

“Like my license. I don’t want to have to go to the DMV and stand in line to wait for another one,” I said. “And maybe my debit card, because I’d have to call Wells Fargo to cancel it anyway, and then I’d have to get a temporary card. And if I need to get anything online between now and the time I get my official replacement card, I’d have so many cards on my Amazon account and that’s kind of annoying.”

“You’ve got to be joking.”

“You can keep the purse itself, it’s a Dooney and Bourke, which is a good brand. You can sell that for like $60 at any secondhand shop that knows what it’s doing. I got it at Goodwill for practically nothing, but they don’t know which end is up. But I have a journal in there with some very humiliating confessions I’d really rather not let out. And a chicken tortilla soup recipe. And my favorite chapstick, Burt’s Bees pomegranate flavor.”

“Oh my god, fine!” He dumped out my purse like an emotional blubber among confidants.

“I’m sorry…”

“What?!”

“I just… in the zipper part there are a few tampons… do you mind if I keep those?”

“Fine, whatever,” he scooped those out and put them on the coffee table.

“It’s just that tampons are like $12 a box and I can’t really afford to waste any.”

I hesitated. “Where’s my laptop? Did you take my laptop?”

“Shut up and sit down.”

“Listen. That’s okay, I have Geek Squad insurance: It covers viruses, water damage, and theft. But, do you mind if I email myself some Word docs and some other stuff I can’t lose?”

“You can’t be serious.”

“I have a few essays I haven’t turned in yet. Plus, I just finished making this beautiful new résumé on InDesign that I’m super proud of. I’d hate to lose it. It took me way too long to figure out how to crop my headshot into a circle. I don’t think I’d be able to recreate it.”

“You have a phone; where’s your phone?”

“Are you trying to make a call right now?”

“Oh my god, no, I’m taking that, too.”

“Oh, okay, for a second there I was really confused. But I’m sorry, I don’t have my phone right now. I dropped it down the escalator at City Target so it’s at the Apple store for repairs.”

“You shitting me?”

“No, this is my real life,” I shook my head in disbelief.

“Fine.”

“Can we take inventory or something?”

“What?”

I looked around and mumbled to myself, “I see you got my CD player, which honestly is embarrassing for me to have kept after 2012, but I guess here we are. So that, and…oh, my watch—it’s not in the little jewelry tray by my keys…”

“Wait, what are you going on about?”

“For insurance purposes. Like, together we can organize a list of things you’re taking with you, so I can have a concrete list of stuff for my insurance company to compensate me…” I scrunched up my face trying to work out the puzzle pieces of that last sentence. “Compensate me for? Compensate me with? I’m so tired, man.”

“I’m not going to sit here and make a list with you.”

“Why not? I’m being very accommodating, wouldn’t you say?”

“Not as much as someone who keeps their mouth shut and leaves me alone.”

“Fair enough,” I turned into the kitchen. “Do you want anything? Water? Coffee? I have some leftover pumpkin loaf from my book club meeting today. Or, I guess, yesterday. It’s morning now.”

“No,” he said. With a beat, he finished, “Thank you.”

“Are you sure? I could put some in a Ziploc for you. I have plenty. Just zap it in the microwave for, like, 10 seconds and have it with some chai. Have you ever had the powdered chai from Trader Joe’s? My cousin Jocelyn got me addicted to it.”

“Fine! Fine! I’ll take some pumpkin loaf. But I need to get out of here.”

“How did you get in here in the first place, may I ask?”

He didn’t respond.

“What was so special about my place?” I cut off two slices of the pumpkin loaf and packed them in a Ziploc. “Did I leave the door unlocked? Were you watching me for a while, seeing when I’d be around?”

“No,” he said a bit shyly.

“I’m here almost all the time; I work from home.”

He didn’t seem to care.

“That takes a lot of skill though, to break into an apartment. I’m a little impressed.”

“Thanks,” he mumbled back, avoiding eye contact.

“I’m just confused as to why,” I handed him the food.

He was silent, looking at the post-seasonal Christmas lights lining the full perimeter of my ceiling.

“So, you’ve got to get out of here?” I asked. “Is there anything else I can get you? Maybe some silver candlesticks?”

He let out a light chuckle. “Les Mis. Good one.”

“Thanks, this was fun,” I admitted, shooting him some friendly finger-guns.

“Yeah?” he popped his hands up jubilantly in reflex to the finger-gun bit.

“Yeah,” I almost blushed. “Ooh, what if we commit arson?” I suggested.

“What!?”

“Again, for the insurance. We could just, like, torch the place.”

His tone shifted, “Oh my god, no!”

“Um, okay,” I backed off, a bit bummed and offended. “I didn’t think it was out of the realm of possibilities.”

“No!” he insisted.

“I was just ‘yes, and-’ing you. But, whatever, I guess.”

“That was like forty steps too far. This is your own place!”

I looked around, uncommitted to the walls. “I’m just renting.”

“You’re insane.” Visibly shocked, he turned towards the door.

I rolled my eyes, “Okay, I am so damn sick of men calling women ‘crazy’ and ‘irrational’ and ‘arsonists.’ Like, c’mon, this is the twenty-first century; we should have evolved past this kind of misogyny—” I was cut off by the door slamming, the burglar gone without any of my shit.

intruder

IT’S LONELY OUT IN SPACE

by Judy Bolton-Fasman • October 16, 2021October 16, 2021

The other night my brother-in-law called us at three o’clock in the morning – the time equivalent of no-man’s-land. He was gasping for air; he was in a fevered panic. He had just realized that the Tylenol capsules he took had long expired. He was frightened that the dud medication would not budge his temperature. “I’m burning from the inside out,” he said. His temperature had edged up to 104. He was inhaling flames. His oxygenation had plummeted to 90 percent. Black and white dreams, played out in old-fashioned reels, buzzed in his head.

In these COVID-drenched dreams, he is suspended in the darkest galaxy, about to free fall. There is no freedom in sloughing off gravity. He longs for the blue marbled earth so far away. I’ve had those scary dreams of flight, too. When I was little, I regularly dreamed that I jumped from the top of the basement stairs with the certainty that I would crack my head open. I woke up just before I hit the yellow and red squares of damp tile where I knew I would lay in a pool of my blood.

I am a child of the ’60s and ’70s who witnessed astronauts precariously tethered to their space ships, eerily floating in negative space – the absence of light outlining their bodies. I dreamed I was one of those astronauts in my own free fall. As the song went – “It’s Lonely Out in Space.” When I awoke, I was drenched in sweat; my stomach ached as if I had been on a rollercoaster. Adrenalin powered my booming heart for hours.

My brother-in-law says he feels like he’s breathing in rock dust – raw and granular, scraping his throat, attaching to his lungs. He says the wheezing is breaking his chest open. His heart is exposed. “I’m going to die in this COVID pit,” he says, too weak to cry. I peer into that pit – it’s full of phlegm and germs that look like the tinker toy depictions of the coronavirus with their red golf tee-like projections.

“This is not your time to die,” my husband tells his little brother. “You’re young, and you’re otherwise healthy.” My husband’s common sense has always been his armor. “You’ll get oxygen when you get to the ER.”

My brother-in-law needs that breath of life. I think of the goddess herself blowing holy air into his nostrils. This is the power of creation in a straight through line from the Garden of Eden to the Emergency Room. My brother-in-law is not a believer, so I don’t mention the creation myth to him. I only tell him to imagine a perfectly oxygenated space where his lungs gently inflate and then deflate without interruption. He does not have pain as his breath travels through his throat and chest.

Suddenly I hear the maraca sound of my brother-in-law shaking pills or maybe stones in a bottle. It’s the treacherous Tylenol that will never heal at full-strength. It’s three o’clock in the morning, and my husband, brother-in-law, and I are the only people awake in the world. “Breathe, buddy,” my husband says. He’s put his arm around his brother with his gentle tone of voice. “You can do it.” But none of us is sure. My brother-in-law has COVID and will be transported to the hospital in an ambulance clutching that bottle of inert Tylenol. He will continue to reach out to us through space and over time long after we’ve hung up.

COVID family illness space

SKYWRITING

by Gabrielle Griffis • October 15, 2021October 15, 2021

I was three miles into the mudflats. An airplane with a banner trailing behind flew over trying to sell me car insurance. Current flowed between my toes, around my legs. I couldn’t remember the last time I felt something different. Like spruce limbs rubbing against my face. The smell of terpenes emanating from pine trees.

I looked down at a hermit crab getting pushed around by the tide. Its shell rolled over the sand. The crab had no idea about the banner trying to sell us car insurance. Or at least I assumed it didn’t.

The tide was going out, getting further away from the cord grass along the shore. Minnows swam in rivulets.

I envied the mottled seagulls padding the sand for shellfish and the others bobbing leisurely in the sun. Regardless of their encounters with beach rubbish, they’d never understand the words capitalism or free-market economy. Their retinas wouldn’t burn with internet advertisements. Algorithms wouldn’t be designed to manipulate their taste for earthworms and larvae.

Above, a gecko gave us the thumbs up, telling us we’d save money. I was the only one in a three mile radius that could drive. I was tired of being stalked by salespeople, buy this razor, use this laundry detergent, try this bottled water that will give you life-enhancing abilities.

Unless the sandpipers were hoarding crustaceans, no one was hoarding wealth out in the mudflats. The ibis, the terns, the mussels, and amphipods weren’t monetising their interests to pay off loans. They were just trying to find food and not die. They weren’t aware of another alternative fate, one where they were captured and sold for a few bucks at a fish market or souvenir shop.

My shirt fluttered in the wind. I waded onward, edging towards the drop off.

Down shore, CEO yachts floated in the bay. Fortune 500 execs smoked cigars and golfed. I could smell their fermented tobacco.

I wondered why something good couldn’t have been written in the sky, like Don’t worry, you will find out the meaning of life or There’s a good reason for suffering. But no, it had to be something stupid about reducing car payments.

“We’re screwed,” I said to the hermit crab.

The crab extended a claw, pointing upwards.

I laid down in a stream, and water trickled over my skin. At least the molluscs didn’t want my credit card. Everything smelled of decomposing microbes and silt. If I laid long enough, the ocean would pulverise me into dust, like the papery flesh of dead fish.

So much for the pull of the moon.

Several billion years had produced airplanes, LaserJet printers, and overcomplicated systems designed by sociopaths to dominate the unsuspecting public. Back on land, I was swimming in nonessential information. Searching, sorting through noise, smoke signals, ideas. I envied the ribbon worms and periwinkles oblivious to the gravitational force of concepts. I was three miles into the mudflats, and I didn’t want to go back. I wasn’t buying anything. I’d eat krill if I had to, live out my days as a withered sea urchin in a driftwood shack. My decisions would be simple. I could roam unexplored channels of the mind. I would write my own messages in the dirt with a stick that said no thank you.

Below the waves, an oyster filtered excess nitrogen to thicken its shell. I was trying to turn nonsense into something useful.

capitalism nature

anti-novel oulipu Paolo Pergola

BOOK REVIEW: RESET

by joshua calladine-jones • October 14, 2021October 14, 2021

By the beginning of Paolo Pergola’s Reset, the central action of the story has already taken place. The narrator, finding himself stranded in a hospital bed some time after the fact, does little more than remain in the aforementioned bed for the duration of the novel, or rather, for as long as he possibly can before being forced to leave by the reality of his recovery. He was the victim of a car accident, a struck-down pedestrian. By his convalescent bedside, he keeps two books with him at all times, which he reads and rereads intermittently: Ivan Goncharov’s 1859 novel Oblomov, the story of a man who rarely departs from his bed, let alone the bedroom itself; and Georges Perec’s 1967 work Un Homme qui Dort (A Man Asleep), a tale told in the intimate second-person Tu of a student who turns away from the world in indifference. From these two references, it should be clear the direction of Pergola’s concept and the emotional register of his writing.

Not coincidentally, Paolo Pergola is a member of Opificio Letteratura Potenziale, or OPLEPO, the Italian equivalent of France’s Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or OULIPO, of which Georges Perec was a pioneering and prominent member. The intentions of Paolo Pergola, then, seem to be to write a story in which the protagonist’s actions are made entirely in the negative: He negates his active existence, he abdicates the throne of life. Everything he does he does instead of doing something else. Not only this, but Pergola himself negates his own native Italian, writing the book instead in English. His narrator’s decisions are made as substitutes in place of (in a conventional and day-to-day sense) actually existing. In a pseudo-Platonic way, his narrator’s life becomes one of metaphysical contemplation, and a parody of the act itself:

People do talk about sleeping. but in the sense of dreaming, my dream is this or that. But sleeping per se, is not talked about much, for example in books. Nobody talks about sleeping in the sense of reaching the basal metabolic rate, I mean, taking into account only the essential energy expenses necessary for staying alive. On the other hand, when you wake up, you are active, your metabolism increases, so you have to eat, and if you eat, you digest, and your digestion increases your metabolism even more, so you can’t take it anymore and that’s why you get sleepy after a good meal. So, you might as well stay in bed.

He might follow Schopenhauer as he turns away from the world’s cruelties and banalities. He might follow Diogenes as he defers the responsibilities of everyday life to be aloof and exempt from the world. But he is neither a philosopher nor a cynic. Neither is he a monk, as most of his contemplations are strictly material and worldly, and many of them are remembrances of a past sometimes as mundane as the present he intends to avoid. Schooldays come back to him, replete with first crushes, bullies, and classroom humiliations, doubling back into the present time, where he tries to anticipate their relevance to his life and their reappearance:

As a young boy I dreamed that I would become a movie director when I was grown up. It must have happened in middle school, that is, a few years after not having saved Caterina Magri, when I came up with this idea. I dreamed of becoming a movie director, of becoming quite famous, and then shooting the movie I had always dreamed of, a movie filmed and produced by myself. I would have called this self-produced and self-filmed movie “Closed Today”. I remember that it didn’t matter what the movie was going to be about, I mean, it could have been a western with fistfights and pistols, a kind of remake of Sergio Leone’s films and it would have been just fine. It could also have been a comedy, a thriller, or even a thriller comedy, that would have been alright. The important thing was not the content, but the title: “Closed Today”.

From his hospital bed, this narrator, Lapo (a marine biologist and experienced traveller-hitchhiker, making him almost interchangeable with Pergola himself) muses on multifarious potential concepts, endeavours and projects, most of them ways to trick and expose. For instance, his film Closed Today would cause the accidental mass-closure of cinemas. Following this, another project is to create a novel that doesn’t exist, in the sense that it cannot be found and thus cannot be bought:

You go to a bookstore, you look for a book, then you go to the counter and say I don’t remember the title, what was it? In Search of a Title, something like that, but I do remember the author, it’s so-and-so. The bookseller looks it up on her computer, and all she gets is No Title Found. I’m sorry, sir, but there is no title by that author. Out of curiosity, I also checked on my computer to see what comes up if one looks for No Title Found, on that bookstore website. If you look for No Title Found, you get No Title Found.

As a result, after some time the book begins to resemble a reliquary of ideas, all of which are paths-not-taken, though they might run parallel to the book. This is frustrating but also amusing and lightens the pretensions that “experimental Oulipian literature” might bring as a form of writing. Instead, the avant-garde is clothed in kid’s-wear. His niece proposes a new way of storytelling (reductio ad purissimum sensum), where all elements of speech can be reduced to a few Nabokovian keywords:

And for any sentences, two keywords are enough, two keywords say it all, you’ll see, she tells me. Tell me a sentence, so that I can show you how it works, Uncle Lapo. Okay, here it is, today Dr. Braglia came to visit us, then you came with your grandmother. And she goes doctor, grandmother. So I tell her, yesterday Rome won one to zero, and she goes Rome, won. What if I tell you something more complicated? I ask her, like some songs? Try it, uncle Lapo, she replies. At the Oriental fair my father bought a mouse, I tell her. And she goes, fair, mouse. And if I tell you Rome, don’t be silly tonight? Rome, silly, she says.

And so nothing happens and nothing continues to happen, until eventually it does, and the narrator begins to realise that to opt-out of living is to opt-out of personal choice. Life is lived on his behalf, and unsurprisingly, takes some less-than-optimal turns. The book is in this way an anti-novel, in which the character is a non-character whose life takes place in the background of the lives of others: a walk-on part, an extra, an NPC. The tone is light and mischievous, but this airiness soon gives way to an expanding sense of melancholy. The cosy feeling of being exempt from being, of being taken care of, of being a patient (unique for being marked as an invalid; neutral for being a nonentity) transitions into the feeling of being excluded, of being expected to act, of being misunderstood and left out.

The narrator dabbles in conventional pastimes: mass-market literature, videogames, et cetera. These minor social and personal pleasures of contemporary life soon begin to seem equal and identical to its banalities. Facebook, Nintendo, Eat Pray Love. As exercises in passing the time, they easily achieve their objective, and no more. Pointless as they seem, they are made to equate with the position the narrator finds himself in: His vegetation is the logic of an expected “normal” life, taken to its point of illogical conclusion. The demand to be productive, to progress, to advance in self-fulfilment, in career, in experience, in marriage, is a form of constant movement, which from a certain angle, resembles a total stasis: a neutralis.

The question of whether it can be considered responsible or reasonable for a person to simply stop living and shirk all responsibility isn’t exactly underlined in the narrative arc. Implicit, instead, is the self-defeat of a man, brought on by an accident. What the book does succeed in is the arduous goal of keeping the attention of the reader throughout a process specifically engineered for nothing (or as close to nothing as possible) to happen. This isn’t an easy task, and this novel-of-peculiarity actually becomes increasingly depressing in an alarmingly predictable order (break bones, lose friends, lose wife, leave country). Nonetheless, this is all carried off with Pergola’s comedic sense of the absurd, his toilet humour, his infantility, his regressions, until it sometimes seems he has acquiesced into the same mundanity his narrator wants to escape. For a novel so ostensibly light, it leaves the impression of a freedom won but at the expense of a sparse, sprawling hopelessness. This, of course, is its broadest success.

Reset
By Paolo Pergola
Sagging Meniscus Press, 144 pages

ZHARA’S CHOICE

by Tom Reynolds • October 13, 2021October 13, 2021

Now that the sun had set, and it was quickly getting cold, Zhara’s ungloved fingers tingled against the metal of the rifle in her hands. From her makeshift hide, the grassland of Nairobi National Park stretched out below and she could still see much of the natural landscape, lit as it was by the purple and red sky. Black silhouettes billowed theatrically in strange shapes across the hills, and though a plane on final approach whirred an unpleasant and tonal whine, Zhara chose only to notice the beautiful dancing shapes that she knew to be large collections of animal life; they moved freely over the undulating terrain, like the shadows of fast-moving clouds.

Rumours of a new poacher team operating were being circulated, and her lions had been missing for three days. “I’ll do what I have to,” she thought, though with less of the relish she and her fellow recruits had shown recently when posturing during ranger training. With 30 minutes until total dark, she scanned left and right in search of her pride, or the poachers, or both. She looked right to the north where the park halted at the edges of the city and the buildings of the financial district loomed upwards like watchtowers. From the corner of her magnified scope she saw what might be two men and spun the rifle toward the shape, her hands clutching the weapon too tightly.

She held her breath.

Nothing. Just the movement of some distant bushes that flapped in the breeze. All at once she missed her daughter Layla more than at any time so far during her first two-week field patrol, and she wished to be safe and at home and able to care for her, the way she did now for the lions. She scanned toward the west where a flock of pelicans took flight. They crossed the dark purple bar of dirt and soot that rested just above the horizon like a lid, and climbed upward into the clear air.

Wait! There!

Below the birds Zhara spotted her pride emerging from the bushes, and she peered back into her scope for a better look. The males, females, and cubs: She noted each as they entered the open area until all were accounted for – everyone was there and safe! She opened her diary and with slightly numb fingers manoeuvred her pencil to note the sighting time and location. Looking again through her scope to watch their behaviour, she noticed an unusual movement in a large swathe of silvery blue grass a hundred metres upwind of the pride. The lions were less playful too, and more aware.

Then she spotted the two men. Their outlines were mostly well hidden, but each time they moved the long grass around them waved, as if to her, so that their presence was now unmistakable. The dust twisted around in the breeze, and Zhara smelt a dryness that she could not quite explain; it tasted as if the dirt from the floor were at the back of her throat. She watched as the men crept forward on their bellies.

She wished desperately that they would back off, think better of it, and go. They writhed closer still, and she gently cradled the trigger with her hooked index finger. A sickly shiver of unease expanded outwards from her stomach. She waited without breathing, and they crawled closer and closer.

They were nearly in range of the lions now, and she needed to take the shot.

At this distance the bullet would drop slightly, and so she had to be careful; exactly as she’d been taught in training. She tilted the muzzle upwards slightly and tried to calm her breath, which was now erratic and came in little gasps.

She squeezed the trigger gently.

Paused. And fired.

The sound of the gunshot slapped against the distant hills, and a group of wildebeest that had been resting nearby scattered in a flurry of hoof-churned dust. Zhara could barely hear their grunts above the thumping of blood in her temples.

Slowly, she lowered the aim back down toward where the poachers had been.

Her shoulders slumped, and the barrel dropped; the men were running away.

The warning shot had worked.

She regrouped with her two squad mates who arrived soon after the shot, and together they set up camp. The fire burned orange as they lay on olive sleeping mats. With their packs for pillows they looked upward, and the flickering light drew pencil lines of the spindly acacia branches under which they rested.

“You should have shot them,” Abuya said, dismissively flicking an apple core into the leaping flames. “I would have.”

“But they were scared off – there was no need to shoot them,” Zhara said.

Abuya sucked a long hiss of air through her lips and shook her head. “They’ll be back. If I’d been there we’d have chased them down.”

“I joined up so I could care for the lions, not kill people.”

“It’s one or the other.”

“But why do we have to choose at all?” Zhara sat up from her mat with her legs crossed, and the fire warmed her face. Above the flames, small orange diamonds floated upward and were gone.

“They made the choice when they entered the park,” Abuya said. “You made yours when you swore an oath to protect the animal life in it.”

Nadia stepped over Abuya to the other side of the fire where their evening meal was boiling over the edges of the blackened cooking pot. She and Zhara were junior to Abuya and took it in turns each night to cook. As she passed behind Zhara she brushed a hand across her shoulders. Zhara watched her as she carefully ladled out three mess tins of stew in equal measure. She remembered her previous job here as a safari guide; all the tourists from around the world who were mostly happy and polite.

“I wish it didn’t have to be that way,” she said.

“No point wishing that.”

“Will you stop?” Nadia said, handing out the tins before taking a seat between them. “You’re not helping.”

Zhara stirred her fork around the thick brown stew. The food was salty and hot, and when she ate, the liquid warmed her from inside out. After a moment Abuya was talking again and Zhara knew she was being watched for the reaction in her face.

“Believe me,” Abuya continued, “it gets real clear that first time, when you watch a guy cock his rifle or notch his bow and he’s in for the kill; when he’s up close, and you can see the buzz in his eyes, and you feel what he feels, and you know there will be death because you can smell it like shaved bones being boiled. And then it’s just a numbers game; hundreds of remaining lions here versus billions of people.” She rolled onto her side to face Zhara. “And then…” she wiggled her index finger in the air like a worm, “you tell me you don’t have to choose.”

Nadia reached over Zhara and spooned some more stew into the tin discarded at her side. “Here,” she said, “eat – we’ve got a big day tomorrow.”

As the dying light from the embers flickered in the darkening night, Zhara could see the distant lights of the city. She thought of Layla for some time, and then of her mother who looked after her now, and her younger siblings, too. They were all at home and protected in the safety of that artificial glow. A wind in the trees stirred the branches above, and she pulled her sleeping bag up around her shoulders.

The other two slept soundly in their beds.

They broke camp the following morning and went in search of the lions. The pride was roving much more than they once had; Abuya said it was because they knew something was up. It was hard to disagree.

Heading north initially, they skirted an almost entirely dry watering hole, visited these days by just a few parched birds pecking in the soggy mud that remained.

Abuya then led them west as the hazy sun rose higher at their backs. Zhara was glad for the hat which gave shade to her neck and shoulders and, when they stopped in the shadow of some trees, she took it off and fanned the warm air around her face. The sweat that glistened across her head and cheeks felt cool for a moment, and the buzzing flies that were their usual companions moved away in search of another resting place.

An hour later Zhara picked up the clearly outlined paw prints of two adolescent males. They led towards a thicket of greenery that stood alone in an area of otherwise arid grass. Placing each foot silently in front of the other, she followed them to the entrance of a narrow track through the bushes.

“Definitely two tracks!” she said, waving to her teammates behind her. They both peered around the landscape at first before running lightly to fall in behind her at the entrance to the bushes. Zhara crouched to avoid the tangled branches above as she entered the dark space, shaking off the thorns pulling at her shoulders. Somewhere out of sight was the angry buzzing of a million flies. She turned a corner that led to a clearing, and the noise grew louder.

There they were; two lions from the pride…

They were facing away from her, and their limbs pointed out at strange angles. It was then that Zhara saw what had caused that uncomfortable feeling of wrongness as she’d approached: Their feet had all been cut off so that each was left with four chubby little stumps for legs. She circled around them and through the noisy black cloud of flies to where she could now see the bloody gash where their faces had been hacked off.

She turned and vomited in the trees as the others rushed in behind her.

“Oh God,” Nadia said. She stood behind Zhara and put a hand on her back.

Abuya ran past the lions’ crumpled remains, her boots stained by the blood congealing in pools below each animal, and out toward the clearing’s exit. There was the crackle of the radio as she called it in. “HQ, we’ve got two dead lions. Looks like they were killed early this morning. Poisoned then cut. Request their extraction.”

Zhara was still kneeling in the dust. Their faces! They were sliced flat off. How awful that incomplete look was. How strange that it would have been better somehow if they’d been fully decapitated. But they only wanted the teeth and the claws of course – no point carrying the whole head.

The sound of Abuya’s footsteps approached and each sickeningly wet squelch was an accusation of what she’d failed to do; that she wasn’t good enough. She stared at the floor and knew Abuya was standing over her because the sun no longer beat against the skin on her neck.

“I’m sorry,” Zhara said, though her words went unheard, drowned out below the noise of the flies. Abuya and Nadia were looking down at her. “I…I should have…” She dropped her head.

“It’s not your fault,” Nadia said and reached down, pulling her up from the limp position on the floor.

“But it was them! And I didn’t shoo – ”

“It’s not your fault!” Nadia said again.

“I’ll do better next time, I swear.”

“You’re doing fine,” Nadia said. She led Zhara away to give her water while Abuya radioed the pilot and told him where to collect the bodies.

That night was the last of their rotation. Nadia insisted she would cook again in spite of Zhara’s protests that she was fine.

“Nothing prepares you for the first time you see something like that,” she’d said. “Please; let me cook.”

“It’s not natural what they did,” Zhara said as she lowered herself to her mat. “It’s so hateful. How could someone do that?”

Abuya was writing up the patrol notes and gave a hollow laugh. “Money,” she said. “That’s how.”

“Money alone can’t be enough.”

“Lack of money then.”

“I hate them all.”

Abuya laughed again, though this time it was a full laugh. Nadia smiled a little, too, and continued chopping. “It isn’t about hate,” Abuya said.

“So you don’t hate them? You of all people?”

“How could I? Most of the poachers are our own from the city; they’re only doing it because they have to. And then there’s all the farmers to the south that poison the lions to protect their own – should we hate them as well? All they’re trying to do is make their own living, same as the poachers or you or me. The truth is the world is getting squeezed on all sides – more people; less space, less money.”

“But all the conservationists and tourists I used to give tours to said things are going to be different now Covid is gone. They said the world is going to be more caring, with more protection and respect for the wild; they said the world would change.”

Now Abuya really laughed, and the sound seemed to fill the big sky. Even Nadia was laughing along.

“Oh good,” Abuya said once she’d stopped. “So long as they’re saying that I’ll sleep soundly at night.”

Nadia spoke in the same way that she always did; quietly, though with a certain sense of honest conviction that meant people always stopped completely to listen to whatever it was she was saying. “The way I see it, all of us are the same: those men, the lions, us; we’re all part of some whole that is bigger than just people.”

Zhara looked up at the inky black through the trees. “What if you’re wrong?”

Abuya dropped her pen loudly to the pad of paper she was writing on. “So long as our world is run by money we will always be separate from nature. Money can’t ever care about nature in the same way that nature can’t ever care about money. One is entirely made up. It is used to track and control, to marginalise and to sort winners from losers. The other…” She stopped and tapped her fist hard on the ground in front of her several times. “…is this. It is real, and earthy, and solid. Sometimes it is beautiful and sometimes it is violent and ugly, but that’s not the point. It exists. And money – or any other abstract lie – will never get it. So you can keep your rich tourists with their donations and their offsets, and your politicians with their taxes and their eco-friendly investments, because it’s all just fancy ways of moving money around.” She pounded the ground one last time. “Any attempt to protect this that puts money as the answer will only ever fail.”

Zhara rolled over, and tiredness eventually stole her away from such difficult thoughts. The sporadic breeze turned the smoke lazily around the camp, and the smell of charcoal reminded her of cooking at home. She watched Nadia scrubbing at the pots and tried not to think of the lions and their faces and the men from before; or the money that they would get for the teeth and the claws.

Tomorrow night she would be home, bouncing Layla on her knees until she laughed and laughed, and she would hold her so tight and she would tell her mum all about the patrol: the way the smell of the bush seemed stronger when you were a ranger rather than a guide and the quiet of it all at night when a tourist camp wasn’t set, and of Nadia’s cooking, and Abuya, too, with her stern moods and capable hands. She would say they were all now friends, and that in spite of everything she could not wait to do it again.

The following morning was colder than before. They rose before dawn and, by the time they got moving, the clouds were pulling each other magnetically together into a low grey sky. They fanned out over a kilometre on their final patrol back to HQ, hoping for the best chance of spotting the lions one last time so that they could deliver a final position report before their time off.

Zhara went to the left with Nadia right and Abuya the central lead. Zhara descended alone into a little culvert that depressed itself into the ground and lost the reassuring sight of Abuya in the distance.

There was a growl from a lion somewhere up ahead, a playful sound from a younger member.

She crawled around for a better view and, from where she now lay, she could see them through a gap in the trees. The whole pride was there, but they seemed different; the cubs weren’t playing as they normally would, and many of the group lay quite still with their heads unusually downcast, as if aware of a pain or loss. Then something glinted in the bushes nearby. As quickly as it flashed it was gone, and she sighted down her scope to where it had come from.

One of the poachers!

His rifle was slung over his back, and the barrel glistened again where it extended carelessly out of the shrubs. Zhara adjusted the scope into focus as she saw the reason for his strange positioning; he had a bow and arrow tensed in his arms. As her fingers fumbled around the cocking mechanism, he released the arrow and she gasped. She scanned across to the lions but saw that the arrow had missed, falling quite short.

Now he was attaching another arrow. Right then, and quite without deliberate thought she made her choice; he would not get a second chance.

She readied her rifle and began to range the target through the scope.

She paused. Slowed her breath.

The gunshot went off.

The lions scattered like alley cats, and a flock of small birds that had been dancing through the branches nearby took flight. Amongst all of it, her world stopped for a moment.

Something was wrong: Why was she lying on her gun?

It felt like she’d been smacked with a sledgehammer, and she struggled to breathe, sucking at hollow air. She rolled onto her back and looked up at the thickening cloud. The patter of distant gunshots crackled, and several whizzed nearby.

It was then that the man who had shot her in the back ran past.

He stopped to look down at her. His eyes were thick, and the blood that she was coughing up stopped her from being able to say anything. He ran.

The lions had run to safety. They must be safe, she thought. They must be.

She thought of their regal heads and proud shoulders and lulled her head from side to side, sputtering some sickly iron taste from her lips. And then her mum was there and she was proud, too, and holding her hand. Except now it was Abuya, and she was stroking her hair. Everything was darker, and she could see the warm glow of home in the distance. There were tears on her face.

“I did it?” She said, tucking her chin tight to her chest to keep from the increasing cold.

“You did,” Abuya said, and a tear fell from her face onto Zhara’s head. “You saved them.”

Kenya nature

Editor's Pick, Letters from the Editor, Nature Issue

THE SWAMP THING AND THE FIRE GOD

by Jasmina Kuenzli • October 12, 2021October 12, 2021

You emerged out of the dark, glowing like a firebrand. And your eyes were twin flames, and your hands held two great, sweeping swords, and the air shimmered around you.

The dust particles surrounding you turned to ash, and the cloud cover became a rain that became a fog that turned to steam as you hissed, and walked closer and closer.

I didn’t touch you.

I watched you, with my face half-hidden in the water. I watched you with my fingers wrapped around my pen, a thin little dagger. I watched you, and I tried to draw you, but I could never make the strokes hold. And you changed too quickly, and I made too much noise.

So I wrote you into a story.

I traced my name around the curve of your skin, brought you forward and back again like a snake charmer. I made you a hero, and I made you kill me, plunging that fiery hand right through my chest, wrapping those flamed fingers around my throat.

And you looked at me.

You looked at me, and your eyes were firelight, too bright to look at directly. And your skin was spiderwebbed with cracks where the magma peeked out, and I didn’t see anything human behind your eyes, no recognition, no brightness of colour other than the flames, and the gold.

And I could feel you. Your fingers crawling across my skin, leaving tender welts in their wake. I could feel you missing me, like the sun in my eyes when I wake, trying to remember you from a dream, trying still to understand.

I fell in love when you leaned out over the still water, not close enough to touch, trying to test your own resolve, to see what you saw when there wasn’t a cloud of smoke.

You burned the reeds down around me. And all the other creatures slunk back into the swamp, slithering to their nests and dens, the venom still dripping from their fangs, waiting.

I looked at you, and I saw your death.

I saw you drowning.

I saw you at the bottom of the swamp, with an alligator gliding through the water.

I saw myself, devouring you.

I couldn’t stop looking at you, and I wanted you.

I took a step toward you, my feet nearly sinking beneath me in the squelching mud, your hands held out in defence, in warning.

I kept going, the wet squelching between my toes, the rain blasting itself to steam against your skin.

I held out my hand.

You shook your head. Your skin had begun flaking off, and the magma beneath your skin was cooling, a gray that would soon solidify to black.

You told me no again.

I told you yes.

I pulled you in, and you embraced me, your breath a pleasantly warm sigh against my shoulder, and I didn’t burn, and I thought that meant we would last forever.

When you curled around me and turned solid, I did the same. You surrounded me into a burnt-flash cage, volcanic rock crumbling, obsidian glinting in the moonlight.

How was I to know that this wasn’t happiness?

I spent too long there, and it still didn’t feel like enough.

I broke out by twisting your head off at the neck, and your body crumpled, your head bouncing on the bank before sinking, half your ear broken off.

I keep trying to speak your name, but I don’t know it.

I only know my own.

I just look for you at the edge of the swamp, right where the alligators find their prey.

The Spanish moss hangs down, and I call your name and wait.

When I see you again, I’ll touch you like a ghost, soft brushes against sensitive skin. Maybe you’ll feel the same pain, but I’ll absorb it. I’ll make it all right this time.

You’ll burn bright again, a slight shimmer in the air, a mirage, and it will all be okay.

I sit and watch and wait.

mysticism nature

EDITOR’S LETTER: NATURE ISSUE

by Eric Akoto • October 11, 2021October 11, 2021

Nature is in crisis, and the crisis is anything but natural. Plant and animal species are vanishing from the earth at an alarming rate while many human beings maintain the bewildering belief that we are separate from nature rather than of nature and wholly dependent on it. With a million species at risk of extinction, dozens of countries are pushing to protect at least 30% of the planet’s land and water by 2030.

Many groups have been accused of being the cause of nature’s destruction, from fossil fuel companies and wealthy countries to politicians, rich people, and the rest of us – collectively the nearly 7.8 billion people who call Earth home.

The problems facing the planet and its inhabitants seem intractable, both for their size and for the political will and global cooperation needed to tackle them. In its first year, the Biden administration, leading the world’s largest economy and second largest carbon polluter, has put efforts behind righting some of the worse environment-related policies of the previous administration and staking out an ambitious direction for a greener future; however, it remains to be seen whether it will be enough and soon enough, and whether legislative support will come through. In China, the world’s second largest economy and second largest carbon polluter, the government is attempting to ensure clear skies for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics – and hopefully beyond amid power shortages and a population that is increasingly concerned about its country’s environmental policies.

Litro’s Nature issue aims to gather multiple perspectives that explore the roots of the crisis as well as its present and future in our everyday lives: What have we done, and why? What should our relationship to nature be? How will future generations – assuming there are future generations – see our dillydallying in the late 20th and early 21st centuries? Are we doomed? Is there any hope for hope?

Join us for a collection of stories and essays that explore and celebrate nature, worry over the future of the planet, and seek answers to some of the most pressing questions of our time.

nature

BEDLOAD

by Peter W. Fong • October 11, 2021October 11, 2021

In the summer of 2018, Peter W. Fong led a first-ever expedition from the headwaters of Mongolia’s Delgermörön River to Russia’s Lake Baikal. Backed by substantial grants from the Transglobe Expedition Trust, the Trust for Mutual Understanding, and the Taimen Fund, his team travelled more than a thousand miles by camel, horse, kayak, and rowboat, collecting scientific specimens and interviewing local residents along the way. The following is an excerpt from a book-length manuscript entitled, Rowing to Baikal.

Rain in the night, tentative at first, then as insistent as freeway traffic, the noise of it thinning occasionally but still there in the background, until finally the stars appear and the temperature drops below freezing. The ducks and cormorants that flocked around our camp at evening have dispersed by dawn, gone with the storm.

The river is beyond bank-full. In some places, roiling clouds of sand and silt rise in visible swirls, churned from the bottom as if by some giant beast. In the larger whirlpools, I can feel the water sucking at the chines, trying to bear the boat downward like a twig or a leaf.

I am alone at the oars, with Lanie and Guido following in the other boat. Recalling our unscheduled portage a few days ago, I am all eyes and ears. Each time we encounter an island, I squint hard at the river’s dark waves, trying to gauge which channel is carrying more water. I don’t make this calculation out of idle curiosity. Under these conditions, the wrong decision can provide a visceral lesson in hydrology, the sort of failure that can fill your mouth with mud.

A river transports sediment in two basic ways: suspended load and bedload. The suspended load is what I can see: the fine particles that make the water look murky, the larger grains that swirl upward and around in boils and eddies.

As its name implies, however, bedload travels closer to the riverbed. These even larger particles are too heavy to rise toward the surface but not heavy enough to withstand the force of the current, and so they proceed downriver “by a combination of sliding, rolling, and saltation,” where saltation means “motion consisting of a series of short hops, often with temporary rests, before propulsion forward for another hop or short excursion.”[1]

I can’t see bedload in this flood, but I can hear it. Sitting in the middle seat of the drift boat is like sitting at the receiver of a dish antenna. The noise seems to come from the air: a distant rasping, whispery and fricative, not at all like the transparent murmur of water.

These are the sounds of collision—not only particle against particle but, in some cases, boulder against bedrock. The volume rises and falls with changes in depth and current and the composition of the river bottom, as if the Selenge is a living voice trying to warn me away from a risky decision. And yet it’s hard not to feel like I’m choosing at random. When two channels appear to be roughly the same size, does it matter which one we take?

Not usually. Most channels are short enough for me to see the next confluence, where the river rejoins itself. In these instances, both options are safely navigable. The uncertainty arises where the river braids, turns, then braids again – hiding the conditions of passage from my view while simultaneously subdividing the flow into smaller and smaller fractions.

In low clear water, it would be easy to avoid the too-shallow places. In an area of open banks, with grassy meadows or broad gravel bars, a wrong choice might mean merely having to drag the boat for a few yards.

This morning, however, the banks and islands support a heavy growth of willows, mature trees that rise 30 feet or more, interspersed with spreading poplars, their trunks as big around as my waist. And the water is so high that the willows’ lower branches sieve the surface, adding even more commotion to the flood’s clamour.

According to Luna Leopold, the author who introduced me to the word saltation, “The nature of a river channel is not closely constrained within a narrow range of characteristics by physical laws that must be fulfilled. The river responds to physics, but there remains much latitude in the morphology that a channel may assume.”[2] This is a scientist’s way of saying that a river’s reaction to flood can be unpredictable. It can flow fast and true, overtopping its banks and burying all obstacles conveniently beneath a cushion of water, or it can carve itself a new bed, uprooting trees and carrying off tons of dirt and rock.

As it turns out, knowing all of this doesn’t help me one bit. Eventually I find myself between two islands of unknown size, in a channel that I don’t like at all.

The problem is not lack of water. In fact, there is plenty more than enough – running deep and fast between opposing banks thick with willows.

The current is so strong that I can’t stop the boat by rowing upstream. The best I can do is keep the bow pointed down the centre of the channel. In some places, the trees are so large that their limbs create a canopy over the river. In others, the banks are so close together that I have to pull in the oar blades, lest they strike against a protruding branch and send the boat spinning out of control.

At one point, I notice with relief that Lanie is keeping her distance behind me. That way, if I run into trouble, she’ll have a few seconds to watch the results and weigh her options.

The worst moments come after I pass beneath a low bower of trees. Several are already leaning dangerously, their roots undermined by the river’s force. Any one of these, I think, is large enough to completely block the channel. And then the river turns abruptly, leaving me blind to what’s ahead. I sit up even straighter than usual, shoulders tense, oars at the ready.

The brown water hurries beneath the boat, anxious to reach its destination. The yellow leaves flutter in the wind. When the channel widens perceptibly, I steel myself for the next narrowing. Instead, the trees withdraw, like clenched hands relaxing.

Soon I can see blue sky overhead, and a low ridge of mountains on my right. A hundred yards later, we are back in the main river.

[1] Luna B. Leopold, A View of the River (Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 185.

[2] Ibid., p. 271.

mongolia river exploration Russia

CRACKED

by Richard Leise • October 10, 2021October 10, 2021

The egg splits on its seam, jellybeans rattling and spilling across the sheet. Mallory can’t believe it. She calls in a loud voice, “Honey, I think I figured it out.” She falls back into her pillows.

“Mallory, I’m right here.” Justin pushes up from the floor. Eggs halve and clatter. “Seriously. Please. You’ve got to quit shouting. You’re going to wake the kids.” He kneels beside their bed. “And you’re supposed to be putting the eggs together, not taking them apart.”

Mallory is asleep; she hadn’t been fully awake. Half of a plastic egg is on her belly. One hand is on her forehead, palm to ceiling, as if she fainted. In the other, a jam jar full of Franzia. A purple jellybean fell to the bottom of her glass, and tiny bubbles rise from the candy, popping atop the surface of the white wine. Her eyelids flutter.

If it weren’t Easter, Justin would leave the glass in her hand. Eventually, she’d roll over, and the wine would spill, waking her, and she’d force herself to get up and undress, to put a towel on their sheet, and she’d probably catch a foot and fall, she might or might not bump her head, or crack a rib (they’d discover the extent of her injuries in the morning) and, after climbing back into bed, there’d be a decent chance for sex.

But not tonight.

It’s already well past 11, and Madeline and Abigail will be awake – if he’s lucky – in five hours. He needs the sleep.

Justin takes the glass from her hand and sets it on her nightstand.

Justin walks outside, holding an Easter basket by its handle. It is dark, for the sun has stopped shining. All is calm, the stars are bright. It’s 70 degrees. This is not the worst neighbourhood, but there is not much to recommend, either. The only house he’s concerned about he makes for first. Fearing some unknown reprisal, he can’t chance leaving these people out. Alternately, he’s afraid of spooking them.

Along the way, he demonstrably places eggs on the small squares of neatly manicured lawns fronting each nearby property; at the roots of trees and against the bases of No Parking signs adjacent curb fronts; and along metal fencing. He filled the eggs with money he collected throughout Lent, something like $80 in loose change and assorted bills. Considering the number of step-this’s and step-thats who come and go? The street, come any given day of the week, fills with a dozen kids – Maddie and Abbie among them – playing some physical variation of a computer game. Tomorrow morning their block will be bustling.

The house. One of two on Constance Avenue (they squat, side by side, looking to passersby like a pair of ugly eyes) that is not owner-occupied. Last Saturday, more people than the structure seemed capable of containing spilled from the door and onto the street. The fight was between a man and a woman, a pair of drug dealers Justin considers the properties’ principal tenants.

In the 20 minutes it took police to arrive, the shouting and screaming woke the girls. Justin put them in his bedroom and turned up the TV. Mallory was nursing a hangover, but adrenaline kicked in. She motioned for him. He went to his office, and they crouched by a window. It was difficult to make out much of the action, which made the implicit violence more visceral. The woman hit the man over the head with a beer bottle; she spat in his face. The man pleaded with someone to get his gun. There was pushing and shoving. Like a teardrop, a little boy slid from the porch and pulled at the man. Someone dragged the child inside. The twinkling of more breaking glass littering the street. For one moment, no one moved. The world was still. When the man punched the woman in the face, her nose exploding, Mallory went back to bed.

Justin knows that someone in the house is watching him, but he doesn’t falter. The place is blacked out, its windows covered with blankets. Bass disrupts the silence, makes thick thin textures, and snares and kick drums in triple-time, offset by hi-hats similarly divided, complete the trap. He doesn’t want to appear anything other than casual. He places two Day-Glo eggs on their lawn. They sink into the overgrown grass.

Home, the front door locked, Justin gnaws on a baby carrot, drops what remains on the floor, and does the same with a celery stalk. He fills, and then hides, the girls’ Easter baskets, double-checking to ensure they received the same number of gifts. This, here, is a time Mallory will regret missing, a moment, 20 years from today, the girls away at graduate school, or married, she will not be able to look back upon and smile. But if Justin – like debt – accumulated the moments of their lives that his wife forfeited, he would be broken, bitter, and resent her, and because he doesn’t want this, he tries to understand what she’s going through, and he doesn’t want her to apologise because he knows that she is, in every sense of the word, sorry.

From the refrigerator he removes the dozen hardboiled eggs he dyed with the girls before bed. They are organic, and it’s difficult to brighten brown shells, but they had fun, the girls using white crayons to draw thick, waxy hearts and flowers on the sides of their eggs before dipping them in mugs containing concentrated primary colours. Cool, but dry, he combines the eggs with 40 or so of the plastic variety, hiding them atop bookshelves and inside sneakers – several of the plastic eggs containing clues as to the whereabouts of the girls’ Easter baskets – too tired to make note of where he’s hiding what, let alone to pen a list. The girls will argue, and Mallory will complain, but it’ll do. He carries what remains through the darkened kitchen.

Out back, double-checking to make sure he locked the privacy fence, he hides the rest of the plastic eggs, tossing another, much larger carrot, near the gate. All is still and good. Tomorrow will largely be terrible – they have to travel a couple of hours to see Mallory’s family – but the morning will be fun.

There is a gunshot. Justin hurries inside, locks the backdoor, kicks off his sandals, and makes for his office. He steps on an egg, the plastic shattering and cutting his foot, the jellybeans unmistakably malleable. Upstairs, kneeling, peering through a space between the curtains, he hears another shot. Only it is not gunfire. It’s the couple’s – the drug dealer’s – screen door slamming open against their house’s siding.

The man pulls the woman down the steps.

In the event of this particular event?

Justin resolved to do nothing. When he was an undergrad, he lived in Buffalo. Drunk, he sometimes stood at his kitchen window and tossed cheese towards a bay of garbage bins. The slices, like orange Frisbees, arced to the earth, and rats, big as raccoons, rocked the bins in mad dashes for the food. It was disgusting, and fascinating, sort of like the other night, when, as if somehow capable of inciting, or controlling the action, Justin, from his window, willed no particular outcome. Only he wasn’t in Buffalo any longer. He, as observer, played no part in anything. He will watch. But he will not bear witness.

The woman shouts a blast of gibberish. The man shoves her free and makes for an egg, grabbing it from the grass. He shakes it, smiling. Justin hears the change rattling. It’s a good one, a few Sacajaweas. The man points to the spot where Justin planted the other. The woman drops her hands from her hips. She cusses when, shook, the egg doesn’t make a sound. The man laughs when she pops it open. A $2 bill.

It’s as though the man made a map. He takes the woman up and down the street, lets her find the others. They pocket the money, dropping the eggs like cigarette butts. Smiling, their faces bright beneath the moonlight, the man and the woman seem happy.

In front of Justin’s house there are two pink eggs. Each contains a 20. The woman knows Justin’s family. She has children, and the kids play together; she wants to leave the eggs alone.

The man says, “Let’s just check them.”

As they approach his house, Justin (somewhat dramatically, he thinks) flattens against the floor. For a moment, he can no longer hear what they are saying. Learning what they do? As they approach, Justin crawls from his office on his belly, sliding into bed; he’ll wait until morning.

It’s not a big deal.

If the eggs are open, he will distract the girls, slip outside, and replace the money. There are many things which, if recorded, even the world itself could not contain the number of books written.

If so? Let this be one of them.

Mallory is talking in her sleep. She is dreaming, and what she pictures isn’t pretty. Justin adjusts her pillows, waits until she’s no longer agitated, and then gets comfortable, staring at the ceiling, listening for sounds of the couple, and waiting for sleep.

Between what’s real and what he invents, people always give him something to do. This makes life interesting, and easier (For Justin hates boredom.) And there are his girls. Like him – only much, much differently – they believe in everything. At some point tomorrow they’ll spy the eggs in the front yard, and they’ll be delighted. They will scramble to slip on sneakers and, still in their pyjamas, scour the street, running from one point to another, picking up the discarded eggs and leaving them in place, certain that the next flash of colour will have yet to be discovered.

Disappointed? Of course. But only because they slept past six o’clock and other kids beat them to the eggs. But still – $20! Each! And when they come inside they’ll turn on the television and, eyes bright, sit on their knees, staring at everything, waiting for their mommy to enter the living room, face puffy, holding a cup of coffee, affecting happiness, lowering herself to the floor, and assuming her role in the family.

Easter family dynamics

Black Lives Matter family history racial violence

HANGING FROM THE FAMILY TREE

by Andre Wilson • October 9, 2021January 24, 2022

I found a website called Lynching in Texas. It’s a project of Sam Houston State University. It documents lynchings that occurred in Texas between 1882 and 1945. The database includes 600 Texas lynchings that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Chicago Tribune, and other newspapers catalogued. I searched this site for corroboration of stories that my mother and grandmother used to tell me about lynchings around Somerville, Texas, but when I entered their town’s name in the search window, nothing came up.

Did my mother and grandmother, both now deceased, lie? Did they make up their lynching stories? While retellings over generations had lost many details, enough remained to point to the veracity of their stories. One location was a bridge over a creek outside of town. One victim was the son of the Heroines of Jericho Lodge member, Nancy Flemings.

My grandmother, Ora Dawson, was born in Lee County, Texas in 1896, and lived during a time when Texas ranked third in the states with the greatest number of lynchings of African Americans. My mother, Jessie Lee Dawson, was born in Somerville, Texas in 1936, near the end of this period. I was born in Los Angeles, California in 1964, during the Civil Rights Movement, but it was the Black Lives Matter Movement, following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, that spurred me to investigate my family’s lynching stories.

In her 1993 self-published autobiography, Yeller Gal: Memoir of a Sharecropper’s Daughter, Dawson used the word “lynched” only once in her manuscript. The same page also contained a recollection that her mother had shown her a tree where “a colored man had been hung.” It was almost as if Dawson wanted to get a couple, but not all, of her lynching stories out of the way on one page so she could resume writing about her life instead of the deaths of African Americans. Regarding Nancy Flemings, from whom her family rented pasture, she wrote: “One of her sons was lynched on the way from Caldwell, the county seat. The whites swooped down like vultures on this group of colored boys that were walking back to the Tie Plant. The boys took off running, but her son didn’t run fast enough and was beaten to death.”

I later discovered his death certificate on a genealogical website and identified Albert Flemings, age 20, as Nancy Flemings’ son lynched in Caldwell, Texas on October 21, 1926, a month shy of his 21st birthday.

However, Dr. Thomas Luther Goodnight, a white physician who signed his death certificate in Caldwell, had diagnosed “shock” as Flemings’ cause of death. Furthermore, Goodnight certified that he last saw Flemings alive on that date and had attended to him before his death at 10 in the morning. Perhaps, in his capacity as doctor, Goodnight attended to him following the “shock.” He might have even witnessed what happened and recognized his patients in the mob.

The timeline resumed with Dawson’s concluding line on what happened next – Flemings “was found dead on the side of the road when they (his brothers) went back to look for him.” Although the small print beneath Goodnight’s signature on the death certificate instructed him to state the “Means and Nature of Injury” and if it was “Homicidal,” he provided no evidence that would implicate who or what caused Flemings’ “shock.” No autopsy was performed.

The website Lynching in Texas uses “legal evidence that a person was killed” by a mob, such as newspaper articles, court testimonies, or legislative investigations. However, a network of gatekeepers squelched evidence that could be used by historians – the lynch mobs that kicked out reporters; the white supremacists who terrorized Blacks into silence; the Jim Crow laws that prohibited Blacks from testifying in court against whites; the sheriff who didn’t investigate; the justice of the peace who held no inquest; the doctor who omitted details from a death certificate.

Relying largely on newspaper articles, it is highly probable there is an undercount in the number of lynchings recorded by this project. In 1916, a crowd of 15,000 watched a mob torture, hang, and burn Jesse Washington in Waco, Texas after his conviction for raping and killing a white woman. For every well-publicized lynching, other unreported and undocumented lynchings also occurred. No “legal evidence” can be found. The stories exist only as oral narratives that survivors and witnesses recounted. When my uncle, Lacey Dawson, was found dead by his car in Somerville, in 1956, the undertaker told Ora Dawson, Lacey’s stepmother, that he didn’t die from a car accident but from a knife wound, and she should look into it. Unsurprisingly, she didn’t report it to the sheriff.

Perhaps I, too, should stop investigating the lynching of Albert Flemings nearly a century earlier. Don’t I have enough recent murders of African Americans to protest about? But I can’t let him go. I can’t forget the trauma. I learned that Albert’s brother, Fred Lee, later married into my extended family of cousins. That makes Albert Flemings related to me by marriage. He’s family. He’s my family’s Emmett Till, Trayvon Martin, George Floyd.

Every generation designates a family member to carry its stories to the next, to connect the past with the present. Before me was my mother, and before her was her mother. Now I’m at the end of the dynasty. My last surviving aunt has fled Texas, because of the virus, unable to plant, in Houston soil, the tree collard seeds I gave her. I’m unable to make my first pilgrimage to Albert Flemings’ grave at the Lyons Community Cemetery in Lyons. I’m unable to walk along State Highway 36 in Caldwell to hear echoes of him and his brothers talking and laughing on their way to work in the moments before their lives changed forever. I’m unable to collect a Mason jar of dirt where I imagined he had bled and died.

childhood disappointment hot air balloons

AT THE BALLOON FESTIVAL

by Amber Wozniak • October 8, 2021October 8, 2021

The hot air balloons lie puckered and splayed across the lot like discarded contraception. Tufts of grass push through the hoary asphalt, and she’s confused by the thick underbelly of it all. Up she insists, lifting her arms. The clouds hurry toward safety in the mountains as we approach the crowd.

It rumbles in anticipation. No one wants shed skin and deflated colour. They want sky. They want acres of God devoured on a dry wind until they are fat on the conquer. They want divine ascension as they spit below and pick clean teeth with trees plucked along the way. Up, up, they insist, and without further ado, flames distend with a wrenching that cuts through the valley.

She hears the roars and cries in horror as the balloons begin to bugle. No one told her it would be this loud, or that she’d feel the heat flush across her face. That in all the beauty of weightless ambition there is a rash that seeps and a chorus of raucous cheers. She scrambles from my arms, slippery from the lotion we’d lathered on her an hour before on the off chance of sun.

Eyes wide, she backs from the crowd. We cross our hearts that she is safe and try to coax her with the soupy ice cream she abandoned in her haste. Each time we think she’ll be soothed, the flames spit into the echoing sky once more. She cannot be comforted and certainly will not be held. The crowd surges closer, closer, as she tries to warn away them and us.

We relent. We tuck our heads, lift her, and push through the masses. She is inconsolable, unable to tell if we are rushing to or from the noise. When there is finally enough distance, she careens backward, insisting down. She won’t hold our sagging hands in the parking lot, thinks we warn her against the wrong dangers. She thought it would be just her and us always, the holy trinity stark in a balmy field as bright splashes of miniature drift quietly by. We are too embarrassed to admit that we thought this as well.

We see them rise, balloons and baskets and men, as our dusty hatchback exits the lot. She refuses to look, has eyes only for the right window. Vultures circle there, steady and silent with their distant, concentric truths.

THE COLOUR OF MY HEART

by Andrew Hart • October 3, 2021October 3, 2021

“Having soul” my friend Alan used to call it, by which he meant those of us who were sensitive, clever and a little bit strange, as compared to the rest of the population; Tory voting, boring and lacking in imagination and heart. It’s easy when you are young to separate the good from the dull, but now that I am much older and living in another country, I’m not so sure who is who and whether I am the decent person that I thought I was when the world and everything in it seemed uncomplicated and there for the taking.

Helen, my beautiful shiksa, and I lay in each other’s arms after the most romantic of love making.

“You don’t need to say thank you…” she told me, and as I started to apologise, “…nor say sorry. I enjoy it too.”

“I know, well I hope so; I still find it so difficult to believe you are with me, just insecurity I guess, and not fitting in, or just not normal.”

“Doesn’t everyone feel like that?” she asked.

“Well you seem normal” I told her, “as if you know what to do in every situation, and will always do the sensible thing.”

“Is it a Jewish thing? Not belonging?”

“No, well maybe, there is a sense of insecurity, but that might be our history, it is more than that though, my friend Alan feels it too, or he used too, and he isn’t Jewish.”

“I don’t see it. You’re little eccentric, that’s all. Especially the amount you listen to that singer you like, Tracey Thorn. You seem okay otherwise. In fact I find you quite calming.”

Later she asked, “Am I really normal?”

“Yes, definitely. Don’t you think you are?”

“Not really. Most people think I’m odd.”

“Oh, why?”

“I’m not sure. I feel that it wouldn’t take much for me to fall into madness. Perhaps that’s why I’m with you. You keep me sane.”

“Thanks” I said and we kissed.

Sometimes Helen said things and later on I would wonder if I should have pursued it, but then she moved the subject on so quickly, or we started being lustful, and it was only afterwards I started to ponder what she had said and how serious she had been. Perhaps I ignored Helen when she threatened to come off the pedestal on which I’d placed her or, deep down, I knew that anyone so beautiful who allowed me to defile her pure, gentile body, must have something wrong with her but I didn’t want her to spoil the illusion that a beautiful woman who could have anyone had chosen me.

Helen rang me one morning.

“Are you in work today?” she asked.

“No, the library is closed on Wednesdays remember, but I thought you were.”

“No, I’m not well,” and she gave a sort of laugh. “Let’s go into Liverpool.”

“But if you’re not well….”

“Oh I am okay, just need a day off.”

My mother would never let me take the day off from school unless she thought I was ill enough for the doctor to be called – which was never – and as a consequence, when I got a job and left home, I still dragged myself into work no matter how ill I might be feeling. It was thus with a feeling of wickedness that I sat with Helen on the train heading into the city, although my feeling of unease was on her behalf for ringing in sick when she was clearly fit and healthy, albeit a bit giggly and talkative.

There was a couple opposite us; she was pretty, Asian heritage with a lovely smell of vanilla coming from her, and an expensive looking winter coat draped over her shoulders, whilst her companion (colleague rather than lover I guessed) looked dull and tired. To my embarrassment Helen started talking to them.

“We are going into Liverpool. Fancied the day off.”

The young woman smiled, “Enjoy yourself.”

“Come with us if you like, you and your friend” and Helen tapped him on the knee.

“We would love to, but we have a meeting.”

They both appeared to draw back into their seats, and then of one accord they got files out of their bags and started leafing through them, refusing to meet our eyes. Helen touched my thigh lightly and then stroked it, she chatted away about inconsequential things so loudly that the whole carriage must have been able to hear.

“You sure you’re okay?” I asked quietly.

“Yes, I’m good. I’m looking forward to that drink though.”

As we left the train I saw her wink at the young man opposite, but the prig refused to acknowledge it, so I gave Helen’s bottom a loud smack as we left, and she giggled.

“Let’s get that drink” I said.

And drink we did; Helen had a better knowledge of the pubs in Liverpool than I did, and we visited several I had no idea existed and probably wouldn’t have been able to find again. She liked the small and dark ones, hidden away in side-streets, which smelt of disinfectant and old beer, and where a couple of old men drank slowly and talked about horse racing.

At one pub “I don’t want to talk about it”by Everything but the Girl was playing.

“Oh that’s that singer you like” Helen said and started to join in: “…if I stand all alone, will the shadow hide the colour of my heart….” Her voice was loud but tuneful, and it contrasted well with Tracey Thorn’s gloomier and more restrained vocal, “…I don’t want to talk about it, the way you broke my heart….”. I looked at her as she sang, but her eyes were unfocused and I wondered who she was thinking about; an old boyfriend she had not mentioned or just life in general.

“Thank you for coming with me.” she told me after the song had finished, “I would have struggled on my own.”

And then she was up and looking for the next pub.

We found ourselves in a side street near the Pilgrim Pub, and suddenly we were snogging by some large, silver bins.

“Let’s do it here…” She whispered.

“But…” she pushed her finger in my mouth and I sucked on it slowly and then lightly bit it; it tasted of salt and cinnamon. After that I did not care about the cold, the smell of rubbish or of being caught; Helen was everything and I was overwhelmed by her.

She had a Bible by her bed.

“I didn’t know you were religious.”

“Someone gave it to me. I was in town a couple of days ago having lunch. This woman came over and started talking to me. I ended up buying her coffee. She gave me it to me.”

“Why were you having lunch in Birkenhead?”

“Oh they sent me home from work. I was just a bit tired that’s all.”

“Don’t worry about me”, she said after a few moments of silence, “sometimes I need a break.”

“How are you finding it?”

“The Bible? Interesting. I haven’t looked at since school. A lot about your lot in here.”

“Well we wrote it.”

“I thought it was God who wrote it. He’s quite critical of the Jews; Jesus is always going on about the Pharisees, they’re Jewish priests aren’t they? And Hosea. Always telling you off.”

“If it wasn’t for the Pharisees the Jews would have been subsumed by the Romans; anyway, religion is like sport, all very well until you take it too seriously.”

“You’re probably right. Mind you, I have seen you when Everton lose.”

I woke up needing to urinate; it was three in the morning and Helen was still reading The Bible, her lamp giving her a halo as if she was a Christian saint.

“Haven’t you slept?” I asked her.

“No, this is fascinating. Why don’t you ever talk about it?”

“I didn’t think it interested you, anyway it is just my childhood, something I wanted to escape from.”

I hurried to the toilet and when I got back to bed she was still reading intently, and almost immediately I fell back asleep. I woke up again at eight and she was gone. And later when I rang her at work from the library, she sounded happy and normal.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“I am okay, a bit tired.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“I will have an early night tonight I think.”

“Don’t blame you” I told her, “I don’t blame you at all.”

I used to dream about Tracey Thorn, at least as much as I dreamed about Helen, although these were not erotic dreams, rather they involved me abandoning her in various places; the library where I worked, Lime Street Railway Station or in the middle of a strange city. I would wake up feeling overloaded with guilt, and eventually I would realise that I had left Tracey in a Burger King, and that she was waiting patiently for me to pick her up and take her home.

I had all of Tracey’s albums; not just the ones she recorded as one half of Everything but the Girl (for which is she is best-known) but also her obscure solo album “A Distant Shore” and the two badly produced bits of New Wave that she did with The Marine Girls, the band she was in as a teenager. Even now, many years later and in another country, I still buy anything new that she releases, and I have read her two memoirs several times over. I follow her on Twitter and Facebook, even sending her messages which she sensibly ignores, and occasionally I still dream that I have left her somewhere alone and frightened.

Whilst I have always loved her voice; melancholic and slightly offkey, it is her that I am obsessed with; so calm and sensible with politely concealed contempt for those who do not meet her high standards. Sometimes when Helen and I cavorted on the bed I would imagine Tracey looking down on us disapprovingly or when Alan and I, drunk and laddish, giggled over a rude joke, there she was glaring at me, wondering when I would grow up. I still yearn to gain her approval, and I suspect that all the achievements in my life are due to her, and my attempts to make her proud of me.

“I am going to church on Sunday, would you like to come with me?”

“Uhm not really.”

“A friend from work invited me; Claire.”

“But don’t Christians disapprove of this?” I pointed to her sprawled naked on top of the bed, her body warm from our passion of a few moments before and smelling of sex.

“I have been meaning to speak to you about that…”

Thus she became unobtainable, but then I had always felt that I was trespassing on her flawless body, and it could not last forever, that eventually I would be caught. She still let me sleep beside her and would kiss me languorously goodnight before disengaging with seeming regret and sleeping with her back to me. I had a feeling that Tracey Thorn would approve.

She talked about God more and more. I used to love her company, looked forward to spending time with her and even imagined it becoming permanent and maybe – breaking my mother’s heart – a marriage. But now our evenings consisted of her reading aloud from the Bible and talking about The Jews, before agonising as to whether we should have sex or not, and it was Hell. Was she unwell, or was this how Christians spent their time? I wondered if her colleagues had noticed anything or had she always been odd, and I had not seen it until now.

“The vicar is doing a talk about the Palestinians. Would you like to go? His brother was there, in the West Bank a few weeks ago and made a film. Quite disturbing.”

“Oh no thanks.”

“I thought you would be interested, doesn’t your sister live there?”

“Not in the West Bank no, in Tel Aviv, and I don’t care about all this obsession with Israel, and the feeling that I’m personally responsible for the actions of the Israeli government and army.”

“Aren’t they your people? Shouldn’t you feel responsible?”

“No. Perhaps if it wasn’t all that everyone goes on about I might be more concerned; but they don’t seem to show the same worry about what is happening in East Timor, or in Burma. Sheesh always bloody Israel, and always how wicked the Israelis are; what about the Palestinian suicide bombers? People blown up on buses or in restaurants? I bet your vicar doesn’t go on about that. It’s just another excuse for anti-Semites to hate Jews.”

“I don’t hate them exactly” she told me, which is when I walked out.

“She sounds as off her head as you,” Alan told me as we drank coffee together one evening in a small cafe, before we went to see Siouxsie and the Banshees in concert at The Empire in Liverpool. “Even if what she says upsets you, perhaps she needs you to be kind, not get cross and hurt, get over yourself a bit.”

“That sounds quite sensible” I admitted reluctantly, “but it’s difficult when I’m with her and she’s going on about Jews and how we control Hollywood and tell the government what to do.”

“Perhaps she has a point, there are lots of Jews in government and in film. And they did work with Hitler during the Second World War, I was reading a book about it.”

I looked at him in despair; he had become comfortable and rich, now that he was working for a law firm in the city centre, so that even on a night out he was smartly dressed; chinos, white shirt and a corduroy jacket rather than jeans and the battered army jacket he used to wear, and his hair looked as if it was cut regularly and somewhere expensive. I had even had to drag him along to this concert, despite Siouxsie and the Banshees having always been his favourite band. I remembered only a couple of years ago us spending a cold night on a bench in Nottingham railway station after seeing them play at Rock City, I doubted that would ever happen again.

“Remember when we used to divide people up, between those who had soul and those who didn’t?”

He laughed, “well people can swap sides, and anyway perhaps those with soul are those who haven’t grown up.”

Next time I came round to see Helen I noticed a sticker of the outline of a fish stuck to her front door.

“It is an ichthys” she told me when I asked her about, “an ancient symbol of Christ. My friend Claire gave me it.”

I gave her a smile, unsure of what to think, as I sat down next to her on the settee.

“You are left-handed as well,” she said, as we did The Guardian quick crossword together.

“Hadn’t you noticed before? And as well as what?”

She looked worried. “Isn’t that a sign of the devil? And witches, they are left-handed.”

“I hope so. Anyway, ‘farmer, six letters, third letter ‘o’’”

“The Talmud is full of spells isn’t it? Against non-Jews, goyim.”

“Who told you about the Talmud?” I looked at her in mock horror. “That’s our big secret, nobody is supposed to know about the Talmud. I might have to kill you now; where is that kitchen knife?”

She looked at me and I realised that she was scared, and I gave her a hug.

“Oh Helen, sweetheart, I was joking. But where are you getting this stuff?”

She cuddled close but didn’t say anything, and I could feel that she was tense, as if she did not quite trust me, and when I stroked her back she flinched.

“Do you cast spells?” she asked, her voice trembling, “is that why I fell for you? You cast a Jewish spell to capture me?”

There was no humour, no banter in her voice, she sounded serious and I did not know what to do or say, so I continued to hold and stroke her, and eventually she seemed to relax and fell asleep in my arms. At about two she went to bed leaving me to sleep on the settee, later I heard her crying, but when I went to see what the matter was, her bedroom door was locked.

Next time I called round she wouldn’t let me in; I knocked loudly on the door but there was silence and when I tried my key, the door was locked from the inside.

“Helen,” I called, but there was nothing, and I imagined her sitting on the kitchen floor trembling and so I left, giving the ichthys a baleful look as I did so. When I tried to ring her at work the next morning, I was told she was busy with a client, and got the same answer when I tried a couple more times later that week, at least she was in work I supposed, rather than hiding away at home. In the end I posted my key through her door along with a note asking her to call me, and then I walked away; after all you cannot make someone see you, especially if you seem to be frightening them.

“She’s clearly mentally ill,” Alan told me, during our last conversation together. “Why don’t you help her?”

“How?”

“Call someone. She’s supposed to be your friend, and you have given up on her.”

“She gave up on me,” I told him, but only half-believing it, and I imagined Tracey Thorn shaking her head in disgust. A couple of days later I posted a letter to her with the contact number for Mental Health Services in Birkenhead, which was all that I could think of to do, but I realised that it was a bit a pathetic, despite all my spurious arguments to the contrary. What would Tracey have done, I wondered? I had no idea.

The next time that I saw Helen was a couple of years later in Liverpool City Centre; she was heading away from Primark, looking scruffier than I remembered with baggy jeans and a long, dirty-looking green t-shirt. She was still beautiful, but you had to look for it beneath the unbrushed hair and badly applied lipstick.

“Helen” I said, and she looked over at me, puzzled and distracted, and I could see her eyes searching and searching, and then she gave up, gave me a frightened look, and hurried away. Later I was looking at my reflection in a shop window; smart haircut, suit and discrete tie, and I realised that I did not recognise myself either.

I am in my fifties now; the best of my life is over with and death is often in my thoughts; after all, Israel is not the safest place to live, with murders on both sides reported every day. Mind you, nowadays it seems Jews are targets wherever they live. After everything changed in England, I decided to make aliyah andflee; at first I lived with my sister and her husband and then I got a job at the university, rented my own apartment and began to make friends, I even had a lover for awhile, until she got bored of me and left. But I am still a stranger in a strange land, and in the evenings when I play Tracey Thorn’s latest album (a series of “feminist bangers” apparently) my mind goes back a quarter of a century ago and I am in love with someone beautiful who when she needed me, I betrayed.

I called at her house before I left England. For the last time I took the train from Liverpool to Birkenhead Central station and then walked up that steep hill, so treacherous in winter, and which left me breathless at any time of the year. I walked down her street again, hoping that she would still be there, but guessing that she didn’t live there anymore. She had left her job in the town centre several years ago and could be anywhere. I had with me a letter asking her to take a chance and come with me, which I planned to post through her door if she didn’t answer.

The house looked the same, even the ichthys was still stuck to the glass on the door, a little faded now and beginning to peel at the top, and for a moment my heart felt as if it would burst. After regaining my breath and plucking up my courage I banged on the door, I thought that I heard a noise from within, but nobody came so eventually I pushed the letter through the letter box, and heard it slip onto the floor. And then just as I turned away, a man came out with my letter in his hand.

“There’s no Helen here” he told me crossly, handing it back to me, “you must have the wrong address.”

I wanted to ask him if he could keep it, just in case she returned, but he had gone back indoors without a backwards glance, and so I screwed it up and stuffed it back in my pocket.

As I stood at the closed door, I lightly stroked the ichthys as if it was as charm, and then, in a burst of anger, I ripped it from the door and squashed it under my foot, wishing it was as easy to rip out the sadness and fear in my friend’s heart, and the guilt in mine.

Love religion

connection movement stillness

JUST BEING

by E.B. Bartels • October 1, 2021October 1, 2021

It’s spring again, and I’m still here, still sitting, still inside. At my desk, I gaze out the window at sparks of green, glimmers of yellow and purple, as daffodils, crocuses, new grass make their way into the warming world. Spring makes me want to get out and move – to go for long walks, to travel to new places, to see old friends, to roll around in a meadow. But instead, I’m sitting still, because I know that is what I need to do to help myself and help others. Being still sometimes feels like giving up. Being still feels like acting helpless. Being still doesn’t feel like enough. I usually think of helping as an active gesture; the words “action” and “active” have the same root, the Latin verb for “do.” But sometimes, I’ve learned, you can take action by doing nothing. Sometimes you can help by simply being still.

My aunt Christine was never still. She was always hiking, kayaking, walking her giant dog, volunteering at the library, working half a dozen jobs, painting watercolours of flowers and trees. Christine’s birthday is one of the first full days of spring. Not the equinox itself, but the day or two after – March 22 – a day not about the transformation, but a day to just exist in this new life. I always associated Christine’s birthday with the beginning of spring, that active time of growth, and called her on March 21 to say happy birthday.

“Thanks,” she’d say, over the phone. Down in Boston, I could hear her smiling, and I imagined her glancing out her window, studying the snow still melting in her part of Maine. “But try again tomorrow.”

We’d laugh, I’d apologise, and I’d call her back the next day. Next year, I’d always say, next year I would get it right. Christine would laugh and say she was just glad she got to talk to me twice. I was glad, too. I didn’t get to see Christine as much as I would have liked – she was six hours up, near Acadia National Park – but I was grateful for the magic of cell phone connections and hand-painted notecards and emails with recipes. Our lives may have seemed separate, but we were woven together, in our own way.

We’d like to think we each exist in a vacuum, that our lives are our own. But your story always bumps up against and bleeds into the stories of others. We are bound and tied up with people we love, people we hate, and people we don’t know or think about – perfect strangers. We touch, transmit, transmute, transfer, and trickle into each other. In order for you to be in the position you are in the world, others have to be below you, above you, and by your side. You can’t draw a clean circle around any one life. If you think you can, it’s an illusion. “Women are masters of illusion,” said famous female tattoo artist Vyvyn Lazonga. “They always have been with makeup and clothing. A tattoo is just part of that illusion.”

A couple of months after I turned 20, I got ink across the veins on my left wrist with the Russian word живая, meaning alive. The word was taken from a quote from Anna Karenina, in which Anna defends her decision to have the affair: “…I am alive, that I am not guilty, that God has made me so that I must love and live.” At 20, I felt alive. At 20, I was in love with the idea of living without guilt. I had realised I could make these decisions without consulting anyone, so I just went to Harvard Square and got a tattoo. With the word on my wrist, I felt inoculated with independence: I was about to depart for fourteen months abroad in St. Petersburg, and I was sure that I didn’t need anyone else. At 20, I saw myself as fully autonomous. I felt a lot like my aunt.

Christine always gave the illusion of independence. She seemed to reject stillness, other people’s expectations, suggestions, guidance. She was constantly in motion, doing exactly what she wanted, regardless of what she was told, at least that was how it seemed to me. She wore the clothes she liked from L.L. Bean and ignored the feminine outfits my grandmother encouraged. She brought her Rhodesian Ridgeback with her everywhere regardless of rules about dogs. She moved to Maine with her husband, even when the rest of her family was in Massachusetts. To me, she exuded independence, confidence. I always thought of myself like Christine – we were both a little bit rebellious, the marching-to-our-own-drummers-types in the family – or at least, I wanted to be like Christine. She did what she wanted. She didn’t need help from anyone. She lived in a state whose abbreviation is ME. Christine took care of herself.

In the earliest part of the 20th century, one way a woman could take care of herself was by being a tattooed lady. “These were independent women who made the decision to take care of themselves, on their own terms,” writes Margo DeMello in Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural History of the Modern Tattoo Community. “Both Betty Broadbent and Artoria Gibbons, well-known tattooed ladies from the 1920s through the 1960s, became tattooed as a means of earning an independent living in an era when it was difficult for women to support themselves.” Choosing to be a tattooed lady, though, was a risky, big choice – to live outside accepted societal norms, making her own rules. She took care of herself; she did what she wanted.

During my year in St. Petersburg, I was wildly free – often recklessly so. I shared bottles of vodka with friends by the canal. I walked home from bars alone in the early morning. I flagged down gypsy cabs. I took late-night trains to the Baltics. I didn’t wear a warm-enough coat. I ate ice cream whenever I wanted. I petted stray dogs. I smoked unfiltered cigarettes. I made out with both Russians and Americans. I took a swig of cognac and plunged into the icy Neva River in February. Perhaps I wasn’t always making the wisest or safest decisions – I was 20 – but I felt independent and self-sufficient. I was like one of those tattooed ladies. I took care of myself; I did what I wanted.

But it’s hard to support yourself – financially, yes, but also emotionally, spiritually, physically. Even when “independent” and “on my own” in Russia, I relied on so many people. My host mom fed me. My host siblings explained Russian culture. My language teachers taught me idioms and slang. My program director coordinated my visas. My college professors checked up on me. My parents sent me money – so much money. My whiteness protected me from xenophobia and racism. My femme appearance protected me from homophobia. My American passport was my safety net. You may think you don’t need any help, that you’re an individual, separated from everyone else, but that’s not true. Even something like getting a tattoo – one of the most independent-seeming actions – connects you to others.

When I got my first tattoo, I couldn’t do it on my own. Ellen, the tattoo artist at the Harvard Square shop, had to do it for me: She penetrated my skin with her needle, she poured ink into my cells, she held her hand steady as she carefully drew each letter. The act of tattooing is an intimate gesture; I felt close to Ellen when she was done. I felt the same way when I got my second tattoo by a woman named Siobhan while I was on vacation in the Pacific Northwest. Even though I was 3,000 miles from home, I happened to stumble on the one tattoo artist in the neighbourhood from the Boston area. As Siobhan filled in the details of the little permanent turtle illustration from a favourite children’s book, we chatted about Massachusetts, and I felt bonded with her – she may have forgotten me as soon as I walked out of the door of her shop, but I would always remember her. She was helping me. And the best way I could help her, as the one getting tattooed – besides tipping generously, of course – was by sitting still. Getting a tattoo may feel like an active action: an act of rebellion, going out and getting inked, dammit! But actually, getting a tattoo is extremely passive. Lay back, sit still. The best way you can help is by just being. And, as much as you try, no one can really do anything alone. You are never truly, completely independent.

Christine relied on her husband, my uncle Ed. She had a close network of friends in her small Maine town. She was deeply involved in the community of the local library. At the end, Christine needed the doctors and nurses who made her comfortable. She could not insert the IV for the morphine drip herself. She could not cut out her own cancer. But before that: Even up near Acadia, Christine talked on the phone to my mom every day.

My mom always answers her phone. If you need something, or just want to talk, she will pick up. My mom is an active helper: She looks around, assess what has to be done, and takes action. She volunteers for tasks, runs errands, drops off soup, drives my grandparents to their appointments. She smuggled our dog into the hospital in Maine when Christine was dying, because she knew it would bring her little sister some final moments of joy. When I left for Russia, I had felt stifled by my mom’s help – part of why I went to St. Petersburg in the first place was to test to myself, to see if I could survive without her always jumping to the rescue. But over the course of fourteen months, even 4,000 miles away, as I opened her care packages with Annie’s mac and cheese, jars of peanut butter, months’ worth of prescriptions, and sweet notes, I started to realise I could never really be independent, nor would I want to be. We all need each other. Freedom and independence are not the same thing. We are all interconnected, whether we like it or not. It’s all a web; even the things we think affect only us. Sometimes you don’t even have to do anything to connect with someone else.

For all my mom’s activity, she also knows that sometimes the best help you can give is just by being there, by always answering your phone, by being consistent, reliable, still. My mom spent hours reading to me when I was a child: both of us curled up, the flipped pages the only movement. One book we both particularly loved was Miss Rumphius by one of Maine’s most famous children’s authors, Barbara Cooney. The story of Miss Rumphius states that the three things everyone should do in their life is travel the world when they’re young, live by the sea when they’re old, and do something to make the world more beautiful. Miss Rumphius accomplishes these first two tasks easily, but, as an old lady, Miss Rumphius still had not done her part to make the world more beautiful. Finally, after one hard year, Miss Rumphius notices how the lupine flowers outside of her window gave her joy and comfort, so she begins to scatter lupine seeds all over the coast of Maine. She wants to give everyone these flowers that helped her so much by just being.

Lupine flowers are tall and straight. Their stalks stand anywhere from twelve inches to five feet tall. They aren’t known for blowing in the wind, like the 15,000 seeds on a dandelion plant, or the way maple seed pods spin and dance their way to the ground. But lupines do more than look beautiful – they do powerful work just by staying put. Lupine flowers encourage bee and butterfly populations. They provide pollen for honeybees, bumble bees, carpenter bees, swallowtail butterflies, clouded sulphurs, Karner blues, beetles, ants, and thrips. Lupines attract hummingbirds; their deep roots prevent erosion and fix nitrogen, returning it to the soil. The lupine is not native to Maine, I learned recently – I guess Miss Rumphius was inadvertently encouraging an invasive species – but naturalists are hesitant to remove the flowers, because of all the good they’ve done. They are a major draw for tourists in the spring. They help just by being.

A tattoo can help just by being, too. Getting a tattoo itself is a passive action, and then, once it’s there, what does it do? Just sits on your skin, slowly fading and blurring, letting time have its way with it. Tattoos themselves are still – but, in a way, that is their beauty. They are steady, dependable. They will always be there in the same place, and they will be there until you die. There is a comfort in that: A tattoo isn’t going anywhere. They’re all a part of you, too. I may not be quite as reckless or wild anymore as I was during that year in St. Petersburg, but my живая reminds me that I am still alive. The little turtle reminds me of the books I have loved. And a tattoo can make someone who is no longer around feel not so far away.

After Christine died, at age forty-nine, I knew I wanted to get a tattoo to honour her, but I couldn’t figure out what felt right for a long time. Then, one day in Maine, almost exactly seven years after Christine’s death, I saw a white cabbage moth – its wings the colour of good watercolour paper, the kind Christine liked – flitter and stop to rest on the stalk of a purple lupine. And there it was: The moth was my aunt Christine, the free spirit, the painter, who moved to Maine, and she was being held up by her older sister, my mother, the lupine – strong, encouraging, unwavering. Helping by just being. Looking at the moth and the lupine I knew this was it. I could see the tattoo on my body before a sketch of it even existed.

I made an appointment at a tattoo place down the street from my apartment called Redemption. I shook hands with Deirdre – because, back then, you could still shake hands – and she showed me the sketch she had made in the time between my consultation and appointment. A delicate cabbage moth sat perched on the top of a purple lupine flower. I felt as though Deirdre must have been with me that day in Maine, had seen the same moth, the same flower.

For the two hours that Deirdre worked the drawing of the lupine onto my right ankle, we talked about our pets, her son, my writing projects, her trips to Costa Rica, and the animals she saw there. We listened to the punk music playing in the shop. Sometimes we were quiet as Deirdre worked on a tricky part of the design. I took pleasure in focusing on my breath and my body, meditating through the flashes of pain. I didn’t look at my phone once. It was just me and Deirdre, ink and needle, moth and flower. I felt safein Redemption, with Deirdre. I felt protected. Deirdre helped me stay in the moment. She helped me remember my aunt. She helped me focus on the being. I sat still, because that was the thing I could do right then, and listened to Deirdre. Often, when taking action, you need to move, protest, yell, scream. But sometimes you need to be still; sometimes you need to listen. Look around you and figure out your place in the web and what is best for you to do – or not do – to help. Now in our second spring of stillness, I’ve been thinking a lot about our interconnectedness. So many think that they can make choices that only affect themselves, that it’s about individual choice and freedom – but no one lives in a silo. Our responsibility, our connection to one and other, is more evident than ever before. But when I get frustrated or sad by those who ignore the rules, or when being still doesn’t feel like I am doing enough, I look to the lupine on my skin and remember. Lupines do an awful lot by simply staying put. We can, too.

Last week, Facebook asked if I wanted to wish my aunt Christine a happy birthday. Startled, I clicked on her profile to see it was still up and running, though it had been long-neglected in the decade since her death. I briefly wondered if I should try to petition Facebook to take it down, but then I saw the messages some of her closest friends had left on her timeline: year after year, wishing her a “happy birthday in heaven” and telling Christine how much they missed her. I guess Christine’s Facebook profile was helping others by being there. After scrolling through the messages, I squinted at the profile picture – not an image of Christine’s face, but a Maine landscape. I clicked to enlarge and there they were: the sharp blue ocean, the tall green pines, and dozens and dozens of purple lupines. I reached down and squeezed my right ankle. It felt good to know I had a matching lupine – we were still connected, in our way.

Barbara Cooney’s obituary reads, “After growing up on Long Island and spending cherished childhood summers with her family in Maine, she took every course offered in studio art and art history at Smith College. Miss Cooney’s mother, herself an artist, took her daughter’s painting seriously, giving her the encouragement she needed to make art a lifelong passion.” Sometimes help isn’t anything big or grand. Sometimes helping looks like being still. Sometimes helping looks like just being there. Sometimes just being is enough.

friendship LGBTQ short fiction

MAUD’S BABY

by Hannah Glickstein • September 26, 2021September 26, 2021

As soon as they opened the nursery door, Liz blurted out, “We’re not a couple.” And I went red, so they must have assumed romance was at least on the cards. I said, “Ronan’s father isn’t around.” That was that. No sharp intakes of breath. No knowing smiles. Just a note on the form and the tour continued. I don’t want to make Ronan go there. The smell of poo and babies wandering about as if they’re lost. The girl waved her arms when she said, “This is free-flow play.” Which seemed like a fancy way to describe toddling about dribbling, clinging to a dirty piece of Duplo. She said that they “talk about feelings and after snack time and practise yoga.” The staff look even younger than me; I guess pay isn’t good.

On the pavement afterwards, Liz reminded me I don’t have any choice, but I might still be able to get work to have me part-time, if I get myself together to phone HR. I laid Ronan in the buggy and tucked the blanket over his bare toes; she put her arm around my shoulder and said, “I can pick him up for you on Thursdays early if you like. But, I warn you, I will feed him ice-cream.” I pressed my face into her arm and cried a little bit. Managed to say, “Thanks.” And swallow it down. Liz removed her arm and started pushing the buggy.

She walked ahead. Her cheeks were purple. Steering with one hand, she used the other to ruffle her hair, so it stood up in spikes and fell in her face; stretched her neck out and rolled her shoulders, so her heavy body became tall and straight. That gesture impressed me at school. The way she never bothered about looking like everyone else. She ate chocolate while they all puked up salad. Wore black DMs. Actually read the books from the library and liked bands from the ’90s no one else had heard of. She made me feel small then; she turned and smiled, “They’re probably watching from the corner of the window. They’ll definitely think we’re a couple…”

Sebastian hasn’t texted again since I ignored his offer of money.

I carried on walking behind Liz down Hainault Avenue, past the massive brown and white semis with paving or Astroturf outside; shiny cars; double-glazing sealing the people inside like vacuum packed boneless fish. Liz had the buggy. My arms felt too light. When I thought about the nursery fees, refusing to reply to Sebastian seemed pointless. What do I get by sulking? It would be better for Ronan if I could take him and Gran on holiday once a year.

But I don’t want to go on holiday with Sebastian’s money. And what if he decided he wanted to introduce Ronan to his wife and take him away himself – on an aeroplane? What’s Mum’s damp house and weedy garden compared to a holiday home in Dorset?

We stopped at the place where the A13 meets that other massive road; where diesel gets into your eyes and sticks to your skin. I lifted Ronan out of his buggy at the crossing, above the exhaust. He wriggled his toes and shouted. He likes watching cars. Liz stroked the side of his face with one finger and asked me if I wanted to get some food. It felt awkward.

We used to go to that café after school if we didn’t want to go home yet. Because it was only quarter to twelve on a Thursday, we had the place to ourselves. Sat by the window. Ronan was breastfeeding. We watched an old lady pass by bent over and wrapped in scarves, her legs emaciated and bare; face tense with pain. We both ordered soup and coffee. Liz curled a pack of sugar around and around her finger and looked at the table instead of my boob. I said the toddlers at the nursery were like puppies in a puppy farm. She smiled, but didn’t reply.

We hadn’t mentioned the argument we had the night after I came back from seeing Sebastian. I didn’t feel like bringing it up.

By the time my soup came, I was almost going to faint with hunger. It’s hard to eat soup, with a baby’s head under your spoon and only one hand. I burnt my tongue and throat. Liz’s sugar packet burst and left a little pile of sugar on the table. She looked at me. Got it over with.

“Don’t ever accuse me of fancying you ever again. I don’t fancy you. It would be like fancying my sister, if I had one. Get over yourself. Do you understand me? I won’t be the puppy you kick every time you get drunk and mess up. Don’t take your problems out on me. I know it’s been hard since your mum died.” She looked away. “But losing your only friend won’t help. I can babysit sometimes, but you need to sort your own head out. Forget about Sebastian. No one’s coming to rescue you. You’re an adult now, Maud. You have to rescue yourself. And your son.”

I wanted to leave, but Ronan was still attached to me. Milk leaking out the sides of his hungry mouth.

I told her I was sorry. But didn’t want to talk about mum. There was no point correcting her. She just assumes that, because he’s twenty years older and married, he only used me for sex. To Liz, men are simple.

She was more her old self then. Ate her soup quickly and took Ronan so I could finish mine. It was cold. I couldn’t taste it. She played peepo behind her roll. Ronan grabbed the roll and gummed it. He was getting his first tooth. It’s through now and he’s sleeping better.

Liz and me used to sit outside that café in the summer smoking, then rub ourselves with lemon segments to cover the smell. After our A-levels Liz poured ketchup all over her Sylvia Plath book at the table by the window – to celebrate never ever having to read it again.

I liked Plath – she made me realise that it wasn’t only mum who’d spend hours in silence facing demons no one else could see. The poetry helped me understand the puppet expression mum sometimes had on her face – when she fell into her green chair after a day at Marks and Spencer. When I was little I thought that, if it wasn’t for me being born, mum wouldn’t have to work there and maybe she wouldn’t be like that. The Bell Jar taught me Mum might have been like that anyway. Even though the parts about suicide made me nervous – especially after the teacher told us what Plath did… I could never have explained that to Liz. Liz pronounced judgement – Plath was even more self-pitying than Morrissey; Patti Smith could beat her in a fight any day. I loved Liz for listening to Patti Smith.

After lunch Liz went to meet Joanie from work. I pushed Ronan home. He fell asleep in the buggy. The sun was sort of warm for the first time this year. So I left the buggy by the back door, with him in it sleeping and hung out washing. When our baby grows, grey bras, odd socks, ancient ragged t-towels and jeans were all neatly hung up, I stood there leaning against the wall watching them blow about. Hypnotised. Clothes in the wind make me think of domestic life stretching on forever. Mothers from past centuries – their names blotted out by men – hanging out wet clothes on the first warm day of spring. Their ghosts haunt my laundry.

That was two weeks ago. I haven’t had time to write since. Because Ronan’s tooth was keeping him up; I had to prepare stuff for going back to work. There’ve been a few days since when it was nearly warm. I took Ronan once to Old Leigh to play with the stones on the beach. He can sit up on his own now and chew a little bit. He’d eat the stones if I wasn’t watching him. He eats like a lion. Liz keeps threatening she’s going to buy him an ice cream. No matter what I say.

COVID friendship missed connections

WHERE TO BE

by Thea Schiller • September 25, 2021September 25, 2021

But I thought you said meet me at the Starbucks on such a such street; so there I was in an oversized palatial car, rented. They upgraded me. I thought it looked flashy like a pimp mobile. No thanks, I said, but that was the only choice.

So, my niece, niece in French with an accent over the e, waited for me…and I her…until both our cell phones, constantly busy trying to call each other, were blowing up.

And how about when I was at the Shubert Theater and not Joseph Papp’s, and I went in and bought my ticket while my best friend was seeing Shakespeare, and I A View from the Bridge.

And now I’m standing near the Tappan Zee bridge, no I mean Mario Cuomo bridge, and I’m looking at the architectural spindles separating shadows on the Hudson, and the clear blue of sky reminding me I wish I could call you and ask you to meet me for a rendezvous.

A vous, to you, and to you, and to you, and to me, and to the sad view of thinking about our year of COVID-19! Whose heart is not breaking?

I know. I get up every morning to open up my mind files and try to touch upon my gratitude list. I have numerous reasons to be grateful. I also know how to reframe, since I’ve been a shrink for 18 years, or should I say a stretch. I’m fully aware of RET: Rational Emotive Therapy. In other words, confront your feelings. Is there any basis in reality for that feeling? Can you refute it? And then there’s DBT: Dialectical Behavioral Therapy and finding the wise mind that sits in the center between logic and emotion. How about CBT: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Change the thought, and you will change how you feel.

SHIT. Okay, I will forget about immediate gratification. The angst, the fear, the loneliness (not every day but moments). Can they disappear in a nano second? They will disappear for those who exercise patience. It won’t be as easy as eating a piece of chocolate cake, but friends have said, “We will hang this summer on our decks.”

Summer – the sound is buzzing in my mind’s eye like a honeyed bumblebee. I’m wishing for a moment of mistaken places, like my texting either Alex, Debbie, or Karen with a I thought you said meet me at Ruben’s, the Mexican restaurant in Peekskill with music, while they are at the restaurant 12 Grapes.

Yes, I’m longing to hear the ping on my cell phone with the text, But I thought you said…Diddle diddle dee, diddle diddle dum.

But for now, I’m sitting in my kitchen dreaming about our rendezvous. Question: Are you?

DREAMED

by Clyde Liffey • September 19, 2021September 19, 2021

I dreamed I was about to die. It wasn’t surreal, I wasn’t astonished, I was in my dream. I must have anticipated the horizontal event as a culmination not the banal termination it is for I was in a sort of holiday mood.

I awoke, anxious to tell family and friends.

It was early, I didn’t eat, drank only water, I had a 7:45 appointment at the hospital.

I ran the tap to the shower thinking this is like the final cleanse, there is no final cleanse.

I sat, near naked, on the doctor’s cot. I was light-headed, had the sort of false lucidity that comes from drinking too much coffee.

“Say Ah’,” the doctor said, “how did you sleep?”

“I dreamed I was about to die,” I thought but didn’t say. I said “Ah”.

He told me to dress, left the room, reminded me to pay the receptionist on the way out. She ran my card through, handed me a soiled bill of health in return.

I wasn’t that late for work, they let me have a mid-afternoon break. I walked the near empty streets, stopped to look in the windows of a realtor’s, contemplated some dream houses.

The front room was spacious. Large grime-free windows let the light shine on hardwood floors. A man with the goatee and smoking jacket sat on a pink Queen Anne chair. A Queen Anne sofa stood near the wall to his right. The coffee table was from a different period. He folded his newspaper, placed it on his lap. “I suppose you want to tell your loved ones about the great event,” he said. “They’re all here, those who could make it that is. You’ll just have to find them.” He emptied the ashes from his pipe into a glass ashtray.

“I know you,” I said. “You’re – ”

He waved his hand as if to dismiss me.

All dream homes have many chambers. I wandered the winding halls, opened doors to apartments, found no one. On the third floor I walked into a bedroom with a balcony outside the window. A women’s nightclothes were strewn on the unmade bed. Of course I didn’t recognize those under- and over-things. I wasn’t hot, I’m mostly dry nowadays. I climbed onto the balcony, leaned on the iron railing. Robins pecked on the mown grass below. I pressed my arms against the bar, a sort of isometrics. For once I wasn’t worried about disturbing anyone. There was a bathroom attached to the bedroom. It was empty.

I left the house the way I came in. The gentleman was still reading his newspaper. This time he ignored me. I returned to myself outside the realtor’s window. I remembered little, it wasn’t a memory mansion, it was bigger than the house – 3BR, 2BA or the reverse – pictured on the realtor’s card.

I don’t remember if I ate, I wasn’t hungry when I returned.

No one looked up or said anything when I sat at my desk. Our office is run like a factory. Kaizen is spoken here almost as much as English.

The virtual whistle blew, everyone left, time to make up my time. I thought of ways to add value, I have no values, work is a way to pass the time. I opened my word processor, retrieved the last document I wrote in. It was my annual self-evaluation. What were my goals, what did I accomplish, did the gap narrow or widen, my goal is to pass the time until.

The vacuums whirred, sometimes they clean early here. I frowned, pretended to update a database. The janitor, a friendly sort, ignored me, said nothing as he emptied my nearly empty wastebasket. After he moved on to the next desk, I noticed a letter at the corner of mine. I opened it. It was in German. I didn’t understand it. It’s easy to look things up nowadays, not so easy in a dream: Ich spreche nicht und lese kein Deustch, not so easy for me to say.

I should have risen, walked around, the cord of the vacuum was in the way. I rubbed my eyes, peered across the room as though deep in thought. A portrait of the company’s founder hung on the far wall. His features were indistinct most likely because of the distance from me, the blear in my eyes, the faux-Renaissance style of the painting though he was born less than seventy years ago. He died a few days before I was to meet him – he made it a point to greet all employees who passed probation – I felt like I was a proximate cause of his demise. I’ll meet him yet, we’ll share a joint, not of marijuana but of meat, lamb perhaps, behold, I’m beholden to no one, why then am I here?

The motors stopped, I was alone. I went to the washroom, passed water maybe more, washed hands and face, returned to my desk to gather my things.

I stood at the side of my car surrounded not by empty husks or hulks but by the buildings of the office park, buildings whose windows were mostly lit, their rooms filled not only with cleaners but also with wage slaves and their betters. After many arduous hours designing the engine of a fast machine, the team decided to call it a day: unseen people germinating seeds that will grow into future and subjunctive fantastic fruit I’ll never taste.

I stand before the imaginary portal, false clarity gone, prepared to meet my fate not lucidly but as my own sodden disintegrating self, that is, I await not the fact but the act – pure, simple, brutal – of ending.

I dreamed I was about to die and yet not yet.

death dreams

BOYS NEVER TELL THEIR FRIENDS THAT THEY LOVE THEM

by Ryan Mason • September 18, 2021September 18, 2021

Boys never tell their friends they love them. They’d rather punch each other in the arm, or make fun of their girlfriend’s new glasses, or call each other words they’d never say in front of their mothers. That’s one true thing about love; there’s only one way to say, “I love you,” but insults are infinite. There’s a sense of depth to them – and darkness, too – like the ocean at night, and there’s a sort of undertow that leads you away from the safety of the beach. But despite all of that, it somehow feels warmer than the kiddy-pool praises handed out by parents, teachers, and everyone else.

(Oh, and yes: You do get used to the temperature once you jump in.)

Back to boys: They’ll hand each other a wrench when they’re fixing their bike, or later, their piece of shit used truck that they protect like it’s their last kidney. They’ll offer suggestions, they’ll give feedback, they’ll debate, they’ll dream, they’ll drink, they’ll drink some more, they’ll throw it up and never let each other forget about it. They’ll drink borrowed beer and stolen whiskey in parking lots at night and smoke weed in park bathrooms in the morning. They’ll pass them the ball on the basketball court and block for them on the football field. They’ll cover for each other, make up excuses, invent signals, blow smoke, cause distractions. They’ll lie, as big and as often as necessary, and then lie about the first lie, wash, rinse, repeat. But if they have to (and only if it’s necessary), they’ll tell the truth, the hard truth, the uncomfortable truth, the truth that hurts, the truth that is heavy enough to split the ground and suck at least one person down.

They’ll be a wingman, a main man, a best man, they’ll grow close, they’ll grow distant, they’ll reconnect, they’ll move away, they’ll grow up. They’ll get laid and married and arrested and, if they’re lucky, get out of their hometown. They’ll go to work, they’ll go to war, they’ll drag each other across the desert on the other side of the world, bleeding, speeding, screaming toward death completely unafraid, just to save the buddy that they love…

…but they never tell them that they do.

friendship masculinity

breakup men and women surrealism

A SURREAL BREAKUP IN THE GOODBYE GARDEN

by David Luntz • September 17, 2021September 17, 2021

We are breaking up in a Friendly’s. I seek distraction from this poignant irony by flicking through the menu. But it only offers bizarre expressions. Like: The tyranny of verb tenses creates the illusion of time. Adobe PDFs saved the Spotted Owl. Lab-grown beef will spare the Amazon Rainforest. Drifting continents suffer from separation anxiety, too. I shake my head and look back up. The jut of her jaw tells me it’s over, that she’s decided. I want to tell her that the infinitive “to decide” shares the same root as “suicide” and “homicide.” That every decision kills some alternative. That perhaps she hasn’t thought this through properly. But there’s no point, because she’s already left without even a “goodbye,” “good luck,” “take care,” or “fuck you.” And I think back to that meadow where we rode to one night: moonlight glinting off the handle bars, frogs croaking, crickets chirping, grass undulating in the somber glow, where it all came apart. Then I close my eyes and she’s right there in front of me in that same meadow on that same night. Most likely I’m hallucinating or something I don’t remember taking is kicking in, because now she gets off her bike, strips, wades into the stream, and lies down on its soft bank inviting me to join her. Butterflies crown her head, anointing her into their order. The earth creeps over her skin. Apricots burst out of her armpits. Salmon leap into her crotch. Roe oozes down her thighs, gumming dead scales to her flesh. But behind this transformation, I sense she’s just preparing to leave me. Because a raven scratches against a window I never knew about in my mind, lured by the scent of my prescience. The beak looms massive and moist. Its savage hunger terrifies me, so I drag large rocks around her to keep that bird from breaking in. She screams at me, Stop! This isn’t how it’s meant to be. After everything, can’t you see there’s a river in me that’ll dry up if you don’t let me get to the water? But as long as the raven keeps clawing, I’ll keep piling the rocks over her. She doesn’t understand I can’t let it in. Her eyes sublimate into nacre. Okay, okay, she rasps, come, you can come with me and maybe, if we’re lucky, we’ll find a tide that will take us to the ocean. But I’m not sure I can trust her. Anyway, my moment now beckons. The alternatives it gestates demand I midwife one of them across the threshold, into being. They clamor like festive church bells in my skull, tolling: What will it be? Then, a premonition or a glimpse of a future memory of a breakup in a Friendly’s, and not even a goodbye from her. So, I wedge the last rock in place, wipe the mud off my hands, and walk away. The bird flies off. The bells stop their mad din. I lean back into the booth, gasping in the velvet silence. A milkshake I’d ordered plinks down on the table. I sense the moist beads on the cold glass and want to take a sip but don’t want to open my eyes and leave her. Still, I know I’ll have to risk it eventually. Then I figure maybe later I could come back and check up on her.

Because for now, I’ve decided.

DREAM JOB

by Nancy Ludmerer • September 12, 2021September 12, 2021

Alice’s new office faced south, overlooking the public library and Fifth Avenue. From the window she saw her favorite lion, Fortitude, guarding the library’s north steps. The office wasn’t large but that first day following her promotion, it was perfect. The furniture was new. Gone was the scratched wood desk with its modesty panel. The dingy walls, scarred by thumbtacks, were gone, too. Instead there was a sleek steel desk with elegant red enameled drawers; pale grey walls (a color called seashell); an aura of competence and calm.

Gustave Caillebotte’s Paris Street: Rainy Day, a gift from her boss, graced one wall. You bring kindness and patience to every interview, Philip Massie said when he promoted her, in her seventh year with the company. Her door was always open – another hallmark, Massie said. You share information. You don’t hoard it. The agency Massie founded in 1985, Career Builders, placed temps to fill in for employees on leave. Career Builders vetted and interviewed applicants so companies didn’t have to.

For Alice’s clients, those temporary positions often became permanent.

“Nice digs, huh?” Massie’s white shirt was patched with sweat, his brown curls sodden. The a/c was on, but low – an energy-saving measure, emblem of the times. Massie looked at his watch. “Your first intake is in fifteen minutes. Liana Broder.”

“I’m ready,” Alice said brightly.

“Don’t forget, party at three.” They were celebrating both the move to 500 Fifth and her promotion. Alice had a full day of meetings until then.

“So, who you rooting for, Venus or Serena?”

“I’m an older sister. Venus, for sure.”

“117 years ago – Wimbledon women’s final, 1884 –Maud Williams beat her kid sister Lilian. Maybe you’re right.”

Fifteen minutes later, Liana Broder stood before the painting. “Where is that? Wait! It’s Paris, right?”

“Paris in the rain. Have a seat, Liana. I’m Alice.”

“This is weird, but it reminds me of a sepia photograph. I love photography, love art – all sorts. Sorry, I’m jabbering. I should be quiet so you can read my stuff.”

“Not a problem,” Alice had already read Liana’s application but reviewed it again, to let Liana get settled. To see how she handled silence. Liana – slender and petite, with curly black hair, intense blue eyes, and a strong handshake — wore a rust-colored tweed suit, a white top, a tear-shaped brooch on her lapel: topaz, her birthstone. She was among Alice’s best applicants in her age group (early 20s): high school valedictorian, 3.6 GPA from Stonybrook, English major. Glowing references. Only a few gaps on the application. In response to Where do see yourself in five years? she had typed unsure. Dream job, she left blank.

The interview lasted an hour. Alice pressed Liana on her goals. Travel – to Paris, to London, to India — was one of Liana’s dreams. But her dream job eluded her. “Something creative. Perhaps everyone says that. Acting or film-making or even writing.”

Liana and applicants like her were the reason Alice’s work mattered. Liana could tell Alice the truth. She didn’t have to feign enthusiasm for a company or business she knew nothing about. Maybe she’d learn to love it – much as Alice found her own niche in career placement.

Not much glamour there. But satisfaction of a kind, so long as you didn’t want too much.

“My sister’s an actress,” Alice said to Liana. Sharing personal details encouraged applicants to open up. Knowledge – about the applicant, the jobs, hiring trends – was key. “Unless you hit it big, it’s not easy. I’m sure you know that. My sister keeps trying but it’s been hard.” Alice’s parents had supported her sister financially for years, dazzled by the notion of Beth’s acting career. “In the meantime, you’re making the right decision to explore other options. And make some dough.”

Liana laughed and seemed to relax. Alice’s screen displayed two jobs: a low-paying three-week gig in publicity at a midtown publishing house, and one downtown, in the financial district, at Cantor Fitzgerald.

“Which do you recommend?” Liana asked.

Although the publishing house was more in Liana’s field of interest, Alice found herself pushing Cantor Fitzgerald. “The offices are beautiful, the people more down-to-earth than you might expect from financial services. The location is amazing. 105^th floor of the World Trade Center. That in itself is special. They’re looking for someone super organized. A decent writer.”

“I love making order out of chaos and I love to write.”

Alice dialed Cantor HR. She rattled off Liana’s strengths. It was arranged. Liana would begin a month-long stint there the next week. Her first day would be Monday, September 10th.

‘Let me know how it goes.”

“You mean Monday?”

“Not necessarily Monday – only if there’s a problem. But later in the week, give me a call. I’d love to hear from you.”

Before she left, Liana stood in front of the Caillebotte. “It’s funny how all the umbrellas are identical. And the cobblestones look like they’re floating.”

“And slippery,” Alice said. “Conveyed with a mere brush-stroke.”

In the hour they were together, she’d grown fond of Liana Broder.

Tuesday came. Alice was in her office by 8:30. Fifteen minutes later, the phone rang. When she picked it up was no one was there. “Hello?” she asked. “Hello?” Whoever it was, was cut off. Then Massie appeared at the threshold of her office, his face ashen, eyes glassy. “Come, Alice. We’re in the conference room. The TV is on there.” When she arrived, 15-odd staffers were gathered. Some were crying.

It was Liana’s second day at Cantor Fitzgerald. She would have arrived early to get her boss’s files in shape. Organizing them so he’d be ready for his meetings.

At that moment, Alice still hoped for the best. Surely the girl would be fine. Surely, she would be.

Fine.

Fifteen years later, Philip Massie stood in the doorway of Alice’s stripped-down office. “One more intake?” he asked. “Please?” His smile was as beguiling as ever; his gray curls spiraled over his shirt collar. On Alice’s desk sat a blue vase of yellow roses. “Good-bye and good luck!” read the card. Alice’s belongings were in boxes. Her desk, except for the computer terminal, was bare.

Next door, in the conference room, balloons floated, tied to a red plastic bucket and shovel. Alice was moving to Southern California, where her parents, sister, and teen-aged nephew lived. There was prosecco on ice, strawberries, brie, a sheet cake. But the party wouldn’t start for 90 minutes. “Okay, hand it over.”

Massie leaned over her desk, sniffed the roses. Alice inhaled, instead of roses, the faint scent of Old Spice the man always wore. Like Alice, Massie was a dinosaur. “Her name is Amy Lawrence. I think you’ll like her. She’s what? 23 or 24. Only a few years younger than you when you started here. She’s interested in executive assistant spots, something financial.” Alice’s mind was so bound up with leaving it was difficult to imagine giving the spiel one more time.

When Amy Lawrence walked into Alice’s office, Alice was sorry she said yes. It was no fault of Ms. Lawrence. Her voice was soft but confident. She had smooth, honey-colored skin, light hazel eyes, and slightly coarse black hair that curled neatly to her shoulders. Her tweed suit brought out her eyes. But Alice found it hard to focus. She knew she wasn’t imagining the resemblance between Amy Lawrence and the other young woman, Liana Broder – only the eye color was different.

“Sorry about my office. Mr. Massie might have told you – after 22 years, I’m heading out west.”

“He said you’re the best, that I was lucky to meet with you.”

“You get credit for knowing what you want. Executive assistant in the financial sector. That makes it easier.” Amy’s resume included BMCC associate degree, Spanish, Maria in Clara Barton High School’s West Side Story. The Spanish might be helpful, and her skills were good. “You’ve got Microsoft Office, PowerPoint, Excel. Just what you need.”

When Alice saw the three openings on her screen, she couldn’t speak at first.

Finally, she said: “Why don’t you come take a look.”

Amy stood behind her. “Is any of them a hedge fund? I’ve heard they’re the place to go if you want to make money.” She gave a slight, self-deprecating laugh.

“Albrecht is. The other two are brokerage houses, Morgan Stanley and Cantor Fitzgerald. I’m sure you’ve heard of them. The positions are long-term temporary and roughly equivalent – administrative assistant to a midlevel manager. Covering for someone on maternity leave. Actually,” she paused, “at Albrecht it’s to replace somebody on paternity leave.”

“That’s cool. Replacing a guy.”

With Liana, Alice spent more time getting to know her. Then, as now, it was a Friday and there was a party that afternoon. Unlike Amy, Liana hadn’t listed anything under dream job on her application. Unlike Amy, she had no answer for where you want to be in five years.

“If it’s Albrecht you want,” Alice told Amy Lawrence, “I should call right away. They close early on Fridays.”

Amy said, “Go ahead.” After a brief phone conversation, it was set. Before Amy left, Alice handed her a business card. Her own name was blacked out; the contact information for her two most experienced colleagues was handwritten below. “Call either one if you have questions.”

Whatever you do, she thought, don’t call me.

Before the party, Alice went to freshen up. While she was in the stall, two women entered the ladies’ room. “Are you staying for Alice’s party?” she heard Marie (who placed medical assistants) ask Patricia, whom Alice had trained.

“I wanted to but I have a big date. Getting my hair blown out, makeup done, the works. I’ll miss her, though.”

“Well,” said Marie, “with Alice gone there’ll be more commissions for the rest of us.”

“Tell me about it! But if it wasn’t for those commissions, she’d still be here, plugging away.”

“Don’t you think she’ll get a job out there? If I know Alice, she will. I can’t imagine her not working.”

“Then why is she leaving?”

“I always thought she was half in love with Massie. Not that she’d ever have an affair. But admiring him, putting him on a pedestal. But then Mrs. Massie goes and dies and he’s single. The fantasy evaporates. At least that’s one theory.”

Alice stayed in the stall until they left. Given her longevity at the company, gossip was inevitable, she reasoned. They didn’t know the truth. They didn’t know she had placed Liana Broder. They didn’t know Philip Massie helped her through it. Alice looked at the mirror over the trio of sinks as she washed her hands. It was cracked and mottled in the lower right-hand corner. Distressed. She’d read a review in the Times the night before of a restaurant where the walls were flanked by distressed mirrors. This was now a much-emulated style – folks sought it in their furniture, like teen-agers (her sixteen-year-old nephew, for example), who purchased ripped and faded jeans. Occasionally a job candidate came to interview with Alice dressed that way, or with three earrings in each ear, or heavily tattooed. Alice would gently explain that, when it came to the jobs in her book, the applicant had to present something different – even if it meant being untrue to one’s true self. Years before, she would speak about the value of working in and experiencing an environment that, at first glance, was outside your comfort zone. She would explain the difference between style and substance; how you could love Shakespeare or Bach or Brecht but still find a home in a corporate environment – even find like-minded colleagues.

Now, she would simply say, “You’re going to need to work on your image before we send you out on a job.”

The crack in the mirror had been there for years. It was strange to think she wouldn’t be seeing it every day, as strange as taking the subway to work that morning for the last time. Every weekday since she started at the firm, she’d taken the 1 train to 42^nd Street and then the shuttle. Often, she arrived at Grand Central without being able to remember boarding the two trains that got her there. If someone asked her directions as she exited the train, she couldn’t even say where she was for the moment.

Her body had memorized the route. It was in her blood. Now she was cutting the bloodline.

Then Alice did something she rarely did during all her years at the firm. She closed her office door. She sat on the floor and opened one of the boxes, leafed through several red-welds. But she didn’t find the photograph, not right away. First, she found the letter Philip Massie wrote to her, a few weeks after September 11, when she tried to resign. By then Liana’s presence in the North Tower, and her death there, had been confirmed. Alice had stopped going to work. She stopped going anywhere.

His letter asked her to stay on. Eventually, she did. At the time she thought it wasn’t because of his letter or even out of loyalty. Rather, it was the prospect of having to explain to a prospective employer why she left. She couldn’t lie. And so she returned to the new office, to the view from her window of Fortitude, to the Caillebotte, to the color known as seashell.

For a while she went to a counselor, paid for by Philip Massie. But the counselor couldn’t help with the dreams. Funny enough, these were dreams, not nightmares. In the dreams, she interviewed Liana and sent her to a different job. Sometimes the job was the publishing house stint that had been available that Friday. Sometimes it was in a real estate office, which weren’t even jobs Alice handled. Once she got a part for Liana in a play. Liana came by to thank her. Alice cupped her hand over her phone receiver, said it was Liana’s own qualities that got her the role, not anything Alice did.

Once she dreamed they were in Paris together. It was raining. Liana slipped on wet cobblestones. Alice caught her.

The dreams lasted for months.

The clipping from the Times, when Alice found it, was neatly folded. It had a paragraph about Liana as well as a photo. It said September 11th was her second day, that she was a temp employee. Alice’s 17-year-old brother was quoted. He spoke about Liana’s optimism. How she always looked forward to September. Even when it rained, she loved the excitement in the air. Something new about to happen.

Fifteen years after the Friday she interviewed Liana Broder, on her last day at work, Alice folded the Times clipping in an envelope. When she took her suit jacket to the dry cleaner that weekend, she found it.

Always after that she would put it somewhere safe, and find it unexpectedly.

New York City September 11

American politics History memes Trump

WE’LL ALWAYS HAVE THE MEMES

by Kevin Hadsell • September 11, 2021September 29, 2021

A Look Back at the Trump Era

On the morning of January 20, 2021, I found myself watching Joe Biden’s inauguration on the CNN livestream. I recall the distinct feeling of reemerging from some subterranean enclave in which I had spent the past four years of my life, along with many of my fellow Americans, like a nation of mole people coming to the surface to squint up into the sunlight. And with a vague sense, too, of having been through something together, some ordeal, whatever it was. It’s probably too early to say what historians will make of the Trump era, but they will likely be guided by the same artifacts that we ourselves, the People Who Live Online, have created to shepherd us through this time in our history. I speak now of what we have entered, wittingly or not, into the historical record for posterity. I speak now of the memes.

By now the meme has become the internet’s primary vehicle for discourse. Typically a simple image overlaid with text, a meme is ideally suited for viral spread across social networks. Taken together, they form a near-perfect conduit for understanding our life and times, like a weird mosaic reconstructed from pieces of the cultural subconscious. Our memes will tell our stories, whatever they are, whether we want them to or not. Our memes will outlast us.

A few of the highlights from the past four years, in no particular order:

WHO WORE IT BETTER?
The split-screen photo featuring Trump’s windblown hair on the left panel, and a tasselled corncob on the right, with the caption, “Who wore it best?” straddling the divide.

SUPERVILLAIN
The entire President Supervillain Twitter account, which superimposed Trump’s actual words, many lifted directly from his tweets, into speech bubbles uttered by Red Skull, the villain of the Captain America comics. There was always a certain uncanny element to this one that struck me as both hilarious and uncomfortable at the same time, not unlike being hit in the funny bone.

TRUMP DRAWS
The Trump Draws Twitter account taking GIF images of Trump holding up newly signed executive orders for the camera, with the order itself replaced by a childish drawing that often referenced something in the recent news that Trump had been going off about on Twitter.

BOND VILLAINS
A Twitter thread begun by history professor Kevin Kruse, matching each member of Trump’s cabinet with a corresponding Bond villain, with a few too-close-for-comfort parallels (admittedly not a meme in the singular, but rather a multipart, semicollaborative meme running over the course of several posts).

And the list goes on…

SYMBOL OF ROT
There were also the vice presidential debates on October 7, 2020, which proved notable not for anything said by either of the candidates but rather for the fly that landed on Mike Pence’s head, inspiring a flurry of memes across social media. These ranged from the puerile (“Flies love BS,” “Actual footage of a fly on shit,” etc.) to the fairly obvious (all of those “pretty fly for a white guy” memes making the rounds on Facebook) to the uncomfortably topical (a photo of Ruth Bader Ginsburg with a caption reading, “I sent the fly.”) The one meme that managed to stay with me, however, was one I saw on Twitter, retweeted by someone in my feed. It featured a screenshot from an online reference page, reading: “The Hidden Symbolism of Insects in Western Painting: Fly – symbol of rot, wasting away, decay, death, melancholia. A fly hovering over a church official or nobleman indicates disfavour with the king or corruption and dereliction of duty.” It was paired with a frozen frame of the Pence photo from that night’s debate replacing the original photo. It struck me as clever at the time, the sort of uncanny parallel that hints at something deeper running beneath the surface. I scrolled on and didn’t really think much about it. Then, three months later, a crowd of angry Trump supporters gathered outside of the US Capitol building in an attempt to halt the official vote count, chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” Disfavour indeed.

While no meme can predict the future, memes can, perhaps, tell us something about our present moment. The relentless, almost feverish pace of meme activity during the Trump years suggests a kind of collective discomfort with the administration, what I have come to think of as our “crisis of narrative.” Since Trump took office – indeed, since he announced his candidacy for the presidency in the first place – there has been a collective sense of discomfort at what this means for the way we understand ourselves and the country we live in. The memes, in this sense, can perhaps be read as our attempt – consciously or otherwise – to grapple with the meaning of a world we thought we knew. Many of the most effective and haunting memes have been those – like the Pence/fly art symbolism meme, or President Supervillain, or the Bond villain/cabinet official Twitter thread – that grapple with the symbolic meaning of the American presidency since 2016.

And it is no secret that the Trump administration itself had been plagued by a crisis of narrative from the very beginning. In short, nobody – from the press secretary to cabinet officials to President Trump himself – knew how to explain its actions to the rest of us in a way that made sense. This crisis of narrative was further compounded by a revolving door of press secretaries, i.e., the people hired to create a coherent public narrative for the White House. And it was further compounded by the way that the Trump administration seemed to embody, to an uncomfortable degree, the dystopian narrative arc of Back to the Future II, with President Trump standing in for Biff Tannen after altering the past to accumulate wealth and power.

This crisis of narrative surfaced in the traditional media, too, as noted by countless hand-wringing op-eds about “the new normal.” The memes responded in kind, filling the narrative void with whatever materials lay at hand. And as we bid farewell to an era that the noted historian Ron Chernow once called “a surreal interlude in American life,” I do wonder if the golden age of the meme is behind us. This combination of surrealism and collective, existential discomfort on a mass scale seems to have been a unique by-product of the Trump years. It is not likely to occur again in the same potency, at least while Biden occupies the Oval Office.

If nothing else, these memes remind us of a time when many of us required a sort of narrative prosthesis to make sense of the world, in the form of images merged with text replicated endlessly through the internet like a hall of mirrors. Though the presidency has returned more or less to “normal,” there is something that still feels not quite real about the past four years, something about the Trump administration that we still seem to be trying to wrap our heads around. I think of the press conference debacle at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, a moment in itself that launched a thousand memes. The incident – in which Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s then-attorney, hosted a press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping about the campaign’s legal challenges to the Pennsylvania ballot count – seemed to mark the end of the Trump era in some vaguely symbolic way. Perhaps in retrospect, this was the only way the Trump’s era could have ended: with a press conference at a landscaping company on the outskirts of Philadelphia, located between a sex shop and a crematorium, with Rudy Giuliani yelling into the void about the media and phantom voter fraud. It was as if some fourth wall had finally broken and we were at last able to see ourselves watching the whole thing play out in real time: a real-life meme containing ourselves and everyone we knew, live on TV. The symbolic resonance alone provided a certain novelistic sweep to the whole scene. Who among us, after all, is not tending to their own garden, in the imperfect and slightly sketchy liminal space between our biological urges and the shadow of death?

As an English teacher, I can assure you that this is top-shelf symbolism, a metaphor for the ages. That the establishment itself shares its name with a famed luxury hotel called the Four Seasons – located just five blocks away from where the ballots were being counted and which we all just sort of assumed would be the location – somehow makes it all the more poignant. This moment, now immortalized in the annals of cyberspace, will be with us forever. It is now up to the historians of the future to piece these events together and make sense of it all. Who knows – they might one day find a satisfying narrative arc for the Age of Trump. It may even provide us with something like closure.

MONTAGE OF MEMORIES

by Thomas Elson • September 10, 2021September 10, 2021

He, at six foot three inches, remembered she was slightly taller. And, on that first evening, in high heels, she was towering.

He could not remember being asked to be her escort for her birthday dinner at the country club. Clouded in his memory was the birthday gift he must have given her. Nor could he remember picking her up or even driving her back to her parents’ six-acre country estate.

But he did remember being introduced to her parents at the country club, and the maître d’ greeting her by name.

He remembered her basement with the two-lane bowling alley he never used, the soft drink fountain with every Pepsi product at the ready, the stereo system with soft music, and the easy feel of the leather divan on his skin.

He also remembered the way she inched closer, brought her long legs under her hips, smiled, partially unbuttoned her blouse, then leaned back, removed her shoes, and extended her legs toward him.

He remembered two more things: Her legs were bare, and her feet were bigger than his.

memories women and men

cooking meat post-agriculture

CHEF’S CHOICE

by Annie Lowenthal • September 5, 2021September 5, 2021

I’m going to hunt a cow, I tell some friends after sinking back a few whiskeys. I say it in jest, but I can feel truth festering behind the words.

I’m sitting in a dimly lit bar with three other somber-faced ex-chefs, anticipation buzzing from our bodies like static across an old television screen.

Usually, we just talk about it — red meat. How it would feel to slice into a thick slab of it — a steak with pink Himalayan salt, seasoned as we used to in the restaurant — to, at last, use our teeth for their purpose. Jeff speaks of blood dripping from his chin, dark as beets. Gerry says he would trade his wife for a tender slice of sirloin against his taste buds, buttery spun silk. He laughs when he says it, but it doesn’t sound like hyperbole.

I hunch over a circular wooden table, a five-minute bicycle ride from home. It’s late, past midnight, and my wife and daughters sleep soundly in their beds, unaware that I crept across the floorboards to the music of their faint snores. If my wife wakes to my absence, I’ll find her pacing in the kitchen brewing tea when I stumble home.

We’ve shut our phones off out of caution because we must pretend that we don’t miss it. We must publicly savor the okra, the beyond-meat burgers, the fried tofu.

Cigar smoke curls around us, thick and balmy.

“How would you cook it?” Simon asks, salivating like one of Pavlov’s dogs. His pupils, full moons, leave little room for blue irises.

“Butter,” Gerry scoffs. “You have to sear it in butter. Top it with a little rosemary. Pair it with Merlot.”

“I don’t know,” I interject. “I’d do something fancy — au poivre crust sprinkled with gorgonzola.”

“You don’t have to hunt one,” Jeff offers. He’s uneasy and his eyes dart back and forth, watching as the bar-back pours Tito’s over ice.

He lowers his voice. “My brother says you can buy it on the black market.”

The smell of stale beer and salted almonds packs the room, sliding across the floor in a sticky film.

“No,” Gerry says. “It’s not the real stuff. You’ll be choking down a human thigh or glute. You’ve got to do it yourself.”

“It’s nearly impossible,” I say, shifting in my seat. I’m pulling on the wiry, rust-colored hairs of my beard. “I could end up dead.”

Simon agrees. “They’re almost eradicated in the States. Unless you’re willing to sneak onto government soil for one.”

“You’ve got to try upstate New York,” Gerry says. “Elites, ex-mob guys, they keep them as pets. Worship them, like the Hindus do.”

“Nah, they breed bovines, castrate and eat ‘em.” Simon waves his hand above his head. “Greedy bourgeoisie.”

“God, you’re a bunch of conspiracy theorists,” Jeff says, vodka spittle spewing from his lips.

“Why don’t you just go to India for one, then? I hear there are some there still, roaming in the streets. They wouldn’t hurt them.” Simon leans on his elbows.

“I can’t afford a plane ticket,” I say. “And besides, they hate us over there since the mass slaughter, though it was more human than most of our factories.”

“The ol’ hunting decree,” Gerry nods — he’s the only one who personally participated. “The fall of the meat industry.”

“So long, cattle,” Simon shakes his head sadly.

We lean back in our seats, thinking in silence. Jeff gestures for the check, as if to silence the idea.

But it lingers in the air, settling over us in a blanket of possibility: I could hunt and cook us a steer.

My wife’s standing in the kitchen staring into a mug of tea, letting the steam heat her cheeks. She jumps when I open the door.

“Went to the bar again, huh?”

Pans decorate the counter. Fresh chopped mint and parsley cling to a cutting board. A bottle of olive oil leaks onto granite.

“New recipe?” I ask her.

She still cooks (though I stopped when we lost the restaurant) at a Michelin-star in Center City that Philadelphia Magazine dubbed inventive and piquant. She never mentions the steakhouse.

Sometimes in the dark when my back is turned, I ask if she misses it. Remember school in Brazil? How we learned to tenderize? I ask. Remember fat and sinew?

“Yeah, new recipe,” she answers me now, reaching to push her black bangs out of her eyes. “Restaurant is looking for a sous chef, if you’re interested. I told them I knew a guy.”

“No, thanks, Ava. I think I’ll keep recruiting for a bit.”

Ava sighs and her eyebrows meet above her upturned nose to form a deep wrinkle. She puts her mug on a coaster and walks quickly around the cramped, industrial-style kitchen, stuffing plates in the dishwasher.

“You’ve got to move on, Dave,” she says. “It’s been five years.”

She reaches for my hand. “We’ve got two little girls. The recruitment job isn’t a career.”

I pull my hand away, sliding it across the crumbs on the countertop.

“I know you’ve been talking to Arabella,” she goes on. “She’s got drawings of cows pinned above her bed. It isn’t normal.”

I back away with my hands in the air, but she keeps talking.

“There’s still fish. There’s still chicken. A true chef can cook anything.”

“Come on,” I say. “You know they’re hard to come by, now. The whole food chain’s out of whack.”

She sighs. She’s tired of having the same argument.

“Well, wouldn’t you rather be alive?” she asks. “It needed to happen.”

Her eyes brush over me, taking in the beard, the tattoos, the untucked shirt, and a look of dissatisfaction mars the pretty features of her face.

“Actually,” I lie, suddenly inspired, “I’ve been thinking of heading to upstate New York. Gerry says there’s a plant-based culinary summit there in a few weeks. Maybe I’ll consider that sous chef job, after all.”

In my bed later, I stare at the ceiling. Moonlight steals through the window, illuminating Ava’s skin like foam against a wave. Half-dreaming, images materialize—me, in a white coat, carrying a tall skewer of beef, bending to slice it with a gleaming silver knife. A patron reaching forward with tongs to grip the piece gingerly and court it to a ceramic plate. The salad bar lined with luxuriant chunks of burrata that ooze cream from the center when punctured with a fork.

“Daddy, what’s methane?” my six-year-old asks in the morning, shampoo suds bubbling in her ears. She splashes and watches droplets fall from the air and merge with the bath water, becoming one again.

“Well, too much of it is bad for the earth,” I say. I’m kneeling on the cold bathroom tile. “When we used to eat cows, and drink their milk, it spread to the atmosphere from their burps.”

Her nose scrunches in confusion, and then she laughs, gums showing where her two front teeth once dangled. I reach forward and release the drain to let it gulp noisily at the soapy water. Arabella covers her ears.

“And you killed them, Daddy? To get rid of them?” she asks, wrapped in a towel on my lap.

“No, I didn’t kill any. Daddy’s friend Gerry did, though.”

“The gov-ner-men told him to, though, right, Daddy?”

“Dave, that’s enough,” Ava shouts from our bedroom.

Three Saturdays later, I meet Gerry at noon, and we sit outside on his front stoop, because the air is particularly warm for November. Yellow leaves line the cement steps and crunch in satisfaction beneath our feet.

Gerry lives in Old City, in a stately, stone townhome off a cobblestone street. His wife is an app developer who funds his gambling habit, and he works for a security company but takes in little commission.

He’s found us a family in the Catskills who recently outfitted their mansion in security. The husband’s a class-action attorney who, according to Gerry, earned a hefty sum in a cruise wreck recovery.

Gerry’s company performed the installment a few months ago and his buddy returned to the office wide-eyed and frantic, pulling Gerry into the bathroom where he whispered, they’ve got a pasture; they’re breeding steers, I’m sure of it. Gerry driveled just hearing it, he tells me after. It’s confidential information, of course, but he scans the computer later, retrieves the address, and draws us a map of the grounds.

Since he’s kept tabs on the file, he learns that this week the family has plans to vacation in Italy. They’ve requested tight surveillance on the home with special focus on the pasture.

“Hey, Dave!” Gerry’s wife leans out the upstairs window and waves. “Have fun at the summit, you guys. Sounds great. I’m so glad Gerry wants to get back in the kitchen.”

Gerry smiles, waves. “Miss ya, babe!”

He looks at me and his voice drops two octaves. “I’ve got two guns: a rifle and a big handgun, depending on how close we get to it. I figure I can hold one, you hold the other. Whoever’s got the shot, shoots.”

I nod in reverence. “Did you get the truck?”

“I’ve got my brother-in-law’s truck. Told him we’re gonna need it to bring back any cooking supplies we buy at the retreat: smokers, grills, the likes.”

Though I shared the first impulse, Gerry’s the mastermind behind our plan, the one who agreed to accompany me. I knew Jeff and Simon would decline, though they’ve asked us to bring back meat for them. I imagine the four of us, hunched over chunks of grilled flesh in a field somewhere, juice dripping down our forearms, like the schoolboys in Lord of the Flies.

Kill the pig, cut her throat, bash her in, and all that.

We leave in the early afternoon, in a white moving truck, the sort with no rear windows that my wife tells my daughters to run from. Gerry cranks his seat back and sleeps, his meaty legs sprawled across the dashboard and I drive, holding my phone in my right hand to navigate the GPS.

Gerry wakes only to request a gas station burger, and we step out of the truck to eat them on the asphalt floor of the parking lot. I wolf mine down in two bites, the taste of beyond-meat sufferable with the promise of fresh beef so close.

Next to me, Gerry takes slow bites of his. He’s sitting with one leg bent underneath his body, balancing his burger on the knee of the other. He looks at me with sad eyes, like taking this trip has brought us closer, entitled him to share something personal.

“Alright,” I say. “Finish up. Better get back on the road.”

“I’m falling apart, man,” Gerry says, voice cracking. “I hate my job. I need a Perc just to get through the day.”

“Ger, in a few hours, you’ll be a chef again.”

I pat his broad shoulder for what feels like an appropriate length of time.

The bulk of our travel unfolds on the Jersey Turnpike, and I pass the time reading the billboards, Gerry’s snores a welcome replacement for his sorrow. In quick succession, I see the Virgin Mary clutching at a string of beads with text that reads “Pray the Rosary Every Day,” and then next to it, a sign that reads, “Wanted: Serial Bank Robber,” across a grainy image of a white male with long hair. Further ahead there’s an older sign, sticking out of the dirt road. A large red “X” crosses out the image of a cow. “Us or Them?” the sign asks.

It dawns on me that in years past, autumn would have brought bloodied fawns, recumbent with vacant eyes, to the side of the highway.

Instead, the scene is picturesque — the Northeast in fall — and a spectrum of burgundy dots the turnpike. I crack open the windows to let in the crisp air and nostalgia washes over me in the form of Thanksgivings as a child. I think of cooking corned beef brisket with my father who loathed turkey, of the way he cured the beef for weeks with large-grained rock salt, in preparation.

My father taught me to carefully slice the meat with an electric knife, avoiding my fingers; in hindsight, he had likely slugged too many beers to cut it himself. By night’s end, cans of crushed Bud Light lined the counter, and shouts wafted through the vents of my parents’ bedroom.

My father’s temper, emboldened by rampant alcoholism, subdued only when we cooked together. In silence that mingled with Frank Sinatra’s crooning, we held our collective breath as we took the first bites of Sunday meatballs, rib-eye steaks, lamb chops.

When he died, I saved nothing of his but his recipes, scrawled on lined paper in chicken-scratch print.

We stop in Poughkeepsie to rest and wait for the still hours of early morning. The motel is a small, brick building with an orange, clay-tile roof. Across the parking lot stands a light blue, abandoned and windowless cement building with the words “Edward’s Adult Bookstore” trailing across the side in shaky, black ink. The sun, an angry ball of flame, sets slowly behind Edward’s.

“Now, that’s a place I’d have liked to check out,” Gerry says, grinning to show white Chiclet teeth. His mood has shifted considerably.

I pull my phone out of my pocket and text Ava: just arrived at the hotel. Beautiful! All expenses paid for. Head chef sounds talented.

So proud of you, she writes back.

At the front desk, a woman hands us the key to our room. She has stringy blonde hair and pockmarked skin, accentuated with deep craters. She’s jumpy, talking fast but struggling to enunciate.

“Two beds, please,” I say.

“You’ll take what I have,” she slurs.

There’s one queen-size bed with a flowered, green quilt in the middle of the square room she gives us. The print, the same as a ceramic bowl my mother gave me to vomit into as a child, makes me nauseous, feels like strep throat again and amoxicillin in a plastic shooter. Gerry reaches into his duffle bag and pulls out a UV-flashlight. He tugs back a corner of the fitted sheet and scans the mattress for bed bugs.

“The wife says you gotta do this at hotels,” Gerry says. “And she thinks we’re at a Hyatt.”

Gerry ventures off to find a vending machine and I lie against a flat pillow, letting my eyes flutter shut. When I open them, hours later, and pull back curtains that cover a streaky window, stars pulse against a vast, black canvas. My chest thumps. It’s almost time.

I look in the bathroom for Gerry, but he hasn’t returned, so I ease on the sink, turning the handles of a rusted faucet, and splash water on my face. I fasten the buttons of my plaid flannel over a white undershirt. Red grooves in my face from the pillow decorate my left cheekbone.

I venture down the hallway in search of a water fountain, my tongue pasty against the roof of my mouth.

At the front desk, Gerry’s dancing slow with the blonde woman. Her greasy hair hangs mid-way down her back swaying along with her hips. He whispers something to her, and they laugh.

“Wouldn’t you love it, though?” Gerry says a bit louder, into her ear. “A juicy, McDonald’s Big Mac.”

“Gerry,” I blurt, my voice high-pitched, unrecognizable to my own ears. “It’s nearly time. We’ve got shit to do.”

“Excuse my friend,” Gerry steps back from the woman. “He was a famous chef once. Tomorrow’ll be his first day cooking since.”

“Not even breakfast?” she asks, monotone.

On the hour-long drive to the property Gerry found in the Catskills, we talk logistics. Gerry has brought his work computer and logs on to the property’s security cameras from the passenger seat.

“We’ll go in and cut the power manually,” Gerry says. “I don’t want to shut the system down from here or they’ll know it was an inside job.”

But once we arrive, Gerry refuses to exit the truck. He doesn’t want to kill another cow, he says; he’s seen too much blood and gore.Seen white, black, and red spotted beings scattered in the grass like battlefield casualties. It’s not as easy as you think, he says.

“What the hell, Gerry?” I ask him, grinding my teeth near his face. “I’ve got to do it myself?”

“I’ll help you cook it after. I’ll cook it myself! I’ll cut it and put it in the fridge,” he gestures to the back of the truck, where the supplies wait.

“What the hell, Gerry?”

“I’ve been watching YouTube videos on butchering,” Gerry goes on, gesturing emphatically.

“It’s a one-man job, Dave,” his eyebrows raise in defense. “I’ll be here waiting. I’ll keep a lookout.”

He’s tired, though, from his late-night rendezvous with the motel manager, and I see his eyelids droop as he speaks. The skin under his eyes is translucent, showing purple, tree-branch veins. I remember how he walked when we first hired him, shoulders thrust back in confidence, broad chin protruding forward.

I reach into the backseat and retrieve the loaded guns, tucking them under my hunter-green jacket. The house sits atop a winding hill, secluded, and shaded with tall pines and maples with roasted-carrot leaves that bask in the light of the truck’s headlights. It’s dark, early morning, and the castle of a home looks menacing—stone pillars frame the front door and a wrought-iron balcony juts from the main bedroom like a threatening underbite.

Gerry has mapped out the spots on the land where motion sensors and cameras hide. I carry the piece of paper with me, stepping across the wet grass on tiptoe in a gentle ballet. The air here is hibernal and unfriendly, a contrast to the recent warmth of the city.

The land is large, sprawling, and it’s a mile walk to reach the enclosed pasture. I disable the alarm like Gerry taught me (snipping the wires with kitchen shears), and unlatch the gate, before bending over to rest my calloused hands on my knees. When I look up, air catches in my throat.

“Holy shit,” I breathe.

It’s a steer, like Gerry promised, with short, brown fur and massive ivory horns pointing toward the gray sky—a figure with demonic presence. I stumble back. He grunts in my direction, his nostrils flaring at the tip of a wet, fleshy nose. Beady black eyes perched sideways on a long, narrow face stare at me, unblinking. It’s got eyelashes, I think.

I’m close enough to use the handgun, which I retrieve slowly from under my coat. I can hear his breathing, or maybe it’s my own, reverberating in a trance that feels drug-induced, but isn’t. I’ve got the gun cocked, pointed in his face, my finger slipping from the trigger.

We stare into one another’s eyes, sentient beings locked in an unspoken understanding—he knows what I’ve come to do. I hold the power here, but I back away slowly. The lust for meat, once primal, feels trivial.

“Hey, drop the weapon,” someone shouts behind me.

I snap my head to the left and see two men dressed in dark suits, shotguns aimed at my back. They’re strapped in bullet-proof vests.

Somewhere in the distance I think I hear a truck engine revving, tires screeching away. Dammit, Gerry, I think.

The men are shouting. They close in on me with pointed weapons.

“No, no, don’t shoot,” I beg, thinking of my wife, my daughters.

I fall to my knees, dropping the handgun, and rip moist stalks of grass from the earth with clenched fists. I’m on all fours, my back in the air, staring into the steer’s eyes. He’s unmoving.

Suddenly, he throws his head back, mocking me.

The early morning sun peeks through the clouds and glints off our silhouettes, two animals at the mercy of a gun’s barrel.

THE REST OF EVERYTHING

by Emma Hill • September 4, 2021September 4, 2021

My Texas pine trees make the world so small. They only die in pieces; that’s what evergreen means: to lose one needle at a time, while spindly replacements brush green against heaven. When my little sister and I played among the pine trees, wind from the Gulf Coast (so, so far away, from the land where Dad was a child and Mama went to college) feathered through the needles and made them whisper. Sometimes, it sounded like our mother: “Be safe. Keep the house in sight,” but other times, especially as we got older, it sounded like new teachers (they came from the private school and taught us to comb our hair and take notes): “Life’s an adventure. Test your limits.” We loved our mother like we loved our shiny textbook covers, which bore our names etched with Sharpie or graphite, so we compromised: We imagined an adventure not too far from the house, where we could tilt our heads the right way and see a thin, white sliver of home.

Mama hated looking back at old photographs and seeing our wild hair. “Did I never comb it for you?” she asked in frustration. We, grown, shrugged; I only remembered Nana tugging tangles out of my sensitive scalp and, the morning before prom, teachers curling my hair at the state essay competition.

There came a point when Mama could no longer teach us the math she relearned herself or English from a borrowed textbook. So we were made to attend a prestigious Christian private school; she went to work early each morning to pay. How did it feel for her, those first few weeks, when we came home exhausted from lugging our textbooks but triumphant, babbling about the Latin teacher with yellow eyes or how fascinating we found Texas history?

Fuelled by our new environment, my little sister and I wanted to create something better than math problems or the cookies our mother tried to bake with us. We wanted an adventure. So we built fairy tales, our own languages, and royal lineages that extinguished themselves in us because we belonged only to the pine trees and the yellow-spotted silkworms that Mama lit on fire once, when they tried to web her cherry tree. They writhed and flung themselves against their own silk to escape the flames, with no luck. We thought we could hear their screaming, but Mama said it was just the moisture in the silk, being released by the heat.

The silkworms, along with their fellows the termites and the pine beetles, were not the only pests in the forest. My sister and I learned, in class or conversation, that pine is a soft wood. The bark scales layer to protect the heart from insects or infection. With the very dirty fingernails of fate, I relieved scales of their duty and signed my name to the death I ensured — a shaky, capital E is easy to press into pine skin. This was the beginning.

My sister and I made good use of dead trees. We were scavenger-children. We built The Hut out of twigs and vines and castaway pine bark.

The Hut was small; it was not really a hut, but a collection of brambles and branches under which we squatted to escape the house where homework and chores awaited.

Our Great Hall was interwoven twigs tied with Dr. Seuss vines from the yard — little pink Pom Pom flowers we snipped off, but the frond leaves, which closed tightly under human touch as if they knew to be afraid of us, we let remain to shrivel into brownness like the rest of everything. We plugged holes in our perforated infrastructure with moss, leaves, pine bark, and other remains: if our mother had not warned us about leprosy, we would have used the roadkill the dogs dragged into the front yard. Armadillo scales make better roof tiles than even pine bark. But our Hut was birthed solely from the once-green things, and the worst punishments we incurred upon ourselves were poison ivy and an occasional briar scratch. If a tree had termites, we left it to rot where it fell. The creatures would swarm our hands, prickling soft skin in search of hard bark, and we were not planning to be eaten.

Pine trees, though soft and susceptible as a human heart, are strong. We only killed saplings at worst. But there are those forces stronger than children that can make even decades-old trees fall.

There was one massive trunk that stayed standing, dead in its tracks, for years, though its roots had withered long ago. It was heat that killed it; a terrible drought sucked the green from the pine needles and left the tree brittle and parched. All the bark sloughed off its haunches until the tree became a single, stark white obelisk marking a part of the forest where we dared not trespass. Pines can live to be 1,000 years old, if they’re not in a 2008 East Texas backyard. I do not know how old our tree was, before the end.

The great white pine fell to a storm when I was lying in bed (not asleep) listening to the lightning rattle the picture frames and trying not to recall the weatherman who’d visited our school and told us tales of lightning climbing through windows and pipes. When the thunderous fall resounded, I squeezed my eyes shut and let myself pretend I was safe.

After the storm, my sister and I went to assess the damage. A ragged stump survived; all else of the great white heart had crumbled to skeletal remains against the earth. In the soggy pine needles we’d dared to finally violate, we balanced booted feet on the ruins and knew we’d never really been far enough. We retreated to the house, where, to our disappointment, Mama had not had time to make cookies.

childhood nature

THE LAST WEEKEND IN JULY

by Zach Murphy • September 3, 2021September 3, 2021

It was the summer of 1993, and Keilani and I sat by the crackling fire as the bullfrogs croaked a sonorous symphony, the grass swayed from a whispering breeze, and the stars zipped in different directions across the vast night sky.

“What a weekend,” Keilani said, resting her hands on the back of her jet-black hair.

“Rad like a cat wearing sunglasses,” I said.

“Satisfying like spelling Sriracha right on the first try,” Keilani said.

That was our thing. One of our things. In fact, when you’ve known someone since the age of five, you amass a lot of things.

I leaned in toward the warmth of the fire, took a deep breath, and prepared to tell Keilani something that I had hesitated to tell her all summer. “I decided I’m not going to Northwestern.”

“What?” Keilani asked.

“I’ve thought about it a lot and I just don’t think college is for me,” I answered.

“But we had it all planned out,” Keilani said. “Together.”

“I’m so terrified of tossing four years away,” I said. “And going into debt forever.”

“Why did you wait until the last minute to tell me?” Keilani asked. “You always do that, and it drives me crazy.”

“It’s not the last minute,” I said.

“That’s another thing you do,” Keilani said. “I know it’s not literally the last minute, but you just have this affinity for suddenly dipping out on plans.”

“Like when?” I asked.

“Remember when you didn’t even show up to your own birthday party? The party that I organized!”

“I had the flu!”

Keilani stood up. “And the time you said you would pick me up from my dentist appointment and didn’t show up?”

“I had a panic attack about driving in downtown traffic,” I said. “I had just gotten my license!”

“I had to use a pay phone while half of my mouth was numb!”

Keilani tossed another log onto the fire and a flurry of sparks burst into the air.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Keilani sat back down, fanned the smoke away from her eyes, and brushed the ashes off her sweatshirt. “I’m going to miss you. That’s all.”

“I’m going to miss you too,” I said.

“So what do you plan on doing?” Keilani asked.

“I want to save the world.”

“Like Wonder Woman?”

“No,” I said. “I keep having these dreams about rainforests losing their color and oceans warping into garbage dumps. I want to try and do something. I’m just not sure what yet.”

“Maybe someday there will be an invention that allows us to see each other’s lives from far away,” Keilani said.

“Sure,” I said. “And maybe Blockbuster will go out of business!”

We both laughed until we snorted.

Keilani reached over and grabbed my hand. “We’ll still look up at the same moon,” she said.

I wondered if I’d ever have a moment with Keilani like this again. “What a weekend,” I said.

Keilani sighed. “Over too soon like a Prince song.”

change friendship

LULU WON’T EAT

by Margaret Nowaczyk • August 29, 2021August 29, 2021

It’s been a week, I think, so I thought I’d bring her in. She just sniffs at her food — I make my own, no store-bought cat food for her, I shred tuna and chicken together, she used to love it, she’d purr and twirl around my ankles when I’d be dicing the meat, couldn’t wait, almost out of her skin every meal time. Now she just stares at the dish, sits there. I’ve thrown it out almost every day this week, dried up and all. Ray, my husband, jokes that’s she’s on a diet and that I should try it, too. Five pounds up and he says I’ve let myself go. Well, he did help me lose all that weight when we first met — he was so encouraging, told me I was beautiful, that I could do it. And he was right. Now, he says that I’m so fat, he’s embarrassed to be seen with me.

Not that we go out that much. I should stay at home and look after my man, he says, since I didn’t give him any kids. He’s joking, of course, it was him who didn’t want kids, but I haven’t seen my friends for a while, he doesn’t like when I go out without him. He expects dinner on the table when he gets home even if I don’t cook as well as his ex, now she was a gourmet cook. She was always elegant, and well-dressed, even if she was stuck up. He left her because of that. Says she needed to be brought down a notch but even then she’d be way above me. He’s so funny.

Lulu’s always been healthy, I take very good care of her. Last year she had a broken paw, the front left. I have no idea how it happened. I came home late from a girls’ night out and she was curled up on her pillow and wouldn’t move. Ray had been watching football and said he didn’t notice anything. She meowed so loudly when I felt along her bones — I know how to check her out, I was going to be a nurse but Ray didn’t want me to finish my degree, said he didn’t want his wife cleaning other people’s shit. Not that I was going to do that, I was already in grad school, but he insisted after we were married. Said I deserved better.

Lulu limps a bit now, but her legs are as good as they are going to get, I guess. Her tail, too. One time she got it caught in the door — see, she has a kink? Ray swore he didn’t see her sneaking through the terrace door when he slammed it shut. He said he was sorry but that it was a tail, not a vital organ, so she’d be fine. And she was. He wouldn’t pay for the X-rays, was I mad — X-rays for a cat’s tail? He couldn’t stop laughing about it. But it’s not her tail that I’m worried about now — she’s getting so skinny. No, she’s not throwing up, just the occasional hairball – Ray loathes those! Yes, she’s still peeing.

Lulu’s a plain tabby — purebred rooftop tabby I call her. I found her in the back of the shed when she was a kitten right after my Bengal got lost. Mau, five-year-old, not a kitten anymore. Ray says he has no idea how she got out, but once out, Mau was gone. Those cats cost so much, nobody would ever return her, she was a strictly indoor cat, I had been so careful with doors and windows. I cried for days, but I wouldn’t let Ray see — he’d be mad that I was so upset about a cat, even it that cat had cost over a thousand dollars. Only the best for Ray, that’s why he got a Bengal but Mau never liked Ray even if Ray was the one who bought her after he ran over Mocha. Mocha? She was my first cat, the one I had before we were married, a blue-eyed Siamese with a brown nose and ears and stockings. She curled in my lap when I read, slept under my desk when I was studying, met me at the door when I came home. She was my good luck charm — I did so well on exams because she helped me concentrate when I studied. She didn’t take well to the move to the big house, but she was starting to get used to it. She loved to sit under Ray’s Merc when the engine was still warm and I told Ray to be careful when he took the car out, to check for her, but he must have forgotten. Mocha was getting old, she wasn’t quick enough to get away. I guess it was an accident.

Lulu was so tiny when I found her, her eyes were still closed. Her mother she never came back. I called the kitten Louloudi, flower in Greek. Ray’s Greek and he wanted me to learn the language so that I could speak it when we travelled there. We sometimes go to the Caribbean, but he has to go to Greece at least once a year — he’s a different man there, happy, relaxed. His family thought I was doing great, but he said that my accent was atrocious so I stopped. But Lulu, I fed her with a dropper and then she learned to lick my fingers. Ray said the milk would kill her because it was from a cow and not a cat, didn’t I know anything, but she did fine. When she was a kitten, she always followed me around and at nights I had to shoo her from our bedroom. After the night when Ray woke me up in the middle of the night and insisted that I change the bedsheets because they smelled of cat, I kept her out of there. But when he travelled for work, she slept curled around my neck — so soft, so warm — and I always changed the sheets before he got home but still, he’d shake out the duvet insisting there were cat hairs on it. There never were, I boiled and bleached the sheets and the duvet cover every time.

Lulu’s older now, but she still runs like a kitten whenever Ray comes into the room. He says she’s killing songbirds whenever she’s outside, a killing machine, not like dogs, those are loyal and devoted, cats are selfish and mean-spirited, like humans, like me. I asked him once if he’d like a dog and he just laughed — he wasn’t going to let me ruin a good dog, he said.

Can you feel her ribs? She’s so skinny now. She used to curl up in my lap all soft and fat when I read but now she just lays on her pillow, getting skinnier and skinnier. Last year when I was laid up with the dislocated shoulder, she stayed with me all the time but knew to make herself scarce when Ray came home. He was mad because he had to do the shopping by himself. Normally, he takes me shopping for groceries, he won’t let me drive, I’m such a bad driver, but with my shoulder in the sling he had to go alone. He only grabbed my arm but he is so strong it popped out. He drove me to the hospital, apologizing the whole time and crying. I told the doctor it was an accident. Because it was. My arm is still sore and I can’t lift it to reach the top shelves so I had to rearrange the pantry – Ray likes to see it orderly. And it hurts when I iron his shirts — it’s my right arm. A fresh shirt every morning, a corporate lawyer needs to look good all the time. That was the only time I saw a doctor — thank goodness I’m healthy, if a little clumsy. Last month I fell on the ice, slipped on the front when the front door slammed shut after Ray rushed in and I cut my eyebrow and had a black eye for a week. No, it didn’t need stitches, it healed nicely with those steristrips from the drugstore, see?

Of course, I’m fine. I’m tough, I don’t fuss much, but I worry about Lulu. She’s not tough.

cats domestic abuse

ALL GOULD THINGS

by Touer Haines • August 28, 2021September 3, 2021

Photo by Kim Eriksson (copied from Flickr)

The young client-service technician stopped showing up one day after the dregs of his morning coffee slid down in the shape of music notes and he looked in the bathroom mirror and saw Glenn Gould’s face instead of his own. No more financial reps or wholesalers or confused clients asking if they were speaking to someone in Toronto.

For money the young man played the piano and for company he entertained individuals whose desire could not be contained at the sight of him. Every blood test came back negative.

That summer he was the headliner at Festival d’été, the music drifting over eighty thousand screaming fans weathering the cool rain on the Plains of Abraham. He appeared onstage with Sir Paul McCartney. He accompanied Lady Gaga. Billy Joel changed some lyrics to honor him during the encore. After all that, a former colleague came backstage with a VIP pass and told the young man he was cool for an Anglophone.

The young man had his former colleague killed, the body incinerated, the ashes scattered along the shores of the St. Lawrence River. He sent a fruitcake to his colleague’s family at Christmas and established a scholarship at Laval University as penance. All world-famous celebrities are allowed one murder, but he’d been a tad too hasty in using his.

He went out and purchased a sports car. Others’ lives flashed before his eyes on the autoroute: H.P. Lovecraft, Norm Macdonald, the back-up goaltender for the 1976-77 Nordiques.

He purchased a cabane à sucre on nearby Île d’Orléans and each night he swam laps in an Olympic-size pool of maple syrup in the hope that he could slow the transformation of his skull into an oversized cube, the rearrangement of his features. His eyes and mouth and nose faced front, while his ears shifted to either side. Everything flattened and appeared painted-on. He could have been from the Big Smoke or spent his life working the fields behind the house his grandfather and great uncle had built (shoddily, with their own hands) in Northeastern Alberta.

He sold his piano for a fraction of what he paid for it and was left with his millions and a case of HPV and the unbearable weight of his head. An aching neck. A bruised and tender face. The inability to pass through doors, like Mayor McCheese. The loss of balance. The embarrassment of being unable to pick himself up. The need to ask his personal assistant to draw his eyebrows back on with a marker after he washed his face.

He gave up on his maple syrup treatment and threw J.Lo’s get-well-soon card in the blue bin. He spent his days in bed, contemplating arson. Years passed before he discovered that if he closed his eyes and concentrated, he could leave his body with its cumbersome block for a head and shoot through the clouds and the atmosphere.

He was entertained by an astronaut’s guitar-playing, but it was tiring to maintain his presence outside his physical form and keep up with the speed of the International Space Station at the same time. He went still and slipped through the station’s shell, into the void, and orbited the earth until the silence became unbearable.

Upon his return he sold the sugar shack and the sports car. He moved to Ontario. Words that had come easily to him, albeit in a thick accent, eluded him. He caught up with friends and acquaintances, and they lamented the lack of squeak in the cheese curds in their poutine. They buttered the crusts on their pizza. They pronounced the names of certain hockey players in a way that made others think they were pretentious.

They were pretentious. And they loved it.

Canada Glenn Gould music

Indonesia Sumatra traveling

THE GANGSTER FROM HELL

by James Roth • August 28, 2021August 28, 2021

“I gangster from hell!” he roared, just as the cook set down a plate of fried eggs on the plastic table.

He, the gangster from hell, looked at me in a menacing way. I had just gotten off an overnight bus that had left Medan, Sumatra, the previous evening and arrived here, at the Banda Aceh bus station, in northern Sumatra, at seven the next morning. I was hungry and a bit dazed from a long journey over a potholed highway. A few days before I had crossed the Malacca Strait, coming across it from Penang, Malaysia, to backpack through Indonesia, starting off in Sumatra. (The Strait had been calm, but even so, a few passengers couldn’t handle the bumping along of the high-speed ferry.)

“Where you from?” the gangster from hell growled. The yellow of a yolk dribbled from a corner of his mouth.

“You Germany?” he demanded.

“I’m American,” I said.

The gangster from hell growled approvingly and bit off a piece of roti.

“Rich country,” a man sitting beside me said.

“I want to America,” the cook said.

We were sitting at a makeshift table on plastic chairs in a corner of the parking area of the long-distance bus station. The bus I’d arrived on, a very modern and clean Mercedes, was at a platform, loading passengers for the return trip to Medan, but even a Mercedes hadn’t successfully smoothed out the potholed road.

“You want eggs, coffee?” the cook asked me.

I said I did.

The man next to me, who was drinking coffee served in a glass mug, said, “He drink whiskey,” nodding at the gangster from hell, who held up a soft drink bottle filled with a tea-coloured liquid. The gangster grinned proudly.

The gangster from hell was perhaps forty, had broad shoulders and a square face and full head of matted down, just-gotten-out-of-bed hair that was turning gray. He hadn’t shaved for a few days, and his beard was a patchwork of gray and brown stubble.

“Where are the buses to the ferry?” I asked. I was on my way to Pulau Wei, an island off the tip of Sumatra, to spend some time there in a bungalow made of bamboo and thatch, snorkelling, reading while lying in a hammock, perhaps getting laid now and then, and also writing.

“You take taxi there,” the man sitting next to me said. “My friend have taxi.”

I would learn that a lot of Indonesians had friends who had what I needed.

The cook set my plate of eggs down in front of me, then a mug of cinnamon-coloured coffee. I ate the eggs. They were, after a long bus trip of eight hours, very satisfying, the greasiness of them. As I was eating, a woman wearing a headscarf, holding the hand of a boy who was five or six years old, came up to my side.

“You give,” the man sitting beside me said.

The gangster from hell said, “Do you give?”

I stopped eating and looked at the woman. Her eyes were gray and cloudy. I pulled out some money from a shirt pocket, 1,000 rupiah, less than ten cents, and put it in one of the boy’s hands.

“You good man,” the gangster from hell said. He drank from the bottle of whiskey. “They never give!”

“And you?”

“I gangster from hell!” he bellowed. This seemed to be validation for everything he did.

“He work furniture factory before,” the cook said.

“Now no factory,” the man sitting beside me said. “Earthquake.”

In 2004, a 9.1 earthquake off the coast of western Sumatra had caused a tsunami to come ashore, killing more than 250,000 people along the coast of western Sumatra, up north in Phuket, and even across the Indian Ocean in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and India, when homes and villages were washed away. The earthquake was one of the most powerful in recorded history.

“He no job,” the cook said, referring to the gangster from hell.

“He do woman work,” the gangster from hell said of the man sitting beside me. He made the motion of ironing a shirt while chuckling to himself.

“His wife have business,” the man said of the gangster from hell. “She give money him.”

He and the cook laughed.

The gangster from hell looked at me. The corners of his mouth remained specked with egg yolk. “Strong, me. I five children. Him three,” he said. And then he thumped his sternum with a fist before asking me, “You married?”

“No,” I said.

The cook looked at me and smiled.

“Why?” the man sitting beside me asked.

“No reason,” I said. “Just not married.”

“A man must marry,” he said.

I ate my eggs and drank the syrupy coffee.

“Man without children not man.”

“He free,” the gangster from hell said back. “American.” He then looked at the cook and said, “He like boys.” He laughed again, a deep belly laugh.

“You pay now,” the cook said. “Pay! You always say this thing.”

The gangster from hell took some bills from his pocket and slammed them down on the table. “Money,” he said, “for your boys.”

“Go away. Go!” the cook said.

The gangster from hell once again laughed to himself as the cook reached for the money.

The man beside me said, “My wife with baby in stomach. Soon four.”

The gangster from hell stood, picked up his bottle of whiskey, pulled up his pants, which had fallen down around his thighs, tucked in his shirt, wiped the egg yolk from his mouth with a shirtsleeve, and staggered off.

The two men and I watched him as he walked across the gravel, and when he stumbled, they laughed but I didn’t.

Africa gender spirituality

KESANDU

by Sheila Atuona • August 22, 2021October 11, 2021

The sky loomed red over Ado and lightning threaded the sky like fulgurant fishbones, appearing then disappearing in a celestial game of hide and seek. On cue, the last hagglers disappeared from the main market as the traders boarded up their wooden stalls and noisily banged the shutters: a ritual that was as much a part of them as their other daily habits. At close of business, traders and customers were once again on an equal footing and they filed out of the market and onto Light Street, side by side.

Caddy boys drove wheelbarrows of merchandise through the crowd unconcerned with human obstacles, faces tight like fists and heads covered with polyethene bags and secured in knots that bunched under their chins. They all donned the same uniform of denim cutoffs and dark polo tops and whether tall or short, young, or old, their bodies were strong-limbed and muscular, in contrast with faces lined prematurely by life and the elements. They were peculiar hybrids of athleticism and old age.

‘Ma, you never see me? You never ‘ear am coming?’ a caddy boy shouted in passing as he sidestepped his casualty, who appeared to be stuck in the mud.

Time equals money and nowhere was this truer than the world of the market. The longer it took them to fetch an item, the more likely it was that their boss’s customer would be poached by another trader. Less wages meant less food, and this was anathema to bodies in perpetual motion.

The caddy continued for a few metres, then gave in to his conscience and turned to check if the person had managed to get up. He rolled his eyes, sucked in a breath deep enough to give vent to a litany of curses, then returned to the person, a woman, he was sure. He held the wheelbarrow in front of him to keep some distance; the last thing he needed was a sound beating from some angry old madam: caddies gave as good as they got, but the elderly remained securely outside this law.

‘Madam, you go get up or you no go get up? he said, shouting because the thunder and the plastic covering his ears made his voice sound thin and powerless.

‘Mek you get up or I go leave you here, now now.’

Why did the old biddy not move? He reached a shaky hand behind him to grab his torch from a pocket. The rain fell harder now and it was difficult for him to see or hear. Just my luck, he thought. As he gestured to click the light on, it fell to the ground and rolled under his wheelbarrow. Old or not, he thought it better to keep his eyes on the figure, as he stooped down to retrieve the light. Only a few minutes have passed, he thought, yet this moment has been the longest part of the day. This time, he held the torch tightly and clicked it on. The aura of light rested on a dark mound or bench and he exhaled with relief.

‘You no know sey dey burn two teef, yesterday. Na dem body be dat!’ a voice startled him.

The caddy recoiled, then looked towards the voice of a diminutive, elderly woman. She carried a white cane in one hand and supported herself on her companion’s arm, with the other. They were mismatched – an old mama, nondescript save for a beautifully white dentition, and a woman dressed in the nonchalance of a foreigner, nothing like the local women who, even if all clad in black, would find a way to stand out one from the other.

‘Madam, wetin you talk? You no get eyes for see am.’

The elderly woman addressed her companion, ‘Kesandu, dey burn tyre and necklace di two. Look am!’ She pointed in an exaggerated gesture that raised her shoulder to her face. Kesandu looked but stood very still. The caddy also turned towards the mound again, this time from a distance. He shuddered as he now saw the outline of two charred bodies, joined at one end by a figure eight. He looked at the women, then at the bodies, back and forth, between life and death. Then, the wheelbarrow dropped from his hands and he began to retch.

‘Take time. Breathe well well. Kesandu, give him salt cracker.’

The caddy batted away their offer of help and ran off, leaving his barrow behind in the rain. Kesandu forced the tension from her muscles and breathed deeply. This was the closest she had come to feeling something since she had arrived.

‘This is a warning, my girl. Mark my words. Somebody wants us to know they are here.’

‘Mama, what do you mean?’

‘Tonight, you must rest. Take my hand.’

The women walked slowly, past the market’s night watchmen, through the perfume of exhaust fumes and eucalyptus, on their way home.

While Kesandu undressed, Mama Nnuku prepared a bath. She poured in a mix of boiling and cold water, then added some leached tuber leaves. Her great-granddaughter’s strength had not yet returned, so she helped her into the bath, until the water reached the shiny scar on her abdomen. Kesandu tried not to wince as Mama Nnuku’s fingers danced over her scar, first with Ranransa stems, then, a thick layer of shea butter.

‘Mama,’ said Kesandu, the first to break the silence.

‘Ptshhhh, Kessy!’ The elderly lady pinched Kessy’s lips. ‘Everything will be clearer tomorrow. You must sleep. For now, speak from here,’ she said, touching Kesandu’s forehead, ‘we understand each other.’

‘Mama. Why am I here ?’

‘Our universal creator in heaven has his clothes down here on earth. Of your ancestors, I was sent back to be your guide here. It is well.’

‘Who were those men, mama?’

‘Kessy, you have inherited the diokpa from both your maternal and paternal lineage.’

‘Why was I chosen?’

Mama Nnuku brought out a small hemp bag from the wrapper cloth tied around her waist and uncovered it to reveal an ivory figurine.

‘When cousin Anyaso died, he had no male issue. It has now passed to you. Diokpa is power, my girl, and your ancestors are behind you.

‘And those men in the market?’

‘People have died for Diokpa and many are unhappy to see it pass to a woman, for the first time. The elders say that the spirits of those who die a wretched death are focused on conflict. Somebody is collecting broken souls focused on destruction, but they will not win. Come.’

Mama began to comb and braid Kesandu’s hair.

‘That medicine you brought with you, do not take it tonight; the tuber leaves will make you sleep well. Let me braid your hair, so that your dreams will stay close to you, even when you wake.

In all the years Kesandu had visited Ado, she had never known a night air so hot and close. She inhaled loudly and deeply the ripe petrichor of the post-rain night that entered at the window. She welcomed the heat that swaddled her, body and thoughts, then trickled like honey onto her eyelids so they fell. She lifted her hand to the point in front where a shard of light pierced the inky night and held up the figurines. Dark brown lines permeated the length of the carvings: tattoos that ran over their faces and sexes, then down to their pads of their feet. She recognized the quivering iteration of the energy she had felt earlier, in the market. Secret. Intangible. Rare. Morning, she felt, would bring her answer.

futurism geology History New York City

CONSERVANCY

by A. J. Bermudez • August 21, 2021August 28, 2021

That last summer, when everyone is still alive, although now, come to think of it, “everyone” is sort of a strong word, we sit on the grass at a slant, slick with sweat, guarding the cake at our knees from a cavalcade of insects. We admire the buildings, as though we were getting away with something just by looking at them. A casually free pleasure amid a moat of things we cannot afford.

You’re saying how you read this article about Olmstead in The Atlantic, how he was this dilettante dropout who thought of parks as reinventions of nature. How he was, apparently, repulsed by the pre-park habit of hanging out in cemeteries, although, with no small degree of irony, the clearing of Seneca Village, itself to the inclusion of graveyards, means we are even now hanging out in a cemetery. You’re saying, as you glide a finger along the icing-thick edge of a chunk of cake, how ironic this is. How there are bodies in the earth.

We remember the spring when that storm tore through New Haven, ripping trees from the dirt. How that patch of green at Chapel and Temple, normally as nondescript as the surface of a pool table, undulated with punched-up soil and grass and there, at the center, was a centuries-old corpse ravelled in the gnarled damp roots of an oak. I’m not sure, actually, that it was an oak, but who cares, you’re saying, that was not the most interesting part of the story.

The outcropping where we sit is Fordham gneiss. Say it aloud, you say – and it is, we concur, wiping sweat from our hairlines (you had hair then), not gneiss at all, but rather bizarre that the rocks themselves, incalculably permanent, have been so permanently named after the men who scraped their inhabitants from the region. Wait though, you’re saying, scrolling through an article on your phone, I think we’re actually sitting on Hartland schist.

What’s the difference? I say.

The cake, by now, is nearly gone.

Across the street, of course, is our favorite place in the world. If you can get past the statue, aimed toward the park as though scouting for ne’er-do-wells, and beyond this a host of head-cockingly problematic interior displays as yet to be resolved by the curatorial committee, it is possible to think of history as a series of rooms, loaded with glittering things in low light, lush with story and outlandish guesses, a shrine to microcosms of grandeur.

On the second floor – or rather, the third, you’re saying now – there is my favorite place within my favorite place: the wall with the sea creatures splayed and spiked, animals one could not have known existed and which even now seem like the brainchildren of an FX department and not evolution. There is the impossibly large crab, wildly long-limbed, brittle and spindly, freckled with phantasmic deviations in color, nestled among its allies and enemies. Artfully arrayed octopi and crisply presentable molluscs, worms in vials, innumerable legs, spirals of tentacles, conjectural models on the verge of cryptozoology, minor crabs, tornado-redolent shells, the heroic symmetry of the lobster. They are all spectacular, all dead.

We do not name these creatures. They are not ours to name.

By 4:00, we have seen the writhing squid of the iconic lower-level diorama and are starving.

At the first-floor café – where we agree on the pretension of the accent mark above the e – the salads are prohibitively expensive, so we buy a slice of cake. We return to the park, and with your back, long and dark, arched over a curve of Manhattan schist, you marvel that all this was once underwater and will be again, that the near-future iteration of Inwood marble will contain the compact memory not only of our bones, but also our belt buckles and hair clips, teeth fillings and rings. The hinges that connect the fronts of our glasses to the sides.

Can you imagine, you’re saying, looking at the halo of buildings around the trees, if we could lie here and see the sun rise and set in an uninterrupted arc from east to west?

Were I to ask you now, you’d remember it fondly but as a mess – a palimpsest of nature and industry, communities expelled and reinvented – with the good-natured largess of an interloper. You’d remember how simple it was, to be both inside and outside of yourself at the same time, the sickly sweet taste of half-awareness that let you be poor and hot and uncomfortable and living the dream all at once.

We cannot comprehend all the things that will happen to us between now and the next time as we stand and wrap up the last of the cake, a treat for the long walk south and the longer train ride north, the backs of our knees etched with the imprint of grass.

break-up fragments men and women

FRAGMENTS

by John Hansen • August 20, 2021August 23, 2021 • 3 Comments

Last year’s thoughts linger on the hem of your maroon dress.

Every Wednesday at 8 a.m. I lean forward from my desk to root on the little boy racing the bus to Willow and 5th St. with seconds to spare.

I once became an explorer in my backyard, among the worms and grass.

You drag the chair closer so we touch, and you take my face in your hands to ask: “Are you okay?”

The entries in her journal ate his future slowly.

We left for a week’s trip to California and ended up in Vancouver eating candied salmon sticks and asking if we knew where we were going.

I witnessed a small bird frozen to death perched in an empty nest alone.

She couldn’t stand to look at your clothes and books anymore, but I couldn’t stand to see they were gone.

The scar on his wrist reminds him of anger and sadness, but the ring on his finger tells him to be hopeful and happy.

In the afternoon I went to the vet for the last time.

She asked me if she could pay for dinner and I said, “Oh wait, I’m sorry, are we on a date?”

It makes me feel like I’m back in school each time I hit “Add to Dictionary” in Microsoft Word.

My wife and I despised our neighbors before they put out the gnomes.

One day he opened the microwave while the food was still hot and realized he wasn’t happy living with her.

Over the past year, she never changed the burnt-out light bulbs in the house. Each room growing darker and darker so that death wouldn’t come as such a surprise.

At night, I press “1” from the main menu to listen to the saved voice message. The only way I can remember what you sound like.

I pondered the menu carefully and ordered success – failure was too far out of my price range.

I changed my relationship status on Facebook to single on a Tuesday. By Wednesday, my best friend’s girlfriend did the same and I received a text from her seconds later.

I imagined nights of crowded concerts and fine dinners with you. But that would require me to talk to you first.

Everyone says that pictures are worth a thousand words. I must have burnt a book’s worth of hers yesterday.

FACTOIDS

by Lin King • August 15, 2021August 23, 2021

A fact about the chickenpox vaccine: Introduced in 1984, it became commercially available in the US in 1995.

A story about the chickenpox vaccine: I was born in the US in 1993. I moved with my parents to Taipei in 1995. In the whirlwind of transatlantic relocation, I did not receive the chickenpox vaccine.

In 2004, I transferred from a Mandarin-speaking public school to an English-speaking international school for the fifth grade and, in my first week, contracted chickenpox. Thus the new girl disappeared on the second week. I heard she’s got chickenpox, isn’t that like what babies have, no it’s what you get if a baby farts in your eye, oh my gosh that sucks, LOL.

Mom was calling long-distance from a business trip in Singapore. Dad was panicking. I was sobbing. I had banged my arm into the refrigerator door and the blistery pox on my elbow had popped, and while wiping my tears with the tips of my nails (hands were blistered) I popped another on my cheek. Salty tears met trickling pus and stung like livid bees.

Dad was trying to comfort without touching, terrified of my minefield body. His hand still clung to the receiver from which Mom was yelling. I was likewise yelling (MY HEAD HAO ITCHY HAO ITCHY). Dad ran to retrieve my comb, the one Mom used to do my ponytail daily with its delightfully sharp teeth. In one desperate stroke he dragged the comb from the crown of my head down to the bottom of my neck. As he did my head went POP POP POP and I went AH AH AH and Dad went FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!

A fact about pomelos: They contain three times the amount of fiber found in grapefruit, making them one of the most effective foods for enhancing bowel movement.

A story about pomelos: On Zhongqiu / Moon / Mid-Autumn Festival, people exchange well wishes, moon cakes, pomelos, premium meat. The year I was in the seventh grade, my parents received over two dozen pomelos from well-wishers.

The Festival came and went. Our many leftover pomelos began to discolor, swelling with the uncomfortable weight of a pregnant belly five days overdue. We began eating them after breakfast, lunch, dinner.

On the third day of this diet, I was struck by an unprecedented stomachache. Caramel-colored pulp gushed out of me and into the toilet, spotted with citrusy clumps. My parents imposed a liquid diet, but the diarrhea grew belligerent. I was appalled but not exactly surprised; since the pox, I was beginning to know something about the ways in which my body could betray me.

On Monday, as I displayed no other symptoms and my parents both had work, I went to school. During my first-period Biology class, I risked a single, wary, silent fart. It was accompanied by an unfamiliar murky wetness. I seized up from head to anus. Petrified, I continued learning about photosynthesis in ramrod straight stillness. After class I lengthened the straps of my backpack until it covered the backs of my thighs, strolled to the restroom at an inconspicuous pace, and changed into my dance leotard and gym shorts. I wedged half a roll of tissue paper under my buttocks and stuffed the shit-streaked pants into the industrial trashcan.

That night Mom showed me how to use a sanitary pad as a diaper so I could continue going to school.

It was my first time using a pad. It was my last time eating a pomelo.

A fact about masturbation: In Mandarin it is zi wei, which also means to console oneself.

A story about masturbation: At some point I discovered the particular pleasure of having a thick down winter duvet tucked between my thighs. Later I realized that further pressure equaled further pleasure, and arrived at the conclusion of wedging a pillow. More realizations: concentrated pressure equaled concentrated pleasure. What did one use to exert pressure?

Hands. Yet the act hardly qualified as an activity. It fell in the category of nose-picking: a private deed—nothing to broadcast, nothing to hide.

By this point I was in the ninth grade. The world economy was in free fall, but this had little bearing on us beyond the fact that our expat classmates whose parents worked for AIG spoke of moving away.

We roamed the hallways in hormonal, rowdy droves. We knew from Hollywood that our peers in the US were likely having sex, but we ourselves had yet to receive any sex education beyond the strictly biological. The extent of our mating rituals saw people stealing each other’s sweatshirts and baseball caps to wear as emblems of intimacy; in the course of these thefts there was much brushing of fingers against necks and pulsing wrists.

During one such performance after school, someone asked Yo does anyone know what masturbation in Chinese? to which someone else said It’s zi wei while at the same time I asked What’s masturbation? to which another person asked Did someone just effing ask what masturbation is?

After which we had no choice but to conduct a democratic count of Who Knows What Masturbation Is.

75%, it turned out: all of the boys, half of the girls.

Henceforth my bedtime regimen was forever clarified, forever tainted. To console oneself was alright-sounding, but masturbation sounded like an industrial disease. Duvet—legs—night—everything was orgasm-stained. There was new vocabulary filling the hallways—Perv! Pedo! Sex addict!

I grew scared. I started a tally in my daily planner. I resolved to document each self-consolation, and that I would not exceed five ticks every month. Self-regulation. The tally would be my umpire against pervhood.

A few weeks later it was five ticks every two weeks.

Five ticks every week.

A fact about tampons: Most commonly found in the US, Germany, and Austria; cited as the menstrual hygiene product of choice by under 2.5% of women in Taiwan, Japan, and China.

A story about tampons: My school had a swimming pool accessible through an outdoor spiral staircase overlooking the track and field. It was shared among all twelve grades, meaning occasional closures when one of its younger users unwittingly defecated.

School policy stated that female students could switch out of swim class during menstruation and make up for the session when their class had moved on to a terrestrial unit. Caveat: broadcasting the exact dates of your cycle. (Boys: Hey why do vampires carry used tampons? Tea bags!)

Most girls faked illness outright. Yet in my junior year of high school, I was met with the un-sick-dayable swim class of the Final Unit Test. Mom said There’s this thing that Americans use—ke shi we shouldn’t use it, normally—ping chang bu ying gai put not-natural things into our bodies—

The only product we found after scouring three supermarkets was a mint-colored box no bigger than a cigarette carton. No applicator

TWO KNUCKLES DEEP?

Beyond an embarrassed frontal view, I had never looked between my legs, never bent down with a thirst for self-knowledge. (I would later learn via film and literature that this was not the norm for many children, who showed you theirs if you showed them yours.) The few hairs I had spawned looked spidery, synthetic.

I pressed the cotton at different spots along the fleshy gap. It took ten minutes—bleeding liberally into the bowl, wiping, flushing, gagging, repeating—before I inferred the hole that must be The Hole. It took another ten minutes of prying and prodding before Mom knocked and I was saying Help help help.

It was done, in the end. Blood on our hands.

I passed the swim test. I climbed out of the pool and a heavy water balloon dropped within me. I knew, intuitively, what had occurred. Wrapping a school-supplied towel—white—around my waist, I ran. Outside: the spiral staircase, wet feet slapping like dead fish, body looming over the field of touch rugby, soccer, javelin—of people dashing, straining, exerting force—and me above their heads, dashing, straining, exerting force—a streak of crimson spreading blearily down the back of the snowy towel like an obscene tail, a mammoth eel, a clown’s carnal grin screeching:

There’s a lot more where this came from!

A fact about fruit: Over 53% of fresh fruit consumed in the US is imported from abroad.

A story about fruit: As part of my undergraduate financial aid package in my freshman year of college, I helped erect pyramids of bananas, apples, and pears in the dining halls. I learned what my Biochem classes did not teach me: that here in New Jersey, hues and varieties of fruit never altered with the seasons. The apples were eternally plastic-looking, green with a discordant flush of rouge, as though spray-painted.

One day, the fellow student who stacked the fruit with me every morning said that almost all the bananas in the world are clones of one banana called the Cavendish after some English duke. I retorted that maybe it was so in the United States, but in the subtropical island where I grew up, we had a relationship with our fruits, we knew that plums and loquats came in the spring, mangoes and watermelons in the summer, snow pears and pomelos—in any case, we, unlike Americans, were free from the clutches of monoculture.

He surrendered both gloved hands in the air. Okay okay, I’m just telling you what I read. I obviously don’t know anything about Taiwan. Then, playfully: Like, is it a part of China?

He had learned, from our daily fruit-stacking, the buttons of mine that were most easily pushed.

Don’t be a dick. I refused to be tempted into another tirade.

So. He pretended to throw one of those green-red apples at me. Are you, like, with-with that guy from yesterday?

Oh—no, it was just a first date.
So do you—are you only interested in Asian guys? I feel like I only ever see you go out with them. (He was white American. Monocultural.)
Um—I’ve never really thought about it. Where I’m from, Asian guys are just—guys.
Right, yeah. (Chuckling, squirming.) That, um, makes sense.
Anyway, the guy from yesterday would be a departure. He’s Vietnamese.
How would that be a departure?
I’ve only ever dated Taiwanese guys.
But still, he’s a tall Asian dude. (Shrugging.) That’s still well within your type, no?

After we finished heaping the glassy apples, I returned to my dorm and Googled the banana varieties in Taiwan, heart pounding: The main cultivars of banana in Taiwan are Pei Chiao, a Cavendish clone, commonly grown in monocultures.

My fellow fruit-stacker, instead of the Vietnamese boy, would become Boyfriend #1. One year later, after the relationship ended, I wondered how much of my initial impetus had been to prove myself open-minded. Or maybe I was trying to make him more open-minded. Either way; the year was 2012 and I, aged eighteen, believed that I was living in a post-racial society.

A fact about urinary tract infections: 50-60% of women will develop at least one UTI in their lifetimes, accounting for 25% of all clinical bacterial infections suffered by women.

A story about urinary tract infections: In my senior year of college, I began experiencing recurring UTIs, despite not having any sex—the most common cause—at the time. (Boyfriend #1 was already onto his Girlfriend #2.) After I got my third infection in two months, I decided that it was no longer wise to flush it out with Ocean Spray juice. I wanted to seek medical help, but had never lived in a country without universal health care. My vocabulary broadened: primary care physician, deductible, copay.

Over the semester, I racked up five infections and $1,070 in bills. Every weekend, I FaceTimed my parents to report a new infection or a new bill. They tried to reassure me:

Don’t worry so much about the money, worry about your work, worry about getting better. The doctor still has no explanation for why this is happening?
Stress, lifestyle, diet, genetics. So no, they know nothing.
Shui-tu-bu-fu, shui-tu-bu-fu.

By which they meant, water-soil-not-adapting. As in, Your body is not acclimating to its new environment.

Platitudes sounded better in Mandarin, but were not any more helpful for it.

I’ve been here four years, Ma. How long does it take to adapt?

Communal dormitory bathrooms were furtive, high-tension places. People would do anything to defecate without being heard. They waited until the dead of night to make an attempt. I learned about these nocturnal struggles from visiting the bathroom three times an hour myself, day and night, to drip drip drip my oft-bloody pee into the bowls. Sometimes I gave up and wore a sanitary pad to bed instead.

One Monday morning, having woken up twelve times over the course of the night due to a throbbing urethra, I called quits on my weekly schedule. I emailed my thesis advisor about having to miss our meeting due to a bad cut I received in the dining hall kitchens. (Thesis topic: Cells of house flies. Thesis working title: Mechanisms of collective cell behavior in M. domestica. Thesis title to my friends: The flypaper.) I found a thick gauze in the RA’s first-aid kit to wrap convincingly around my finger. I made myself a bowl of instant ramen with lukewarm tap water and crept back into bed.

Things that friends and family said during this time:

You’re smart and young and everything will be fine.
There are people who would kill to be in your position.
Have you heard of gratitude journaling?
Being sad for a week or two is normal, but at a certain point you just need to DECIDE to stop being sad, you know? You need to DECIDE to get over it.
Mom: What do you want to do then, do you want to leave school? Is that what you want?
Dad: Do you want to come home? Yao hui jia ma? Come home?

Wordlessly ejecting droplets of pink urine in bed, my shoulds and should-nots encircled me like a Halloween-themed carousel, grotesque faces flickering Coney Island-style. I should: update my resume, research post-grad job options, go to the lab to check on my house flies. I should: apologize to my thesis advisor for the meeting I missed while faking an injury. I should not: fake injuries to miss advisor meetings. I should: fold my laundry, trim my toenails, correct my posture. I should not: under any circumstance, have another spicy instant ramen, because if I ate one more bowl of that shit this week all my hair would fall out by age thirty.

A fact about consensual sex: 21.2% of US college students have had sex that was not it, according to the Association of American Universities.

A story about consensual sex: The last time I had it in college was also the first truly Bad Sex I ever had. It was the night before graduation, and I’d been drawn in by the Euro-beauty of him, the chumminess, shined Oxfords, racial ambiguity, dark curls. Goal-setting: You’re a grown-ass woman, just have impromptu sex for once, see if you like it.

An hour later we were in his bedroom. There was undressing, repositioning. While he had been making atrocious mmm-shlrr-aarnph! noises amidst fondling, he went radio-silent once he was standing (pants pooled around feet with shirt still on) and I was kneeling on the bed (naked). My lips were cupped around their very first Italian penis, descendant of Casanova, receiving zero response. His hands hung palm-open. He could not be more inert if Michelangelo had chiseled him.

In-out, in-out, in-out, in-out. My belly button was cold. I unplunged myself.

I’ll get the condom?
Can we keep going for a bit?

What the fuck? Was it possible that the paralysis was a positive reaction? There was nothing but to dive in again. In-out-in-out-in-out-in-out.

Can you go a bit faster?

Inoutinoutinoutinout. I opened my eyes to confirm that this was really happening, and watched the wiry hairs of his happy trail grow closerfarthercloserfarther.

Can you lick my balls a bit?

Out of determined self-preservation, I unlocked my leaden jaw, said in my best raspy voice I want you inside me, et cetera and finally was penetrated.

It took over twenty rabbit-like minutes. I queefed loudly when it ended.

This was only funny in hindsight. In the moment it felt like I’d volunteered to have someone gouge out my soul from the walls of my throat with an ice-cream scoop. To call the incident a violation would be semantically sloppy, but afterward, for a year or so, I could not find anything consoling in the bodies of others.

A fact about stasis: though commonly used in reference to a general state of stagnation, medically it refers to the slowing or stoppage of fluids or semifluids.

A story about stasis: After graduation, I moved to New York, started Job #1, stirred my stir-fry, and watched my Asian TV shows recommended by Mom. Shows with names like The Heartbreaker Surgeon and The Heartbroken Sommelier. They hailed from Japan and Korea; they bridged the solitude between Taipei and Brooklyn.

Job #1 was copyediting for a pop-science magazine—a poor man’s National Geographic, a poor me’s Research Assistantship. (My thesis advisor had unsurprisingly hired her other advisee, the one who never missed a meeting.)

Job #1 made for an easy tagline on dating apps. Male strangers enthused: My grandpa / grandma / dad / mom subscribes to that.

Job #1 paid close to nothing, just enough to rent a Brownsville half-basement with two other roommates. Just enough to subsist on frozen Chinatown dumplings that came in sacks like dog kibble bags.

Job #1 was interesting but Job #1 did not a career make.

I spent hours with the dramas every night, pining. I tried to intellectualize my fervor as a sexual homecoming. I tried to justify my habits by noting that the news was unbearable. (The year was 2016.) My ogling was out-of-body, however; in reality I would not have parted my legs had the Heartbroken Sommelier placed his slender fingers on my knees. The aftereffects of Bad Sex persisted. I had no real desire to exchange fluids (or, for that matter, semifluids).

Yet, once in a while, I would curl up in bed with my Amazon Primed vibrator that looked like a crayon on steroids. The bluish glow of the J- and K-dramas streaming illegally on drama888.com.tw would be the only source of light in the room—the millennial porn for homesick girls in need of self-consolation. The buildup was painfully slow, no matter how filthily the imagined scenes devolved: I would end up straddling the handsome hairless dimpled faces one by one as they lapped away diligently like cats. But I was only circling the drain. The gratification never came. Growing sweaty with physical strain and self-revulsion, I would concede defeat to anticlimax and set the sleep timer on my audiobook app. Somehow, I had grown inconsolable.

A fact about treading water: The western grebe is a water bird known for its mating ritual, during which couples pair together by running across the water surface in unison. After copulation, the male brings food to the female in what is known as courtship feeding.

A story about treading water: Boyfriend #2 first appeared under an airborne boat two meters overhead. We were in a museum and he was photographing said boat with a hefty Canon. He looked almost glossy from his resemblance to the magazine men stacked next to my bed. The inky pool of water, a part of the installation, had soaked through my left sock before he turned his lens to me, clicked the shutter once, lowered the camera, and said: I’d love to send you this photo—but you should also know that your foot is in the artwork.

We walked through the exhibition together, then to the museum café, where Boyfriend #2 told me he was a fashion photographer who only took meaningful pictures as a weekend indulgence. He was from Seoul and took me to dinner at his favorite K-town restaurant, ordering in his native tongue. Two weeks later we were boyfriend-girlfriend. We consoled each other, exhaling I think I’m in love with you. Later I discovered with slight surprise that he, unlike I, did not watch any dramas from his homeland and had not considered them at all when pacing the beginnings of our romance.

Boyfriend #2 had graduated from art school, where many of his peers vociferously denounced all those who did not #FreeTheNipple or #FeelTheBern. (It was 2017, but they were far from over it.) My wardrobe was what Mom called flattering: tight-fitting but well-covering. Women in Boyfriend #2’s life aimed for the inverse: wide-legged denim with loose, nipple-freeing tops. After a Bushwick party at which many a pair of pale breasts bounced without bondage, I wept to him in a moment of drunken weakness: I am the opposite of what you want. To which he, high, replied What? What? What the hell are you saying?

We both apologized the next morning. I began going braless on the weekends, celebrating my feminine #Freedom under baggy sweatshirts.

For one year, we spent our weekends indulging in whims and shared culture, taste-testing rice rolls from Cantonese bakeries, watching Japanese cult films at the Lincoln Center, and blue-balling solicitous hosts outside Little Italy restaurants—pretending to be tourists and cracking up when they nihao’ed back. At our anniversary dinner, I thought, fleetingly: We can have a future together, back in Asia, where we belong. Then he stiffened. A girl approached—5’10”, slim-jawed, halo-haired, loose frock made from what looked to be a floral tapestry barely covering her bronze, #Freed bosom. She gripped his shoulder, shook my hand with cool, smooth palms. Flicked her hair as she walked away too-slowly.

Was that the runway model you used to sleep with?

Some hesitation. Some nodding.

Oh, so that’s the kind of slut who lets a guy from Tinder stick his dick in her without a condom, giving his future girlfriend an STD scare that cost $250 to test?
Fucking hell. (Slamming down cutlery.) Did you really have to go there? Fuck!

The next morning, I recounted a heavily censored version of the fight to my parents over the phone.

Mom: Well, okay, what happens when you’re both middle-aged but the topless models are still twenty?
Dad: Gan ta ma de! I didn’t raise my daughter to date a guy like this. You understand me? Fuck him!

Later, after Boyfriend #2 had become Ex-Boyfriend #2, I discovered with slight surprise that I, despite it all, could still pine after the dramas from his homeland. The surprise was directed at two distinct phenomena: my resilience; my recursive inability to learn.

A fact about melatonin: Though widely known as a hormone that regulates sleep cycles, it is also produced at night by nocturnal animals, for whom melatonin does not promote sleep.

A story about melatonin: Job #2 was copyediting for a pharmaceutical marketing agency. Job #2 paid significantly better than Job #1 but was more ethically dubious. I left trivia-filled Job #1 for lawsuit-filled Job #2 to, I told myself, save up for my impending PhD.

Then, somewhere between saving up for and receiving rejections from PhD programs, I lost the ability to sleep. A lasting believer in Mom’s motto of not admitting not-natural things into our bodies, I resolved not to seek any higher power than melatonin tablets, though by this point I was twenty-four years old and could no longer pull all-nighters without vomiting. I bought bottles of fast-acting rapid-dissolve melatonin. I went from 3- to 5- to 10-mg pills, from 1 to 5 to 10-a-day pills, then down again to 0 pills. I stopped acting; I rapidly dissolved.

Awake awake awake. I knew that I was leaving my self-esteem entirely in the hands of the distinguished institutions to which I’d applied. Things that friends and family said during this time:

Mom: This is not natural.
Dad: It’s okay if you want to come home.
You should NEVER rely on external validation.
Did you ever try gratitude journaling?
I think the project of our twenties is to find our worth within ourselves, you know?

I knew all the phrases and I thought, Bull-fucking-shit. If you were worth something, somebody would tell you so; find you worth within yourself was the euphemism people used to gently dissuade you from continuing to await recognition.

I made no effort to cultivate Self-Worth because I fundamentally did not believe it to be real. One would not seek out God if one knew He did not exist; one would not track down Dragons if one knew They never lived; one would not strive after Self-Worth if one knew It was only a mean-spirited myth, perpetuated by people who had either found success or failed so consistently in life that, somewhere along the way, they began to believe in miracles.

My insomnia worsened enough that I nudged aside my distrust in the American health care system and looked up therapy options. All the top-reviewed options were financially ridiculous; I downloaded a text therapy app from a recurring subway ad.

Me to text therapist: If you already know that everything in life is a cycle and you’ll end up back at this point sooner or later, what’s the point of slotting yourself back into the circuit now that you’ve fallen out of it?

Text therapist to me: Lets unpack this.. why do you think you used the word “circuit?”

I held my thumb down on the app icon. All the icons began to wiggle and the little Xs popped up—I clicked it. Thus ended text therapy.

Question #1: If I go Home now, what was the point of coming all this way?

Question #2: If this is all there is, what is the point of going all the way?

Awake awake awake. I fantasized about dropping dead of a headache. The doctors would puzzle over the mystery of a reasonably healthy, mid-twenties woman kicking the bucket, and would crack open my skull to discover a medically unprecedented growth the size of a peach pit. Upon further examination, the growth would not only prove to be the culprit of my premature death, but also the cause of my recurrent desire for death throughout my abbreviated adulthood. The growth would debut in peer-reviewed papers, named after the smart, smart men who cracked open my skull.

Those who once sneered at my personal and professional choices would reverently relay over dinner: It wasn’t her fault that she didn’t accomplish anything, she was just Undiagnosed.

And I would be #Free! Asleep asleep asleep—without the gory logistics of suicide, without the posthumous guilt of breaking my parents’ hearts, without the crushing anxiety of living an aimless life all the way to its wrinkly end.

A fact about rain: Taiwan has three overlapping seasons of it per year—plum rain season from May to June, afternoon thunderstorms from June to August, typhoon season from June to October.

A story about rain: Today it is raining so torrentially that a hole opens in the ceiling of Fulton St Station like a spacetime vortex. Water gushes down with the force of a fire hydrant. It is disgusting, an abomination, a health hazard—but I catch myself marveling at the sight as one would at Niagara Falls. It is the first time since leaving Boyfriend #2 and starting Job #2 that I catch myself facing an objectively bad situation and not taking it personally.

When affection ceases, the memories of it are never quite of affection. They fossilize in the form of something much more absurd, like the sight of a postcoital penis, soft and sticky with recent exertion, cast in the glare of a suddenly switched-on light.

When unhappiness eases, the memories of it are never quite acute. (Fact: Pain is only felt in the brain, an organ that cannot itself feel pain.) But pieces of unwelcome recollections, immediate and abysmal, flutter into mind at random times of day like street pigeons. As though somebody is two paces behind me and every so often pinching the skin behind my neck with a pair of icy eyebrow tweezers. By the end of each day I am covered in a million tiny bruises.

The thing about facts is that you can never tell which ones will expire. (Fact: The Earth is flat. Fact: Pluto is a planet.) When I am in the thick of things, the fact of despair seems eternal. But day by day I go on, picking up what had spilled all over the floor. One morning I wake up and realize that, for the first time in a long time, I do not remember falling asleep.

I shower, I go to work, I vote in the midterm elections, I meet with friends, I book a plane ticket to Taiwan for the holidays and look forward to it. I look forward. I am unfazed by little failures like getting soaked on a subway platform—little failures that could once capsize a whole day.

A proverb about encountering water. Shun-shui-tui-zhou. Along-water-push-boat. Meaning, Use the current to your advantage. This saying has a negative connotation—opportunism being frowned upon by the ancients. Instead of riding the wave, they advocated for yu-shui-jia-qiao. Meet-water-build-bridge. Meaning, Roll up your sleeves. Meaning, Overcome.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, I say.

Ladies and Gentlemen, there is a—Queens—bound, express—train, now arriving.

I mind the gap.

I board the train.

facts Health Sex taiwan

City modern life New York City urban life

WHAT IS THE CITY BUT THE PEOPLE?

by T.S.J. Harling • August 14, 2021August 23, 2021

In 2016, I finally made it to New York. I had only ten days there; and I ran around that city like I only had ten days left to live. I had managed to wangle a stay for my partner and I in a dingy, tiny, fifth-floor apartment with no lift – but it was on the Upper East Side, and I never felt more glamorous. We saw the view from the Rockefeller, read the poem on Liberty Island, and drank Bellinis at Grand Central Station. We went up the Empire State Building at midnight to be awed by the lights, the murmur of the traffic below, the romance. I didn’t care about the rats, the heaps of rubbish on the streets, the income inequality – all that was just like home, after all. I did not want to see Ground Zero.

To me, there are two seasons in this city. The first is Christmastime, with outdoor ice-skating and shopping in Bloomingdales, and scenes from Donna Tartt novels. The second is high summer, which means athleisure, gold hooped earrings, and beatbox stereos. We were there for neither, and needless to say, neither really exists. We were there in spring. We were there for the first Monday in May, and saw the red carpet rolled out for the Met Gala.

We ate bagels for breakfast and bought black-and-white cookies to take home each night – which we could not locate back in London for love nor money. (Not even Hummingbird Bakery does them in the UK.) We ate out every night, but we most loved the diners – something we do not quite have an equivalent for back home.

Conceding a temporary pause, we watched the first episode of Friends, a random episode of Seinfield, and an American news programme. There was a commentator arguing convincingly that Trump could not win the upcoming election, because no one had won the presidency with a divided party. I wanted to believe him, like we all did, but later I had an eerie sense of doom when I saw several instances of graffiti hating on Hilary and a man on the subway wearing a red pro-Trump T-shirt. If the Democrats have lost New York to the Donald, I thought, perhaps there really is a chance he could win.

One afternoon I went to the MOMA alone while my partner went to the Cooper Hewitt. I had already accepted I would see whatever main exhibition was on at the MOMA, and at that time it was Edward Degas: A Strange New Beauty. And I should have loved it. When I thought of Degas, I, like everyone else, thought of pretty ballet dancers. Instead I found something much darker.

As I moved around the exhibition, I saw that Degas is not some sweet Impressionist but a relentless chronicler of the female body under the patriarchy. His women are prostitutes, actresses, and dancers; all in some level of performance and pain; the bodies are twisted, contorted, exposed. By the end of the exhibition I was emotionally drained and left with the feeling that only New York could have shown me this. Only New York could have shown me the Old World, my world; shown me a glimmer of what it really is.

New York, in a more objective light, is, or can be, Trump Towers, Enron, and Ayn Rand novels; it is poverty in the projects and it’s taking you for a sucker. But not to me. My New York City is 70s punk rock, it is the 1920s Harlem Renaissance, it is, from any generation and any ethnicity, pure poetry. It is the radical and corporate art scene. It is Basquiat. It is Nora Ephron’s screenplays. It is Radio City lit up on a rainy night in the 1940s. It is Madonna in the 80s screaming into a microphone that she will take over the world and prancing around the city in Desperately Seeking Susan. It is Michael Jordan at Madison Square Gardens.

As I write this, in the summer of 2020, I yearn, with a certain privilege to have the space to yearn, for New York. I cannot help it. I winced as if taking a hit to the stomach when I read about the lives lost in New York in this year’s brutal spring, even as London lost tens of thousands at the same time. I sobbed foolish, selfish tears when I saw on the BBC that a field hospital had to be set up in Central Park. Because New York for the past hundred years at least has been the most seductive city in the world. New York is my Mr. Big.

If New York is the young handsome buck, then London is his old wizened aunt with the wrinkles and the scars to prove it. Here, we seem to think carnage is part of our heritage. We had the Blitz, the Plague, the Great Fire; we think we’ve seen it all before. But New York, my love, I wanted something better for you. The greatest city in the world should have had the greatest healthcare in the world. I wanted your lights to never go out.

From this side of the pond, New York is the constant demand for more; more money, more power, more glamour. New York wants more, but it also wants better. It wants the best. Here in the Old World, we have given up believing in things, in believing in best. We have lost hope. We don’t believe in monarchy but can’t be bothered with the upheaval to let it die. We don’t believe in democracy, politicians, intellectuals, God, or anything at all after the Reformation, the Reign of Terror, the World Wars. And while the American Dream is also simultaneously the American Nightmare, I can’t help but keep loving you, New York; for your audacity of hope.

art art criticism Christo

THE GARDENER OF EDEN

by Richard Owen Collins • August 8, 2021August 15, 2021

The gardener of Eden is a lonely man.

If anyone were to watch him while he inspects every blade of grass and every petal of every flower, or while he murderously hunts for the weeds which ruin his life daily, they might see his mouth moving with muttered curses.

If anyone were to stand near him while he hand-cuts acres of perfect verdant lawn with a pair of scissors, or while he lays fresh soil and plants exotic seeds in it; while he takes care of every square inch of paradise, they might hear those curses as they travel on the wind.

But of course, no one sees or hears him, because the gardener of Eden works alone.

Not even they notice him. The happy couple. She’s given him a polite smile once or twice, when he accidentally on purpose trundled past them in his motorised lawnmower, but it was hollow. Like it was only for politeness, nothing more. Like she saw him as the help. Here only to make this place prettier for her to enjoy.

Though maybe that is what he does and why he does it. Maybe that’s why he gets up at dawn every day and works until sundown – for her. To make this place a paradise, all for her.

Her man – asshole – has never even acknowledge him.

He just picked up his girlfriend and carried her into the bushes where they made love for hours while the gardener of Eden tried to drown out the erotic sounds with his motorised lawnmower. It didn’t work. He heard her moans. He heard them all night. He still hears them.

If the gardener of Eden ever tells you he hasn’t thought about poisoning Adam, or suffocating him in his sleep, don’t listen to him. He’s lying. He’s thought about it many, many times.

Every night, when his back aches from the labour and his hands are raw from the dirt, he returns to his lodgings, the little wooden cabin by the lake. He shares a room with the security guard of Eden, and every night they like to sit on the bench outside their cabin, passing back and forth a bottle of whiskey, lighting cigarettes. Sometimes they talk, sometimes they don’t, sometimes they sit in silence and watch the sunlight fade on the water.

One night the gardener of Eden takes a swig from the bottle, passes it to his friend, and speaks his mind.

– . . . Think it might be time for change. You know?

– You thinking about getting out?

– I mean, sure, He gives us a free room and free meals. But the room is small, and, no offense, I have to share it with you, and the food is the same stale bread and soup every day. And this is the best whiskey we can get in paradise? This stuff? Like He can’t afford to give us any more than that?

– You know, I –

– And do we ever get any thanks for our work? Do we ever get so much as a nod? A pat on the back? A “hey guys good job I appreciate it”?

The security guard of Eden takes a drag of the cigarette and holds in the smoke while he takes a swig of the whiskey then lets it all out in one and passes the bottle back.

– You know . . . this isn’t such a bad gig. I’ve had worse.

– I’m not asking for much.

– So, what? You’re going to quit?

– Been thinking about it. Maybe I will.

– Where are you going to go?

– . . . I could go places.

– You think you’ll find somewhere better?

– I have worth, I have –

– We’re in paradise.

– . . . Only paradise for some.

The two men sit by the lake and drink in silence for a while longer. The gardener of Eden doesn’t say it, but he knows his friend – his only friend – is right. There’s nowhere else for him to go.

He will die here, by this lake.

He keeps getting up at the dawns every day and tending to his garden until the dusks.

He breeds a special kind of flower. A blue rose. It didn’t exist before him but now it does because he made it so. He watches it grow from nothing to something. Something beautiful. It’s like his own child.

It takes him a while to build up the courage to do it.

He watches the couple from afar.

He hates how lovely she is.

How lovely she is what will kill him.

On the day he finally does it, he takes the bottle of whiskey with him to work. While he finds slugs in the grass and pours salt on them and watches them shrivel up and die, he takes swigs. He feels it burn in his heart and he likes it. His usual backache and heavy shoulders feel lifted. He feels stupid. He likes it.

He sees them as they emerge from the waterfall, naked as monkeys. He nearly vomits but keeps it in. He wishes he could catch her alone, but he knows there’s no chance. Her man is always with her, always has his arm around her.

The gardener of Eden walks up to them, the dumb happy couple, with the flower in his hand. He nearly stumbles as he approaches them. Neither of them notices him until she speaks, until he blurts out the line he’s been half-practising in his foggy head.

– I saw this and . . .

They stop and turn to look at him. She looks startled. She looks lovely. Why does she always have to look so lovely? Can’t she just have one day where she looks bad? Can’t she smell bad, or something? Why does she have to be so incredible, so desirable, all the damn time? He’s sick of it.

The happy couple look at the drunk gardener of Eden with the dead flower in his hand as they might look upon a dying animal. With some kind of abstract removed pity.

– . . . And thought of you.

The gardener of Eden dribbles down his chin. He wants to cry.

She takes the flower from him and smiles politely. Her man looks at him with a smirk, like he is no threat, like he is nothing.

The happy couple walk on, hand in hand.

The gardener of Eden drinks the rest of his whiskey until he passes out on the grass with vomit on his chest.

Some nights later, he and his friend, the security guard of Eden, sit by the lake again, passing back and forth the bottle.

– You’re getting into dangerous territory, man.

– . . . I love her.

– . . . I know.

– I wish I didn’t. I wish I simply liked her. I wish she meant nothing to me. I wish I hated her.

– You think I don’t love her too? We all do. She’s the only woman in the universe.

– Even if there were billions more, none of them would be as lovely as she.

– Jesus, relax. Here, drink some more.

The security guard of Eden passes the bottle. The bottle is all that there is.

– You should’ve seen her face. Like she was disgusted by me.

– You’d been drinking?

– . . . Just a little.

– Maybe if that man of hers wasn’t in the picture, maybe she’d maybe feel differently. You know?

The gardener of Eden lights his next cigarette.

– What are you saying?

– I’m not saying nothing, no.

– What?

– I’m not saying, I’m just saying. Maybe if he wasn’t around . . . Maybe she’d look at you a little differently.

– Are you saying what I think –

– I’m not saying. What are you saying?

They sit in silence by the lake passing the bottle back and forth.

– . . . How would you do it?

– I wouldn’t do it.

– What if you were me?

– Look man, I’m not having this conversation. You should talk to the snake.

– The snake?

– He’s good with this kind of thing. Helped me with a problem before.

– What problem?

– Don’t worry about that. Just talk to the snake.

He doesn’t actually think he is going to do anything, at first. He thinks it’s just idle imagination. He thinks if he can play out the fantasy in his head, that will be enough. But some days later, while he’s on his knees in the mud ripping some weeds apart with his bare hands, all just so this place can be as beautiful as it can be, the happy couple pass him by again. They seem to always be hand in hand, walking, smiling, stopping only to make fiery passionate love in the flowers, then walking some more.

She pulls her hand away from Adam’s and skips over to the gardener of Eden, on his knees in the mud. Adam looks confused, and stops.

She looks at him, the gardener of Eden, she looks at him, and this time she really looks at him. She doesn’t look through him. She sees him. She smiles. The gardener of Eden looks up and sees her smiling and nearly falls over, right there in the mud.

He thinks to himself, if this place is paradise, it’s all because of her.

She smiles and says – Thank you. For the flower. It’s really pretty.

The gardener of Eden is too stunned and overjoyed to respond.

– . . . I didn’t mean to be rude, before . . . I just . . . Well, thank you.

She skips back over to her man who still looks perplexed. She retakes his hand and they keep walking. As if to reaffirm his ownership, Adam grabs her ass and squeezes, then deliberately looks back to the gardener of Eden with a somewhat threatening glare.

It takes an hour for the gardener of Eden to stand up, and when he does, he knows exactly what he is going to do.

He finds the snake in his tree, being all snaky and shit.

He just comes out with it.

– I hear you can get things done.

The snake slithers around on the branch, acting purposefully coy.

– Where did you hear that? Hiss.

– It needs to be quick.

– You want me to take out Adam, right?

The gardener of Eden is incredulous.

– How did . . .

The snake smiles his slippery smile and humps his branch.

– Oh yeahhhh.

– I don’t want him to suffer. I just . . .

– And then what?

– . . . What?

– What happens next? Let’s say I do what you’re asking me, and you are asking me, aren’t you? Let’s say I remove him from the picture. Then what? You don’t think the big guy, the boss, you don’t think He might notice? You don’t think He might have something to say about it?

– . . . It has to be subtle.

– Right. It has to be like nothing ever happened. It has to be of his own doing.

– I hear you’re an ideas man.

– You hear a lot of things, don’t you?

– Listen, are you going to help me or not?

The snake writhes and groans and salivates and then nods his snake head.

– I can help you. Leave it to me. You just keep on top of those weeds.

The snake humps his tree until he orgasms.

Days pass and the gardener of Eden has a lump in his chest. Even the whiskey won’t keep it down. He sees the happy couple, frolicking, making love, laughing, but now the hot green pain he normally feels is dampened, quietened, by a heavy blanket. This blanket is guilt.

He hopes it doesn’t last long.

During the nights on the bench by the lakeside, the security guard of Eden says nothing to him. He passes the bottle back and forth. The gardener of Eden can tell his friend is ashamed of him. He stays quiet and finds comfort in the bottle. The bottle is all that there is.

More days pass and he thinks nothing is going to happen. He thinks the snake lied to him just for fun, while having no intention of doing anything about it. He finds he’s actually relieved. It isn’t worth it. He doesn’t know what would happen if the boss ever got angry about something, but he can imagine it would be bad. He’s heard rumours.

He can swallow his feelings, he can learn to find happiness in his flowers again, like he did when he first took this job, before her loveliness ruined everything.

This is paradise.

He can get used to it.

Then one morning a memo arrives at the door of the cabin. The security guard of Eden is the one who opens it. The kettle has just boiled, the gardener of Eden is making their ritual cups of tea.

– It’s from the big guy.

The gardener of Eden’s heart drops.

– . . . What’s it say? . . . Are we finally getting that pay upgrade?

– “Following an unpleasant apple related incident, of which I will spare you the details, Eve has been permanently banished from the grounds, effective immediately. Your custodial duties remain unaffected. Should you have any questions, direct them to my secretary. sincerely – The boss.”

The gardener of Eden spills the tea all over the cabin floor.

His friend – his only friend – looks over at him, his eyes cold and piercing. Right then is his judgement.

The security guard of Eden folds up the memo and puts it in the drawer. He leaves the cabin, where the gardener of Eden sits, all alone, with only himself to talk to.

He opens the bottle of whiskey and drinks until the butterflies in his stomach are dead and drowned.

Later that day, he finds the snake, wriggling and rubbing himself against his tree.

– You! What did you do?!

The snake playfully acts dumb. He gives the gardener of Eden an innocent look, then closes his eyes and groans as he humps his tree.

– . . . Don’t know what you’re talking about. Oh yeahhhhh.

– I asked you to take care of Adam.

– Oh, you did? My bad. I must have misunderstood.

– Don’t play dumb with me, you snake.

– A simple misunderstanding. It can happen.

– You played me.

– Don’t beat yourself up about it.

The gardener of Eden screams and lunges himself toward the snake, who casually slithers further up his tree to the highest branches. The gardener of Eden bangs his head into the trunk and the snake laughs, then continues to hump his tree until his eyes bulge and he froths at the mouth.

The gardener of Eden returns to his work, but it lost all meaning. His flowers, his grass, even his enemy weeds – he doesn’t feel anything for it anymore. Paradise is grey. Paradise is over.

When he returns to the cabin by the lakeside, he sees the security guard of Eden, sat on their bench, passing the bottle back and forth with Adam.

The two men are silent.

The gardener of Eden meekly approaches them at the bench. Adam moves up, makes a space and pats it with his hand. The gardener of Eden sits down next to him. Adam passes him the bottle.

They drink in silence until the light fades away from the water.

Eden fable gardener

Art, Essays, EssaySaturday

THE GIFT OF THE GATES

by Stephen Wolf • August 7, 2021August 15, 2021

Soon after the ball atop the Times tower officially brought in 2005, workers in Central Park busily prepared the enormous conceptual art project by the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude. For fifteen years they had been trying to create The Gates, the project’s name an allusion to the park’s original formal entrances carved into the perimeter wall: Women’s Gate, Children’s Gate, Strangers’ Gate, Warriors’ gate, etc.

Thousands of “portals” were planned along the walkways, each waving with saffron fabric. At last New York City had permitted the installation on the strict conditions that it would not be permanent nor harm Central Park in any way. Immediately the project was attacked by some park lovers as antithetical to the Greensward Plan since the park was meant for neither entertainment nor amusement. Bike riders condemned it as a safety hazard for limiting space on the walkways, and a few birders ruffled owing to the disruption the gates might cause Pale Male’s hunting grounds. The park would not profit financially except from the sale of sweatshirts and hats, but hotels and restaurants capitalized creatively on the expected boom when tourism was only recently recovering from 9/11. One hotel with a park view provided binoculars to each guest, while a restaurant served mussels in a saffron cream sauce.

Financed entirely by the artists, the installation would cost an estimated $21 million, which outraged some people: How many hospital wings or crumbling classrooms or struggling families could be aided by such a sum spent for something so impractical, temporary, and indulgent? Though restrictions on entertainment in the park had been tossed out long ago and the world’s most adaptable red-tail hawk could pluck his next squirrel or pigeon from the tree-tops and we weren’t really supposed to cycle on the walkways anyway, I dreaded the huge crowds the event would bring into the park. Besides, I begrudged Christo’s art since the late summer of 1985; with sand-colored canvas, he wrapped Pont Neuf, the oldest bridge crossing the Seine, just when I saw Paris for the first time except in my dreams. Of all the bridges over the river, Pont Neuf was the one I least wanted to see under wraps.

But my girlfriend with whom I was traveling on her way to see family in Munich had often visited Paris and enjoyed the spectacle.

“Ach, deez alt bridge,” she said disapprovingly. “Unt now,” and her eyebrows lifted, “zee bridge is made new, ja?”

For weeks the park teemed with volunteers receiving instructions from people scooting from group to group in golf carts, cluttering walkways and eating in crowded, boisterous shifts at the Boathouse. Press photographers and film crews were everywhere. Christo and Jeanne-Claude surveyed the process on a slab of rock overlooking Wollman Rink; they appeared thrilled, thin, interesting, wrinkled, Jeanne-Claude’s hair bright orange and Christo’s eyes so lively.

And finally on a chilly February 12 beneath a bright sky during a photo-op with Mayor Bloomberg, Christo and Jeanne-Claude unfurled the first gate: Across two saffron-colored poles each sixteen feet high and straddling the walkway was another pole from which unfurled saffron-colored nylon fabric that hung or, ideally, fluttered above us. Throughout the park for the next few hours, spaced twelve feet apart, 7,502 more “gates” were unfurled, varying in width from five feet six inches to eighteen feet wide and covering twenty-three miles of park walkways with 1,076,391 square feet of saffron fabric.

There were gates at all the park’s entrances, around Sheep Meadow, down the promenade, encircling Bethesda Terrace, the Great Lawn, the Harlem Meer and the Reservoir, gate after saffron gate winding along every walkway except through the Ramble and the North Woods. Gates led to every tunnel and waited at the other end, crossed Gapstow Bridge and lined the Pond, marched through the zoo, behind the museum, even reflecting in the museum’s back windows while young volunteers handed out two-inch squares of salmon-colored fabric as souvenirs. But soon it all seemed repetitive after the first three thousand and crowds overwhelmed The Gates. Thousands of visitors posing for photographs caused bottlenecks along the walkways, international film crews narrowed the paths even more, and one young man videoed the event while weaving through the gates on roller blades. I headed home and didn’t think much more about it.

For the next week I avoided the park, but one Sunday morning a light snow began to fall, turning heavier in the next hour until two inches coated the fire escape railings outside the window. The sooner we arrived, the more the park would be only ours, so we bundled in boots and jackets, mittens, scarves and woolly caps until my children Lily and Skylar resembled little gnomes. With birdseed and peanuts for squirrels, we headed into the snowfall on our old sled with steel, red runners and “Paris Champion Fastback” in faded letters along the wooden slats.

Even a Midtown workday turns quiet during a snowfall, muffled and slow, but no place is more hushed than Central Park where the snow doesn’t quickly turn to dirty slush. Having forgotten about The Gates I understood everything when we arrived; in the white park a ribbon colored like the sun wound along the walkways. It dipped and gently curved, rose and then descended again, motionless and glowing in the unblemished snow. My children were dazzled.

“Daddy,” Skylar, said, amazed, “how beautiful.”

“Who did this?” Lily asked, hushed and enthralled.

Along the West Drive as we trudged the saffron-ribbon shore of the white lake, a black limousine ground the snow beneath its slow-turning tires. The back window was down, and two pale, wrinkled faces smiled out into the cold air: an old man, his bright eyes beaming, and a woman with hair only a shade darker than the gates.

STEPHEN ANDREWS

by Paul Attmere • August 6, 2021August 13, 2021

Stephen Andrews stole fifty three-penny sweets from the corner shop. Stephen Andrews ran naked across our road. Stephen Andrews right-hooked his back-from-prison dad. Stephen Andrews only had one kidney.

He left one day without warning, his empty chair pushed too far under his doodle-covered school desk. Nothing for a month and then he rang, sniffling on the end of the line, telling me his mum had taken them up north and he was going to donate his right kidney to Jeremy, his straw-haired brother.

Years later, tagging along with my sister, hoping one of her friends would cop off with me in the filthy corner of Parana’s Bar and Bistro, Stephen Andrews wobbled over with a shot of something amber in one hand, an unlit cigarette in the other. His skin, once chalk smooth, was now acne-scarred. Tufts of brown hair sprouted brown like sun-withered weeds from his chin. The old lines were drawn when he didn’t speak. Half a pint later, I said: “Recognize me?”

When he spoke, parched lips flattened against the rim of the glass — one jerk of his neck draining it dry — the words came out sharpened by the spirit. “Borrow me some money, would you, Stump?”

Stephen Andrews got straight F’s. Stephen Andrews got drunk in French. Stephen Andrews fingered Karen Hazard in the boys’ toilets. Stephen Andrews would rest his bumfluff chin on my prickly head and call me “Stump.”

Halfway between the cashpoint and the Odeon Cinema — one hundred pounds gleaned from yours truly with a hands-in-prayer promise to pay me back — trouble kicked off as we passed a group of lads. Stephen Andrews spinning around yelled: “Take all you cunts on!”

“Take all us on, is it?” said the red-eyed leader of the gaggle or pride or murder or whatever you call a collective of chest-beaters in T-shirts. He had me by the ear like an end-of-tether teacher.

“His words,” I said. “Not mine.”

Stephen Andrews could do zero to “really fast,” quicker than me. Stephen Andrews owes me a new set of front teeth. Stephen Andrews took my pouting sister behind some bins while I played with a shard of broken bone in my nose.

Such a strong grip for a nine-year-old, Tyson leads me to the candle flame. “How long can you keep it in for, Uncle?”

I try to keep my finger in the flame longer than Tyson, but the smell of burning flesh gets right up my nose.

“True, is it you lost your front teeth helping my dad?”

Tyson’s never-met dad had much to answer for.

Stephen Andrews has been spotted on the Costa del Sol. Stephen Andrews has been spotted in Sofia. Stephen Andrews has been spotted high up in the Atlas Mountains. Stephen Andrews has been spotted in Burnham-on-Sea.

It’s a thirty-minute bus ride to Burnham-on-Sea. I stagger down the promenade with a newspaper shielding me from the pelting rain. The front page of the sodden local rag has a picture of an older, thinner Stephen Andrews beneath the headline: “Kidney Cancer Lottery Winner Won’t Quit.”

Stephen Andrews’ brother died when he was eight. Stephen Andrews only has one kidney. Stephen Andrews has a sad story. The first two are straight from the horse’s mouth. The third’s my take.

A thin roll-up between purple lips, Stephen Andrews cuts a scrawny figure behind the beer-sticky counter of The King’s Head. He polishes the same beer glass until it squeaks.

“How’s the sprog, Stump?”

“Like you.”

“His mum?”

“Better without you.” I paused. The glass squeaked. “How much you got?”

“Months.”

“I mean money.”

“Too much.”

I keep my tongue rolled like a fat cigar behind my false front teeth.

I unfurled the damp newspaper. “I guess, ‘Won’t Quit’, refers to you serving pints until you drop.”

“Today’s a good day.” Stephen Andrews points at a full head of hair above his wan face. He tells me it’s a wig then stops and holds his index finger up like that guy in the painting of Jesus having supper. “You can still smell Karen Hazard on that.”

On his gravestone, I’ve installed an artificial candle and a bunch of top-notch plastic pansies.

Stephen Andrews left lottery millions to “you and yours” — his words, not mine. Stephen Andrews paid me interest for the hundred pounds lent way back — my words not his. Stephen Andrews’ epitaph reads:

Stephen Andrews

Father, Son, Brother, Friend.

Cunt.

His words, not mine.

death friendship school

TWO CUPS OF COFFEE

by Carolyn R. Russell • August 1, 2021August 1, 2021

Photo credit: https://myfriendscoffee.com/

I arrive early and sit at a table with a view of the sidewalk just so I can do this: watch as Mark lopes toward the diner, his bow-shaped mouth in full pout. He shakes his head, crosses the street, and stares into a storefront’s reflective glare. A minute or two later, he comes back. With the full weight of his shoulder, he swings the door open; its belled frame shudders and clangs.

He makes a beeline for me and slams his way into a chair.

“What the fuck? What’s so damn important you had to call the house?” he half-whispers furiously.

“I’ve emailed, I’ve texted, I’ve called. Nothing from you,” I say.

“Right,” he says. “Because we’ve been nothing since your profound revelation or epiphany or some such shit. So, what? Your karma decided to give you a free pass when it comes to my married ass? Good for you. Except I’m no longer interested.”

Mark gets up, like we’re done, like he’s calling the shots.

“Sit down. I need to tell you something important to both of us. Please don’t make this any harder.”

He does this thing guys like him do. He grabs his chair and turns it backward at the table and straddles it, facing me, like his throbbing manhood must be fenced in, contained, lest it wreak havoc upon the place.

“Go ahead, Annie,” he says. “This can’t be worse than our last little meet-up. ‘Cos that was fun. Big, big fucking fun. Ask my wife.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry for everything. I’m glad she decided to stay.”

Mark stares at me, those emerald greenies more eloquent than he’s ever been. He rubs the blond stubble on his face and takes a deep breath.

“What is it?”

“I’ve been contacted. Rudely. By our former…mentors,” I tell him.

“That’s impossible,” he says. “Are you sure?”

“I’m as sure as I can be, given the circumstances.”

“Mary, mother of…” His right hand curls into a fist.

“Yes.”

A woman with a metallic briefcase enters the restaurant and sinks into one of the cracked leather booths near us.

“How could you let this happen?” says Mark.

“Say something unexpected. Just this one time.”

“Fuck you,” he says.

I make a show of looking around, my gaze lingering on the newly occupied booth close by.

“I’m not sure we should be talking about it here. Why don’t we…”

Mark interrupts me.

“I am never. Going anywhere. Ever again with you. Not even around the corner. So let’s get on with it. I have to leave soon.”

“There hasn’t been a day I haven’t regretted…” I begin.

“Shut the hell up! You have no idea what…just tell me why I’m here now or I’m gone.”

“Yesterday I was mugged,” I tell him. “At least that’s what I thought was happening. After I got home and cleaned up, I realized that the guy hadn’t taken anything, he had given me something. In my handbag. You can guess what.”

I watch as he digests this news. In a near-hilarious ‘tell,’ he swipes at a phantom trace of cocaine beneath his nose.

“Christ,” he breathes, and he closes his eyes. “I guess you expect me to handle this. It’s not like you’ve ever been into getting your own hands dirty.”

This bit is certainly true. It’s how I’ve stayed alive in a lethal line of work.

He stands abruptly, and his chair smacks against the table. He stalks toward the restrooms and barrels through the swinging double doors.

While he’s gone, I make a quick phone call to The Accountant. When I look up, Mark is at the counter. He brings two cups of coffee to the table, and places one of them in front of me.

“Still sugar, double cream?”

“Touching, you remembering that,” I say. “So, we do have some options.”

“Not so much,” Mark snarls.

I take a small sip of coffee. It’s very bitter, like my cold dark heart.

“If we work together…” I begin.

“You really want to go there? Look, I can’t stay. Gotta be somewhere. And I need to think.”

“I’ll call you,” I say.

His baby face flushes. “Don’t. I’ll get in touch with you when I’m ready.”

He raises his cup and waves it dramatically. “Salut!” he says.

He takes a long pull of his coffee. I bring my cup to my lips and pretend to swallow.

“Like I said,” Mark says, “I’ll be in touch.” He pins those Irish eyes on mine.

I flutter my eyelids and angle my head slightly before I let it begin to droop slowly toward the tabletop. Mark catches my cheek in the palm of his hand and eases it onto the surface and Jesus, the touch of his skin on mine, even now. I hear him walk away, then listen to the belled door do its thing.

The gunshot is loud enough that my fellow diner patrons jump to their feet. A woman screams, and there’s a lot of shouting. A few people have rushed to the windows.

“Fuck me, that guy was just in here!” says one of them, a guy with a salt and pepper goatee.

“Well, now he’s all over the sidewalk,” says his pal.

Amidst the commotion I slowly raise my head. The first thing I do is rub my lips and tongue with a napkin; my signature crimson gloss glows bright against the white paper. I spit a couple of times for good measure.

I check my phone and find that The Accountant has left me a message: debt paid in full. His version of mission accomplished. The palm tree emoji at the end of his text tells me he’ll be out of pocket for a while.

As I leave, I dump the poisoned liquid out of my coffee cup and put both cups in my carryall. A girl can’t be too careful.

coffee dirty business

Cities home New York City

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

by Margot Gardin • August 1, 2021August 5, 2021

A Love Letter to a City I Refuse to Call Home

If you ask me if I enjoy living in New York, I could rattle off a list of its faults so long you might find yourself casting your eyes to the floor, silently wishing you had never asked the question.

The streets that perpetually reek of dog urine in the summer.

The eruption of arguments imploding and fireworks exploding at 3 a.m. outside my apartment window.

The dripping sweat of strangers sandwiching me on the subway as I hold my breath and pray for the conductor to announce that the train is now running express to my stop.

The congested avenues that conspire with the pedestrians who unapologetically pummel by, unlikely to scatter even the scraps of an “I’m sorry” behind them before being seamlessly swallowed into the crowd.

The snow that is only snow for a few brief moments before the dirt and grime of the city streets claim it, creating a slush no child would choose to play in.

Yes, I love the American Museum of Natural History and the High Line and Broadway and all that jazz. But it comes at the price of sharing the streets with ambling tourists and erratic taxis and rats that lie in wait for you beneath the sidewalk garbage bags.

I have lived in New York for 14 years now, and yet, I have never called it home. In fact, I have often proudly, and perhaps obnoxiously, declared to anyone who would listen that I am most definitely not a New Yorker, despite my extended stay. I’m from California originally — the other coast, the one with everlasting sunshine and endless stretches of ocean, the one where you can spend the morning skiing and then warm yourself at a bonfire by the beach that same evening. “West coast, best coast,” as we say.

To be honest though, this response is rehearsed. Although, when asked, I tell people I’m from Los Angeles, the question is one I long ago learned to despise. Born in California, I was six weeks old when my family moved east, beginning a pattern of cross-country relocations that soon outnumbered the fingers I could hold up on my two hands. Although I painstakingly packed up my life each time we set out for a new city, I inevitably ended up littering the road with abandoned zip codes and faded friendship bracelets. I learned to experience home as a feeling, rather than tangible coordinates —a space defined by the comforts of family and worn books and mom’s homemade poppy seed onion bread, rather than by a street sign or white window shutters or the oak tree in the front yard.

After I graduated from college, my family moved back to California, the place to which I now return when I tell friends I’m “going home for the holidays.” Yet, unlike many of my friends who fled New York City for their respective homes when the COVID-19 pandemic began, I remained at my job, working at a hospital in Manhattan. Much to the dismay of my mother (who was counting on the return of her fiercest Scrabble opponent to ease the burden of quarantine), this meant that I could not similarly escape to the comforts of in-unit laundry and the fully stocked kitchen that always awaits me in my mother’s house. Instead, as the pandemic raged, I found myself here, alone in this city that I would not call home, with little company other than a recently gifted succulent (whom I now endearingly refer to as my “emotional support plant.”)

Worried about losing my mind and being unable to find it amongst the loads of laundry coating my floors (because who really wants to use a communal laundry room during a pandemic), I began spending as much time outside as possible. I have often heard Central Park referred to as “New York City’s backyard,” but it was a backyard I preferred far less to a private outdoor space, where I could dress as I pleased and belt out song lyrics undeterred by the irritated looks of strangers. (Not that the public nature of the park stops people in this city from doing just that. If only I were that brave.)

But with the threat of being cooped up in a small New York City apartment looming, I donned my modern-day armor (a not-so-stylish face mask and a bottle of Purell) and began to utilize the park like the true New Yorker that I refused to be.

I started running outside, abandoning my indoor jump rope for jogs along the Bridle Path (for which I’m sure my downstairs’ neighbors are grateful). I began learning guitar, practicing along the green stretches of grass lining the bike path. I stumbled upon Shakespeare Garden and strolled through it, reading the quotes and trying (and failing) to read the sundial. I breathed in the scent of pink peonies, and photographed trees with purple blossoms that grew right out of the bark. I ventured up to Belvedere Castle, marvelling at the vastness of the park, disappointed that I could not ascend the winding stairs within to see the view from the very top. I took long walks, discovering new paths and pockets of the park I was not aware existed. As I explored, I read the inscriptions on the benches I passed—benches dedicated not only to loved ones, but to the park itself—and even jokingly picked out a peaceful waterfront alcove where, if I were to donate a bench, I would like it to reside.

When I began to feel antsy, Central Park delighted me with a tree crafted for climbing, the perfect spot for reading book-after-quarantine-book, offering a backdrop of leaves interlaced against a Tiffany blue sky.

When I lamented distant family and scattered friends, it mourned with me, offering up its bleeding hearts that bloomed in solidarity.

When I felt alone, it surprised me with the company of a bale of turtles congregating at one end of the pond, swimming just beneath the wooden overhang. (Although, the racoon I encountered in the Ramble was much less appreciated.)

When I did not know which way I ought to go, Central Park presented me with giant mushrooms and a rabbit with a pocket watch and a girl with a bow in her hair who whispered in my ear that sometimes we must swim through our tears in order to find our way. Perhaps, one day soon, we too might awaken from this mad world in which we are living.

The more I explored, the more I realized that despite living in New York for fourteen years, and in New York City for six, I knew so very little about this park, and perhaps about this city. Though I have eagerly awaited autographs outside the theatre doors of Broadway, I have yet to feel the waves of the New York Philharmonic wash over me in Lincoln Center. Though I have awaited trains in Grand Central Station, craning my neck upward to trace the constellations that dance across the ceiling, I have yet to stand beside the Fearless Girl in Wall Street. Can I truly say I have lived in New York if I have not yet cheered on the home team (or any team for that matter) at Madison Square Garden, if I have not yet given myself over to (and then the next morning regretted giving myself over to) its endless night life? I had filed New York City away under “necessary evils” before bothering to crack open its cover and explore the wonderlands and secret gardens flourishing inside.

As I sit now in my tiny room in an apartment that I once shared with two friends (how else can one afford the ridiculously high rent in this city), I hear a few notes of “New York, New York” drift in through my open window, intermingling with the clapping of hands and banging of pots that mark the arrival of 7 o’clock. Someone is playing the song loudly in the street below, and as I watch the occupants of the building across the street step out onto their balconies to sway and sing along, I realize that this city has gotten under my skin. Like a sometimes dirty, but so very persistent stray cat that refuses to leave your doorstep no matter how many times you tell it to scat, a stray that slowly slinks its way into your heart until one day you decide to bring it inside and allow it to stay—I have come to love this city, despite its faults. As I wove my way through its fields and reservoirs, New York City wove its way into my heart.

So, one day, should I be able to inscribe a bench and place it by the water’s edge, I think it would read: “Thank you, New York, for opening your branches and benches to me, even when I sullenly refused to wipe my shoes upon your Welcome Home mat and step inside.”

Or something like that.

I have many years to mull it over, many years before I can exchange student loans for such gestures of gratitude. But I have decided that in the meantime, as I finish out my schooling and wait to see where life might bring me next, perhaps, perhaps, it might not be so bad to call this place home.

ghosts mothers and daughters pleasure prayers

FAJR

by Hilal Isler • July 30, 2021August 5, 2021

At dawn, there was a sharp knock on the door, her voice full and low, coming from the other side. “It’s your mother, darling,” she said. “Open up.”

“Where have you been all this time?” I asked.

“Look how you’ve grown!” she said.

None of this surprised me in the least, even though my mother had been dead for twenty-three years. A reel of thought, wound tight inside my mind, began to unspool. Memories of the way we were. Combing wet henna through our charcoal hair. Loose white skirts skimming the Kaaba’s marble ground. Holy ground. A tiny mole, just offshore of her sad little mouth. Ours, a world of immovable routines and restraint. Ours, a world of misbehaving men whose terrible secrets we kept.

My mother settled on the sectional now, carefully arranging the folds of her pink kaftan, pushing cable bangles up her forearms, as high as they would go. She said, with neither pretense nor prologue: “Out there, I’ve made many new friends. From these women, I’ve learned everything there is to know. What I taught you was wrong. Shame is pointless. Pleasure is the path. Rumble your hips often and rejoice. Tell the truth about them. Shout it, if you must. Everything else has been explained here.”

From inside the wide bell sleeve of that glorious cloth, she produced a folder of hammered gold. I watched as she placed it carefully on the cushion beside her. I opened my mouth to speak, but she was already gone.

Fiction, Interviews

A Flash of Inspiration: “The End of the 20th Century”

by Christy Hallberg • July 30, 2021July 30, 2021

For this installment of A Flash of Inspiration, we’re featuring “The End of the 20th Century,” a story by Linda Mannheim that originally appeared in Litro on October 30, 2020. The rhythm of the piece is what first struck me, its musicality and iteration. At its heart, there is a mix of aggression and wistfulness for a time in New York City before 9/11 when the rebelliousness of youth seemed innocent and full of promise and purpose.

CAH: How long have you been writing flash fiction? Do you write in other genres? Do you find that you return to certain themes in your writing repeatedly?

LM: In the early ‘90s – I started to hear people talk about flash fiction around then for the first time. At the time, I was in a writing program with some pretty conservative ideas about what a story could be, so it was really good to see a break from that. I’m the author of two short story collections, This Way to Departures and Above Sugar Hill, and a novel, Risk. I write a lot of long form prose and am starting to do more nonfiction, too. “The End of the 20th Century” is part of a series of pieces I’ve been working on that are linked to journeys on public transport, which seems an especially good topic for flash. I usually tell people (when forced to explain what I write about) that I’m interested in how people live their day-to-day lives following political conflict and upheaval. Much of my writing takes place in the neighborhood where I grew up in New York, Washington Heights, which is home to a lot of migrant and refugee communities.

CAH: What inspired the subject matter of “The End of the 20th Century”? Does the story have any autobiographical elements?

LM: “The End of the 20th Century” is very autobiographical. I was doing temp work on Wall Street in the 1990s – I moved back to New York around then after being away for a long time and I was living a very different kind of life than I’d had there before – living in Park Slope (calm but very connected to the rest of the city) instead of Washington Heights (chaotic and cut off from a lot of the things the city has to offer). There was a certain amount of tumultuousness to my life around that time, but I was also having a blast hanging out with people who were temping and trying to do creative work at the same time, accessing all kinds of events that were free or cheap, and making my way around a city that was gentrifying but not gentrified to the extent it is now. It also felt like there was a lot of progress at the time culturally – a new phase of the gay rights movement (including ACT UP), more films, and TV shows by and about people of color, and a spoken word scene that was taking off. And 9/11 absolutely marked the end of that era and shut a lot down – not just in New York, but throughout the US.

CAH: The style of the piece is very staccato, with repetitive phrases throughout. It reminds me of the punchiness of punk rock. What correlation between style and content do you see?

LM: It’s really interesting to hear about how the style of the piece comes across – I hadn’t thought about its connection to punk. Rhythm is important to me when I’m writing, but I sort of figure that stuff out intuitively as I go along and don’t think much about it consciously. When I took my first poetry workshop, the instructor told me I was getting too hung up on narrative and should do nothing but write for sound for four days in a row. Her instructions were: Don’t worry at all about the meaning of the words – just write for sound for two hours a day. And I did and it changed my writing forever – not just my poetry, but my prose. It showed me how much of the musicality of language we can access intuitively. I feel like she gave me a huge gift and I recommend everyone follow her advice.

CAH: There seem to be political undercurrents in the story, even in the irony of counterculture zines being printed on Wall Street. What political statement is the story making about the end of the 20th century?

LM: I wanted to capture a dynamic I saw at the time, which was: Let’s get temp jobs so we can do the creative stuff we want to do. And the temp jobs that paid well, in places where you could also do some of your own work, were mostly on Wall Street. A lot of the temp jobs involved hanging out, waiting for someone to hand you correspondence to type, and occasionally having to run errands or make copies. The full-time staff were pretty absorbed in what they were doing and just wanted the temps to be on call if they needed help with something. All of these places had amazing photocopiers and printers and their use wasn’t tracked very much – if you were fairly discreet you could print things up, and everyone did (I used to print my manuscripts at jobs like that). I remember hearing at the time that a lot of zines were secretly printed at investment companies.

CAH: Where do you turn for creative inspiration? Which artists have most inspired your own work? What books are on your nightstand?

LM: There’s so much amazing prose out right now shattering ideas about genre and form. Some recent favorites are Lara Pawson’s This is the Place to Be, Ruby Cowling’s This is Paradise, Irenosen Okojie’s Nudibranch, Sharon Duggal’s Should We Fall Behind, Heidi James’ The Sound Mirror, Aleksander Hemon’s The Question of Bruno, and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

My terrifyingly high TBR pile includes (or will include) Wendy Erskine’s new collection, Joanna Walsh’s Seed, Leone Ross’s This One Sky Day (published under the title Popisho in the US), Catherine McNamara’s Love Stories for Hectic People, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, and Jo Lloyd’s The Earth, Thy Great Exchequer, Ready Lies.

The books that I come back to the most often are Carolyn Forche’s The Country Between Us, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull, all of which break with preconceived notions about life after conflict.

CAH: What are you working on now?

LM: Next up is a short story collection called Documents set during and shortly after South Africa’s apartheid era. The title story is made up of letters, government documents, and official notices. I’m also working on a constellation novel about the years when my father was a refugee. The research for that includes an exploration of how we talk about seeking and providing refuge and there’s a blog on that theme that refugee writers and non-refugees have contributed to.

9/11 inspiration New York the writing life

Central Park family memories New York City

THERE’S ONLY ONE STRAIGHT PATH IN CENTRAL PARK

by Peter E. Murphy • July 25, 2021August 15, 2021 • 1 Comment

Your mother died of lung cancer when you were seven years-old. You have two snapshots of her taken in Central Park. In the first, it’s May, 1952, and you’re about a year-and-a-half-old. She’s sitting on a blanket as you totter in front of her wearing a white sweater and baggy white pants. You’re holding a key in one hand and a can of something in the other. Your ears stick out like two large sails. In the second photograph taken a month later, she’s stands on the grass holding your hand as you eat an apple. She wears a dark blouse, light colored skirt with a floral pattern, and high heels. In both pictures she’s almost smiling.

You moved from Wales to New York when you were a baby. All you knew as you grew up on the Lower West Side of Manhattan were pavements and asphalt. The only trees you saw were on a black and white television. You loved the smell of the grass in Central Park, and when you discovered the carousel you thought you were in heaven. “Please, Daddy, please,” you begged and got to ride up and down on a beautiful, white horse, up and down, up and down. When you were in the park another time and couldn’t find it, your father said it’s a magic carousel. It turns invisible when it gets tired so it can take a nap. Looking back, you realize that he probably didn’t have an extra quarter for you to ride it. Today it costs more than three bucks.

When you were twenty-one and newly sober, you asked your father, “Lung cancer, really? She was only thirty-three.”

He hesitated…“No, pills and alcohol.”

Oh boy.

“I didn’t want to tell you, afraid it would knock you off your wagon.”

He was right. Your wagon got kind of shaky.

You moved to South Jersey for a couple of years. Half a century later, you’re still there. You stayed sober. You’ve done all right. You’re semiretired and work part-time at a university that’s named a writing institute after you. This week you’re at a hotel in New York near the Port Authority. You write during the day, and in the evening, you go to a show. You’ve been writing in hotels for more than thirty years. You love the sameness, the blandness, the lack of distractions that allows you to concentrate. The only people you talk to on these writing retreats are the ones who serve you food.

You wake up at 5 a.m., turn on the hotel mini pot to caffeinate yourself, and begin to write. After working for a few hours, you take a break, gorge yourself at the breakfast buffet, then decide to walk it off along 8th Avenue. You pass a not-so-gentle-looking gentleman’s club near 42nd Street where you’re blocked by a twerking Adonis who wears tight pink briefs, gold sneakers and nothing else. He swings his hips at you and snaps his waistband singing, “Come in, Baby. Come in.” Too much, too early, you think. Maybe you should turn around and walk back to your hotel. Instead, you descend into the subway and take an uptown C to 86th Street and walk into the park.

You find an empty bench in the shade with a view of the reservoir. You’re glad you came. You haven’t been in the park in years, maybe not since The Gates, Christo’s installation of orange…were they orange?…cloth-covered “Gates.” You knew it was impossible, but you wanted to walk through all seven thousand of them.

Because your father couldn’t take care of you by himself, he sent you to a boarding school on Staten Island. You knew they were supposed to hit you when you were bad, but they hit you when you weren’t bad. They hit you for not finishing your dinner because you were feeling sick. When you threw up on your plate, they hit you again and made you eat your vomit. And because you didn’t know how to make your bed, they made you take off your clothes and hit you. Every morning. Take off your clothes and hit you. You knew you were a little person, but they made you feel tiny.

You missed your daddy. You missed your mommy. You were learning about hell in religion class and thought you were in it, but you were confused. You thought you had to die first to get there, and although you didn’t remember dying, you weren’t sure.

After you ran away from the school a second time, an aunt and uncle felt sorry for you and took you in. On the ferry from Staten Island to Brooklyn, they bought you a hot dog and Coke and a Casper the Friendly Ghost comic book. You wondered why Casper didn’t go back to the people who loved him before he died. Instead, he wandered around looking for new people. Because you thought you might be dead, you were afraid that you would have to wander around like Casper did. Your father remarried three years later, so you moved in with him and your new stepmother in Queens.

Years pass. You grow older.

Before your senior year in high school you get a summer job filing stacks of expired policies at an insurance company on 66th Street and Broadway. You ask a file girl out on a date to the Woolman Skating Rink, your first concert, to hear Spanky and Our Gang sing “Sunday Will Never Be the Same.” You and the file girl become a thing, a little thing, a bumpy little thing.

After work a dozen or so clerks hike two blocks to the Sheep Meadow to play softball. You pass a deli where you stock up on beer. You’re good for two quarts of Ballantine. You lie on a blanket with the girl. She sips. You guzzle. You kiss. She sips. You guzzle. You kiss.

Time to play ball. You split into two teams, “Collision” vs. “Personal Injury,” and use a manhole for home plate. Who knew there were manholes in Central Park? One of your teammates has to pee and somehow manages to lift the cover off the manhole. He climbs down, relieves himself, climbs back up and puts the cover on wrong. You’re next at bat, too blitzed to notice it. You swing, hit the ball, and as you run toward first base, you step on the loose manhole cover which swivels up, and you fall, your crotch landing on its edge. Game over.

File girl walks you to the restrooms near Bethesda Fountain so you can check the damage. You’re hurt, not emergency room hurt, but go to the doctor the next day hurt. On the way back she tells you the walkway you are on is the only straight path in Central Park. They planned it that way. It never occurred to you that someone planned the park. You thought like everything else it just happened.

You quit drinking after New Year’s Eve because you get so drunk, you frighten yourself. You last three weeks without a beer or a shot, and you’re at it again. You and file girl see each other during the school year. Even though you’re drinking more and more, which pisses her off, she agrees to go to your prom with you. A few days before, you cut school and spend a drunken afternoon walking around the park. You talk to a charismatic mandrill at the zoo. Then you walk over to 59th Street where the horse and buggies hang out. You decide to find out what it costs for a romantic, after-prom ride through the park. You ask a horse, “How much do you charge?” He doesn’t answer. The driver yells at you to leave his horse alone. You say, “It’s rude to interrupt me while I’m talking to my friend.”

“Get the fuck away from my horse,” he yells, as he picks up his whip and climbs down from his seat. You wonder if you could take him, but you’ve never won a fight in your life, so you run away.

Prom night comes and file-girl begs you, “Please don’t drink.” “Don’t worry,” you say, “I’ll be good.”

And you are good! The prom is at the Americana Hotel, where a few days earlier The Beatles held a press conference. They’re starting their own record company and calling it Apple. You don’t care about apples, but you like the Beatles, so right on! After the prom, you go to the Copacabana and watch the fancy show while sipping overpriced Coca Colas. What you wouldn’t do for a shot or two of vodka. Then you ride back and forth on the Staten Island Ferry, back and forth, making out with file-girl who tells you she’s proud of you for not drinking. You ask her to go steady. She says yes and wears your high school ring.

A week later she takes you to a graduation party in Washington Heights where someone offers you a drink. “No thanks,” you say, refusing it. At least you think you refuse it.

You wake up the next morning on file girl’s front lawn, her father spraying you with the garden hose. “If you come near my daughter again,” he says. “I’ll shoot you.” Your ring is in your pocket. You never see file-girl again, but a few years later you hear from one friend that she becomes a nun, and from another, that she’s married and has five kids. You believe them both.

You graduate high school. You go to college. You flunk out. You go to a second college. You flunk out. You go to a third college. You flunk out. Fuck it! You get a job tending bar. Now you’re a professional drinker. It’s the Sixties, so of course you do drugs. You’re afraid to drop acid because two friends have had bad trips: one never returns and is in a nursing home, the other burns down his house. This doesn’t stop you from doing mescaline. You make the mistake of swallowing a tab before seeing Easy Rider at a theater on the Upper East Side. When Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda get their heads blown off by a shotgun, you can’t stop screaming. You leave the theater and walk into Central Park to clear your own head. An enormous insect with one bright eye chases you. The roar of its wings follows you as you run out of the park, find your car, and somehow manage to drive without crashing, over the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, along Queens Boulevard, Woodhaven Boulevard, Crossbay Boulevard, home.

“Peter, come up here. I want you to watch this,” Your stepmother says.

“No, Ma. I’m going to bed.”

So, you trudge up the steps and sit down, wondering if that giant insect has followed you inside the house.

“Watch!”

You watch. It’s a talk show. David Susskind is interviewing a druggie. You nod off.

“Pay attention,” she says, shaking you awake.

You look up at the television and see you and your stepmother sitting on a couch across from David Susskind.

“So, Peter,” Susskind says, “Your mother suspects that you’re taking drugs. What would you like to tell her?”

“Leave me the fuck alone, man. I just wanna go to bed.” You can’t believe you just said “Fuck” on television.

“She’s concerned, Peter. She thinks you’re screwing up your life.”

“Please, Mr. Susskind,” you beg, “I’m tired. I just wanna sleep.”

A few days later you learn that the police have been using helicopters to patrol Central Park at night in an attempt to reduce crime. You figure that the bright eye that chased you was probably just a spotlight. Probably.

Time to get back to your hotel, back to work. You lift yourself off the bench, and as you walk toward the Subway, swirling colors distract you. You see five women wearing saris kicking a soccer ball. They fall all over each other, laughing. They’re rolling on the grass in hysterics. You feel as if you’ve stumbled into a scene from Bend It Like Beckham. As you watch them, you begin to laugh. You laugh like you haven’t laughed in a hundred million years. You are grateful for your life. You never want to stop.

growing up labor camp migrant labor

FALSE PARADISE

by Stephen Newton • July 25, 2021July 25, 2021

On the summer morning Raleigh meets Eddie the Ogre, her grandmother sends her on an errand to requisition bread and milk from the Mess Hall’s commissary. From the doorway, Gram watches the energetic 12-year-old run at top speed past the gate and up the hill through the migrant labor camp. Not a care in the world, she thinks. You’d never know that child has been to hell and back.

Gram goes back inside the shanty. From a kitchen cupboard she removes a coffee tin and takes it to the dining table. She opens the tin and pulls out a folded newspaper page, which she spreads out before her revealing a yellowed news clipping with a 72 point headline that reads: “CHILD FOUND CAGED IN ATTIC: MOM JAILED.”

She pours coffee into a gold-rimmed china cup, lights a cigarette, and reads the story, as she has countless times since Raleigh came to live at the camp. When she finishes, she contemplates the three-column wide photo beneath the headline. In it, a young woman covers her face with her hands as police escort her through a crowd of angry onlookers to a waiting squad car. “To hell and back, for sure,” Gram mutters.

With its veranda-like porch, the Mess Hall reminds Raleigh of a picture she saw in Ladies’ Home Journal of a grand house overlooking its estate. Below her, she can see the whole camp, with its 10 rows of white-washed shanties. Past the front gate and across the highway, a hundred acres of loamy muck spread like a black earthen sea to the tree covered foothills of upstate New York’s orchard region.

Raleigh walks to the rear of the Mess Hall, pushes open the screened door to the kitchen, and steps inside to the aroma of a dozen loaves of fresh baked bread set out on a table beneath a squadron of twisted flypaper strips. Instead of Howard, the chief cook, a stout woman in a white apron stands at the sink peeling potatoes.

“Excuse me, ma’am. I’m looking for Howard.”

The woman looks up from her work and scowls at Raleigh. “Where did you come from? You’re not allowed in here, young lady.”

“My grandmother sent me for a loaf of bread and a gallon of milk.”

The woman laughs. “Milk? And a gallon, no less? Bread? This ain’t no charity. Now, you get, before I—”

“But, Howard—”

“For your information, Miss Smarty Pants, Howard don’t work here no more.”

A great lump of a man wearing a blood-spattered apron pushes aside the plastic slats covering the entrance to the walk-in-cooler and steps into the room. He looks from Raleigh to the woman. “What’s the problem, Connie?”

“We got no problem, Eddie.” Connie says, her paring knife poised above a half peeled potato. “I was just breaking the bad news to this little ragamuffin that the free lunch is over.”

Eddie is puzzled.“What free lunch?” And then, looking more closely at Raleigh, he says, “Ain’t I seen you before?”

Raleigh shakes her head.

“I don’t know, kid. I’d bet good money on it. I never forget a face, do I Connie?”

Connie has had enough, she has work to do. “Listen, girl,” she says to Raleigh, using a friendlier tone, “I don’t know who you think you are, but here’s the deal. We run the commissary now, okay? That means me and Eddie are in charge of it all. As much as we’d like to help you out, we just can’t afford to give out free food to every white trash family in the county.”

“But, you don’t understand,” she says. “I’m Raleigh. My grandfather—”

“Well, Raw-lee,” Connie says, waving a dismissive hand, “you just run along now. Go beg someplace else, and tell your people that there’s no more handouts coming from this kitchen.”

“I’m not begging, I—”

“Now, listen here, Raw-lee,” Eddie says. “You mind, and do what the missus says, or we’re going to call the sheriff and have you escorted off the premises.”

Raleigh turns and runs out the door. Glancing over her shoulder, she sees the couple leering at her. She runs down the hill and through the camp until she reaches the glorified shanty her grandparents have shared for as long as she can remember.

Gram has been watching for her and throws open the door.

“Howard’s gone,” Raleigh sobs, “and the new lady called us white trash, and then this horrible man threatened to call the law on me.”

Gram sends Raleigh to the bathroom to clean up while she uses the telephone. “Hello, this is Helen Coker. Who’s this? Well, Connie Bowersox, I want you to know that my husband Charlie runs this labor camp, and from now on, if my grandchild Raleigh asks you for even so much as a toothpick, you’re to give it to her—no ifs, ands, or buts, or you and your man can kiss your jobs goodbye. We are on our way up there for an apology, and two loaves of bread and a gallon of milk.”

“That woman thinks she’s the Queen of Sheba,” Gram says to Raleigh as they go out the door, “but she’ll soon know who’s boss.”

Raleigh’s world passes into late afternoon. She has forgotten her morning’s humiliating encounter with its subsequent forced apologies, made and accepted. The entire experience is already banished to the dim corridors of her mind reserved for her nightmares, real or imagined. It is, after all, Saturday, and the entire camp will show up at the Mess Hall tonight for free movies and popcorn.

At dusk, Raleigh joins her grandfather at the gate as he checks in the work crews returning in trucks and busses from their long day in the orchards. Charlie Coker barks out each person’s name like a drill instructor, marking them off on a clipboard he props in the crook of his withered left arm, shattered by a German bullet during the Great War.

Jesse Montroux’s truck is the last to arrive. One by one, the crew members climb off the truck and take their places in line. At last, her grandfather calls the name Raleigh has been waiting to hear, “Caitlin Montroux.”

“I’m here, Mister Charlie.” Montroux’s daughter is a slender young woman of 18 years. Gold hoops hang from her ears and instead of wearing a plain shift into the orchards like the other women, Cat wears a man’s white dress shirt, sleeves rolled up, tied at the midriff, and a green and yellow striped skirt. Only the thin soles of her black canvas sandals speak of poverty as she climbs down from the flatbed truck to stand in line with the others until everyone is accounted for.

Cat is Raleigh’s best friend. Together the two walk to Cat’s shanty, which is directly across from her grandparents’. Raleigh sits on the narrow bed, while Cat shares the highlights of her long day, another fraught with hard work and little to show for it. Wages are low enough for the men, Raleigh learns, but women receive even less.“Been that way forever, and nothing’s ever going to change,” Cat says. “It’s a man’s world, Miss Leigh, and that’s a fact.”

Cat owns a portable phonograph upon which she frequently plays her only record, a worn 78 rpm. She removes the record from its dust jacket and places it on the turntable. She lowers the needle, and Billie Holiday sings, “Papa may have, and mama may have….”

Raleigh and Cat sing along, “God bless the child….”

In the Mess Hall, the dining tables have been pushed aside and a 16-mm projector sits on a wooden stand surrounded by rows of folding chairs, all facing a movie screen set up against the front wall. Usually, there is a sermon before the show, but tonight, the itinerant missionaries, Brother Robert and Sister Jean, simply bow their heads and give a prayer of gratitude for the plentiful harvests and for all of God’s bounty. The donation basket is passed up and down the rows, the lights go out, and Felix the Cat raises havoc on the sparkling screen as he outwits a nasty bulldog that reminds Raleigh of Connie’s husband, whom she has dubbed, Eddie the Ogre.

While Sister Jean changes the projector’s reels, Raleigh and Cat wait in line for popcorn. To Raleigh’s dismay, the Ogre is in charge of the popcorn machine. He has traded his filthy apron for a short sleeve pullover and a pair of baggy trousers.

“Here for more free handouts, Miss Raw-lee?” Eddie asks.

Cat steps in front of her friend and holds out two nickels. “Supposed to be free popcorn, Mr. Eddie,” she says. “But we got the money for two bags, please.”

Eddie scoops popcorn into two paper bags and hands them to Cat. “Keep your money, girl,” he says. And then, just loud enough for Raleigh to hear, he mutters, “I’ll collect what’s coming to me, sooner or later, you spoiled brat.”

The two friends return to their seats and sit sweltering in the darkness for the next hour. The slowly rotating blades of the Mess Hall’s only ceiling fan are no match for the humid air, heavy with the odors of tobacco, popcorn, and sweat.

But no one seems to mind the heat. The audience claps and cheers enthusiastically, while Hopalong Cassidy rides and shoots his way through False Paradise. And watching it all from the shadows, Eddie the Ogre plots his revenge and waits motionless, like a predatory insect, for the film to end.

Thunder rumbles in the distance as a storm moves across the valley. The crowd lingers outside the Mess Hall and then disappears into the camp. Raleigh and Cat walk to the Wash House, where Cat folds her laundry, while Raleigh waits for her outside. At 10 o’clock, row after row of tiny houses throughout the camp go dark, and Raleigh wonders if their occupants are dreaming of faraway homelands—Georgia and Alabama, or even Puerto Rico and the Bahamas—where they have long ago become strangers.

From his hiding place, Eddie waits for Cat to lift the laundry basket off the table to balance on her head, and then he switches off the lights. He moves fast, and is on her before she can scream, placing one massive paw over her mouth, the other around her throat. “Not a word, girly,” he says, as he forces her to the floor onto the pile of spilled laundry. He stuffs a handkerchief into her mouth and hog-ties her wrists to her ankles with a length of clothesline. Cat struggles, but she is no match for Eddie.

Alarmed by the sounds of a scuffle, Raleigh opens the door to find Eddie crouched over Cat. “Your turn, now, Missy,” he says to her, getting to his feet.

Raleigh steps back outside, slams the door in Eddie’s face, and slides the lock bolt in place. Instead of heading home, she runs up the hill toward the woods.

The locked door gives way with one loud crack, and Eddie rushes out, looking in every direction for his prey. He runs to the rear of the Wash House just as Raleigh disappears into the woods. “I seen you, Miss Raw-lee,” Eddie taunts, lumbering after her. “Old lady Coker can’t help you now.”

Gram is worried. She peers out the front door. Cat’s shanty is dark. “Charlie, you better drive up to the Mess Hall and find those two scamps. Something ain’t right.”

Charlie Coker says nothing. It is easier, he knows, to make the trip than to argue. He turns off the television set, just as Gorgeous George, one of his favorite wrestling stars, enters the ring for the final match of the night. Coker goes to the top drawer of his desk and removes a 45 Colt revolver, the same one he was issued during the war. He puts on his grey fedora walks to the door and steps into the night.

Her wrists and ankles are raw and bleeding, but Cat is free of her bonds. She gets to her feet and pulls the filthy gag from her mouth. Just as she steps outside, Coker’s truck roars past her on its way to the Mess Hall. She runs after it shouting, “Stop!”

Coker comes to a stop and gets out of the still idling truck. “Where’s Leigh? What’s going on?”

“Mr. Eddie’s gone crazy and chased Miss Leigh into the woods.”

“You can drive, can’t you?

“Yessir.”

“Get in, and go like hell. Tell Helen to call the sheriff and tell him to bring his dogs. I’m going after Leigh.” Coker watches the truck turn around and speed down the hill. He places his good hand on the revolver’s grip and enters the woods, sure that he knows where Raleigh is hiding. Every Monday, Coker loads the camp’s trash into his truck and hauls it to the landfill. Raleigh often accompanies him, spending the time exploring. He knows that she built a shelter—a primitive lean-to—on a rocky ledge above the creek, about 15 minutes hike upstream from the landfill. By he time he reaches the creekside, his breathing is labored. He removes his hat and wipes his brow with a handkerchief, and then he starts upstream to find Raleigh’s hideout.

Eddie is searching the perimeter of the landfill for Raleigh when the old man appears out of nowhere, scaring the hell out of him. Fortunately, Coker doesn’t spot him and seems more intent on following the creek upstream, than watching his back. Eddie takes it as a sure sign that Coker knows where his granddaughter is hiding. He waits until Coker is about 20 yards away, and then follows him, the sound of his footsteps concealed by the roar of the whitewater creek.

In her dream, Raleigh is struggling to find her way out of a maze of green plastic trees when she steps into a hole and begins falling. Raleigh wakes to find herself being dragged out of the lean-to. When she opens her eyes, Eddie the Ogre is standing over her, a dark specter outlined against the moonlit sky.

“Got you now, brat,” Eddie says, pulling her to her feet. Raleigh resists, but Eddie has both her wrists trapped in one of his huge hands. With the other, he tears her sundress down the front. Raleigh bites the back of his hand, drawing blood.

“You damn brat. You’ll pay double for that.”

Raleigh stands shivering in her underwear, her arms crossed at her chest. To her horror, the Ogre pulls her grandfather’s revolver from his belt, and points it at her.

“Hopalong Coker’s not going to save you tonight, missy,” Eddie says. From somewhere, he produces a flashlight, and shines the beam in her face.

“What did you do to my grandpa?” Raleigh shouts, glaring into the light like a cornered animal.

Raleigh’s fury stirs Eddie’s memory. “I know I seen you before,” he says. “Your picture was in the paper. Your mama’s crazy as a loon. I’ll bet you’re just as crazy, ain’t you?” Eddie points the Colt at her head, and makes a show of pulling back the hammer. “Take your drawers off, or else,” he says.

Raleigh removes her panties, but covers herself.

“Move your hands.”

Raleigh obliges and closes her eyes.

Eddie brings his light to bear on her, starting at her feet and moving the beam slowly upwards. “Holy Mother of Christ,” he cries, backing away from her as if she were toxic. “What are you, some kind of freak?”

Raleigh opens her eyes expecting to see the Ogre looming over her, but he is too close to the edge and is struggling for balance, his arms flapping in the moonlight as if he is trying to fly, and then he is gone. She hears no scream, just the roar of the cataract below.

With a caution born of years of abuse, she crawls to the edge and peers over. The full moon reveals only the turgid rapids, boiling white. There is no sign of Eddie.

Raleigh has been called a freak before. Her mother called her “special” and kept her hidden away for years. Gram says she’s neither. “You are a survivor, that’s what you are. And don’t let anyone tell you no different.”

“My name is Raleigh,” she shouts into the abyss below. Back inside her lean-to, she dresses in a pair of shorts and a pullover sweater. It only takes her a minute to scramble down the slippery incline to the creek, where she heads downstream. At the bend, she sees Eddie’s half-submerged body wedged against the rocks like a fallen log. In the distance, she hears a dog barking, and the voices of men calling her name.

THE ISLAND

by Sarah Moses • July 23, 2021July 23, 2021

Photo by Ky0n Cheng (copied from Flickr)

I spend two weeks on the island. My friends come to visit. A bosom friend, a flirtatious friend, and a friend I had forgotten. They bring rations: poultices and potions, short stories and logbooks, popsicles, playing cards. We set up camp. My bosom friend reads to me. She describes greener and rockier islands to me. Tells of birds with feathers like mirrors that shimmer and shake. She smooths my sheets and warns of the flirtatious friend. He arrives two days late, too early in the day. He lights a fire and removes the sheets from me. Braids my hair and runs off and finds a ladybug and lets it crawl all over me. We share a popsicle. He drips onto me. We play cards. My friend loses one game, and another, and then he no longer wants to play. He prepares a poultice and then a potion, and finishes it, forgetting to offer me any. Now he shimmers and shakes. He wants to explore, though he knows I can’t come along. The next day, at dawn, he is gone. All morning, I look out at the sky. The island seems barren and dry. I send out a smoke signal. Late at night, a voice comes calling for me. A friend from another time or place lies down next to me. He slips a ribbon from the pages of a logbook. Tells tall tales about distant ports of call. Talks of tigerfish and sea mist and palm oil. He brings news of inclement weather. The chimes and bells begin clinking. I’ve been thinking, my friend says, but the wind whisks his voice away. We wrap ourselves in the flapping sheets and follow the storm clouds across and then off the island.

friendship Islands

Education inspiration students teachers

INSIGHTS AT LIQUORLAND

by Michael Harris Cohen • July 20, 2021January 21, 2022

LiquorLand should have been a safe space, a student-free zone. Instead, Arlo Hunt, weed-reeking 10th grader, slouched at the checkout counter. His back faced Joan, but the tangled hair, the slumped shoulders, and the Megadeth patch meant it could only be Arlo, Joan’s worst student.

The bottles clinked in her basket. A confession of Russian vodka and Florida orange juice. Her guilty vacation, the only one she could afford, a tonic for the end of summer break.

Arlo concentrated on a Snickers, rolling it like a cigar. He still hadn’t seen her.

Was he reading the ingredients?

As far as Joan knew, he’d never read anything for her literature class. He’d failed stupendously. Cutting class, napping when he showed, extending the alphabet of choice on quizzes, writing his own answers to circle: “F: Because Walt Whitman was a queero.”

“Some students are assholes,” the biology teacher, Dan, had told Joan in her first week of school. She’d flinched when he said it. Not anymore. Though in Joan’s hierarchy of student assholes, Arlo was king. He called her Joanie. He’d stuffed a decapitated mouse in her coat pocket. She couldn’t prove it was Arlo, but she’d seen it in his eyes. In his dreadful smirk.

She’d replace the bottles and make a break for it. Running into students at the supermarket or Cineplex was weird enough, the students unfailingly open-mouthed and wide-eyed, as if teachers lived dormant outside class, just plugged into rechargeable compartments where they didn’t need to eat or see movies. In these moments, shame was a time machine, especially with the girls—who roamed in packs, as they always had. Joan was 16 again, back in “hell school,” lonely, tongue-tied, unsure what to do with her hands, imagining the post-mortem giggles that would dissect her awkwardness.

Now in LiquorLand? With Arlo Hunt?

He had his phone out, the Snickers vanished, probably filched. Slumped and scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, the one skill every student excelled at. “Homo phonus,” Dan called them.

God, if he films me here.

There were stories. Teachers on the town, phone-filmed drunk, dancing horribly. Unflattering candid pics shot at pools or gyms, images posted and shared. The teachers’ humiliations enshrined in a forever-cloud.

Forget the reshelving. She’d drop her basket. Split. Avoid Arlo and his peach-fuzzed smirk. But it was too late. He’d turned and spotted her, flashed his amber-toothed smile, blue eyes dazzling under greasy bangs.

“Miss Porter?”

“Arlo? What a surprise.”

In a one-on-one conference she’d tried to connect over his name: “How cool you’re named after Arlo Guthrie,” till Arlo said, “Who?” and that his father believed you shouldn’t name a kid till you shouted their potential handle, insured it carried and didn’t wear out your voice.

“Arl-O! Arl-O! Arl-O!” Arlo had bellowed in the empty classroom. After, the two of them sat still as Stratego pieces across her desk. That had been that.

Arlo ogled her basket. “Screwdriver party?”

Joan shrugged in a way she imagined cool girls did, though her party was a party of one, screwing herself to the couch, binge-watching crap.

“Decompression,” she said. Decomposition she thought, suddenly remembering how Arlo once malapropped the word in an essay. Or had he?

Joan paid and scooped her change. The bottles clinked in their paper bag. She nodded to Arlo as she exited, digging for car keys.

He followed her to the parking lot.

Joan’s casual key hunt became a frantic dig past hand sanitizer and secret cigarettes, till she discovered them (at last!) under a crumpled Kleenex. She jammed the keys in the door, but he was at her shoulder, reaching, touching her back.

“Miss Porter.”

Her gut tilting, Joan whirled, keys weaponized in her fist, though Arlo didn’t notice. His eyes were downcast, suddenly shy. He was close enough to smell sweat and cigarettes.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said, “about something I read in your class.”

“Oh,” Joan said, more shocked than if he’d stabbed her.

Arlo still gazed down, as if his memory sprung from the lot’s oil stains and bent butts. “Something like,” he murmured, “dreams don’t work unless you do.”

He squinted up, eyes searching hers, and Joan saw he was sincere. The words had cut him. They’d left their holy scar, the way only literature can.

“That’s great, Arlo. You follow those dreams.”

“Definitely, Miss Porter. I will. And hey, could you maybe buy me a six-pack?”

And she did. Why not? She took his crumpled dollars and procured beer. After all, summer was at its end for the assholes and Arlos of the world, too. All of them back to grades and degrading. And they’d shared a moment. Not in the classroom, where Arlo was forever on the back foot, but in his natural habitat of concrete and sodium arc lamps, of gum wrappers and failed lottery scratchers. They’d connected over the power of language, though she couldn’t place the quote.

Arlo straightaway popped a can and thrust it at Joan, right in the LiquorLand lot. She foresaw headlines: Teacher Contributes to Delinquency of Minor; Teacher Seduces Stoner Student, tabloid scandals, her life landmined. Still, she took it and hunkered next to him on the curb, though the dreams quote nagged her.

Was it Langston Hughes? Maya Angelou?

She searched her head even as she savoured the icy beer, the evanescent feeling of being lawless and cool, this silent correlation with Arlo.

Then she found it in her classroom. It hung above and behind her head, pinned to the wall: an inspirational poster that predated her – literary as a fortune cookie – a quote over snow-capped mountains. The word dreams filled the clouds.

She laughed, a sharp bark in the night. Arlo grinned and popped a second beer.

His easy manner with a cigarette, his crossed boots on the concrete, he could still be anything, Joan thought. Or at least something. What had she been at his age?

Later, at home, two screwdrivers deep, inspired, she’d write her first short story in years, “Insights at LiquorLand.”

Now, Joan raised her beer.

“To dreams,” she said, “and where they take us.”

They toasted. Two cans touching in the August night.

Fiction, Friendship Issue

IN THIS WIDE AND WICKED WORLD

by B. P. Herrington • July 19, 2021July 30, 2021

Shawna Hart lived on the river bottom where she rode her rusted-out pickup hard and careless like it was a smooth-mouthed nag. In high school, she abided no foolishness and scared the living fire out of every boy who crossed her path, waylaying wisecrackers and jocks lamebrained enough to taunt her. Rumour has it that Shawna would never have swaggered down the aisle to “Pomp and Circumstance” had she not cornered the twitchy runt of a principal in his shuttered office and threatened him against holding her back a year. Furthermore, she ought to have been fired long ago from her job at the Save-All Pharmacy for perpetual insubordination. But Mrs. Elsie Price, the senile manager, kept her on. And it was at the pharmacy that Shawna roared into the sad but peaceful life of young Lonnie Odom.

Lonnie was a lanky, freckle-faced momma’s boy, severely sheltered in the Pentecostal holiness of his little country church. When he was not beside his mother in the pew, he passed the time in their snug living room absently perusing the latest issue of The Gospel Harvest while his mother sewed beneath a rust-coloured lampshade. His childhood friends had long ago left him to romp through the thicket, shoot down squirrels, and drift along yellow creeks. After losing her husband in a mangled wreck, his mother was determined to harbour her only child from all these pursuits.

So when Lonnie graduated high school and needed to earn his keep, Mrs. Odom asked Shawna Hart, whose family lived up the road, to get him a job at the Save-All and give him rides. Mrs. Odom did not think the Hart family, a rough clan of unchurched drinkers and smokers, was much count. But she took Shawna’s sturdy frame and gruff demeanour for steadfastness. At first, Shawna scarcely acknowledged Lonnie beside her in her truck, and she ignored him all through their shift. Then one day she found him alone in the tiny breakroom and motioned him over to the fridge. He stood at her beckoning. She took out a little Tupperware bowl of chocolate pudding marked Elsie Price and peeled off the lid. She pulled from her pocket a small bottle of liquid laxative – unpaid for, of course – and poured it into the pudding, grinning and glaring at Lonnie as she stirred it with her finger. He dropped back down in his seat and hastily ate up his sandwich, terrified.

After Mrs. Price had her late lunch, Shawna and Lonnie passed the rest of their shift under the same unholy expectation. The old lady’s frame, already hunched by a weak back, doubled over incrementally until she could do no more than lean at the register and fan herself. An hour before closing time, she scurried out from behind the front desk and hobbled down Aisle 7 toward the bathroom. Shawna signalled Lonnie over to witness the dire moaning and the tweaks of gas behind the door. Grunts gave way to shuddering gushes. Shawna nodded her head like a music lover enjoying the sweetest strains. And she would not move her eyes from Lonnie’s, for she had taken him under her ragged wing. Lonnie buried his face in his pillow that night and asked Jesus to wash away his sin: He had never been party to such a thing in all his life. He pleaded for the Holy Ghost’s anointing that he might lead Shawna to salvation. But then he turned aside, remembering the old woman’s pitiful groans, and thought it better to pray for deliverance from Shawna.

Every Monday and Tuesday when they got off work, Shawna and Lonnie dropped by the Shady Rest Burger Stop and shared a jumbo basket of onion rings. She slopped ketchup over her side of the basket and ate the rings whole while he nibbled and sipped ice tea. She talked much louder than he preferred, spilling forth an endless saga of personal feuds and betrayals. Her great enemy was the congregation of Good Shepherd Baptist Church, which Shawna had attended with her grandmother from age nine until just a few months ago. But something had gone awry and she loathed every last person in the pews – she hated the whole Youth Fellowship in particular and most of all she despised Jenny Blackman, the preacher’s daughter. Lonnie nodded with a barely audible mm-hm as his eyes flitted around other tables, terrified that respectable folks might overhear a pious girl like Jenny Blackman being so maligned. Though she never showed a shred of respect for Lonnie’s holy, upright living, Shawna’s anger was moored in a peculiar righteousness unfamiliar to him, an all-consuming wrath toward hypocrisy. Even her awful trick on Mrs. Price had a deeper meaning he could not have guessed.

At the Shady Rest a few days after the pudding incident, Shawna said out of nowhere, “You ’member Billy Creel? Used to do maintenance at the Save-All? You know how come Mrs. Price fired him, huh?” Lonnie did not know. Shawna leaned in. “She says she caught him drinking beer in the parking lot before his shift. Grown man sitting by hisself in his own truck having a beer and she fires him for it.” She thought Lonnie was not sufficiently moved. “Well, you know Mrs. Price has a grown son lives with her? And would you like to know what he does from sunrise to sundown? Just knocks back one beer one after another. Don’t lift a finger except to knock back his next beer.” Shawna sat back and studied Lonnie’s disgusted face. “Yep. Mother of a no-good beer-guzzling son fires a honest hard-working man for popping a cold one in his own truck.”

Lonnie’s brain was naturally steeped in signs and prophecies, but Shawna had just laid on him a revelation so startling that even a good Holy Ghost-sanctified boy like Lonnie, for whom beer drinking was as bad as fornication, could very nearly be moved to pity poor Billy Creel and to see Mrs. Price as a hobbling witch. In the following nights, Lonnie would lay beneath his tisking ceiling fan, praying and worrying and working it all out in his head. He could not discern precisely what Shawna was, but she frightened him.

The next time they went to Shady Rest, Lonnie took a big swig of ice tea as if it were whiskey to steel his nerves and said, “You have set here and told me every dirty secret all these poor souls have to hide. But you have yet to tell me just what it is about Jenny that’s got you to where you hate her so much.”

Shawna was in mid-bite. She plopped the greasy ring in the basket and drew the napkin across her lips. “Lonnie,” she said, more seriously than he had ever heard her speak, “it’s a lot you don’t know.” She folded a dripping onion ring into her mouth and licked her fingers.

The next Saturday evening after clocking out, Lonnie found Shawna slouched on a wooden crate in the alley behind the Save-All. “We going or not?” Lonnie asked. Shawna stared him down like she was a cow chewing cud. “How’m I supposed to get home?” he whined.

Shawna rolled her neck around until it popped, and she looked off. “I got my mind fixed on what’s got to be done.” Her lips played with a toothpick.

Lonnie kicked out his lower jaw. “Shawna Eason, you been talking so much bull since I met you, ain’t no way I can keep track of what you say.” He shook his head. “Who you think is gonn’ give me a ride now?”

Shawna roared laughing and nearly rocked herself off the crate. “Oh, you gittin’ a ride all right!” Lonnie grimaced. Shawna rose with a heave and a grunt and flicked the toothpick away. She walked over, a little stiff from sitting, and slapped him on the back. “You git yer ass in that truck.”

When they got on the highway, Shawna cranked up the honky-tonk station, and though Lonnie saw her mouth wide with laughter, he could not hear her over the crying pedal steel guitar and the flapping wind. Five miles outside the city limits, Shawna turned down the back road that she always took to get them both home. But when she roared past Lonnie’s driveway, he startled and yelled, “Where’s your head at?”

Shawna brayed, “I told you we was going for a ride! Haw!” She punched the steering wheel. “You ain’t believed me but now you see!”

So he thought nothing of it as they rounded the bend toward the river bottom where Shawna’s trailer house swept past and the blacktop petered out into a sandy deep-rutted logging road.

Shawna clicked off the radio and hunkered toward the windshield. She shifted her head like an owl and said, “Yep. Still there.” She swerved aside and killed the engine. The rusty hinges of her door croaked as she stepped out. “Whatch you waitin’ on?” she yelled into the cab. She walked along the headlights’ path, and Lonnie slunk out after her. Shawna whistled him over. “I seen this yesterd’y. Figured it wouldn’ have moved by itself.” She snorted and kicked the dead possum’s rump. “Pick ’im up.”

Lonnie whined a protest, but she was already halfway back to the truck. He leaned down to the moonlit sand that still panted the last breaths of heat absorbed all through the day. Lonnie’s eyes adjusted, and he could see that in death the possum bared a little snarling smile and hid its nose in its hairless articulate fingers as if it were sniggering.

Shawna returned and whipped open a paper grocery sack. “Scoot ’im on into here.”

Her hooded eyes cast streaks of shadow down her cheeks. She forced the sack into his hand and left. He lifted the possum’s rear with a stick and slid the open sack along the body, and as the slender grinning face slipped inside, a mournfulness overtook Lonnie. He closed the sack and crisply folded the top. When he lifted it, he found it much heavier than he had anticipated, weighted by the distinct pull of a lifeless body that has surrendered to gravity.

Shawna caught him gingerly nestling the sack between two-by-fours in the truck bed. She pounded the steering wheel, hollering, “Just th’ow it in, God damn it!”

Lonnie climbed into the cab and pressed himself against the door, prone to spring out and tumble into the littered roadside ditch. Leaning his head out the open window into the whistling air, he scanned the scrawny limbs that crackled in the headlight rays, and he longed to be curled up with the possum and its secret purpose. Grown man collecting dead possums, living in fear of a lunatic – ought to be ashamed, he thought. Even as Shawna’s truck ambled back onto the highway, the will to question had gone out of Lonnie.

After a while, Shawna coasted over beside a tight stand of pines and hollies near the grounds of Good Shepherd Baptist Church. “You know who’s fixing to come through them doors yonder in about ten minutes?”

“I hadn’ got the slightest idea,” Lonnie moaned.

“I thought your little possum friend might like to be friends with Jenny Blackman.” She could not hold back her smile as she watched his face drain. “So when Jenny comes out to get in her car, can you guess what she’s gonn’ find sitting there in her seat just a-grinning at her?”

“Oh my God, Shawna!” Lonnie grabbed the door handle.

“Where you going?” He sank back. “Yeh, you just sit tight,” she said, ducking out of the truck. She slipped along the church’s shadowed eave and, hunkering as she ran to Jenny’s Toyota, dumped the possum out of its bag into the front seat. As she got back in the truck, Shawna laughed. “She’s gonn’ be out directly, after she’s straightened the hymnals and shined up the offering plates for church tomorrow. Like Jesus even gives a shit.” In a moment, Shawna slugged his arm. “Haw haw! Here she comes!” Shawna seized his collar and shoved his face into the windshield.

Jenny came briskly out of the wide doors in her prim blue dress with her blond locks dangling and a dog-eared Bible pressed to her bosom. As soon as the girl ducked her head into the car, she stumbled backwards onto the perfectly trimmed hedges. She swayed and heaved up a steaming arc of vomit.

Shawna clawed at Lonnie’s sleeve and glowered at his stricken eyes. “How come you cain’t take a joke?” She gripped him hard. “You loyal to me or ain’t you?” Her voice broke: It was not pitiful but terrifying. Lonnie turned aside and trembled. “If you ain’t got me, you ain’t got nobody.” She cranked the engine. “You think that ain’t a fact? Ain’t nobody gives a flying fig about Mister Lonnie Odom.” She spun out and guffawed. “Ain’t nobody gonn’ give you the time of day.”

Lonnie’s throat clotted up. He rolled down the window hurriedly to let the wind wipe away his tears. Later, when Shawna had dropped off the stunned boy at the end of his long dirt driveway, she tugged from her back pocket a tattered square of folded notebook paper. By the yellowed dome light of her cab, she yanked it open and read the letter again –

Dear Shawna,

Me and you have been like sisters ever since I moved here from Shreveport ten years ago. Being a preacher’s kid, I moved around so much I couldn’t make friends too easy. I used to pray to God every night to send me a friend. So when I walked into Sunday School that first time here and you asked could we be friends, I knew the Lord had answered my prayers. But now I just about wonder if it was ever a blessing at all. You have turned your back on the Holy Ghost and God’s natural order. Sad to say, I have seen this coming for a while now. I have prayed and sought the Lord about it and I just don’t know what else to do. All I know is I hope you can get right with the Lord.

In His Love,

Jenny

There was a lull in Shawna’s vengeful crusade. Lonnie praised the Lord for this and vowed never to be an accomplice again. Life rolled on after the business with the possum: long shifts at the Save-All, rides home with honky-tonk music blaring, onion rings, Lonnie sipping ice tea while Shawna laid out her charges and spouted new gossip. Then one evening after their shift, they climbed into the truck, and Shawna sat sullenly for a few moments before she started the engine. Even on the highway, she did not turn on the radio. Lonnie attempted chitchat, but she would not have any of it. When Shawna did not take the road home, he was fit to be tied. Somewhere, about two miles down a stretch of unfamiliar road, the clustered boughs gave way to a treeless gap on one side, with nothing visible beyond, not even a hint of brush or tall grass. Shawna slung the truck off the main road into that blackness, and they soared clear of the ground. She whooped a high cackle, and Lonnie’s jaw sprang agape with a cry. The wheels slugged the ground and the fender scooped dirt. Lonnie opened his eyes and saw that they were charging down the steepest road he had ever seen. The cackle and the cry died in the hot air, and there was only the sandy hush of the truck rushing down the dirt road, listing in and out of the ruts, liable at any moment to skid off into the bulwark of pine trunks.

Lonnie feebly asked, “Where we going?” He kept his face to the fleeting roadside, but he felt her squinting at him.

“Boy? You don’t know?” She shrieked a whistle through her teeth. “Haw, boy! How you lived here all your life and you ain’t never been down Hooks Cemetery Road?”

He did not turn from the window. But any soul born in this sawmill town was bred on the tale of the spurned wife who lived long ago at the bottom of that hill, who wended from her cabin one night holding her baby boy. Standing on the muddy creek bank, she had raised her arms in the moonlight and, even as she sang a lullaby, tossed her baby boy into the gulping waters.

Shawna’s headlights cast flickering claws of shadow in the bramble along the road. She pulled over into a wide flat ditch and killed the engine. Chirping croaks and clicks rose up in the deeper woods. Shawna strode off into the brush without a flashlight, swatting aside branches with her forearms. Lonnie leaped out and yelled over the hood, “Where you goin’?” The crackle of her reckless progress faded deeper into the thicket. “Shawna!” His voice was thin as pine straw. He stumbled after her through the interwoven thorny vines, stopping now and then to frantically disentangle himself, and each time he paused, he thought he heard, over his panicked breathing, the mourning mother’s lilting lullaby in the wind. Lonnie found Shawna standing in a patch of rugged tombstones that sprouted among coarse weeds. The stones cowered beneath her, huddling their mossy faces together.

“Shawna, why you bringing me out here?”

“We come out here to get one of these stones for a little present – for Jenny.”

Lonnie could not see her face in the shadows. “You done lost your mind.”

Shawna did not move. “I been telling you how she done me, how she turned her back on me. You gonn’ sit and watch me get treated thataway?”

“Shawna, I ain’t about to do what you ast me.”

She did not raise her voice, but she deepened it. “She’s dead to me, Lonnie. We gonn’ leave a little tombstone right in her front yard. And she’ll see it and she’ll know.”

A shiver stole Lonnie’s breath. “I’m not gonn’ do it.”

“You ain’t never been a friend to me,” Shawna suddenly sobbed. “I ain’t hardly ast you for nothing. And here you just up and forsake me.” She stomped off, sobbing so hard that her loud cursing came out in a yodel.

Lonnie, lost to the world, dropped down beside a mossy stone. The tall dewy weeds, washed with moonlight and combed by an ebbing breeze, left him feeling that he had settled at the cold grassy bottom of a lonesome sea. He embraced the stone – it gave way too easily in the wet earth – and drew it near. The tipping stone disclosed a name:

Caroline Amanda Ard

1882–1896

Peace I leave with you

My peace I give unto you

He nestled the gravestone to his starving heart and turned up his face to catch his breath. Beyond the highest lashes of limbs, stars peeped from their perches. He pulled Caroline’s name into his sternum and curled up like the possum. Shawna was cussing him and tearing through the woods. Her footfalls cracked and rang near and far on all sides. Limbs croaked against the trunks of other trees. Frogs chanted at the faraway creek. Lonnie contemplated this Caroline Amanda, conjuring Jenny Blackman in a faded gingham dress, coming down the sloping forest floor to the mirroring creek. He longed to stroll the shaded bank with her and swing on a vine to the other side. But Caroline Amanda was gone and buried and forgotten, and he would not find consolation, he feared, before the mourning mother threaded a path through pines to drown him in her grievous love.

friendship revenge sheltered troubled

consolation inspiration writing

CONSOLATION

by Hannah De Giorgis • July 18, 2021July 18, 2021

The postcard mocks me from the corkboard. Framed by wrinkled photos and meaningless maxims scribbled on sticky notes; by newspaper clippings and out-of-date concert tickets; by labels ripped from fancy bottles of Brunello and Viognier, and pictures of the Birth of Venus and impressionist ballerinas. Scattered odds and ends that I had hoped, once, denoted an original mind. What a lark.

It’s tilted, this postcard. Fastened by a green tack. On it, a lopsided teapot teeters:

Do I Dare Disturb the Universe? it asks.

Before, it seemed a daily wink to knock me out of complacency. In recent years, it morphed into a daily kick to remind me of my failures. Because, over the years, it has become increasingly apparent that the answer to that damn question, bathetically and depressingly, is NO.

No, I don’t dare. I never dared. I never will.

Bitterness was never part of the plan. But here we are. Here I am in my pokey little attic study with a sky light. A room of my own. I look at the screen in front of me and reach to light a cigarette. I exhale smoke rings over my pitiful attempt at an exorcism.

An adieu to words – they’ve been stolen. And it feels like they’re not coming back. Why do words sometimes flow like some [enter appropriate simile when writer’s block has abated] and why are they sometimes snuffed out before they’ve even begun to be transcribed from a whisper of an idea in your mind to the concrete solidity of characters on a word document, materialising via the keyboard magically tap, tap, tapping away?

I’ve learned to loath the click of the keyboard. Do you dare disturb the universe? Well, teapot, I used to think I dared. I didn’t want to leave a thumbprint on the world, you see; I wanted to kick the world into the stars with a post-metamodernist masterpiece.

In the end, I didn’t dare.

WHAT THE *$£ #£@ IS THE CURE FOR THIS?

I raise my eyebrows; I don’t remember typing that. I wonder to whom I was directing this odd rhetorical question. To the line-up of those “greats” I once studied? Those who harboured a grand genius, the essence of which remained elusive? It’s a truism to say one can’t define modernism and, as one who has smothered oneself in modernism, I can affirm it’s the truth.

I delete the last paragraph and I plug on.

Writer’s block, you are a cliché and yet you are what I find myself with. Now: how may you be dispelled, if you please?

I delete that too. I sit and stare. I sit and stare as the cigarette burns down until the unsmoked straight resembles a droopy phallus. I stub it out and light another. The tappety tap tap continues.

Aren’t I meant to have the bug? You know, the writer’s bug. Aren’t I meant to squirrel myself away in a room of my own and not stop the steady flow of ideas desperate to break out from the over-stimulated but under-liberated richness of my imagination, dribbling out in a delicious stream of consciousness with too many subordinate clauses and too few full stops, as some homage to the original SHE, she who was a bloody she-wolf, and who once told the world of women that they too needed a room of their own?

Only rich ones, I might add. She was a snob but one to whom I aspired. Sally Seaton and Septimus Smith changed my life.

Liberate me, please, the genius ideas are meant to scream. I want to leap from your genius mind to the blinking blank page. From your richly vivid imagination.

Imag-ination. I-magi-nation. I’m-a-Gin-at-Ion.

Words, broken up, are strange.

ALSO

W-o-r-d-s-C-a-n-L-o-o-k-S-o-D-i-f-f-e-r-e-n-t-D-e-p-e-n-d-i-n-g-O-n-H-o-w-T-h-e-y-’r-e-P-r-e-s-e-n-t-e-d.

O-r-R-e-p-r-e-s-e-n-t-e-d.

O-r-M-i-s-R-e-p-r-e-s-e-n-t-e-d.

Now I’m just being silly. And am fully aware that I sound like an arty-farty wanker whilst writing this experimental bit of prose. “Experimental” might be a euphemism for pretentious, don’t you think? Just like “delicacy” is a euphemism for disgusting. But maybe it can win me the Booker Prize and a trip to the Bahamas.

Isn’t that the dream…?

I plough on.

James Joyce did a whole chapter of Ulysses without any punctuation and if he can do it so can I although I can’t help but think he was just saying a big f*ck you to the reader you think you’re so clever don’t you that you’re reading the most enigmatic novel that has ever been written but haha you don’t realise that my sole purpose of writing it was so that pretentious gits like you could be exposed as idiots while being simultaneously smug at your lofty self-dubbed erudition and it might just be because it’s on the syllabus of your literature degree but you might equally be reading it just because you want to throw it in at a dinner party when someone asks what are you reading and you casually say without being completely able to hide the smugness in your voice with its received pronunciation oh you know I’m reading Ulysses and the silence afterwards says without needing to be said because I’m clever and you’re a philistine that’s right I’m clever and you’re a philistine because I’m reading Ulysses that’s right I’m a GENIUS and you’re a stupid bloody philistine

Even if when reading it I understood sod all

I take it back. It’s just as confusing to try and write without any punctuation as it is to read it. I look over at the shelf where, to highlight my sparkling hypocrisy, there gleam three copies of Ulysses: one Oxford edition; one Penguin Modern Classics; and one beautiful green hardback– a birthday gift from my deceased mother a decade ago. Un-deceased when it was given, obviously.

Well, hats off to you, Joyce, you enigmatic genius. You dared disturb the universe. You dared expose the intellectual snobs before they took their toast and their tea. But I still think you’re unnecessarily, self-consciously… esoteric. Maybe that’s what I’m trying to be now… Maybe that was your point.

Not in all your novels. I love your short stories. But when I was forced to read Ulysses, once for my undergrad and once for my post, I did hate you. Just a little bit. I did think you sounded like an arty-farty wanker. Just not enough to throw out three copies of your arty-farty novel, apparently. Those gems are for the eyes of my dinner party guests. Pride of place, middle of the fourth shelf, sandwiched between The Complete Poetry of Marianne Moore and Collected Essays of George Orwell.

Of course, I didn’t say I didn’t rate the “epic one-day novel” in seminars, for fear my fellow students would look down at and denounce me, declaring, “How dare you call yourself a literature student? Don’t you get it??” And, internally, still hypothetically, I’d respond, “Of course I don’t bloody get it. And if you do, you’ve missed the point.”

Eliot got it. But the rest of us?

We had the experience but missed the meaning.

… or did we have the meaning but miss the experience?

Which is worse, I wonder?

Drag in, drag out, new smoke ring.

Well, now. What has this little torturous exercise achieved? Has it cured me of my writer’s block? Hell no. Has it shown me that hammering out words on the painfully white screen helps?

Marginally…?

Now the white screen isn’t so white but has little marks on it. Little marks that make up letters that make up language. How the hell can these little marks on the page carry so much meaning? Meaning elusive to me.

I digress.

Liberate us. Scream the words. Liberate us from the depths of your messed-up imagination.

Eliot was in his early twenties when he wrote Prufrock. And me? Shit…

I slam the laptop shut.

Bartock, my French Bulldog, is barking by the door. The door to my one-bedroom-fifth-floor-attic flat in South London. I’ve lived alone for years (excluding canines, of course, and I’ve never been one for felines). I’ve lost count of how many (years, not dogs). I used to be able to say I was smart and, if a woman is smart, she never needs a man. But then all my friends got married and had babies. Being smart is no longer enough.

On the bright side, I’ve been a bridesmaid ten times and am a godmother twelve times over. If anyone needs gift ideas for babies, I’m your walking, talking catalogue: I know, for example, that while new mothers might say they favour wooden toys, they quickly discover the destruction they wreak and so plastic ones, while initially earning a sigh, will later earn you a thank you. And I am a pro with empty baby compliments. “Isn’t he an angel?” I can coo when, in reality, he’s an ugly little pumpkin head. Or I deflect: “I could just guzzle up her toes; they’re like cute little jelly babies” to avoid slipping out with, “heavens, please don’t make me look at her face much longer.”

My friends used to be capable of intellectual conversation. And then they got knocked up.

Bitterness was never part of the plan but, while we’re on a role with embittered rants, I still live in a state of indignance over the injustice, the imbalance between the labels of “bachelor” and “spinster” – the former so frivolously positive, the latter so overwhelmingly pathetic. They said it would all change after hashtag me too. It didn’t. It’s just better disguised.

Youth used to be on my side. And all the positive trappings along with it: innocence; optimism; hope for the future; readiness to spatter colourful paint across the calling blank canvas we are told is our future potential. A glimmer in the eye that told the world I was ready to take it on, just try and stop me.

In the end I stopped myself.

It was a fear of failure when all is distilled. Fear that, two decades on, I would turn back and be filled with ominous and all-consuming regret. Life’s short, so we hear over and over again. But, in the swell of the moment, in the hiss and thick of it, it doesn’t always feel short. When we’re young; when, proportionally, a day counts as a much bigger fraction of our lives. When youth is on our side…

So, I turned down numerous dates when I had the dewy-skinned freshness of youth (skin so dewy, one boyfriend said he wanted to eat it; he didn’t last long). And when my hair glowed with that youthful lustre, I flicked it over my shoulder and told the Kens of the world that I was no Barbie. Who cared about beauty? I had brains.

I threw myself into writing.

Two decades on, my hair is straw, my skin, sandpaper, and the brains are still there, only with nothing to show for them. Well, ten mediocre novels, only three of which published and none critically acclaimed. The room of my own, once a source of pride, contracted until all I felt was alone. I scrape by from one month to the next. I would’ve starved long ago if my brother weren’t a QC. The support doesn’t come free, though. The invoice: a debt of eternal gratitude. And stand-in childcare support at a moment’s notice.

The room of my own has shrunk. Who cares about freedom when all one feels is loneliness? And that all-consuming regret, once a past fear, has become a present reality.

Only a creator can comprehend the terror of a blank page. It stares. It calls. It mocks. It leaves you questioning your validity as a writer… as anything of worth. And the older you get, the worse it becomes. Until, one day, it’s no longer a blank page. It’s your life.

I didn’t dare, you see; I didn’t disturb the universe.

It’s extraordinary the speed with which past habits, so ingrained, so seemingly unforgettable, can fall away. My habit was that I used to believe in myself.

Bartock’s still barking.

All right, you beautiful mutt, give me a moment.

I retreat to the shower and wash the stale tobacco away. It’s easy to indulge in the arbitrariness of thoughts occasioned by a hot-water stream in a box. If I’d paid attention to that mindfulness course Mia signed me up to, I’d be losing myself in the steamy dream of heat on my skin; I’d be lost in the blush on my thigh as the water gets hotter and hotter; I’d be zooming into the individual droplets on the peach fuzz of my arm…

The water’s gone cold.

I can’t afford to get my boiler fixed.

I sigh and grab a once-white-now-grey towel.

That is not it, at all. That is not what I meant at all.

About what, you ask, as I plagiarise Prufock?

Life. This was not what I meant at all.

There are so many expressions, aren’t there? That iterate our need to detach any personal agency over our lives. What will be will be. Que sera sera. Che sarà sarà. What’s done is done.

Bugger that. I want control back.

When I was a cub, I wanted to rule the pride. Instead, I shrunk to a pussy cat. It’s too late to be the goddamn lioness I was always meant to be. Che sarà sarà…

I pick up the lead. Bartock, still by the door, is so excited his whole body is oscillating from his wagging tail. Oh, to have that pure, concentrated joy over something in life – anything. The curse of human consciousness. Of the conscious consciousness. The one that D.H. Lawrence complained about in a poem about a fish.

My scarf is drawn, my hat pulled down, but the cold is heavy. I didn’t take him out yesterday so Bartock is owed a longer walk. The ice crunches as we approach Battersea Park.

Yummy mummies seem to multiply here. They advance in packs, hysterical in their neurosis, fixing their tiddly toddlers with their Tippee Tommees of formula milk. Or is it Tommee Tippees? Who gives a shit? They do, of course. With their baby sensory classes and organic baby food. With their playdates and their fear of processed sugar. With their vacuous existence…

Bitterness was never part of the plan.

And this has nothing to do with the fact that, approaching my fortieth year, the likelihood of my procreating is slim. What would the world want with another me? Any precious thing to bring into this world would only be chewed up and spat back out by it. That’s what I tell myself, anyway.

Along the Thames, the runners fly. Ahead is the Pagoda. Behind it, Albert Bridge. One of my favourite places in London. Even in the cold, when my breath plumes in tobacco-less puffs, when the trees are skeletons and the path littered with winter’s debris.

The lead pulls.

Bartock is frolicking with a golden spaniel.

“Looks like they’ve made friends.”

A lady with a cheery face nods over at them. If only it were so easy for humans, I want to add but something stops me.

The lady’s arm is entwined with an elderly gentleman. He has cloudy eyes and a stick. But it’s the expression that draws me. The lines in particular. They are no furrows from pain; they are crows’ feet from laughter. His is a face that has known and that radiates joy.

“Tell me what they’re up to, Jilly,” he commands, amicably.

“Crumble’s made friends with a French Bulldog.”

“Has he now?”

“Indeed. Play bows all around.”

“What’s his name?” the man asks, smiling.

He’s looking around expectantly.

I tell him. And, on hearing my reply, his empty eyes fix on me. We exchange the mundane pleasantries of strangers while I, London born and bred, want nothing more than to extricate myself immediately. Yes, it has got chillier recently. No, I didn’t know that they were playing Jazz at the bandstand later. Thank you, Crumble’s very cute as well. Bartock? He’s nearly three.

Extrication is at my fingertips…

“Cheer up, love,” says the man, finally. “It might never happen.”

“Bob!”

I assure Jilly it’s fine; Bob hasn’t offended me. Even though he has, a bit. And I leave.

But I want to tell Bob that it already had happened; my life had passed without having really been lived. I’d mocked the yummy mummy and their middle-class worries and called them vapid. But it was my own existence that was empty…

“Bartock, no!”

He’s trying to bonk a Jack Russell.

On the other side of the riverfront path, a man is running. Eyes that smoulder, and that know they smoulder, try to lock with mine. He’s handsome but expels the air of a jerk who works in a bank. At one moment looking so smooth, so suave, he trips over his shoelaces the next. It’s cruel to derive joy from someone’s discomfort. I can’t help it; I bite my lip.

Cheer up, love, it might never happen.

I exhale and my semi-opaque breath unfurls like a mushroom cloud. Reminiscent of an A-bomb or an exploding volcano.

Across the murky river, I can see the distant buildings kissing the gritty skyline. And I can hear one of the feral parrots that perversely populate London parks. And I can smell the depths of winter clinging to the air, intermingled with woody coffee grinds from the booth nearby.

What is life, I ask myself, but a bouquet of senses? This is Mrs Dalloway’s London. An endless sequence of moments of being, stitched together at their edges. A quilt to make life full. And, surely, with all of those at one’s disposal, anything is possible. Mia should get her money back. Who needs mindfulness when one has Mrs Dalloway?

The banker wanker, albeit with a little less swagger, is up and running robotically again. Maybe it’s a sign.

Back at the flat, my laptop jingles on and down I sit, as Bartock curls up by the fireplace that no longer functions as such.

And out they come. Out they pour; out pour those words, like a chirruping skylark riding the wind; no, like a tiller of earth ploughing the fields; like gems gleaned from a golden harvest; like ballerinas pirouetting over the stage; like mounds of clay sculpted to perfection; like a hammer forged for the hand of a giant… no, no, no. All contrived shite.

So, then, come on, I ask myself: words as what? What are words to you?

Words as the only consolation for one with a lonely heart and a room of her own.

Words like a mushroom cloud to fill the dreary abyss.

There it is. There’s that damned simile.

ESCAPE FROM BROOKLYN

by Eve Rose • July 17, 2021July 17, 2021

Back when I was a would-be punk rocker (more Blondie than Bad Brains), there were two ways to escape Brooklyn’s brutal summers: Take the D train south to Brighton Beach or north to Central Park.

Brighton beach had the boardwalks and sea air – not to mention Coney Island, its raucous sister down the road, with its Cyclone roller coaster and Nathan’s hot dogs (best consumed in that order). But it was the early ‘80s and if you wanted to be cool, you went to Manhattan.

At night, we’d sneak out to dance at CBGBs in the Bowery or the Mudd Club in TriBeCa. If we had extra cash, we’d scour thrift stores in the Village for leather jackets with silver zippers, pink jump suits with silver zippers, really anything with silver zippers. But if we wanted something bigger, something that would deliver us from the city, we’d take the subway uptown to Central Park. After an hour underground, we’d burst on to the street, sweating but energized. We’d fly through the park on our skates, crouch under stone bridges to smoke weed, scramble up the rocks to spy on couples making it in the grass.

It wasn’t as if we were returning to our natural habitat. That was the bagel shop on Avenue M or the cramped apartments of Ocean Parkway. To go to Central Park was to see our fellow New Yorkers out of place. We were not our regular selves and yet we sensed the possibility. If there was a war between the city’s skyscrapers and the park’s sycamores, we knew the city would win, crushing the park beneath its concrete feet. But if that fight was not physical, but spiritual, the kind that tells you that maybe there is a better way, not screaming and smoking and pushing, but air in your lungs, sun in your eyes, space in your head, Central Park would be the victor.

No matter how much energy we had, the park always settled us. By a lake, by a rock, by a tree, we’d finally relax. We’d talk for hours, until it was time to go home, never quite ready to face the roar of the subway or the confines of our apartments and houses.

But the park was more than Zen retreat. It was a place where BIG things happened. It’s where I saw my first outdoor concert – Elton John singing “Imagine,” a tribute to his friend, John Lennon, who would die three months later outside the Dakota apartments overlooking Central Park. It’s where I attended my first rally, marching from the United Nations to the Great Lawn, chanting for nuclear disarmament with 600,000 other people, carrying my “Bread, Not Bombs” sign and the tuna fish sandwich my mother packed for me. Coretta Scott King told us: “We have come here in numbers so large that the message must get through to the White House and Capitol Hill.” We were young enough to believe her, intoxicated by the power of “acres of people.”

At times, we suffocated the park with our marches and free concerts, hundreds of thousands of people crushing every blade of grass, bending every tree limb until they could no longer bounce back. The park would grow angry and lash out, taking our friends, one by one. I don’t think I ever went to a concert without losing someone to a porta potty or snack cart. Ivy or Joel or Carolyn would leave our blanket for something to eat or to go to the bathroom and never return (“I got lost, man,” we’d hear later, back in Brooklyn, and we knew it was true because it had happened to us too). At Simon and Garfunkel’s 1981 free concert, I nearly suffocated as I weaved my way to the porta potties, the crowd lifting me off my feet, squeezing me until I could barely breathe. I tried to move my arms and legs, but they were no longer mine, caught in the crush of bodies. Then, just as quickly, I found my footing and ran, terrified, to the subway, all the way back home to Brooklyn, never even hearing “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”

The park, with its prissy paddle boats and vintage carousels, wasn’t perfect. I once left a Ramones concert on venue objections alone. No punk band should ever perform on an ice-skating rink turned concert venue at 6:30 p.m. on a bright summer evening. The Ramones were for night clubs with sticky floors and big amps.

Even if the Ramones had played at 11 at night in the park, I doubt I would have gone. Like most New Yorkers, I was much more at home in the Quaalude-infested bathroom of CBGBs than I was in Central Park after dark. I wasn’t afraid of muggers or rapists, but of the nature itself, everything alive, hiding in the darkness. It was a discomfort I’d carry with me my whole life, even after moving to Alaska (especially after moving to Alaska). On my first day in Anchorage, when I saw a grizzly lumbering toward our car, I told my boyfriend, “Don’t make eye contact,” not even allowing myself a second look at the wonderous creature. Schooled on the subways of New York, where avoiding eye contact was the best way to keep letches and losers at bay, it was the only way I knew how to protect myself. I later learned animals do the same when trying not to provoke a predator.

The one time I entered the park at night was for a boy. His name was Andy. He played drums in a garage band. He carved replicas of the black obelisk on the cover of Led Zeppelin’s Presence album. His hair was blonde, and his jeans were torn. I was desperate to impress him. Earlier in the evening, he’d taken me to my first Japanese restaurant in Greenwich Village. I was 15, intimidated (the only non-American food I’d eaten was pizza) and starving. I tried to copy his moves but couldn’t figure out the chopsticks. The minute he left for the bathroom, I tipped the bowl of noodles into my mouth, slurping up as much as I could. He caught me on the way back to the table, our eyes meeting in shame. When he asked if I wanted to hang out in Central Park, I agreed. How else could I redeem myself – the girl with noodles on her chin who didn’t know how to use chopsticks? We grabbed the train uptown but got off at the wrong spot. The only way into the park was over a concrete wall with a five-foot drop into the darkness. Rather than slowly climb down, I jumped, spraining my ankle so badly I couldn’t dance for months. We never made it to the bench; I barely made it home.

For me, the park was at its best in the day, concert-less, protest-less, mine. There, I could forget about the boys I liked who didn’t like me, my strict father, my growing awareness of the world’s injustices and my adolescent impotence. As long as I was inside the park, I felt safe.

But like the shock of bright sun after a matinee, the world outside the park could be harsh. Surrounded by some of New York’s most expensive real estate, its sidewalks were full of women in couture suits with houses in the Hamptons, a place we didn’t even know existed. They were the “one percent” back when we just called them millionaires. In my purple pleather pants and Clash t-shirts, I knew I didn’t belong. They could look down at me from their high rises all they wanted when I was inside the park, but on the street, so close to them, I felt truly small. Even the doormen, with their white gloves and golden epaulettes, sneered, though they probably lived down the street from us in Brooklyn. It wasn’t until I was on the subway, the familiar smell of urine and hot metal mixing in the air, that I felt comfortable again. By the time I got off the train at Avenue J and walked home, past the pizza place and the bagel store, past the orthodox Jewish girls in their long sleeves and high-neck dresses, past the apartments with their smell of fried onions, the park was gone.

Brooklyn

alcohol God miracles skepticism

FISHER OF MEN

by James Sullivan • July 16, 2021July 16, 2021

Photo by cesar bojorquez (copied from Flickr)

Father Ryan said he feels God’s presence among the people — in bars.

For our group, half among us sneering skeptics, this information became mere fodder for his mockery. That he, like every tottering drunk in history, felt connected to the spirit world when inebriated, was not evidence for his God. And the fact that he seemed to require liquor to feel the presence indicated, at least at first, the inauthenticity of his communion.

But we didn’t think he was lying. We thought his brain was soaked.

Then one day in class, he pointed to Gabe — the shortest among us, son of Kashmiri immigrants who’d quickly climbed the US corporate power pole — and declared that he, among all of us, was closest to Christ.

“That’s what he’d look like!” Father Ryan boomed. “Not one of your lily-white Jesuses with flowing hair.” Gabe shrugged at his gawking classmates. I was chuckling halfway to the floor. Father Ryan’s tone indicated he intended to shock us. And he had. Not in the way he seemed to mean it — as in, you rubes must not know Jesus was a Mediterranean. But rather in that he’d singled out our classmate, a scientific atheist with Richard Dawkins in his backpack, biting his tongue through THL 430: Jesus Today, Jesus Tomorrow.

What shocked us more was what he told us at the bar.

“Yes, yes, he looks more like him,” Ryan said. “But that’s not really what I’m getting at. Not all of it.”

“You mean not just short and brown?” I asked. Gabe raised an eyebrow an inch — half the advantage I had on his height.

“You might see soon,” Ryan took a long swallow of a Guinness, “that he stands above us all.”

We’d heard from our friend Jessie that Father Ryan had a way of divining your future. “He told me I should start saving for a new car,” he said, “and then, what do you know? One month later, I smash my front end on a guard rail.” There was reason to question the veracity of Jessie’s claims. Most of the time when we saw him, he was plastered. And at least one time we saw him, he was asleep naked outside his apartment door atop a nest of his pee-soaked clothes. But several other lesser party animals reported similar feats of prediction.

“You will,” Father Ryan said, catching a belch, “inherit the Spirit, and for you it shall, for a time, grant divine works.”

“What’s that mean?” asked Murphy, who shared an apartment with me. He tugged on the priest’s black shirtsleeve, jostling his clergy collar, sloshing his Guinness foam. Over the summer, one DMT plateau too high had filled Murphy’s eyes with visions of Christ inside our liquor cabinet, spirit dancing blue against gin glass. Since then, Murphy had strained for the wisdom not delivered in his cocktail. “Hey, what’s that mean?”

“Pipe down, son. What I’m saying is he’ll be a miracle man for a while. Now, who’s got the next round?” Murphy whipped out a credit card to keep the beer flowing and find out all the drunken mystic could tell him. Gabe and I snickered over our free drinks. Before we left, Father Ryan whispered another prediction in Gabe’s ear. Gabe shuddered: “What a weird old man.”

But in defiance of our skepticism, the miracles rolled in. After Gabe helped Murphy cram for his sociology exam, Murphy managed a B-minus. Our friend Ron found a girlfriend. After Gabe gave me an introduction, I got a twenty dollar-an-hour editing gig for a group of overstressed pre-med students looking to cut corners on term papers, allowing my broke ass to finally buy a new pair of (off-brand) sneakers. One weekend, for a full thirty-two hours, Murphy’s nose glowed purple. And when Jessie, filled to his eyebrows with whiskey sour, lost control of his car on an icy road and fishtailed, fish after fish after fish down a steep hill, hitting not a single oncoming or parked car, and regained control just in front of his parking space, he swore later that some other power had taken over him, some other hands — soft and brown and coated with thick, dark hair — had rested upon his and guided every turn of the wheel. When Jessie told us this, Gabe simply shrugged.

Soon, though, the miracles shrank to mere parlor tricks. Fingers producing brief bursts of flame like haunted candles at a horror movie séance. His tongue folding Starburst wrappers into waxy cranes. Gabe was more comfortable with this level of divinity, anyway, the kind he could use to entertain the pretty, high-class women he’d invite to parties in our apartment building. This was the way he met Jennifer, who was engaged to someone else at the time but whom Gabe would later marry. Father Ryan had whispered her name in Gabe’s ear that night at the bar. Told him she was the 100 percent perfect match for him. That’s why Gabe had saved up one last big miracle, something way better than a parlor trick or a glowing nose, to show Jennifer on their first night alone together. She left her fiancé the next day. But what precisely that miracle had been, they never told a soul.

construction friendship Love writing

ROUTINE

by grace (ge) gilbert • July 14, 2021July 30, 2021

Pittsburgh again.

I am killing time, waiting for my friend B at the Phipps Botanical Gardens. He is observing a class for another class neither of us cares much about but would be truly devastated to fail and have to extend active indifference toward for another semester.

I came here because parking is free and, observing

the passive aggressive signs warning against freeloaders who are trying to park for free without actually viewing the gardens &
the parking cops roaming like the giants or monsters in a video game who walk slowly and relatively unprovoked until they notice you,

I decided to put on my keenest face and walk very intently toward the gardens, exaggerating my gait more than usual, not that anyone would notice or care, but, as humans do, I acted for the off chance.

Last night at around eleven I attempted to put together a storage bench from a box that looked unbelievably flat, and thus, impossible to assemble into something usable. I staggered while carrying the awkward rectangle through the narrow basement hallways of my shoddy apartment complex and opened the box with my apartment key, shreds of Styrofoam interrupting my neutral-patterned area rug, which I purchased not aesthetically but due to the clause in my lease that required carpeting to be on 80 percent of my already meager space, which seemed to take away from the original appeal of renting a place with hardwood floors.

I spread the variable wood pieces across the floor of my studio, critically concerned about the shape I couldn’t imagine – the direction booklet showed a diagram of the bench as if it were blasted apart and captured mid-explosion, each piece floating above its intended location within the structure.

Before beginning the assembly, I remembered S, who told me prior to moving me into my first dormitory in college that the only things I need straightaway when moving into a new place are

a) cookies (for friendship) &

b) a toolkit (for construction…and bribing others into friendship).

This is one of those pieces of advice that I always had in the black box of my brain, that thing of mystery that contains some items forever and rejects others even after repeated exposure, and yet I found myself on the floor of my apartment lacking both things.

And yet, night always seems like a good time to begin a project, as if constructing this cheap wood-veneer bench without a screwdriver might be more possible somehow than if I attempted it during the day.

I admit I was slightly inebriated. I would like to think this was not due to my own poor judgment but instead my tepid politeness, though both and either could be (and are) true. K and M and I somehow made a habit of frequenting a dive bar between our three-hour classes each week, buying two-dollar Lagunitas IPAs and baskets of French fries with honey mustard even when the only thing compelling us to do so was ritual, not any kind of physical need for food or drink or even the warmth of a social outing, though this was all a comforting bonus.

A human can make anything a habit by performing it for six weeks, my father told me when I was a child. He did

25 chair-sits
25 push-ups
50 jumping jacks &
(?) other miscellaneous exercises

in front of the television every night, eyes focused on the golf match being quietly narrated by a man who could get an equally important job at NPR or perhaps as a narrator for children’s audiobooks, but chose golf, of all things.

The habit of frequenting this exceptionally mediocre bar, named after some literary hero or another, brought with it a sense of comfort and responsibility – to say no would disrupt the energy of everyone’s week, the rituals we all made over cheap beer and carbs.

So I obliged, even though I didn’t quite feel like drinking, but the comfort of it compelled me to order my usual (whatever is cheapest), and I suppose the tint of excitement it added to my mostly indifferent perspective toward the day was favorable, the city-smog feeling a bit more lively, my sweet friends a bit more jovial, as if my mind had gone from the diagram of atoms within a gas (slow, vast movements, a swath of space) to that within a solid (packed, tense, slightly vibrating).

I was already considerably tipsy during our evening class, my third class of the day, the one taught by the particularly eccentric and cerebral writer who makes even her absence a performance (What were your minds doing in my absence? she asked. That is poetry.)

She propositioned that we all go and get a drink together after class, and though I desperately wanted to go home and sleep off my slightly nauseating and dehydrated high, I obliged because I felt like it might be important as a contributor to the writing community, and so we decided on a place close to hers but far from all of ours, the Ace Hotel bar, which I had been to only twice before and both times had ordered cocktails I couldn’t quite stomach for one reason or another but drank anyway because:

I was in situations that required a social lubricant (involving the question, Can you tell me a bit about your experience in the writing program?) and
I couldn’t afford to lose ten dollars because of a capful of black pepper or a bit too much thyme or not really knowing what mezcal actually is but liking the sound of it.

Our professor ordered a steak and downed quite a few old-fashioned cocktails, chewing or sipping a bit between long-winded narratives, ones that I thought were either entirely genius or demoralizing, but perhaps I was a bit too tired and aloof at that point to decide.

A lot of first poetry books are bad, she said, but no one is ready to talk about that, and while she spoke about the publishing industry, I felt like a fool even being there, a poet of extreme non-importance, writing a first book of probable extreme non-importance, drunk and hunched in sluggish admiration of someone who has both critically acclaimed books and a hankering for steak that can be met at any time – though this is perhaps an exaggeration, and they most definitely have a life filled with problems I could never understand, there was what felt like an impenetrable space between us, and my words stopped completely short of a few polite yet self-conscious laughs and nods.

I got about three steps into the direction booklet before I realized that I would definitely need a screwdriver, which seemed mostly a suggestion against the pace of my drunken eagerness to build, and so I used my pointer finger and thumb to twist the screws into place, which was good and fine until I looked down at my action and noticed a bloodied, torn off swath of skin staining the new, aggressively clean-smelling deconstructed bench.

I remember, as a fervently evangelical high-schooler, listening to a podcast series by a charismatic Christian pastor about the Song of Songs, that one book in the Old Testament that is gleefully full of innuendo.

You need to channel the sex-energy into other activities before marriage, said the pastor, going on to explain that he was so sexually frustrated and excited during his engagement that he built an entire houseful of furniture from scratch for the anticipated union.

I don’t remember much else about this series, though my frustrated, virginal self took feverish notes that I’m sure are floating around somewhere in the clutter of my childhood bedroom, and this is something I hate to think about.

I am skeptical that the act of building is inherently sexual or primal, but the next day, in a hungover stoop, I asked B to come help and we tried to assemble the beast together after having purchased a four-dollar Phillips head screwdriver from Home Depot. I realized in our laboring how just the language of manufacturing is embarrassingly sexual:

is it in the hole?
O! no
Fuck
re-align
insert here? no, there…
screw
hammer
oops, sorry, fuck
we DEFINITELY put the raw side up.

To even admit that this pattern came to me while intently concentrating with a dear friend over a thirty-dollar bench made me feel incredulously mortified, but I suppose this primal need to construct things is somewhere along the lining of that biblical amygdala, each IKEA desk and bookshelf a conquest that brings our historical selves back to Babel, back to the ark, back to any towering mass that we can stand aside with broke-open palms and love if not for the mere fact of knowing that we are powerful enough to create something even more powerful.

When B arrives, we will do one or more of the following:

wipe down the table with pocket wipes to leave no residual evidence of my brief respite in the Phipps café
pray to the city-cop gods that I don’t get another parking ticket
drive together to one of the record stores in the greater Pittsburgh area, perhaps browsing different albums in different aisles for a while, touching things that we want and then not purchasing them
procure some takeout dinners in some Styrofoam boxes
take a brisk walk through the cobbled smog of Squirrel Hill

& eventually, after some/all of the above, I will go to what I’ve been calling home, where I will place my keys and muddied sneakers on the brand-new hallway bench (missing a screw or two, regrettably), and I will have one of those orienting protagonist moments where I stare at the new thing with some semblance of home-inducing gratification, and I will crawl into bed and turn on an algorithmically decided documentary about some artist’s illustrious but sad life, and maybe crack open whatever book I left propped up on my pillow, and I will fall asleep somehow in the dim light of knowing that tomorrow is another day and that

Things are constantly just happening

everywhere &
all at once.

friendship men and women Montauk relationships

THAT SUMMER

by Hannah Silverman • July 13, 2021July 13, 2021

Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash

The first time I visited the Montauk house, early that June, it was cloudy and unseasonably cool. I wanted to stay in and watch movies, but he’d already planned the whole picnic: bread, cheese, wine, and all. We took an old blanket to the cliffs and laid it down in the wind. It was a lot of trouble. I shivered the whole time and worried what the moisture would do to my hair. He liked my hair curly, or so he said. He asked about my work at the design firm. I told him I’d been promoted, and he nodded solemnly. “I hope you have time for your own projects,” he said. We drank the whole bottle of wine in clear plastic cups. We touched hands and bumped shoulders easily. We talked about middle school and people we used to know. We’d known each other for ten years by then. I worried sometimes that our friendship was built mainly on nostalgia. We’d rarely spent time together outside of the suburb where we grew up. The beach, the cliffs, were new territory for us.

Back at the house, we changed into bathing suits. The clouds had dissipated and suddenly it was hot. My suit was a modest two-piece. High waist with reasonable coverage. “You look like a grandma in the 50s,” he said, with feigned disappointment.

I rolled my eyes, smirked. “I never dress for a man’s benefit,” I said. It sounded like I was bragging.

We took his dog, a beautiful three-legged husky mix, down to the empty beach. We forgot to bring towels so we sat right in the sand. I hated the feeling of sand in my bathing suit, sticking to my skin, invading every crevice. That kind of thing had never bothered him. He let the dog off the leash even though it was against the rules. We watched her jump around in the surf, her three legs flailing in every direction. We giggled a lot and called her name, just because there was nothing left to say. Eventually she tired herself out and fell asleep in the sand.

We went into the ocean despite my objections. The water was cold and clear. He ran out ahead of me. The sharp shells on the ocean floor didn’t bother his callused feet. I stood at the water’s edge first, building up the nerve to swim. I liked the feeling of wet sand between my toes, the illusion of gliding backward every time the surf receded under me. I pretended that I was a permanent thing around which the Earth waned.

I waded farther in. The water came up just below my chest, but if I lifted my legs I could float. I closed my eyes, dunked my head. My hair was a lost cause. He swam in circles around me while I floated on my back. My cheeks were very warm and I knew the sun would bring out my freckles. This was a little trick I played to make myself look sweet and alluring. To evoke some latent longing in him, perhaps.

“You look peaceful,” he said. I hummed and smiled. I could tell he was proud of himself for bringing me here, giving me this.

I did a little flip in the water and ended up facing him. We were the same height. It made him self-conscious but I liked it. Our eyes, our mouths, our shoulders met perfectly. I wrapped my arms around his shoulders. I could smell his deodorant, even in the ocean. Our lips were inches apart, but I knew he wouldn’t kiss me. I pressed my cheek against his and he hugged me back, tight and glistening and warm.

After we showered and put on dry clothes, he cooked us dinner. Vegetable stir fry. He took it upon himself to feed me “real food.” I knew how to cook well enough, but I liked being taken care of. I took care of him too in other ways: reminding him to wear sunscreen, cutting him off after two cigarettes. He served dinner in one big bowl with two forks. We drank the craft beers that I’d brought with me. I did the dishes while he polished off his beer and searched for pay-per-view movies. It all felt natural, like we’d built a life together.

We shared a blanket on the couch. Our bare knees touched, and I remembered the first time we’d kissed. Fourteen years old in the driveway behind his house. He’d put his hand on my cheek, told me to lick my lips. It was a sweet, childish kiss. Quick and light and allegedly meaningless. Just for practice, he’d said. It had been my first. Now, he laid his head in my lap and purred like a cat. I pet his short hair, watched the tiny grains of sand jump up from his scalp. The dog got jealous and nuzzled under my other arm.

“When does Nina get here?” I asked.

“Tomorrow morning,” he said.

Nina was his girlfriend. I’d never met her, though they’d been together for at least a year. The dog was hers, actually. She was an artist. “You have that in common,” he said, though her work hung in galleries and mine decorated obscure tech websites. I nodded and smiled. I was anxious to meet her. From pictures, I thought we looked alike.

He squeezed my knee under the blanket and smiled goofily up at me. “I’m glad you came,” he said. The house was floor-to-ceiling windows, and the sun had long set. It would be time to sleep soon. I leaned close and blew the salt from his neck. He shivered. I kissed his forehead and then the dog’s.

He came to my Pocono house later that summer, in early August. It was a last minute trip. I hadn’t left the city since June and was desperate to be somewhere without cell service. I’d taken great pleasure in composing my “out of office” message. I hadn’t seen him since Montauk, but he accepted my invite easily. He was a freelance musician and his father paid his rent, so he could afford to be spontaneous. He said, regrettably, Nina was unavailable, though I hadn’t invited her.

My parents had only owned the Pocono house for a year and were wary of visitors. They agreed to let us stay for the week because we promised to help with maintenance: trimming the brush around the house, cleaning out the kayaks. He did most of the yard work the first day we got there. He was always happy to work outside, use his hands. He’d brought the dog with him. He’d tied her to a stake in the ground, and she followed on his heels as far as her leash would go. I stayed inside that first morning, watched him from the kitchen window as I boiled water for tea. It felt like playing house. I switched on the electric fireplace for ambience, despite the heat. After an hour outside chopping wood, he came in sweating and asked me to make the tea iced.

In the afternoon, we went to the lake down the road. I drove us there in the golf cart my parents had inherited from the house’s previous owners. The dog sat on the floor between his legs, panting. I would have preferred she stayed at the house, but he said she wasn’t accustomed to being alone. We passed other golf carts along the way, mostly older couples in visors who waved as we went by. I pictured us in fifty years or so, retired and visor-clad, on our way to swim. “Let’s get married when we’re old,” I said.

“Okay,” he said. He scratched the dog’s ears and squinted in the sun. The golf cart moved so slowly there was hardly a breeze.

“In twenty years, if neither of us is married,” I said. I was serious, at least a little bit.

He scrunched his nose, shook his head. “In forty years,” he said, “There’s still a lot I want to do.” I pouted. In forty years we’d both be sixty-five. Too late to start a life together. I made a show of rolling my eyes, but he wasn’t looking at me. I took a sharp turn into the gravel parking lot facing the lake.

The golf cart turned off with a little switch, like a toy. The dog jumped out and paced impatiently on her short leash. We left our valuables on the front seat. I’d remembered to bring towels and cherries, which I carried with both hands to the short rocky beach. The lake wasn’t much to look at. It was small and murky, claustrophobic compared to the ocean in Montauk. We had to wade through mud and algae to get to the water. The dog whimpered, her paws stuck in the mire. “Sorry, I wish this were nicer,” I said.

He nodded. He seemed to agree with my assessment, which annoyed me. I sulked and sloshed into the water ahead of him. He stood ankle deep in mud at the shoreline, the dog beside him. He crossed his arms, gazed past me at the giant houses across the lake.

“You coming?” I said.

“I’m not a big fan of still water,” he said, “You go ahead.” He turned back to where I’d laid our towels on the beach.

The water really was unpleasant, but I stayed in because it seemed worse to follow him out. I swam out past the buoys that marked the lifeguard-protected area. I swam and swam until I couldn’t touch the bottom anymore. It was nicer once I couldn’t feel the mud between my toes. I closed my eyes and dunked my head. I stayed under water, counting the seconds until I couldn’t hold my breath anymore. At one hundred I came up for air, lungs burning. I felt suddenly awake. I went back under before I had a chance to catch my breath. I didn’t count this time. I pictured my lungs inside my chest, full and ready to burst. I exhaled a slow stream of bubbles until there was no more air inside me and my entire body deflated. I resurfaced slimy and shivering like an infant gasping her first breath.

The drive back to the house was slow and quiet. I was damp and smelly from the lake. He drove with the dog beside him in the front seat. I sat in the backseat, watching the road disappear behind us. I had an uneasy feeling in my chest that I couldn’t place.

The dog leapt toward the house when we pulled into the driveway. She scratched at the door with her muddy paws. I insisted she stay on the screened-in porch until we could hose her off. Inside, I took off my damp T-shirt and shorts and left them where I stood on the kitchen floor. He looked at me in my 50s grandma bikini and said, “You might as well leave your bathing suit there, too.”

I scoffed. “You wish.”

“I won’t look,” he said. He walked to the edge of the kitchen and turned away from me to face the connected living room.

I slipped one strap off my shoulder and then the other. I waited to see if he’d turn around. He didn’t move. I pulled the bikini top over my head, felt the relief of air on my damp chest. He was shirtless in his swim trunks. I stared at the back of his head, his furry neck, his bare freckled shoulders.

“Don’t turn around,” I said.

“Okay,” he said.

I dropped the bikini top in the pile on the floor. I stepped out of the bottoms quickly, unceremoniously, and left them on the floor, too. I had never undressed in front of him, as much as we’d flirted in high school. I looked down at my body, my doughy stomach and pale thighs. I shivered and felt a little thrill at being naked in a room with him.

“I’m going to shower,” I said.

The bathroom was down the hall on the right. I had to pass him to reach it. I approached him slowly, each step heavy and measured, until I stood right behind him. My breasts were level with his shoulder blades. I was close enough to see the goosebumps on the backs of his arms. The air between us was weighty and warm, almost solid. He stood unnaturally still. We both took shallow breaths. If I leaned forward, we’d be touching.

I reached for his fingers, hooked my index around his thumb. He squeezed and held me there, frozen, for two, four, six, excruciating seconds. I counted and held my breath. I could hear the dog whining on the porch outside. On ten he released, dropped his hand to his side without a word. I slipped past him on my tiptoes, felt the air dissipate between us like breath sucked from my lungs.

The water was scalding and harsh. I stood facing the showerhead, breathing in steam. My cheeks and scalp burned, but I didn’t turn away. I thought of Nina. She was more beautiful than I was. Petite, with dainty features and a soft voice. We’d gotten along in the performative way that women do in front of men. Lighthearted compliments and polite questions. She had an easy way about her that I admired. She’d laughed along, unthreatened, as he and I had reminisced together. The dog loved her more than me, of course.

I sat down in the tub. I pulled my knees, puffy and razor-burned, to my chest. The water poured over me, unrelenting. A lukewarm puddle formed around my body where the water couldn’t reach the drain. It made me feel dirty. I pressed my fingernails into my pruney palms. They left perfect crescents in my skin. I did it again and again until the skin split. The water made the blood run, little rivers across my palms.

I turned off the faucet once the water ran cold. I stayed there, naked on the floor of the tub. The last of the water trickled down the drain. Hair and spit and skin cells disappearing into the pipes. How many little parts of me did I lose every day? I stood shakily and stepped out of the tub. I’d waited so long that the steam on the mirror had cleared. My cheeks and eyes were red, my lips purple. I wrapped the biggest towel around my body. It nearly reached my ankles. It smelled like the detergent my mother used. I breathed in the floral scent, in out in out in out, until I felt dizzy and light.

He was waiting for me in my bed. Just lying there with his eyes closed, listening to the local radio station. He’d changed into a T-shirt and sweatpants. He looked soft and harmless like a little boy. He opened his eyes when I walked in and sat up on his elbows.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” I said. I fiddled with the towel secured loosely around my chest.

Neither of us moved. Finally, he said, “Come here.”

I climbed onto the foot of the bed and crawled to him, one hand on my towel. He opened his arms invitingly. I lay down in the crook of his shoulder. We fit together imperfectly, but it was familiar, comforting. My wet, tangled hair dampened his shirt, and cool droplets slid down my collarbone. I shivered. He wrapped his free arm around me, pressed his hand flat and firm on my spine. My back arched toward him instinctively. He slipped his hand beneath the towel, traced my skin with warm callused fingers: my lower back, my hips, my belly button. I pressed my body against his and let his fingers inside of me. I sucked in my stomach and held my breath. He kissed me. Harder and saltier than when we were kids. I bit his lip and tasted metal. His fingers scraped my insides. My whole body burned. I didn’t want to breathe. I wanted to be something pure and non-human that didn’t need oxygen, didn’t need anything. Outside, the dog howled. He pulled his fingers out of me too soon. I gasped, soft and desperate. His hand dripped with sticky brown menstrual blood. Another piece of me lost.

I didn’t see him again until that winter. He’d convinced me to spend Christmas in Montauk. The design firm only gave us two days off, but I had sick days saved up. I told myself I would quit in the new year, anyway. I wanted to do something fulfilling, whatever that might mean. The town was empty and cold and sparkling. Inside, the house smelled like bourbon and apple cider. The tree was real and bare, waiting in a corner to be decorated. Some soft, jazzy tune played from the TV speakers. I suspected it was a song he wrote. The sun had set early in the evening.

Nina was there. We had the house to ourselves, the three of us. He was outside with the dog, smoking too many cigarettes. Nina chopped apples at the kitchen island while I rolled out dough across from her. I finished up with the dough and pressed it into a pie tin. Nina was only halfway through the apples. I would have offered to help, but she looked so focused. She glanced at me and smiled. I’d been staring, watching her like an animal behind glass.

“That looks good,” she said. She nodded to my flat oval of dough, crumpled slightly in its too-small tin. I’d used a wine bottle to roll the dough, since we couldn’t find a rolling pin. She was just being nice, but I blushed anyway. I wanted to impress her.

I held the wine bottle by its neck and wagged it in front of me. “This makes all the hard work worth it,” I said. I let Nina tell me where the wine glasses were, even though I already knew. I poured heavy glasses for each of us. We made eye contact and cheered. Nina took a dainty sip and returned to slicing apples. I twisted my glass around on the counter, watching the condensation form. “How’s work?” I said.

She shrugged, feigning bashfulness. “I’m working on a new exhibition for the Feminist Art Coalition, but I’ve been stuck on one piece for weeks.” I nodded and sighed as if I knew the feeling. “What are you working on lately?” she said. She stopped cutting apples and looked at me. Her earnestness caught me off guard.

I’d been designing a logo for a new word processing software, but three weeks in I realised I’d ripped off Clippy, the old Microsoft animated assistant, and scrapped the whole project. I stared at my hands on the counter. Her gaze was intense. “I’m transitioning away from graphic design,” I said, which would be almost true, if I actually mustered the will to leave my job. I heard the thump of the knife on the cutting board resume.

I glanced at Nina, but she seemed to have lost interest in me. I took several gulps of wine, just to do something with my hands. My cheeks were hot. I couldn’t stop watching her. Her long fingers around the knife, her fine straight hair behind her ear. She wore a green Christmas sweater his mom had knitted for her. I wanted her to look at me again.

“Do you think you’ll get married?” I said. I could have meant to him or in general.

Nina looked up, tilted her head like she’d never considered it. She said, “I’m not sure I see the point.” She could have meant in marriage or in answering the question. Either way, I regretted asking.

I finished my wine. “You’re probably right,” I said.

She looked toward the porch, where we could see him through the sliding glass door. He ashed a cigarette with one hand and played fetch with the other. “I’m glad he has a friend like you,” Nina said. I couldn’t tell how much she knew, but I sensed that the details of our friendship wouldn’t concern her. I both craved and resented her approval.

Before I could respond, she gasped, “Shit.” The knife clattered on the counter, and she raised her hand to her face. She’d sliced open her thumb. I jumped from my stool and leaned across the island to examine her. Blood flowed dark and steady down her hand.

I wrapped the nearest dish towel around the cut and said, “It’s probably not as bad as it looks.” She nodded, glassy-eyed, cradling her hand against her chest.

I ushered her down the hall to the bathroom. She sat on the toilet seat, clutching the dish towel now saturated with blood. I kneeled at her feet to search the cabinets for a first aid kit. I wobbled slightly, dizzy from the wine. Finally, I found a box of decade-old rainbow Band-Aids. “Looks like this is all we have,” I said, turning back to her. Nina laughed and relaxed a little. Her eyeliner was smudged and I realised she’d been crying. I had the overwhelming impulse to protect her. “At least you’ll be stylish,” I said. She winced as I pulled the dish towel from her thumb. I dabbed at the cut, with little regard for our clothes or the white bathroom tiles. I threw the towel in the sink and groped at the Band-Aid flaps with bloody fingers.

Suddenly, I heard his voice behind me. “What happened?” he said. He was standing in the narrow doorway, eyes scrunched in concern. I could hear the dog whining in the other room. I stood shakily, realizing what a mess I’d made. He pushed past me to kneel where I had been. He rested his elbows on Nina’s thighs, brought her hand to his face. He was gentle with her. Nina smiled and bit her lip. She said his name, soft and natural like it belonged to her.

I was suddenly queasy and hot, like I’d woken violently from a dream. I wiped my bloody hands haphazardly on my jeans. I murmured, “I’ll get out of your way,” as I slipped out of the bathroom. I tried to steady myself in the hallway. The house was too warm, the air too heavy to breathe. Sweat stuck to my hairline. The dog sniffed at my ankles. I patted her head, leaving pink streaks in her fur. I said, “Sorry,” to the dog, who was confused and restless. I slipped on my shoes and went out the backdoor, across the backyard, and through the small cluster of trees that marked its border.

I didn’t realise I’d been running until the sand stopped me. I took fast, shallow breaths, the cold air stinging my throat. My eyes adjusted quickly in the moonlight. Behind and above me were the cliffs where we’d picnicked months earlier. They watched over me now like shadows, dark and weightless. I walked slowly forward, letting my sneakers drag and fill with sand. The ocean was a loud, colourless mass in front of me, dangerous and alive.

I heard a sound like pounding hooves behind me. I turned and saw a three-legged figure sprinting toward me. I must have left the porch door open. The dog whooshed by, wild and panting, straight into the ocean. Just as quickly, she disappeared into the swell. For a moment I froze, convinced I’d imagined it. Then I heard distant yelping over the crashing waves.

I ran straight ahead into the ice cold water. The waves slashed at my shins. I plunged desperately deeper, calling the dog’s name over and over. I couldn’t feel my body, couldn’t see anything. The dog barked furiously somewhere in front of me. I sucked in all the air I could and dove under water, swimming in her direction. My cheeks, my eye sockets, my ears, were throbbing. Finally I collided with another body. I grabbed onto the dog and kicked my legs furiously until her head was above water. It’s okay it’s okay it’s okay, I breathed into her fur. I felt her frantic pulse against my chest and squeezed her harder. My toes scraped the ground as I pulled us both toward the shore. A final wave pushed us to land, and I collapsed with the dog beside me in the surf.

I took several cold, salty breaths, staring up at the stars. I was numb, untethered, a thing without a body. I twisted my head toward the dog. She lay on her back, all three legs splayed out at her sides. I brought my hand to her chest and found her heartbeat. She wriggled under the weight of my palm and jumped clumsily to her feet. She licked my cheeks and nose and mouth. I closed my eyes. I didn’t have the strength to push her away. She lapped at my hands, balled into fists by my sides. Her tongue was hot and relentless. I uncurled my frozen fingers and let the dog lick them clean of everything foreign, salt and sand and blood that was not mine. We would have to return to the house soon. Probably, the pie was almost ready. The dog huffed and licked my eyes open. I laughed, startling us both.

curiosity friendship loneliness psychology

THE WALLS OF A HOME

by James English • July 12, 2021July 29, 2021

“New Ideal Diner” by Boston Public Library

I have always been curious about how adults arrange their lives, especially their lives within the walls of their homes, which is why I found myself fascinated by the story my buddy Packy told me a few weeks back about his friend Veratina. It seems that Veratina saw a psychologist for over thirty years and became quite tethered to the man, which didn’t surprise me because thirty years is a lot of therapy, even though I can’t say that for a fact because most people don’t talk about their therapy – at least not the people I know – and is another thing I’m very curious about. But then the psychologist, who was in his early seventies, died of a heart attack, his brother put the house on the market, and Veratina bought it.

Packy had told me the outline of this story in The Palace Diner, where we have lunch once a month, but he didn’t go into the details. Packy’s my best friend. We talk about everything, even though the conversation tends to focus on our health and what we will do when we can no longer manage the demands of our own homes, which I hadn’t thought much about until I injured my lower back a few months ago, couldn’t pick up my newspaper, and watched the pile of Globes on my doorstep get bigger and bigger. We’d just sat down yesterday when Packy said: “My wife and I had dinner with Veratina last week.” Packy is six-four, his moustache is the same reddish brown as his eyebrows, and he had a sharp tan line around his eyes from a recent fishing trip with some buddies.

“Where?”

“At her new house.” He took off his sunglasses and put them next to the ketchup bottle. The skin around his eyes was pale and he had a bar of white, like a piece of chalk, across the top of his nose.

I put down my menu. We were sitting in the back booth at The Palace. A few feet away, Chet, the short order cook, was flipping hash browns and Labelle was making a milkshake. I love The Palace. It’s a busy diner, with casual booths on the left and a long counter with blue stools on the right. Metal lamps with large yellow bulbs hang low over each booth, filling them with a warm light, and there’s a bank of blenders, coffee machines, and coolers behind the counter. I said: “You had dinner at the dead psychologist’s house?”

“It’s not a dead psychologist’s house. It’s Veratina’s house now.”

“So, how was it?” I couldn’t hold back my fascination. Here was a woman who’d shared her most intimate feelings with a man for thirty years, he’d died, and she’d moved into his house. What was it about him and his house that made her want to do that? What did she think would happen inside those four walls?

“Fine.”

I waited for Packy to say more, but he looked hesitant, as if he felt guilty about sharing Veratina’s story. I unfolded my paper napkin and put it in my lap. The Palace uses thick paper napkins and that’s one of the many touches that gives the diner a homey feel. “Where does she live?”

“In Springfield. Just off the interstate.”

“Did you tell your wife the story of the house before you went for dinner?” I paused. “I mean, to give her a heads-up?”

“No.”

That surprised me. “You didn’t warn your wife that Veratina had bought her former psychologist’s house?” Packy tells his wife everything. I don’t have a wife or girlfriend, and my sister cut off contact years ago, so Packy’s the person I talk the most to. We grew up in the same town, went to school together, and have been friends for almost fifty years.

He shook his head. “Nobody knows about it.”

“The real estate agent and Dr. Van Meter’s brother weren’t aware?”

“Nope. Veratina is extremely private. Her only friends were the psychologist, plus my wife and me.” Packy closed his menu and slid it in the metal holder. “She doesn’t go to church, doesn’t belong to a gym, and has few connections. It’s hard for her to get close to people.”

“What’s her job?”

“She works in a lab, like you. It’s pretty solitary.”

Our waitress showed up with two glasses of ice water, a slice of lime in mine. “Hello, fellas. How’re we doing today?”

“Hey, Sylvia,” I said. All the waitresses at The Palace know us, which is another reason I like the diner so much. Sylvia is in her forties, arranges her grey-blond hair in a high ring that reminds me of a fluffy halo, and wears black clogs. She’s very familiar with my culinary likes and dislikes, especially my aversion to raw onions. In my opinion, to be able to go out to lunch, sit in a cosy diner, and have the waitress hold the raw onions on your lunch order without being told to is as close to home cooking as a person can get.

“Fine,” Packy said. “How about you?”

“Can’t complain.” Sylvia tapped her pad and looked at Packy. “Same thing as last Monday?”

“Sure,” he said. “Why not?” Packy has invited me on numerous occasions to join his weekly lunch with his fishing buddies, but I have always declined. I’m not a big fishing fan.

She smiled at me. “You want the regular?”

“I’ll try the corned beef hash, with two poached eggs.” Regular for me is a tuna melt with Swiss cheese on whole wheat, but for some reason, Packy’s story had put me in a daring mood.

“Eggs on top?” Sylvia stood a few feet away and crossed her arms. I could smell the lilac in her perfume. I have a soft spot for lilac. My mother used to put on lilac perfume for my birthday.

“On the side,” I said. “With rye toast, please.”

Sylvia left. I took a sip of water and refolded the napkin in my lap. “So, tell me about Veratina’s place.”

“I feel like I’m betraying her. Maybe I shouldn’t have told you the story.”

“Oh, come on,” I said, feeling a twinge in my lower back. My lower back has become the first place in my body that registers any change in my mood. I sat up straight. “It sounds like a fascinating story. Besides, who would I tell?”

Packy couldn’t dispute my second reason, and he must have wanted to talk about Veratina himself, because he aligned his placemat with the bottom of the table and said:

“It’s in a quiet neighbourhood.”

I nodded. “I would think so. A psychologist would want a quiet place.”

“How do you know that?” Packy didn’t ask his question in a negative tone, but my comment seemed to surprise him.

I shrugged. “Psychologists must need peace and quiet to do their thinking. Did Dr. Van Meter have a family?”

“Just a wife. She died in her fifties.”

I thought about that. Dr. Van Meter lived in a house with the memory of his dead wife, and now Veratina was living in the same house with the memory of her dead psychologist, plus the psychologist’s memory of his dead wife. It felt almost too complicated to ponder, which surprised me because I spend a lot of time by myself pondering all sorts of complicated things. I said: “So what happened?”

Packy arranged his knife and fork in front of him. “We sat in the living room, had a drink, and chatted about the weather, real estate taxes, and why people don’t use their turn signals when they drive.” Packy glanced at Chet, who’d just slapped a hamburger on the grill. “Veratina rides her bike to work. She said that drivers who don’t signal are a menace.”

I was going to tell Packy that my sister probably commuted on her bike, too, but since I didn’t know where she lived, I couldn’t say that for sure. I said: “How was the dinner?”

Packy took a sip of water. “Veratina made lasagna and a nice Caesar salad. She gave my wife the recipe. You want it?”

I laughed. “You know me and cooking. I’m lucky if I can whip up a plate of hot dogs and beans. So…you ate and then you went home?”

Packy shook his head. “Then Veratina gave us a tour.”

Sylvia returned with our lunches. She put a hamburger and fries in front of Packy and served me the corned beef hash. As soon as I saw my plate, I knew I’d made the right choice. Even though I’d taken a risk ordering poached eggs because they often come out runny at the other diners I eat in, these looked fine, plus my hash shone with an inviting veneer of crunchy fat. Sylvia motioned at our plates. “Can I get you fellas anything else?”

I pointed at the bulletin board behind the counter. “You’ve got a new post card.” A few years ago, The Palace put up a board so their regular customers could send cards from the places they travel to. I love looking at that bulletin board. One of my harmless fantasies is to sneak in The Palace one night and read what the regulars wrote to Sylvia, Chet, and Labelle.

She looked. “Which one?”

“See that card next to the Washington Monument? It’s new.”

“I’ll ask Labelle.” Sylvia smiled at me and then said something I wasn’t expecting: “Would you like to send us a card?”

“Me?”

“You always notice the post cards.” Sylvia gave her halo of hair a delicate pat and

nodded at the board. “There’s room for you.”

“The problem is,” I said. “I don’t go anywhere.”

“There must be someplace you want to visit.” She smiled at me. “I’ll write the diner’s address on your check.”

After she left, Packy said: “Why don’t you take a trip? You can send a bunch of cards to folks.”

I laughed. “Who would I send cards to, besides you and The Palace?”

“You could send a card to your sister.”

“I don’t know where she lives. And even if I did, she’d throw it out.”

We tucked into our meal. It was quiet in our booth, except for the clink of our forks and knives. After a time, Packy put down his burger and wiped his lips. “We started in the kitchen.”

“Modern?”

“The stove and dishwasher looked at least ten years old, but Veratina bought a new refrigerator. The cabinets were new, too, with pull-out shelves where she kept her pots and pans.”

“Any family photos on the refrigerator?”

Packy shook his head. “Veratina doesn’t have a lot of family.”

“She must have some photos.” I don’t know why I said that because I didn’t have any photos in my apartment either, and besides, I knew nothing about Veratina. “Where’d you go next?”

“She led us back to the living room, where she pointed out the bay windows, which were six feet wide; the fireplace, which had small blue tiles around its border; and the mahogany bookcase. Then we went into the dining room, where there was a chandelier and a corner cabinet.”

“Any china in the cabinet?”

“No.”

By now I had to admit that I was obsessed with Veratina’s house, but I still hadn’t seen the thing I was looking for, even though I didn’t know if such a thing existed. Maybe it didn’t exist. Maybe Packy was telling the truth and Veratina just wanted to live in the house that her devoted psychologist of thirty years lived in. “Next?” I said.

The three of them went upstairs. Packy described the master bedroom, with its plush green carpet, the two bedrooms in the back that looked out on a sycamore tree, and the bathroom with its tub and walk-in shower. He described the pull-down ladder for the attic and the cedar closet in the master bedroom.

I said: “Did Veratina sleep in Dr. Van Meter’s old bedroom?”

“Archer, that’s not what this is about.”

I stared at him. I had to ask the question that had been in the back of my mind ever since he’d brought up the story. “Veratina wasn’t in love with Dr. Van Meter?”

“Absolutely not,” he said in a firm voice.

“How do you know that?”

Packy shifted in his seat. “Dr. Van Meter provided a lifeline for Veratina. Thirty years of support, understanding, and compassion for a woman who had great difficulty getting close to other people.” He paused. “They had a special relationship and Veratina wanted to honour that.”

“She paid for the relationship.”

“Yes, she did,” he said in a vexed tone. “But that didn’t make it any less sustaining. At least Veratina could make a connection with someone.” When I didn’t respond, he said: “So you don’t agree that everyone needs close bonds? That we all need people we can share our inner thoughts with?”

“Not like that.”

He ate the last of his French fries. “That’s enough of the house tour.”

“No, keep going.”

“I should stop.”

“Finish the tour!” I said a loud voice.

At the grill, Chet turned around and stared at me, his spatula suspended at shoulder height. The busboy, who was three booths away, looked up. I lowered my voice. “Finish…please.”

I’ve shouted at Packy in the past, but I would never do that in The Palace. The last time I yelled at him was when he signed me up for a men’s group at his church. The time before that was when he sent me information about his book group, which I promptly threw out. Sometimes I think the only reason Packy has remained my friend is because we go back so far. We visit our hometown several times a year, even though my parents are long gone and strangers have bought their house. Many things happened in my house when I was growing up and, as I’ve gotten older, I find myself thinking about them more often, though I don’t understand why they took place or why they made me arrange my life as I have. Once, I knocked on their door, but no one answered.

Packy finished the tour. He told me how he, his wife, and Veratina went down to the basement, where Dr. Van Meter’s brother had left behind the woodworking bench. Apparently, the doctor was quite a woodworker and used to make gifts for friends and family.

“So that was when your wife figured it out?”

Packy nodded. “Veratina basically told her.”

“Did your wife ask her why she bought her former psychologist’s house?”

“Yes.”

“What did she say?”

“She said the house was in a good neighbourhood, it was close to her job, and it made her feel connected to Dr. Van Meter.”

“So that’s all it was about? Connection?” I got out my wallet to pay. “It wasn’t more than that?”

Packy started to say that people shouldn’t underestimate connection, especially folks whose lives were solitary, which made me interrupt him and say that food and shelter were more important than connection.

“I’ll grant you that,” he said in a voice that was half subdued and half irritated, but after the basics, he went on. “It’s connection we all hunger for, even people who have trouble getting close to others and act if as if it doesn’t matter,” which was a criticism of me and made me want to raise my voice at him a second time, right there in The Palace. But God bless Sylvia because just then she showed up and said: “You fellas going to order dessert?”

“What’ve you got?” Packy said.

“We have some nice pies today.”

“That’s a great idea,” I said. I love all the food at The Palace, especially their pies. I love their blueberry pie, their apple pie, and their strawberry rhubarb pie. I even love their pecan pie. The problem was that I honestly did not know which pie to pick. But then I had an idea: Why not let Sylvia decide? She knows my likes and dislikes, right down to the lime in my ice water, and she’s never disappointed me. I like all the staff at The Palace, even the busboy and the part-timers, but I would have to say that Sylvia and I are the closest of all.

death Education Literature class Romeo and Juliet school Shakespeare

THE UNFORTUNATE BUSINESS OF THE DEAD CHILDREN

by William Macbeth • July 11, 2021January 21, 2022

It was Monday morning.

“Yeah, he’s dead,” said John.

Susanne looked at John, her colleague of almost ten years standing, and someone she regarded as, if not exactly a friend, then at least a sympathetic associate. “Are you sure?” she said.

“Yeah,” said John. “It’s all over the local news.”

“How?” said Susanne. “How did he die?”

“Stabbed apparently.”

“Jesus. That’s fucking terrible.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“I mean that’s the third this year.”

“The third what?”

“The third student of mine who’s died this year.”

“God, really?”

“Yeah, first there was Theresa Tatchell. Do you remember her?”

“Oh yeah, I remember Theresa. Nice girl. How’d she die again?”

“Drugs.”

“Yeah, I didn’t know that.”

“And then there was Jeremy Baskerville.”

“He was the hit and run, wasn’t he?”

“Yeah, the drunk driver. And now this.”

“Yeah.”

“God, I hope there aren’t any more.”

“People might begin to get suspicious.” John started laughing.

“It’s not funny.”

He stopped laughing. “No, of course not. Sorry.”

Later that day Susanne was teaching a class of fourteen and fifteen year olds, the dead boy’s classmates. She was teaching them to identify and analyse examples of imagery in Macbeth, a play by William Shakespeare about why it’s probably not such a great idea to murder a king. Basically, what goes around comes around.

She gave everyone a worksheet and made them write down quotations from the play and analyse them. What did the quote mean? What was Shakespeare trying to say? What was the effect on the audience?

At the end of the lesson she addressed the elephant in the room. The elephant in the room was the dead boy. He wasn’t there anymore. He had become figurative.

“I’m sure you’ve all heard the horrible news,” she said. The students looked at her blankly, giving no indication whether they had heard the news or not. The effect of this was rather unnerving. “Um,” Susanne continued, “well, of course, this is a terrible, it’s, I’m sure … well, if anyone would like to talk, um, if you need to, sort of … I mean if you need someone to talk to, or even if, well, what I’m trying to say is …”

“It’s OK, Miss,” said a boy in the front row. “We’re OK. No one really liked him anyway. He was a bit of a dick, to be honest.”

“Oh,” said Susanne. “But that’s not really the point, is it?”

“It’s OK, don’t worry about it,” said the boy. “We’re fine. Aren’t we?” The boy who was called Miles looked back at his classmates. “Aren’t we?” he said again.

His classmates mumbled assent.

“But,” said Susanne, “it’s just that, well, the thing is. He isn’t, or wasn’t, the first. There have been others.”

“Other what, Miss?” said Miles, who seemed to be taking on the role as the spokesperson of the class.

“Other dead, um,” said Susanne, “other children that have been, well, that have died.”

“Well, yeah,” said Miles. “Obviously.”

“I mean to say,” said Susanne, “from my classes. Other children from my classes. He was the third this year.”

“At least it’s less marking for you, Miss,” said Miles.

“It’s not funny, Miles. These are dead children we’re talking about.”

“OK, Miss,” said Miles.

“I just want you to be aware,” said Susanne. “Children from my classes keep dying.”

“It’s not your fault, Miss,” said Miles.

“Thank you, Miles,” said Susanne. “I appreciate that. Well, anyway, just so you know. Just please be careful, everyone. OK?”

A few days later, actually a week later, it was Monday morning again. Susanne was making herself a cup of coffee in the office.

Phil entered the room. Phil was a tall man with very little hair. Soon he would be almost totally bald. He was also Susanne’s line manager, the Head of English.

“I’m sure you’ve heard the news,” said Phil, addressing Susanne’s back as she made her cup of coffee.

“No,” said Susanne, fearing the worst. News, in her experience, was very rarely good. News always, in her experience, meant bad news. “What news?”

“Another student’s died,” said Phil.

“You’re kidding,” said Susanne.

“I’m most certainly not.”

“Not another one of mine I hope.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Oh God. Who?”

“James Harding.”

“Harding, Jesus. How? What happened?”

“He cut himself rather badly down by the old train line. The cut got infected. Sepsis.”

“Sepsis?”

“Yep. It’s a killer. Lots of people die from it. It’s deadly.”

“Jesus.”

“Yep.”

“Jesus.”

“That’s five this year, isn’t it?”

“Five?”

“Yeah, of your students.”

“Um.”

“That have died.”

“Um, I think it’s four actually.”

“That’s still quite a lot.”

“Well, yeah, but-”

“It’s unheard of, actually. I can’t remember a teacher ever having so many dead students in one year.”

“Well, yeah, but you don’t, I can’t, you don’t think-”

“You’re going to have to be careful.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, five is rather a lot of deaths to have in just one year. You wouldn’t want any more now, would you?”

“It’s four. Four deaths.”

“Whatever. It’s a lot of deaths for one teacher.”

“But they’re not, you don’t, you can’t, they’re not…my deaths, they’re nothing to do with me.”

“Well, they are your students. You are their teacher.”

“But–”

“Five is rather a lot.”

“It’s four.”

“Four, right, but it’s still a lot.”

“But you can’t possibly, you don’t, you do realise that there’s nothing I can actually do to stop people dying in their free time.”

“Of course, I realise that, Susanne. I’m not blaming you, of course not. But I’m just saying, five, I mean four, is rather a lot, and people will start to talk and, you know, all I’m saying is you just better be careful, for your own good, that’s all. I’m just trying to…you know, it’s not me you need to worry about. I’m trying to help, you know, that’s all.”

“Well, who, what, who do I need to worry about?”

“Look, I’m just saying, just be careful. You can’t afford any more dead students. That’s all I’m saying. It doesn’t look good.”

Susanne sipped her coffee. It was too hot to drink really, but it was there in her hand so she had a little sip.

“What do you expect me to do?” she said.

“Just get it sorted,” said Phil. “Make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Later that day Susanne was teaching a group of thirteen and fourteen year olds, the dead boy’s classmates. This was the second death of the year in this particular class. They had been reading The Merchant of Venice, a play by Shakespeare, about a Jewish moneylender. She was asking the students to consider whether the play was anti-Semitic or not, and to find evidence from the play to support their view. Basically, the consensus was that some people thought it was anti-Semitic, and some people thought it wasn’t.

At the end of the lesson she looked at the empty chair where, had he still been living, James Harding would have sat. She felt herself beginning to well up, but then she remembered the words of Lady Macbeth in Act 3 Scene 4 of Macbeth when she says to her husband, “When all’s done, you look but on a stool.” And that sorted her out. James Harding was dead. It was just an empty chair.

She decided to address the class. “I’m sure you have noticed,” she began. “That one of you is missing today.”

“Yeah, we know,” said Annie, a smart girl in the front row. “Our form tutor’s already spoken to us about it. He’s dead.”

“Well, yes, OK, so that’s good then.”

“It’s good?” said Annie. “It’s good that he’s dead?”

“Well, no, obviously, it’s not good that he’s dead, that’s not what I meant. I meant it’s good that you’ve already been spoken to about it, because that’s, it’s–”

“Because it means that you don’t have to do it,” said Annie.

“Well, no, not quite, that’s not quite, but it just means that I can speak to you about other things, maybe more important things.”

“More important than the death of a child?” said Annie.

“Well, if you would just let me speak.”

“Of course,” said Annie. “Go ahead.”

“Thank you. Yes, well, what I wanted to say was that it seems to me that some of you, and it certainly doesn’t apply to everyone, I realise that, but some of you need to, perhaps, take a little more care of yourselves. James is the fourth student from this school to die this year, and while I don’t wish to speak ill of the dead, it does seem, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to suggest that, maybe, if people just took a little more care of themselves, then there wouldn’t be quite so many of them dying.”

“So, what you’re saying is,” said Annie, “you want us to take care not to die?”

“Yes, essentially, that is what I’m saying. Words to that effect.”

“Essentially?”

“Yes.”

The bell rang. The children stood up and hastily exited the room. The noise in the room became a din.

“Don’t forget what I said,” said Susanne, largely unheard. “Please be careful. We don’t want any more people dying.”

Fast-forward another week. Another Monday morning. When Susanne entered the office to make herself a cup of coffee Phil was already there, checking his emails.

“The head wants to see you,” he said.

“Me?” said Susanne.

“Yes, you,” said Phil. “She wants to see you.”

“What, now?”

“Yes, right away.”

“What about?”

“I don’t know. She just said she wants to see you ‘first thing.’”

“Have I got time to make a coffee?”

“I wouldn’t have thought so. It sounded important. Quite urgent, actually.”

“Jesus, no one else has died, have they?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Jesus, I hope no one else has died. If someone else has died, I’m screwed.”

“The door’s open,” said Jane. Jane was the headteacher, and a thoroughly professional person she was too. Everything about her was professional: her hair was professional, her smile was professional, the way she said, “The door’s open” was professional, as was the way she said, “Please, take a seat.”

Susanne took a seat and sat with her hands folded nervously on her lap. Jane finished perusing some document or other that was on the desk in front of her before directing her professional smile on Susanne. “Now,” she said professionally, “this whole business really is most unfortunate.”

Susanne obviously knew what she was talking about but felt as though she ought to pretend she didn’t. “What business might that be?” she said.

“Why, the dead children of course,” said Jane, prof-

“Of course,” said Susanne. “I thought that was what you meant, but just to be sure.”

“I do hope there isn’t anything else I ought to know about.”

“Oh no, absolutely not, no, no.”

“Good. Well, yes, as I was saying. There are five dead so far, is that correct?”

“Four.”

“Four, right. That’s still quite a lot. And they were all in your classes?

“Well, yes, but, there’s no, that doesn’t mean, you can’t-”

“There’s nothing to worry about, Susanne, I’m just establishing the facts.”

“And Jade Filimore, is that one of yours?”

“Oh yes, actually, she is one of mine. But she hasn’t, has she, she’s not…dead, is she?”

“Not yet, no, but the prognosis is not good.”

“Prognosis?”

“She was taken ill at the weekend and is currently in intensive care.”

“But that’s not, there’s nothing, I mean–”

“Please, Susanne, no one’s accusing you of anything.”

“Good, because, you know, I can’t, there’s really nothing that I can do about what students get up to in their free time.”

“Well, no, no one’s suggesting there is, really, but you have to admit it does begin to look a little, how can I put this, a little more than coincidental, doesn’t it Susanne? You are their teacher after all, aren’t you, and as their teacher don’t you think you ought to take some responsibility for their welfare?”

“Well, yes, I see what you’re saying, and I do take responsibility, while they’re in my care. I mean no one’s actually died during my lessons, have they?”

“No, of course not, Susanne. No one’s suggesting they have. Look, please don’t get upset. I really am just trying to establish the facts of the matter. I am certainly not leaping to any judgements here today.”

“Good, because there’s no, nobody can, I don’t think you-”

“And, of course, there’s now the added complication of the parents.”

“The parents?”

“Yes, the parents. People talk, Susanne, and of course word has got around that students in your classes keep dying, and parents are understandably, how can I put this, jittery.”

“Jittery?”

“Yes, jittery. I think that’s fair to say. I have received several emails from parents asking for students to be removed from your classes, and one parent has even threatened to remove their child from the school altogether. I have tried to reassure them, of course, but they really are jittery, very jittery indeed.”

“Right.”

“Yes, so you see, I find myself in quite a difficult situation.”

“Yes, I see, but you must understand that there’s nothing, I really don’t see, I can’t stop people dying.”

“No one is expecting you to perform miracles, Susanne, but I think that, ultimately, as a professional, that if children keep dying then, sadly, I really wouldn’t have any choice. You would have to take responsibility. Your position here would become untenable.”

“Untenable?”

“Yes, exactly.”

“Right.”

“Yes, I am sorry Susanne. Like I say, it really is a terribly unfortunate business. But, as you can see, my hands really are very much tied.”

“Right, OK, I see.”

“Well, thank you for understanding. And fingers crossed. Hopefully Jade will get better and this whole thing will blow over.”

“Hopefully.”

“Yes, well, do be careful.” Jane smiled professionally. “All the best, Susanne, and good luck.”

Later that day Susanne was teaching a group of eleven and twelve year olds, the sick girl’s classmates. The class had been studying Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. In today’s lesson the class were asked to consider the similarities between Shakespeare’s play and the Greek myth of Pyramus and Thisbe. One of the most obvious similarities is that both pairs of titular characters end up committing suicide. After considering the similarities between the two stories Susanne then asked the class, in pairs, to produce a modern day retelling of the Pyramus and Thisbe myth. Her intention was to give the students as much creative freedom as they wanted, and she was quite relaxed about how much of the original story they included in their own version.

“Does it have to be set in the olden times?” asked one student, a boy called Nasim.

“Oh no, absolutely not,” said Susanne. “You can set it whenever you want.”

“Do they have to be called Pyramus and Thisbe?” asked another student, a girl this time called Jessica.

“Oh no, not at all,” said Susanne. “You can call them whatever you want.”

“Do they have to kill themselves at the end?” asked another student, a boy whose name Susanne, for some reason, could never quite remember.

“No,” said Susanne. “Not necessarily.”

At the end of the lesson she had been going to talk to the class about Jade Filimore. The doctors had almost given up hope, and it seemed likely that she was going to die within days. She wanted the class to know that she was there for them if they needed someone to talk to or a shoulder to cry on.

Susanne looked around the room. The students were busily imagining ways in which their imaginary lovers could end their imaginary lives. They seemed happy enough. The absence of Jade Filimore did not seem to be concerning them unduly. Just leave it then, thought Susanne. There’s no point rocking the boat when it’s bobbing along quite contentedly. And so she left it alone.

She didn’t say a word about Jade Filimore.

Next week. It was Monday morning. Yes, another one. The first person that Susanne saw after arriving at work was John. His face, it appeared, had been seized by a kind of intense excitement.

“Have you heard?” he said.

“Heard what?” said Susanne, naturally fearing the worst.

“The news.”

Bad news, thought Susanne. That’s what he should have said: bad news. All news was bad news.

“What?” she said. “Just tell me.”

“There’s been a suicide.”

“What? A suicide?”

“A double suicide.”

“Oh God. Are you serious?”

“Dead serious.”

“Jesus.”

“I know.”

“God.”

“I know.”

“Who? Who was it?”

“Kate Maiden and Billy Butler.”

“Oh God.”

“Did you know them?”

“Yes. Oh Jesus.”

“Were they in your class?”

“Yes.”

“Oh dear.”

Susanne made her way to the office where she found Phil staring intently at his computer screen. He was reading an article on the local newspaper’s website, obviously, thought Susanne, about the dead children, the double suicide. The star-crossed lovers. She could imagine the headlines. She checked the kettle. It was cold.

“Good morning, Phil,” she said.

“Terrible, just terrible,” said Phil. “Have you heard?”

“Yeah, I saw John in the corridor.”

“Terrible, just terrible.”

“I know. It’s awful.”

“The head was just up here looking for you. You’d better go and see her.”

“Did she say what it was about?”

Phil didn’t answer. He had returned his attention to the computer screen. “Terrible,” he muttered, “just terrible.”

The door was open, and inside Susanne could see Jane tapping away at her keyboard, and looking up every so often at the screen in front of her to check what she had written, and make any necessary corrections. A pair of glasses was professionally perched on the end of her nose. Susanne knocked on the open door.

Jane swung around on her plush leather chair to face her. “Ah, Susanne, good morning. Please come in,” she said.

“Phil said you wanted to see me,” said Susanne.

“Yes, that’s quite right. Do take a seat. I’ll be with you in just one moment.”

Susanne took a seat and looked around the headteacher’s office. On top of a filing cabinet she noticed a professional portrait of the headteacher’s three children, smiling like professionals-in-waiting. She could imagine Jane standing behind the photographer. “Nice big smiles everyone,” she could imagine her saying, while smiling broadly herself, by way of example. On top of another cabinet was a plant. Susanne stared at it for a long time, trying to figure out whether it was real or not. In the end she had to give up. It was impossible to tell. If it was real it was doing an admirable job of pretending not to be, and vice versa.

“Right,” said Jane eventually, rising from her computer and removing, briefly, the glasses from their perch on her nose. “Sorry to keep you waiting, but I’ve had a deluge of emails to respond to this morning. A veritable deluge. There are a lot of concerned parents out there, let me tell you.”

She sat down opposite Susanne and looked at her rather severely. Her severity, though, was on a strictly professional basis.

“I suppose you’ve heard what’s happened.”

“Regarding the suicides?” said Susanne.

“Yes, regarding the suicides,” said Jane.

“Yes, I have heard.”

“A most unfortunate business.”

“Terrible.”

“Yes. Absolutely dreadful. The families must be absolutely…well I can only imagine.”

“It’s unimaginable.”

“Yes, quite. That’s exactly the right word. It is unimaginable.” Jane paused, sat back and looked directly at Susanne. “Now as I am sure you can imagine, I am under enormous pressure to do something about all this. Seven children from our school have died and people want answers. I simply can’t afford to do nothing.”

“Seven? I thought it was six.”

“No, seven, I’m afraid. Your Jude Filimore passed away over the weekend too. There was nothing more the doctors could do apparently.”

“She wasn’t, you know, my-”

“Now, come on Susanne, let’s not quibble over semantics. You know quite what I mean. She was your student just like all the others. And there is a pretty solid consensus forming, I have to tell you, around the idea that this has moved a little beyond the realms of coincidence. It is surely pushing the boundaries of credibility to suggest that this is all down to pure chance.”

“I haven’t, but I don’t know–”

“In all my many years of teaching I’ve never heard of anything quite like this happening before. Have you?”

“Well, no, but that doesn’t mean-”

“Tell me, Susanne, is it true, and please excuse me for asking, but is it true, as I’ve now heard from multiple sources, I have to say, is it true that, only days before they took their own lives, you asked Kate and Billy’s class to write stories about teenagers killing themselves?”

“Um, well, yes, in a way, I suppose, but we’ve been studying Romeo and Juliet. I only asked them to write their own modern versions of the story.”

“Which, to be clear, were to end with the lovers taking their own lives?”

“Well, yes, they could end like that, but they didn’t have to, and I made that quite explicit. I did say they could change the story, they didn’t have to take their own lives.”

“I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you, Susanne, that teenage suicide is hardly an appropriate topic for such young children. These are eleven and twelve year olds we’re talking about.”

“But it’s Shakespeare, for God’s sake, it’s Romeo and Juliet.”

“There’s no need to get upset, Susanne. This is a difficult issue for all of us, but there’s no need to get upset. Be mindful of whom you are talking to.”

“It’s not, I’m not getting upset, but I just don’t feel that you’re, I don’t think–”

“OK, look. I think, ultimately, Susanne, if what I’m hearing is true, and you seem to be confirming that it is, then I really have no choice but to suspend you, effective immediately.”

“But what, how can you, I haven’t done anything wrong.”

“It seems to me, Susanne, that you are guilty of, at the very least, displaying poor professional judgement. Very poor. To study texts that seem to glorify teenage suicide, when there is already a trail of dead children, seems to me to be an example of, like I say, at the very least, poor professional judgement.”

“For God’s sake, it’s Shakespeare.”

“Let’s leave claims of authorship to one side for the moment, shall we. These are young, vulnerable children we’re working with here, Susanne, and next to the welfare of vulnerable children the reputations of one writer or another count as naught.”

“You can’t do this to me.”

“The children have to be, are always, our primary concern.”

“I can’t believe this.”

“Yes, I think we are all in a state of shock, which is all the more reason to suspend you while the dust settles. Allow us to investigate these deaths more closely. And let’s just see what happens. If, after all, the deaths continue then it will be clearly proven that it is nothing to do with you.”

“And if they don’t?”

“Well, let’s just wait and see, shall we. Let’s not jump to conclusions.”

There was a pause. The two women looked at each other. It was Susanne who broke the silence.

“So, shall I leave now? Do you want me to leave now?”

“Yes, absolutely. Your suspension is effective immediately, as I said. I really have no choice. As you can see my hands are tied.”

“Right. May I clear my desk, say goodbye to colleagues?”

“I think, don’t you, it would be better if you didn’t. In fact, I will have to insist that you don’t. It is in nobody’s interests to make a fuss. Of course, we will respect your privacy in this matter, and would appreciate it if you would do likewise. You, of course, mustn’t talk to the press or anyone else about any of this.”

There was another pause. Susanne was wide-eyed. Shocked. Jane was steeled. Professional.

“So, you want me to leave quietly?” said Susanne.

“I think it would be in everyone’s interests, don’t you?” said Jane. “Nobody likes a fuss.”

Central Park death family New York City

NYC DNA

by R. R. Noall • July 10, 2021July 10, 2021

We buried my grandpa in Central Park.

It was October, and my breath hung in the air, creating a fog suited for the occasion. I was bundled up, all in black, walking to the family bench. This visit to Central Park was different from any other I’d ever taken, but it’s stained every visit since.

When I visit the city, I always go to the bench. Preferably alone and sweaty because I’ve run there. Going there requires a sprint. There’s an urgency to visit. To have a talk. The second I land at LaGuardia, my legs begin to twitch.

Many who visit New York City put “Bow Bridge” on their checklist. It’s iconic, having appeared in every romantic comedy based in NYC since the ’90s. The view everyone sees – I know it well. That’s where my grandparents have their benches. You may as well put “visit Roger” on your checklist of sights to see.

Of course, when I arrive to visit grandpa, there are about one million people there. Because I am now older and wiser, I’ve changed visiting hours. Now, I like to go at a god awful hour in the morning or late afternoon, nearing sunset. Somehow, though, when I visit, the weather is always fringed regardless of the season.

I remember the way my grandma held the box. It was as if his ashes were a baby, delicate and new to the world. A small soul you want to smother in love and keep safe. We all gathered around the bench as she sprinkled my grandpa all over it. A squirrel came by, hoping it was bread crumbs. It was very mistaken.

Together, we walked to the bridge in a harmonic sway. Long slow steps. So long you feel as if the ground’s disappeared and you’re falling. Everyone was crying. Then, grandma threw grandpa over the bridge and into the water. If he weren’t dead, this would have been much more dramatic. Instead, it was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

Air parted him, and he drifted away, clouding the water below, but methodically. It was as if a frayed string was being tugged ever so slowly through the water. I stood there and watched him fade away.

When I visit the bench, I talk to him between gasping breaths, because let’s face it, I am no runner. He was, which is hilariously ironic (14 NYC marathons to be exact). We laugh about how very illegal it is to put human ashes in the park. I tell him I’m gay and hope he’s cool with that. We talk about my brother, Weston, and how all of those tennis lessons paid off. Of course, he asks me about Gigi (my grandma), and I say, “she’s never stopped missing you.”

The crazy thing is that our “most real” conversations happen on that bench, post mortem. My face scrunches writing that, but I’m thankful too. To have somewhere to visit, quiet, in the city. To know someone who’s a part of it’s DNA.

UNRELIABLE MEMOIR: CLOTHES

by Ashley Yang-Thompson • July 9, 2021July 9, 2021

Photo by Thomas_H_foto (copied from Flickr)

In high school I wore a pirate costume every Friday and I had one-and-a-half friends. When I wasn’t wearing a pirate costume I was wearing a Goodwill golf polo over a girdle I found in mother’s dresser after eating seven quesadillas in a row while watching LOST on an overheated DIY desktop computer which beeps like an emergency vehicle if you don’t put a fan directly in front of the monitor. There was the floor-length tie dye skirt and the felt shark jacket and the top hat that had sunflowers growing out of it. There were the shapeless sacks I wore so I could binge away every feeling I couldn’t swallow. There was the hat like an exclamation point out of my head. There was the baby school girl prostitute ensemble I wore the year I got skinny on speed and opioids. There was the latex catsuit B. ripped apart in the narrow staircase which reeked of rancid Bud Light Lime. There was my mother’s silk shirt which she wore when she was my age, an ocean away from here, when her life was full of possibility, before the Cultural Revolution, before she had me, before every person in her life let her down by dying or not dying or failing to protect her or love her or be who she needed or wanted them to be, before she learned to use men for their money, before she covered the windows in sticky notes and installed double-bolts on the doors, back when love was like an open window two feet off the ground that let in the sounds of sparrows and cicadas and a young man clandestinely playing a banned violin. I wore that shirt until the buttons fell off and the armpits were permanently stained.

clothes memoir

guests old friends three-way

GUESTS

by Louis Gallo • July 7, 2021July 27, 2021

We hadn’t seen or heard from Sam and Nellie in, I don’t know, ages, so when they called, each on a separate line, giggling, still smoking dope, to inform us they were headed our way, Linda and I felt slightly unsettled. Nothing seismic, just the fluttering of a thistle in the wind. We were excited, sure, but time is a sledgehammer, and what if they weren’t the same people we knew so well during our last year in college?

Linda and I had changed, that’s a fact. I would like to think for the better, but then I’m the one looking in the mirror. Back then, about seven years ago, you couldn’t separate the four of us; we lived together in this sloppy hovel rented out to students by the usual evil slumlord, we partied hard, gave tomorrow the finger. And more often than I can remember, Sam wound up in bed with Linda and I with Nellie. Sometimes our entire fleshy quartet gave that ratty little bed with the clacking headboard and splotchy sheets a good workout. Not something I regret, but Linda and I are married now, settled, mature, I guess you could say. So are Sam and Nellie, married, that is. I don’t know much more except that Nellie still peddles her artwork on Jackson Square down in New Orleans, and Sam works as a waiter at Café du Monde.

Sam is massive, could hurl a boulder, but he’s also a gentle soul, spaced-out, relaxed, easygoing. I say is, but who knows? I was once the same way (though never quite as thorough, or sincere, at it as Sam), which is why we blended so well. We liked to think nothing could rattle us. Sam would flick back his long blond hair, smile, toke some weed, and say, “What difference will all this make in one hundred years?” Which always calmed us down.

Nellie, a little high-strung, sometimes shrill as a piccolo, had cobalt-black hair draping down to her fabulous derriere. She wore granny glasses, smoked skinny brown cigarillos, recited poetry to us when we floated in the haze of altered consciousness. She had a passion for William Blake, and I can still hear her delicate yet crystalline voice almost chanting, “He who bends to himself a joy/Does the winged life destroy. . .” Always the slight hoarseness, a hairline in the crystal, so throatily sexy.

She painted darkness, though, images she extracted from what she called the underworld, always with the help of weed and trance drumming and sometimes good, old-fashioned OHM. In another life, I can imagine her as some exotic, sensual queen or maybe courtesan, or both at once. I can even picture her in a cave in ancient Greece foaming at the mouth. Oh, I was hot for Nellie – an ache, a wound, an obsession – and we all knew it, even Linda, who sometimes succumbed to the same passion. But, for better or worse, my mind always had a superb braking system; I knew when to back off, knew Nellie meant disaster. You didn’t exactly get along with Nellie, you worshiped her, obeyed her, craved her approval. She had tattoos of fish on each breast – the left, a swordfish; the right, a hammerhead. She wore rosary beads and a big clunky cross, though she denounced Christianity in general as contaminated by mindless Jesus freaks. Yet I spotted her more than once skulk into the small Catholic chapel on campus, where, inside, she knelt between pews, rubbed the beads furiously, and, I guess, prayed. Nellie was vamp gorgeous, like the young Greta Garbo whose movies I’d seen in a film class; her body, more angular and leaner than lavish, demanded homage – and it received it.

But Linda was more my type, less urgent, more reasonable, softer, radiant, not scalding. She was, and remains, beautiful, too, in her own blondish, quiet, glowingly melancholic way. I’m not saying sex with Nellie was anything less than volcanic (yet always a struggle, as if she yearned to drag you back into a smoky prehistory full of vines, wet ferns, and bogs), but with Linda you could breathe, smile, dare to relax. The rainbow after a summer shower. I’m not sure how Sam felt about Linda in that area because we never talked about it. Whatever happened, happened. Nor did he ever ask questions about my bouts, and I mean bouts, with Nellie. The two women said nothing. Our collective muteness on the subject probably blanketed some unexplored realm of the psyche better left unexcavated. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

Sam and Nellie, even Linda sometimes, taunted me for being a business major, but I would wag my finger and smirk, “Someday.” The brakes once again. I had always suppressed a pebble-sized dread of the future even as I cursed it, especially back then when cool meant taking tomorrow about as seriously as a grain of rice. I feared winding up on the street, lurking, at 50 years old, in an alley with nothing more than a bottle of Gallo wine in my sack. I needed a plan, a path, a direction, and never assumed the future would cuddle me fondly with fuzzy soft mittens and set me down in a nest of doves. Which is how Sam and Linda felt – blessed, I guess you could call it.

Nellie, you were never certain what Nellie thought. Those grotesque, black images on her canvases, gargoyles and typhonic half-beast, half-man shadows, they weren’t exactly happy-go-lucky. Sometimes I dreamed Nellie drove her car off a bridge or drank a gallon of Prestone. And yet she laughed enough, mothered us when we were down, nudged us back in line when we lagged. She also drank more than the rest us put together and remained permanently stoned. Even Sam gave it a rest every now and then. Linda and I certainly did. We couldn’t bear feeling murky, drained, and hollow all the time.

These days Linda and I don’t smoke or drink much aside from a rare glass of Chardonnay or Chablis when out at some restaurant. We don’t own one bottle of liquor. Weed now makes Linda frantically paranoid; she gets cold, trembles, imagines enemies waiting in siege. The last time she smoked, she went hysterical and screamed at the kitchen sink. She said it swarmed with demons. I just stopped smoking as a matter of course. The lone toker is a desolate toker. And although I often miss the beauty and surge of those glorious highs, the way orange juice tasted, the munchies. . . I don’t miss them enough to repeat history. I also enjoy clarity of mind, order, straightness. And given my business, I can’t afford to stumble.

Business major made good all right. Member of the Better Business Bureau and Chamber of Commerce. One little backslide and I could lose everything: the very enemy mentality we friends swore we would never, ever condone in others or embrace ourselves. Bourgeois. New, improved. Batteries not included. Walmart of the mind. So, imagine, I went out and started a company! I’m the traitor, the living fifth column. When Linda and I first moved to Richmond, I landed a nothing job in an antique store and noticed fast that the dealers went broke half the time; those who cashed in, as usual, were of administrative ilk, the ones who leased warehouses, divided them into cubicles and rented each cubicle to the desperate dealers. Plus they took a hefty commission on every sale. The dealers were screwed both rent- and commission-wise!

So I secured a bank loan – don’t ask me how I, fresh out of college, merited it – scouted around for a warehouse, found one in decent shape on a commercial stretch of Monument Avenue, and stuffed it with dealers in every conceivable kind of discarded treasure. I had one middle-aged lady who sold nothing but depression glass; another, a grizzled old man, baseball cards; a gay couple who specialised in fine art and, of all things, doilies; one creepy, recluse-like fellow who handled antique cigar labels. Talk about crazy. While I went home with the bacon, the dealers trudged out with a few scraps and bones.

Did I feel guilty? I refused to feel guilty. The business of America is business, and all that crap. We made so much money the first year, Linda quit her waitress job and opened a small nursery. She and plants got along fabulously. If Linda breathed on a seed, it sprouted the next day and soon blossomed into something serenely wondrous and bountiful. At this point she has two college students helping her out; one of them, a bearded Jesus-looking young man, reminds me of me seven years ago, and every now and then it occurs to me that Linda and this neo-hippie are getting it on. Does it bother me that my wife might be unfaithful? Of course it does. I keep my eyes open.

The day before Nellie and Sam arrived, we vacuumed and mopped floors, scoured the bathrooms, changed sheets on the two beds, crammed food into the refrigerator, even bought cases of wine and Samuel Adams. They planned to stay a week or so, and Nellie turned her gardens over to the two students. My assistant manager would take care of my business. I didn’t quite trust him and planned to make random appearances at the warehouse while Nellie and Sam took naps or walks or blissed out or needed to be alone. I did intend to smoke some for old times’ sake but not to the point of phase shift; maybe Nellie and Sam had toned down as well, though I doubted it, not after hearing their voices on the phone. They sounded exactly the way they sounded seven years ago. And I knew they sensed a tightness in my voice, the modest strain of surprise, apprehension. Repeating the past is always a bad idea. On the other hand, I longed to see them, and so did Linda.

If one could capture on celluloid the facial reactions of people who knew each other intimately meeting again for the first time after nearly a decade, what might such footage reveal? Delight? Horror? While seven years may seem an eye blink when you’re ensnared, they’re a vast chasm if you try to obliterate them, which is the point of reunions. The flesh slackens and wrinkles, hair thins, the lean torso turns ziggurat, blue clouds form under eyes a bit dimmer than before. Memory freeze-dries its phantoms. You note that a once cute little mole on the cheek has turned blobbish and hairy. So when the doorbell finally rang, Linda and I looked at each other for a long moment and made no move. When it rang again, we scampered, and suddenly, abruptly, there we all were, united again in space-time, hugging, kissing, laughing, sweating. Sam, in wrinkled shirt and khakis, looked great; he hadn’t changed a bit or perhaps he looked even rosier than I remember, and bigger. Had I shrunken a tad?

Nellie, oh, I felt wave patterns flow from her being; she was still radioactive. Black leather pants, the figure more rounded and thus even sexier, a tight halter, the upper mounds of her breasts exposed. The hair shorter but still below her shoulders. Two golden loops dangling from her earlobes, and a subtle platinum ring coiling out of one nostril. A new tattoo on the upper right forearm: a dolphin leaping out of the sea. No more granny glasses (She would later mention that laser surgery made her vision better now than when she was born.)

Of course, they were apprising Linda and me as well. We felt ant-like eyes crawl all over us. What did they see? No doubt, defects that had evolved, erosion, which our mirrors obscured from us, had grown used to. I knew I weighed a little more, had sprouted a few strands of grey, and cultivated the finer feet of crows. Linda, too, had gained some weight, but only four pounds or so; her face had hollowed out some, her lips seemed tauter. But if such impressions were being registered, Sam and Nellie didn’t seem to notice or care. They barged in, dropped their knapsacks to the floor, stretched, and took in the abode. Why did I feel so treacherous?

“Where’s your car?” I asked

Sam laughed. “We hitched, man. All the way from New Orleeeeeeans. We live in the Quarter and don’t need a car. Besides, we’re against cars.” He snorted a lot. “Poisoning the atmosphere. Megabucks for corporate interests. We walk or use bikes.”

I failed to mention at that moment that we had just bought a great, guzzling SUV, which I could justify because we always needed to transport Linda’s plants or cartons of stuff from the warehouse.

“Sit down, sit down, y’all,” Linda said. “We pulled all the sofas together so we can stretch out.”

They did sit but continued to silently take in the room, our possessions, the antiques, the aura of nouveau riche. I admit I squirmed a bit. I had replaced all the plastic light switch plates with fancy vintage brass. Suddenly they seemed out of place, even grotesque. You notice brass; plastic goes unseen.

“Looks like you found a gold mine, Jake. Ve-ry impressive. You own or rent?”

“Own,” I said. My words came out more clipped, abrupt, than usual. “Well, the bank owns. We pay the bank.”

“Yeah, we just rent. Don’t see any point to owning. Remember that book by Thoreau we read in English? ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.’ We figure if we want to split, we can just pack our bags.”

“Where are your shoes?” Linda asked.

We often went without shoes in the old days, so it seemed normal enough that Sam and Nellie were only wearing socks. But their shoes had disappeared.

“We didn’t want to mess up your floors,” Nellie laughed. “We don’t want to burden you. They’re outside.”

“No big deal,” Linda said. “Kind of cold without shoes right now.”

“We’re okay,” Nellie said in a tone that suggested, no demanded, let it go.

“I’m cooking a big pot of spaghetti tonight,” Linda said, “so you better prepare for an Italian feast. Garlic bread. Antipasto. The works.”

“Cool,” said Sam. Then: “Uh, where’s the bathroom? Do you mind?”

“Go down that hall, hang a right. You’ll see it. It’s the one with the toilet.”

“Yeah, right,” Sam said. I always liked that little growl in his voice.

He pulled a towel out of his duffel bag and proceeded down the hall.

“What’s with the towel?” Linda asked. “We have towels.”

“Oh, you know, we don’t like to burst into people’s houses and make a lot of extra work,” Nellie waved. “We bring our own towels wherever we go. Which reminds me, I’m going to take a smoke.”

“I’ll get an ashtray,” I said. In the old days, we used beer cans for ashtrays. Now I had lead crystal beauties.

“No, I’ll stand in the doorway. We can still talk. No dirty fumes in other people’s houses. That’s not fair.”

“Nellie,” Linda said, “that’s crazy. You can smoke in here. We don’t smoke any more, but you don’t have to stand in the doorway.”

“I insist,” Nellie said as she extracted the joint from a pocket in her leather pants. How anything could fit into one of those pockets, even a smashed little smoke, amazed me.

“You’re looking good, Nell,” I said as she moved toward the door.

“Like my ass?” she laughed, poking it out as if on exhibition.

My eyes met Linda’s. In the old days I could have pounced on those words, come up from behind, and shown her exactly how much I liked it. But something in Linda’s eyes warned swing low, sweet chariot, so I didn’t respond at all. Yet Linda herself did not hesitate to take in the sight. A perfect ass, yes, still, after all these years. Praise God from whom all blessings flow. Burnished leather on women has always weakened me.

I had noticed that when Sam bear-hugged Linda when they first arrived, she had stiffened up. And worse, I had stiffened as well. I didn’t want Sam near or alone with Linda. Had Linda and I become the dreary, boring burghers the four of us had once passed off as the living dead? Skirmishes on a psychic battlefield. Sam and Nellie were obviously up for reenactments of the good old lustful days; they exuded hormonal energy, even smelled like bodily fluids. Linda and I had wrinkled into dusty old prunes, which is not to say that I could simply whisk Nellie’s charms away with a straw broom. Suddenly I had a secret life, yearning for another woman in the very presence of a wife whom I adored. And I had no idea what Linda was thinking.

Nellie stood in the doorway, blowing Saturns outside as we made small talk.

“It’s so great to see you guys!” she effused. Her smile weakened me. “I see you’ve lost a little hair, Jake. Few silver strands in mine. Are we getting old?”

“Old is a concept,” Sam said, blasting back into the room. Sam always seemed everywhere at once.

“Yeah, right,” Linda laughed. “That’s what the mirror says every morning. Have y’all got into Oil of Olay yet?”

After a while Sam and Nellie decided to take a walk around the neighbourhood, stroll up the avenue, and check out the Civil War heroes.

“We’ll come, too,” I said, eager to get out of the house for a while. The house usually felt spacious and airy, but I was having a little trouble breathing.

“Oh no, no, no,” Nellie said, “I’m sure you all have work to do. We’re not just barging in and making you drop everything. Last thing we want to be is a burden.”

Five minutes after they left, Linda and I went up to take a nap. “We must be old,” I sighed. “They’re still the same. Here we are, tired, sneaking in a little sleep while they’re out and about town.”

Linda said nothing. She slid under the covers, placed the pillow over her head and lay still as a corpse. I lay beside her and listened to her breathe, rapidly at first, then still, still, the easy respiration of sleep. But just as I began to doze off, she said softly, “Sam’s getting a double chin. Nellie looks a little pale.” Then the curtain dropped and we zonked out cold.

They still hadn’t returned when we got up, so Linda went down to the kitchen and got out the big pots. I heard clanking, faucets running, cabinet doors slamming. She planned to cook a gigantic mound of pasta while I set the table and poured the wine and toasted the garlic bread. It’s all we ate back in college, spaghetti – easy, fast, a no-brainer. We had the table all set and the meal ready when Sam and Nellie came in carrying some white paper bags. “We found this little deli,” Sam said.

“I’ve got spaghetti,” Linda said, her jaw dropping ever so slightly.

“We don’t want to be a burden.” Nellie’s refrain. “You go ahead and eat and don’t waste a dime on us. We have these neat little sandwiches and salads.”

So we gathered round the table and ate, Linda and I the spaghetti, Sam and Nellie the baked tofu, cheese, and alfalfa sprouts, which Nellie claimed sanitised the intestines. “Death begins in the colon,” she laughed. “Got to keep it flushed. Pasta is like sludge. But, hey, I don’t want to spoil your meal. We bought some wine, too. This French Pinot Noir, loaded with antioxidants.”

Antioxidants?

“We have wine,” I said meekly.

Afterwards we retired to the living room, slouched on the sofas, and stared goofily at each other. Sam retrieved the inevitable plastic bag from his knapsack. “This is excellent stuff,” he said.

“We grow our own. Never know what you’re getting on the street. Organic, man.”

“Not laced with pesticides,” Nellie added.

The subtle superiority of it all.

He rolled a perfect joint, got it started, and passed it to Linda. Linda gazed at me with raised eyebrows.

“She can’t smoke anymore,” I said. “Paranoia. Me too, a little, but not like Linda.”

“That’s pretty common,” Nellie said. “All your old phobias and terrors start to emerge. The weed is like a catalyst. I know this guy in New Orleans who like goes into a coma when he smokes. It’s still great for Sam and me, thank God.” She offered me the joint. “Jake?”

“Yeah, I’m okay,” I said, sucking in a lungful, exhaling fast, coughing. My eyes watered.

“Wow, this is potent. You grow your own?”

“Beats the middleman,” Sam laughed. “We have this great skylight, and down there the humidity is so high, anything grows. All you need is some mud and little pots. We’re not dealers, though. It’s just for us. Which reminds me . . .”

Sam stretched and pulled out a wad of cash from his jeans. “For you,” he said, pushing it at me.

“What’s this?”

“Just helping you out with the expenses for having us.”

“Are you nuts? You’re our guests. I’m not taking any money from you.”

Sam grinned. “If you don’t, I’ll stick it in a drawer somewhere, and you’ll find it later. We insist.”

“Take the money, Jake,” Nellie said. She reached over and put her hand on my knee. Suddenly I felt zonked, warm, tingly, blasted with joy. The room tilted a bit; colours intensified; I was on my way.

“You guys!” I laughed. “What is this stuff we’re smoking? Laced with coke? Hey, I heard on the news they found an invisible universe. Imagine. Here we are in the visible universe and somewhere out there is an invisible one. What if we live there, and, you know, we’re like invisible? How could you tell which was which? What’s the real us?”

Nellie and Sam roared. “Jake, I believe you have entered the kingdom. How long has it been?”

Nellie floated over and eased herself onto my lap, her legs clutching my thighs vise-like, so that we faced each other. “Remember me?” she asked and rubbed her lips all over my face. She smelled like almond oil and oestrogen and desire.

I had lost track of Linda, though I sensed her disapproving aura. And vaguely I understood that Sam had made his move. He stood above her behind the sofa and massaged her shoulders. “Oh, that feels good,” I heard her moan. But I know her moans. This one was tentative. I smashed my lips onto Nellie’s and pawed at her breasts as she unbuttoned my shirt. “We’re invisible!” I cried and began to plummet into her primeval depths. “We’re geometric forms. Nobody can see us. This isn’t the universe.” I lingered over the delicate flesh coating her ribs. What splendid membrane. It sent flames through my palms. “Oh, oh,” I was reduced then to grunts. “Oh, oh.”

Then I heard Linda screaming at Sam. “I can’t do this,” she cried, “I can’t. It’s not the same. Stop it, I can’t – ”

My wife’s anguish jolted me instantly back into the visible universe, not some psychedelic phantom world, and I tumbled gracelessly off the sofa onto the floor, Nellie still half naked. “Hey,” I cried, “what’s happening. Sam? Linda, you okay?”

Sam grinned, and I don’t know if it was my angle or the effects of the homegrown, but he looked demonic. That easy grin, now the rictus of a skull. There was a skeleton in our living room, its finger bones groping for Linda. She had curled into a ball at the edge of the other sofa and was softly weeping. “Ease off, Sam,” Nellie said. She gathered herself together. Nellie could always read a situation. “They’re freaking out.”

“I’m sorry,” Sam said. “I thought – ”

“Maybe we should leave. We don’t want to be a burden,” Nellie mumbled. And at that moment I hated her. Sam came over and lifted me off the floor by my armpits. I hated that, too. Aren’t armpits sacred? A territorial deal.

“Hey, man,” he laughed, “the vibes are terrible. You okay? Weed is poison for you two now. No problem, amigo.”

“Not just the weed,” I mumbled. “A misunderstanding. I think you people came here to fuck us.”

An ominous silence ricocheted around the room. Then, “Duh?” from Nellie. And more tittering. “Hear that, Sam? We hitched all the way from New Orleans to fuck our friends. Some guests we are, eh? I think we should leave.”

Sam would do whatever Nellie asked. Without Nellie, he would have crumbled years ago. “Yeah, I guess,” he said. I thought I heard his bones creak.

I slid over on the other sofa and hugged Linda. “You all right, sweetheart?” No answer but she shuddered in my arms. “I swear to God I’m sorry. It’s not like it was. I couldn’t stand to think of you and Sam together. And look what I go and do! Please forgive me.”

Linda turned to face me. Her cheeks were swollen and splotchy, and tears poured out of her eyes. “Do you love me?” she asked pitifully.

“You know I love you.” I started to cry, too. “I love you more than everything.”

“More than Nellie?”

Nellie and Sam had been stuffing their junk into the knapsacks. “Jake doesn’t love me, Linda,” Nellie answered for me. “But we all used to love each other. I don’t know what’s happened here, but c’est la vie. I hope we weren’t a burden.”

Hearing it one more time incensed Linda; she reared up and cried, “No, you weren’t a fucking burden. I wish you had been. I wish you had used our towels. I wish you’d eaten our food. And smoked in the house. Well, you did, finally. Bravo. And didn’t make us feel like lepers. And please splotch mud on the floors. And act normal, for Christ’s sake.”

I could feel Nellie cringe, even with my face burrowed into Linda’s chest.

“Normal?” she laughed. “You call this normal? This house . . . what is it, Tudor-ersatz or something? What’s the cost per inch around here. All those creepy statues. This is how you live now? Jake was right. There’s an invisible universe. And you’ve moved to it. We’re out of here. But I swear we aren’t going mad or pissed off or offended. We’re just going. I wish none of this had happened.”

They did not slam the door. It’s as if they simply disappeared, and not a trace remained except a tiny roach in the ashtray. Suddenly I thought of this character I learned about in English class. Tithonus. An ash hanging in some jar. My mind was still altered, and I wondered if they had ever really been here.

“They actually smoked inside,” I said. “Maybe we didn’t give it a chance. They’re our best friends.”

“I don’t think so,” Linda said, stretching, relieved, “not now. What happened? Are we boring now? Old, dull, stuffy? Maybe we’ve become our parents. That’s not so bad, is it?”

“Who knows,” I said. “I’m just glad they’re gone. Do you think I should get in the car and offer to drive them to the bus station or airport or whatever?”

“And be a burden? No way, Jose. They’ve got their own thing worked out. You need to stay here with me. I’m on the verge of an anxiety attack.”

I love you, Linda,” I said, nuzzling my face into her neck. “You know that, right?”

“But you wanted to fuck Nellie.”

“Oh, man,” I sighed. “I’m not sure if I did or not. I would have, probably. It’s happened before and nobody minded. But I didn’t. Doesn’t that count?”

“It counts,” she said, and smiled at me for the first time since our guests arrived, “but only by default. You’d better watch your step, Don Juan.”

“They were quite a burden,” I laughed.

“Yet it’s like they were never really here. Like we imagined it all.”

I leaned back on the sofa, collapsed in sloppy relief, sloped my head over the backrest, and slid out of my loafers. “I’m not sure they were here. I’m still a little zonked, but . . . an invisible universe, imagine.”

“What’s that over there?” Beth asked.

“Where?”

“On the what-not, squashed under that old clock. When are you getting it fixed?”

I squinted, recognised, and groaned. “Oh no, it’s cash. Sam left the money after all. They were here.”

“You have to send it back.”

“I don’t know, I’ve got to think about it.”

“You have to send it back.”

“It would be like saying we’re through, we never, ever want to see you again. As it is, maybe there’s a chance.”

“You have to send it back.”

“Is that what you mean by watching my step? It’s a real bridge-burner.”

“Send it back.”

baseball crime friendship loneliness

EMPTY PROMISES

by Thomas Carlson • July 7, 2021July 7, 2021

He likes the feel of it, the snap of the mitt as the ball embeds itself in it. Occasionally he tosses the ball high in the air, a shallow fly to short, but it fails to deliver the same pop. Better to stay where he is, sitting on the front step, smacking the ball over and over and over again into his glove. His mind is blissfully empty, the rhythmic thwap a hypnotic medium, suspending time in a soft cocoon.

It’s the rustling of bicycle chains, the pealing of laughter, that pulls Leo from his trance. There’s a group of them, six or seven, whooping in delight as they pedal past him. Another gathering of the neighbourhood kids, heading to the fields behind Martin School to play kickball or capture-the-flag or hide-and-seek. Just the thought of it makes him miss his brother. He grips the ball, throws it into his glove.

A car drives by. A motorcycle. A truck slows to a crawl as it pulls into the driveway across the street. Cortos’ Market, it reads. From Our Door to Yours. He’s never seen it before, never seen any vehicles there. He pays attention. A man comes out of the house, greets the driver, takes the groceries back inside. Appears to be in a rush. Doesn’t see the boy across the street watching him.

Ball in glove. Thwap.

A week passes. The Cortos’ Market truck turns into the driveway across the street. He wonders what it would be like to have a visitor, even if it’s only once a week, even if it’s just a delivery man. The routine hasn’t changed: his neighbour comes out, takes the groceries, hurries back inside the house.

The truck exits the driveway, leaving in its wake a bluish-black plume of smoke as it heads up Summit Street toward its next customer. The exhaust has barely dissipated when a group of kids ride by with Wiffle balls and bats, racing by without so much as a glance in his direction. Today, of all days. He looks down at his glove, squeezes the ball inside.

His parents are home from work, locked away in their bedroom. Their routine the past few years, ever since cancer claimed Ben, as his counsellor at school likes to put it. Will they come out to make dinner? He hates himself for thinking this. Of course there will be dinner; when have they ever let him go hungry? The real question concerns dessert. Will there be a cake or cupcakes, candles, and singing? A further wave of self-contempt. Dinner should be enough.

He remains on the step for another fifteen minutes, then walks inside and makes his way to the kitchen. Empty, a box of Ronzoni ziti unopened on the counter. He feels a longing, knows it transcends hunger. The bowls are on the top shelf, so he brings a chair over to the cupboard. Grabs two, takes two spoons out of the drawer. Is generous with the ice cream, three scoops per bowl, and is about to leave when he stops. He places the bowls on the counter and opens the pantry. What he’s looking for is at eye level, in a Tupperware container between the tissues and the peanuts. Mom’s “famous” brownies, the most common obstacle to his parents’ repeated promise of a health kick. Just one more in a long line of empty promises.

He places a brownie carefully in each bowl, then returns to the pantry to make sure the Tupperware lid is closed tight, that the air is out. A minute later he crosses the street and rings the doorbell, carefully balancing the bowls as he does so.

The shade pulls back first, then the door opens. He’s of an indiscriminate age, older than the boy’s parents, younger than his grandparents. He appears neither surprised nor bothered to see him. “Where’s your glove?”

The boy lights up. The man has watched him, has seen him. “It’s at home.” He hands him a bowl. “This is for you.”

The man looks past him for a second, scanning the street. “Why don’t you come in?” It’s dark inside the house. The air is rich, fragrant. It smells like Espositos’, the Italian bakery on Hamline. “So what’s this for?”

“I figured you might be lonely.”

“Why’s that?”

“No one visits you and you never leave.”

The man says nothing, just nods, and in that silence a million truths are expressed.

“And it’s my birthday.”

“It is? Today?”

The boy nods.

“Well happy birthday…”

“Leo.”

The man holds out his hand, looking at him, looking through him, it feels, as the boy’s hand finds his. “Happy birthday, Leo.”

How long has it been since he’s heard these words? Tears threaten his eyes, and he has to look away.

“What’s your name?” the boy asks a minute later.

A beat. “Paul. Paul Lavery.”

They sit on a sofa and begin working on their bowls. A TV the size of a car hangs from the wall opposite them. “So what did you get for your birthday?” Paul asks.

“Nothing.” Leo finishes his brownie in one bite, takes his time chewing, grateful for the quiet it offers.

Paul places his bowl on the coffee table in front of them and stands up. “I don’t know about you, but I think we could use a couple sodas to wash down that dessert.” A minute later he returns with two root beers. He hands one to Leo. It has an envelope wrapped around it, secured by a rubber band.

“What’s this?” the boy asks.

“For you.”

He opens the envelope, stares first at the hundred-dollar bill, then at Paul.

“It’s for your birthday.” Paul smiles. “You didn’t think I forgot, did you?”

Leo sits on the front step, shuffling the ball in and out of his glove. His mother pauses in the driveway, waves to him while she waits for the garage door to open. He waves back, listens as the door closes again and the garage and the house and her loss swallow her up. Maybe it’s seeing her, maybe it’s not, but the itch is stronger now and he can’t wait any longer. He goes inside and climbs the stairs to his bedroom, pulls the box of cannoli out from under his bed. He’d waited until this afternoon, when he was home alone after school, as if it mattered, to walk downtown to Espositos’. Twelve dollars. He’d used his own money, cash he’d earned from shovelling driveways and walking Mrs. Parker’s dog after she had her hip replaced. He didn’t want to use the gift from Paul. That he wants to keep forever.

He rings Paul’s doorbell and waits. Once again the curtain pulls back before the door opens. “Leo.” A quick glance, left and right. “Come in.”

Leo hands him the box.

“Let me guess,” Paul says, lifting the top and eyeing the pastries inside. “It’s your birthday again.”

The boy smiles, holds up his glove. “I remembered this time. Want to have a catch?”

Paul hesitates. “Okay. But out back.”

The backyard is fenced in, creating a secluded haven. Leo looks around, expecting a dog that isn’t there. “I was going to bring my dad’s glove, but he’s a lefty.”

Paul catches the ball barehanded, tosses it back. “Just as well.”

“What do you mean?”

This time Paul throws a pop fly in the air, and even at ten years of age Leo understands it’s to buy himself a second or two. “Probably best not to tell them about me.”

“I was wondering when you’d be back,” Paul says.

Warmth fills Leo’s chest as he hurries into the house. He’s been thinking about me. He wants to ask Paul if he has children, but there’s so much wrapped up in that question that scares him. Before the thought trails off into the air unspoken, Paul’s back is to him and he’s walking away. “There’s something I want to show you,” he announces over his shoulder. “It just arrived.”

A minute later he returns with an unopened box. He slices the tape with a pocket knife and pulls back the flaps. First a baseball glove, big, dark leather. Then a pair of Boston Red Sox hats, navy blue with a red B. He hands one to Leo. “This is for you.”

“Let me guess,” the boy says, a slight catch to his voice despite his smile. “It’s my birthday again.”

Two days later, it’s Friday. Teachers drone on; the clock torments him from one class to the next. He left his glove and ball, his new Sox cap, on top of his made bed before leaving for school. An easy grab when he drops off his backpack.

The kids in the front of the bus see it first. The driver slows to a stop a few doors from his house, the street barricaded by police cars parked at haphazard angles. His throat goes dry. He jumps out of his seat and asks the driver to let him out here. She does, then backs the bus up and eventually turns down Winchester Avenue. Leo stands in his front yard, transfixed by the scene across the street. Watches for what feels like several minutes, confused, frightened. Please, God, no. Eventually the door opens and Paul is led outside, his hands cuffed behind his back. His eyes are vacant. Not Leo’s; his are stinging as tears pour violently down his cheeks. He doesn’t hesitate. He runs over before the police can stop him and hugs his friend, neither of them saying a word.

Everything is surreal, unsteady, like he’s walking atop a waterbed. He drags himself out of his room at nine the next morning after a sleepless night. His parents are sitting at the table drinking coffee and reading the paper. “Hey, Leo, grab a seat and get a load of this.” Like they’re a family that does this sort of thing on a Saturday morning. The words float just out of reach; he can make out only snippets. Anthony Dinofrio. Extortion. Flight risk.

Everything is surreal.

He needs to use Paul’s money after all. He climbs in the taxi, gives the driver the address.

“What’s out there?”

The question catches him off guard; he doesn’t know how to answer. My friend.

It’s not a far trip, and before he knows it they’re pulling into the driveway. He’s never been here before, and the sight of it overwhelms him. Brick walls and barbed wire. Towers surveilling the grounds. Scary. He pays the driver, waits for his change, climbs out. The guard hesitates a split second before ushering him in. Leo’s good at reading people, a skill born from experience, from years spent on the periphery. He pegs the guard easily enough. Pity.

In through a double set of doors, the second refusing to open until the first closes. Cameras mounted in the corners watching him. He eventually reaches a receptionist’s desk, where a heavyset woman sits behind a sliding glass window. She does a double take, mirroring the guard’s expression. “Can I help you?”

“I’m here to see” – he’s been rehearsing the name all week, but it still sounds strange coming off his tongue – “Anthony Dinofrio.”

“And you are?”

“A friend.”

She removes her glasses, exhales a deep breath. “Only adults are allowed to visit.”

“Please,” he begs.

“I’m sorry, kid,” she says, not unkindly, “but rules are rules.”

He turns away, doesn’t want her to see.

“If you give me your name, I can tell him you came.”

He lies in bed, unable to sleep. The day has finally arrived, and armed with that truth, time slows to a halt. He eventually gets up and throws on his cap. He lays everything – the envelope, his glove (no ball), the sign he’s made – on the bed before tiptoeing to the kitchen for a silent breakfast. He’s memorized the T map (red line to Park Street, green line to Kenmore) and the schedule, knows exactly when he needs to leave the house.

He can’t possibly wait that long.

Summit Street is empty at this hour. He wears his glove on his left hand, carries the sign in his right. He holds it backwards, the side with the writing facing his body. It’s not that he’s embarrassed by it or ashamed of it; it’s just that it’s private, something personal between him and Paul. The envelope sits safely in his front pocket, but he stops every few minutes to make sure. If his dad were here he could hold the tickets for him. Not an option; Leo couldn’t risk asking him, couldn’t risk the disappointment. He reaches the T stop, buys a token, waits by the platform with his fellow passengers. When the train arrives it’s empty, and he finds a single seat. Reads his sign. Checks the envelope.

By the time they reach Park Street, the car is full and he’s grateful to be getting off. Most everyone else disembarks as well, and he follows a sea of humanity up the stairs and over to the green line. Even though he’s early, a wave of panic – will he make it on time? – washes over him, but multiple trains come in succession and he’s able to get on the second one. It’s packed with passengers, many wearing Sox hats and shirts. An older woman sits by herself and he shimmies into the seat next to her. He avoids eye contact, stares across the aisle at a poster for a local MBA program.

“Leo? Is that you?”

He looks at the woman next to him. Swallows around the lump in his throat. One of the third-grade teachers at his school, the one he wished he’d had last year. “Hi, Mrs. Lewis.”

“Are you alone?”

A single bead of sweat trails down his side.

“Do your parents know you’re here?”

The lie would be harmless enough, would bring the conversation to a merciful end, but he can’t get himself to tell it.

She fishes through her pocketbook. “Leo, can I have your mom or dad’s number? I need to talk to one of them.”

“I’m fine, Mrs. Lewis. Honestly.”

“I would feel much better if I could talk to your mom or dad.”

Kenmore, next stop.

Leo stands up, looks her in the eye. “It was nice to see you, Mrs. Lewis. I’m sorry if I caused you any trouble.”

It takes a while for the passengers to disembark, but eventually he’s outside, two feet on the ground, breathing fresh air. The crowd is carried up the street as if on an escalator, and Leo experiences a sense of belonging that sends a chill down his spine. He wipes his eyes with his sleeves and then looks up. Up ahead, above the throng of people and the buildings lining the street, Fenway Park rises into view. A thrumming in his chest, a tingling in his fingertips, he hears everything with piercing clarity. A car horn honking in the distance. A kid next to him snapping his fingers. A cacophony of voices competing to be heard above the brouhaha. Tickets anyone? And: Get your programs here. And: Soxhatsshirtssweatshirts. Someone yells Paul’s name and he freezes. Two guys are smiling at him; they each raise a beer in salute and yell, “Go Sox,” as they walk by. Leo looks down, realizes his sign is facing out. He smiles and waves, but the two men are gone. He turns his sign back around before continuing on his way.

When he reaches the gate, he hands a ticket to the attendant. He then pushes his way through the turnstile and follows the signs to his section. An usher guides him to his seat, and with each step they descend, it becomes a little more real. Closer and closer to the field, until they stop at the second row. “You got a great seat, kid. Enjoy the game.”

He puts his glove on the empty seat next to him and takes in the scene. The Green Monster. Pesky’s Pole. The red seat in the right field bleachers, where the longest home run in Fenway’s history landed. Players are coming in from the outfield, their stretching and jogging and pregame rituals coming to a close. The grass is so green, is cut so perfectly into crisscrossing squares. He wonders how long it takes to mow the entire field, who the lucky guy is that gets to do that.

He leans his sign against the front of the adjacent seat. He then opens the envelope to put his ticket back in. The piece of paper inside is folded in thirds, and Leo pulls it out and unfolds it, smoothing it on his lap. By now he can recite the note from memory, but he doesn’t care. He reads it one more time.

Leo,

As you already know, my name is not Paul Lavery. I’m sorry I lied to you about that, but I felt like I had no choice. I swear it’s the only lie I told you; everything else was true. I loved your visits, I loved playing catch, I love brownies and ice cream and cannoli. The truth is, I liked being Paul Lavery better than I ever liked being Anthony Dinofrio. Even if only for a short time, you made Paul a better person.

They told me you came to visit me here. I can’t tell you how much that means to me, how much I wish I could have seen you. It got me thinking, and I came up with an idea. The tickets are for this Saturday’s game. The seats are right behind home plate, second row. The game’s on TV, and I plan on watching the entire thing. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best I could come up with. I can’t wait to see you Saturday.
Your friend,
Paul

A roar erupts from the crowd as the Red Sox take the field to warm up. Leo returns the letter to the envelope and places it back in his pocket. Directly in front of him, the catcher crouches into his stance and readies himself. Leo closes his eyes, listens for the thwap of his mitt. Eventually he opens his eyes again. When he does, a cameraman walks past him, panning the crowd. Leo reaches for his sign, makes sure it’s facing the right way, and holds it up.

Editor's Pick, Friendship Issue, Letters from the Editor

MAKE THE SALE

by James Kennedy • July 7, 2021July 7, 2021

Loud music filled the room, making it hard to hear anything else. The neon club smelled like sweat and chemicals. I wished I’d put the drugs somewhere less awkward than tucked into the waistband of my corduroys like I’d seen in the movies. Not my drugs, technically, but Zoe’s drugs.

Until that moment, I’d never actually been to a club, or even a party. Never had time to “expand my social circles,” as my mom would say, mostly because my parents made me study on Friday nights. Zoe always promised to take me out sometime to be my wing woman. She was my best friend, even if she was way different. I was obsessive about my grades, a middle-income kid from the suburbs with fast feet that earned me a scholarship at an elite-ish East Coast college. Zoe skipped class, smoked cigarettes, and joked about dropping out to start a punk rock band. I never told my parents about Zoe. They would’ve disowned me after taking one look at her tattoos and mane of bleach-dyed hair. Honestly, I loved that Zoe didn’t care about anything and that she thought it was cool I played the violin. She gave off an aura of zen that pacified my anxiety when we’d hang out to talk about funny, wild hypotheticals instead of college applications and assignment deadlines.

Anyway, Zoe would sell pills on the side to help her mom out and make some extra income because “real jobs are lame.” Her mother couldn’t afford rent the last semester of our senior year, especially when Zoe got sent off to court-enforced rehab after she was caught smoking more than just cigarettes on school property. So, she dialled me on a payphone from the hospital and asked for my help.

I’d never taken any drugs, per se, but I was up to the task. I trusted Zoe, but I also didn’t want to get booked and lose my scholarship. Zoe just laughed. She told me to keep my cool, be straight up, and I’d be just fine ’cause nobody would suspect someone like me.

I really thought that it wouldn’t be too hard to sell them for her, plus it would add some flavour to the summer of my senior year. But by the time I actually walked to the front door of her mom’s place, I was sweating bullets. Glancing over my shoulder for cops, I pulled a fat plastic package from the second potted plant on the right, just where Zoe said it would be. I felt uncertain about Zoe’s advice, but I followed her instructions to the address that I’d scribbled onto a sticky note. The package sat shotgun and my stomach churned while I drove across town, staying well below the speed limit.

I ended up in a seedy club with a handful of truckers tossing dollars to strippers at eleven o’clock in the morning. I waited to meet “some tall guy in a hoodie” while wearing corduroys and a collared shirt, drugs crammed into my pants and no way to back out, all just to do her a favour because I really liked Zoe. Not liked-liked, but I did like her a lot. As a friend. Obviously.

Someone cleared his throat behind me, and a tall guy in a hoodie asked if I was Zoe. The guy stared me down before I snapped out of my trance and nodded yes. He asked me why my parents had given me a girl name, and I told him that they had hoped for a girl and didn’t want to change it. A look of confusion washed over the guy’s face, but he shrugged it off. He asked what I was selling, and I told him that I had a lot of blue pills and pink pills and some pills that were orange circles. The guy squinted like he was trying and failing to figure out if I was being serious, so I threw in a light laugh. He loosened up a little with a chuckle, and I thanked God.

The guy ushered me to a back room. He sat me down next to a tiny poker table covered in partially full bottles of Coors sitting on cracked Radiohead CDs instead of coasters. He took a sip absentmindedly and gestured to pass him the goods. I tugged the package out from my pants, and the guy barely hid his disgust, asking if I could actually just set it on the table. Before I could offer to wipe it off with my shirt, the guy flipped open a pocketknife and cut into the package. Zoe had told me to not let him do that. You don’t let him touch a thing and step out that door ’til money’s in your hands, she had said. So, I demanded the guy give me the cash and give it to me soon. I realised after the words left my mouth that I may have been a little forceful. The guy shot me a long, hard glare, but he eventually pulled some crumpled bills from his pocket and slapped them onto the poker table.

I watched with bated breath and questioned whether I should bail. The guy prodded the tightly wrapped bags of rainbow pills with his knife and spoke to me, but I missed what he said so I asked him, “What?” The guy cracked a smile and asked if I was a cop. I told him of course I wasn’t, so then the guy said okay and asked if I wanted to count. When I said, “Count what?” the guy furrowed his brow and stopped poking the bag. Rubbing the blade between his fingers, he asked if I was dead sure I wasn’t a cop, and I told him that I definitely was before correcting myself to say no, I actually wasn’t, like I actually wasn’t a cop. The guy then asked why I was dressed like I was going ballroom dancing. I tapped my fingers on the side of my chair, trying to steel my nerves before I finally decided to get it off my chest and told him the truth: I was going to a violin recital after this.

The guy asked if I was high or something. I said that I definitely wasn’t, but he seemed uncertain and my stomach felt like lead. I wanted to just melt into the floor, forget the cash, leave the drugs and ditch, but something pulled me back. A bearded man with an earring popped out from the doorframe and asked the guy who the fuck I was. The guy stuttered that I was Zoe, obviously, to which the earring man said that he must be blind or stupid. I said thank you to both of them, my hip knocking into the table as I stood to exit.

I froze. A bottle near the edge teetered before spilling directly on the guy’s crotch, another few smashing onto the floor. The guy cursed like a sailor and threatened to shove my head so far up my own ass that I’d suffocate. In an instant of thoughtless bravery, my heart thudding like a drumline, I snatched the cash from the table, stepped over the broken glass, and bolted out of the back room like my life depended on it. The earring guy reached into his jacket pocket to pull out I-don’t-even-wanna-think what and before he could yell at me again, I was back into the daylight and I went straight to my car. Tires squealing, I came out of the parking lot so fast that I thought I might pass out from the acceleration.

In case you’re wondering, I made it to my violin concert. I played Canon in D minor and got a standing ovation from a room full of parents. I hopped off stage right after and dialled Zoe on the nearest payphone. Smiling into the receiver, she picked up immediately. I told her that I’d survived like she said and the deal was done. Zoe whooped and hollered loud enough that I heard a nurse tell her sharply to quiet down. She told me in a whisper that I was just full of surprises and she was seriously so proud of me. My heart sang, and I promised to drop the wad of cash at the second potted plant. Zoe laughed and said she’d see me real soon.

I waited and waited, but Zoe didn’t make it out of the hospital until the very end of summer. By then, I’d already left for college and arrived on campus feeling like I’d won the battle yet lost the war, happy to have done my part but stuck on the times we had missed. I did get a postcard during my first week, though, my heart lifting when I saw it was from her. The postcard came with a photograph of Zoe, grinning and carefree with an arm wrapped around her mom, a lipstick kiss stuck to the back and scrawled note, a thank you with a promise that if I was ever back in town, she would definitely take me out sometime.

drug deal friendship

EDITOR’S LETTER: FRIENDSHIP ISSUE

by Eric Akoto • July 7, 2021July 7, 2021

Romanticising friendship comes easily. Friends are those special companions who aren’t family but, at their best, sustain us in similar ways; and, unlike one’s birth family, they are chosen, which also speaks to the greater freedoms and solidarity that friendships afford. The history buried deep in the word friend, related as it is to both love and free, should come as no surprise.

As with all human relationships, the reality of friendship is complex and varied. We have BFFs who last for less time than the latest teenage fad. We can become friends on Facebook at the click of a button and can unfriend with the same ease. There are friends with benefits, frenemies, and bromances, and there are fair-weather friends and friends in high places. And, inevitably, there are toxic friendships.

The 21 stories and essays in Litro Magazine’s Friendship issue show the complexity and variety of this universal, human relationship – the joys that friendships bring as well as the pain when friendships go awry. In “Guests,” four friends who have grown apart realise they cannot rekindle their former relationship. In “We Leave, We Return, We Leave Again,” the narrator questions how well he knew a friend who has died. “Who’s Your Favourite Monkee?” asks whether we can turn our tormentors into our friends. “Insights at LiquorLand,” “Empty Promises,” and “Bric-a-Brac American” explore cross-generational camaraderie. “Routine” and “That Summer” speak to the complications that sexual desire can bring to a friendship. And “Partners” delves into the limits of friendship and the impact of time and bad choices.

Like good friends, these stories and essays are in conversation with each other but also with the pieces in Litro’s last digital-only issue, on the theme of loneliness. Whereas there the disconnect between people predominated, the Friendship issue shows that, despite everything that can go wrong with friends, our instincts for friendship are durable, necessary, and hopeful.

friendship

1/16, 1/32, 0

by Jake Zawlacki • July 4, 2021August 1, 2021

According to my dead Grandpa, I’m 1/16 Cherokee.

“Yeah, I’m Cherokee,” she said to me from the passenger seat. We were young and driving and looking for a place to sin in the dark.

“Come on, how would you know that?” I ask, skeptical of White people claiming more than what was already theirs. As if we need more.

“My grandma was a quarter.”

I look out the window away from her to the hanging streetlights. Then back.

“I mean, all of us in the west, aren’t we all a little part native? Like, in a bad way?”

But now she looks away irritated, her arms crossed over, her legs straight in front of her in the car, not Indian-style.

“I guess I’m just saying, are you really Cherokee?” She’s not listening, but I need to say this. “Do you identify as Cherokee? Do you live the life of a Cherokee? Do you understand anything about what it’s like to live like that? To have people hate you because of who you are? To wish you didn’t exist?”

She sighed and shook her head.

“Because I don’t.”

I kept driving.

He was born on an Oklahoma Indian Reservation. Leighton Cleo Halpain. Son of Solon Tilden Halpain and an unknown woman. Born on the same year as the state itself: 1907. 1/2 Cherokee.

1/32

According to my dead Great Grandmother, I’m 1/32 Cherokee.

She tried to research her husband, Leighton, but it was always a dead end. “She traced her parents to BC,” my mom told me, but she couldn’t get past that reservation in Oklahoma.

Leighton’s father murdered Leighton’s mother. My great great grandmother. Maybe she was half Cherokee, or full Cherokee, but I can’t think of anything besides alcohol that would have caused that. I imagine her face and her cheekbones look like they’d cut through her skin they’re that sharp. She couldn’t have smiled a lot, not with being married to a drunk cowboy who would have beat her every night. Just like his son Leighton would beat his children, my Papa, my Great Aunts.

I want to write that how he killed her was cowardly. I imagine he just shot her, no dramatic confrontation, no nose to nose anger at their tough land in a tough state. Just a shot. A trigger. Him just sitting there with a half-emptied bottle of something brown and cheap and her walking into his drunken world.

I want to write that that’s not how it happened. That actually, the old man had hit his son with an open palm and it was the last time he’d do it.

“Oh yeah?” he would say, standing from some rickety wooden chair, creaking with release, “You sure ‘bout that?”

And she would stand there, over her son, her dark hands covering his white face, and she’d say, “Yeah. That’s right.” Then she’d run from the two-room shack of their home and out to the small barn covering the horses and tackle and guns. She’d fling open the wooden box and grab it, place the butt against her thigh, and slide two shells into the cracked barrels. She’d snap the shotgun close and walk back into the house, but Solon would already have his pistol out in a shaking hand, his face mean and red.

She’d look down to her son sitting on the floor crying, and she’d look up at her husband standing there with a trembling barrel pointed at her. And she’d raise the barrel up, her straight black strands hanging over her face like tiny icicles, and he’d shoot her. The shot would tear him out of his glaze and his eyes would open wide staring at the blood darkening her bosom, the cries of their son on deaf ears in the wake of the gunshot.

“There’s going to be a race war up on the Res,” he said nodding. “I’m telling you, people aren’t going to put up with this.”

I shook my head and shot the basketball. “You really think so, huh?”

He passed it back to me. “Yeah, seriously.”

I shot it again.

We switched positions and I passed it to him. I thought of Dudds and how he was always cool to me, but how he had that side. I remembered that kid who moved schools because Dudds overheard him talking shit and said he’d kill him. But he only smiled at me, whenever he showed up for class, broad and tall and lumbering. Always smiling, but always with that smile that hid something, or maybe I’m just imagining it.

I pass the ball back to him and think of what he said. “Dudds chopped him up in pieces and burned him in his car. Like a psychopath.”

It was true. They found burned remains in a car, but the news never said if he chopped him up like a serial killer. I wonder if he did, Dudds, with that big smile hiding something.

I wondered if he cut him up in 32 pieces.

According to my Great Aunt, none of us are Cherokee.

It’s a relief. It’s a relief to think that I don’t need to claim anything more than I have already, than my blood has. It’s a relief that I won’t be able to swindle myself into free health care or casino money from people my other people had murdered and thieved and silenced.

It’s a relief that that murder didn’t happen. That it was just an old legend of Cowboys vs. Indians, even if they were married. She died in California, not Oklahoma. And her hair wasn’t black, it was blonde.

I’m glad I can’t even feign ownership of this land, my lineage going back to serfs under Czars and peasants under lords. Or maybe they were lords in Hillmorton, England in the 1350s. Maybe they were Viking Chieftains crossing the Atlantic with Erik the Red.

But they weren’t Cherokee.

Or maybe they were.

Blood cherokee lineage

Central Park nature New York City Wilderness

CENTRAL PARK AS YOSEMITE

by Helen Schary Motro • July 3, 2021July 3, 2021

Central Park was the Yosemite of my childhood. Climbing its black rocks flecked with silver mica was akin to scaling Half Dome. Sledding hills were mountainsides, Stuart Little’s sailboat pond vast as a glacial lake.

To my child’s eye it exuded the tension of a tangled Black Forest, full of dark woods and unexplored corners. Like the Badlands, Central Park was somewhere you entered at your own risk. Hide and seek held out the mystery of Hansel and Gretel, regardless that home base might be the statue of Daniel Webster. Its own horses galloped through, even if they did bed down for the night in Claremont Stables instead of at a hitching post in Nevada.

Central Park had the big brassy quality Carl Sandburg extolled in Chicago. It wasn’t prissy. It didn’t have park benches named after millionaires. Its old wrought iron bridge looked rickety. Like traversing a precarious suspension bridge over a Colorado gorge, crossing it took guts. The park maintenance men in their visored caps doggedly spearing candy wrappers with pointed sticks were heroes waging a battle lost from the start.

Unlike aristocratic ice-skating in Rockefeller Center, the Wollman rink in Central Park was of the people. Hot chocolate cost a quarter, and the ice looked as crowded as Weegee’s photos of Coney Island in July. Walking back home across the park, ice skates slung over our shoulders, wet socks freezing our feet, my friend and I pooled our cash for rides on the deserted wintertime carousel. With cold red hands the operator turned on the music for two lone little girls.

Yet to a city child, Central Park still offers the Wild West a stone’s throw away from the Essex House. Thirsty from an afternoon of running, a concession stand beckons like a little house on the prairie, and on the first sparkling morning after a snowstorm the virgin drifts come waist high on a child.

It is populated by the creatures of the wild. Pigeons are its eagles. Squirrels divide the turf and reign as uncrowned kings. Holden Caulfield’s ducks circle its ponds; a bronze dog stands watch. On an unseasonably warm morning in January the seals in the zoo sunbathe, lolling in nirvana atop rocks thoughtfully provided by the zookeepers.

If winds in Central Park are never as piercing as the blasts howling off the Hudson onto Riverside, when the sign over Columbus Circle lights up nineteen degrees, the only people who feel warm are toddlers in quilted snowsuits begging to climb the jungle gym just one last time.

But no matter how low the thermometer, there is one secret protected spot where the sunbeams hit with an intensity reminiscent of the Caribbean. No winds reach the bench facing south which hugs the outer wall of the tennis house beside the public courts on 94th Street Taking fifteen minutes shelter there at noon on a winter solstice warms up enough to unbutton a coat and walk on feeling sun kissed.

Forsythia bushes anticipating spring are so hardy they need no trimming courtesy of the New York Conservancy. Minuscule buds start appearing in February. Magnolia trees inside the park wall are busy dreaming up the white blooms of April even as their branches are laden with winter snow. At their pinnacle in May, legions of blossoming cherry trees rival the magic of Pissarro or Van Gogh.

And for Big Sky country in the middle of Manhattan, urban children have only to travel as far as Sheep Meadow, two thousand two hundred miles east of the Rockies.

Earth science fiction visitors from outerspace

BROOD XXV

by Christopher De Pree • July 2, 2021July 2, 2021

Photo by Kevin Gill (copied from Flickr)

They fell to the Earth 25 million years ago, dandelion fluff from another star, designed to shed their outer layers like discarded snake skin as they hit the atmosphere. When the planet’s carbon dioxide-rich air slowed them enough, their black crystalline wings unfurled like great parachutes, and they glided toward the surface. The birds and apes, camels and whales of the Oligocene era, looked up as vast shadows darkened the skies.

The visitors touched down in grasslands on all of the continents. The ground shook like an earthquake as each one landed. There were hundreds of thousands of them, each one generating gale force winds as it inhaled carbon dioxide.

They drank in the Earth’s rich atmosphere and the planet began to cool. The visitors knew instinctively what they had to do. They used their metallic mandibles to burrow into the Earth. The plains of Africa, Europe, Asia, and North America shook with their digging. Day by day they disappeared deeper and deeper into the planet where they would wait.

They slept deep in the bedrock of the Earth. Above them mountain ranges reared up, species came and went, glaciers moved, and one branch of primates proliferated. Slowly at first, and then faster and faster, these primates replenished the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

And then one day, there was a sound like thunder in the distance.

THE RBG VOTING RIGHTS ACT: REAUTHORIZATION & AMENDMENTS ACT OF 2021

by Read Cook • June 29, 2021June 29, 2021

117th Congress

An Act
To amend the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to revise the criteria for determining which States, entities and persons are subject to the Act’s preclearance requirements, to establish voter registration protocols, and for other purposes.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the “Ruth Bader Ginsburg Voting Rights Act Reauthorization and Amendments Act of 2021.”

SEC. 2. CONGRESSIONAL FINDINGS.
(a) PURPOSE.—The purpose of this Act is to ensure that the right of all citizens to vote is preserved and protected as guaranteed by the Constitution.
(b) FINDINGS.—The Congress finds the following:
(1) In the eight years since the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder, several states have enacted voter suppression laws to prevent minorities from casting meaningful votes, surprising no one but Chief Justice John Roberts.
(2) In 2016, a large percentage of American voters decided it would be fun to let the Babadook be President. He was nearly reelected.

SEC. 3. COVERAGE OF STATES.
(a) Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (52 U.S.C. 10303(b)) is amended to read as follows:

“(b)(i) All post-Shelby changes to the respective election laws of Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia are hereby invalidated. Any future proposed changes to the election laws of these states must be precleared by the President of the Southern Poverty Law Center, Stacey Abrams, and Michelle Obama (collectively, the “Panel”).

(ii) Each of the States listed in subsection (b)(i) is hereby penalized the use of one Senator for a period of six intervening Elections. The unused Senators shall be reassigned to the recently established States of Puerto Rico, District of Columbia, Top California, West Philly, Chicago, and Austin.

(iii) John Roberts is hereby barred from entering all National Parks.”

SEC. 4. TEST OR DEVICE; REGISTRATION Application.
Section 4(c) of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (52 U.S.C. 10303(c)) is amended by inserting the following:

“(cc)(1): Notwithstanding anything else in this Act regarding the prohibition of the use of tests and devices for the purpose or with the effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on account that a person does not “possess good moral character,” the following individuals must complete a voter registration application before each Election in which they wish to vote:

(A) persons owning timeshares, commemorative coin collections, or MyPillow® Mattress Toppers;

(B) persons who carry a pocket-size copy of the Constitution with them at all times;

(C) past or present members, shareholders, or representatives of:
(i) poorly-regulated militias;
(ii) Mar-a-Lago;
(iii) The Federalist Society;
(iv) or for-profit colleges;

(D) anyone who has ever posted the following:
“Thanks for the tip to circumvent Facebook… Works!! I have a whole new profile. I see posts from people I didn’t see anymore. Facebook’s new algorithm picks the same people – around 25-who will see your posts. Hold your finger anywhere in this post and click ‘copy.’ Go to your page where it says, ‘what’s on your mind.’ Tap your finger anywhere in the empty field. Click paste. This is going to circumvent the system. Hello new and old friends!’”

(E) All persons owning both a tiki torch and a copy of Mein Kampf;

(F) Tucker Carlson.

“(cc)(2): Prospective voters covered by Section (cc)(1) shall complete the registration application forms as promulgated by the Federal Election Commission and send the completed and notarized forms via United States Postal Service in an envelope showing such a dated cancellation mark which is not later than the three hundred fiftieth day before the next ensuing primary, general or special election.

(cc)(3): All applications timely received shall be reviewed and approved by the Panel, just as soooooooon as it can get around to it.

law politics rights voting

gay love Mutsuo Takahaski time

ONLY CHILD GRAYSON

by Rebecca Pyle • June 27, 2021June 27, 2021

Corridors. All mystery lies in corridors. Constructed buildings, the channels between rooms, where secrets rise high and vaporous and secret. Conception is corridors, desperate racing sperm traveling to the vault. In your walk down the hall or up the hall is determination; in the hallways, in the corridors, you formulate your resolve.

The spy hones his intent as he approaches the place. The king sees the corridor as the reprieve before and after appearance. Duty. Streets are corridors to the town square or the museum; in the house, the hallways and walkways around the house are corridors, leading to the outdoor courtyard. If your clothes, Grayson has noticed, look fine in the corridors they will shine in their relative repose in the room or the courtyard.

Well, thinks Grayson, at the end of trips: I knew by the time I reached the end of the corridor what I was going to say. Knew what I would say at the art museum, in my head, to the paintings.

Grayson was lonely. But he was wearying of art museums. They are a garden full of seed packets, he thought.

Grayson is a code name for the famous son of a famous author, who became what he most hated, which someone he knew said he was doomed to do. What or who do we hate most? We will become it. But then Grayson’s father died and he did not hate, so much, that his father had been famous, as he had been an author. Grayson began to understand it had been his father’s way of fending of fears of death. Or war. Or living. All of it, maybe.

Grayson would order food in the corridor-shape of a narrow London restaurant. The Corridor would be a fine name for the restaurant, he thinks.

It was curious to him that she would want him. It was troubling; who would want him? He was too many puzzles fully formed. Or half-formed. Or quarter-formed. Grayson was not a gray son; he was an always new son, he was an always old son. Poor son. Rich son. So forth. It all made a dull song with a fading ending.

Increasingly, since his father’s death, Grayson preferred standing on bridges. Instead of the mystery of corridors.

Time to move on to bridges.

Struts, the angular struts, the suspending lines were the excitement and the power of math and geometries. We can hide our souls in those sharp, responsible triangles. If you have any thoughts, he thought, you know them most sharply on the bridge. There you know what has been a spoilage of time. You choose to move on to things, or you choose to abandon things, as you stand on a bridge, though you do not consciously pick or choose among your ideas. All your ideas are buried somewhere in your head; but it is as if the processes of making dependable bridge-making metals happen in your head. As the metal suffered the heat and the melting and the mixing with other metals—in Thor-smith’s furnace—your head casts out what would interfere with the making of strong metals. Impurities of whimsies, dangerously undercutting impurities, which would spoil the metal broth.

A bridge says choose only what is strong and well-wearing and pure. Cast aside the distracting frail ideas. Keep what will keep you and others safe.

You feel the strength of your arms and hands as you leave the bridge. Your legs, though, still belong to corridors. On the bridge there are thoughts that are somehow the strength of your arms and your hands and your heart. They bring you to B, and then C, and then A after A after A. Abracadabras.

Colors are purities. Yet, to find the strength of colors within muddled colors is a sign of strength also? Grayson is/was a painter at times. There is medicine in colors? Even the colors of the interior of your house can armor you? Detecting weakness in colors is an armor? Perhaps. But too much bold color a weakness also?

Once someone named Grayson had a great deal of money stored away, and before it was gone, and he was gone, he, Grayson, sent it to her. He was glad to get rid of it. His father’s money. She was not surprised. She did not even say thank you. It was investing in a garden, she said, and a writer. She bought the farm and she bought many gray-speckled white horses, had them trained and then, one by one, once as a duo, gave them away. The farm was a splendor with or without horses. The memory of the horses was greater than the actual horses. From the memory of the horses came tremendous novels, he eventually learned. Each of the horses gained a true name in the novel which they had never had as actual horses. (As actual horses, they were called the name on their sales records, from purchase. That was their fate, she said, and she could not interfere,)

This had felt like fun gamble. Ireland. He had decided to do it after too much travel in the United States.

New York, he decided, is a state which contains a great deal of anguish. It is not good, he decided, to stay too long in New York. One must frequently part with it, and then return.

California will form the most strength in you via the sun, he decided.

Florida, he decided, was a very long fortune cookie message, too generously giving you the drift of the high palms’ leaves ruffling very high in the sky. Avoid Florida in its summer! Be there only in the spring, and in the winter if you have a place on the water. Do not trust the water or the sunset! It contains a liquid gold which, at night, might subtly affect the dark deep spots of your heart. That sunset will try to get you to give up on determined endeavors. You will try to live on crumb-cake and laughter, and your life will end, possibly, in some defeat. There are turtles in Florida who hide from the sun, who go deep into the water to hide from the sun, and they are the strongest creatures, in Florida. The rest are sun-sick.

There is serenity in Canada, fortune cookies-for-traveling-Brits could say. Trees grow and grow and grow. There are long drives. There is an appreciation of cars and distance. Travel far, far north and you will grateful for all you have. North-dwellers and a large number of forest dwellers are the most keenly grateful of people.

Grayson had traveled in that newest continent. Now, he is home again.

What does Grayson need? Grayson could not tell you, except that he finds the finest refuge not in a book or computer page, which are rectangles. Always, for him, it is the square. Thus, he chooses the square. Some of the best courtyards at the end of outdoor corridors (walkways) are merely square. The most beautiful woman’s earring, he has decided, is the Picasso cube, or square; a woman wearing square earrings is an achieving sight; even a very old woman can be a great beauty if adorned with earrings which are squares.

Give her a ring to promise her to you, he thought once on a bridge, a ring which contains squares. He had already given several women over decades rings with rounded stones. How natural. Those relationships had rolled away like river rocks.

The next, he decided, would receive a square stone, and even more of what was left of his father’s over-large estate. Square it away, he was thinking, on the bridge. Square it off. Square dance?

He thought of her departed horses, how they flowed in strides and shapes mostly circles, ultimately, by turns. How novels, including her novels, made you sit in place but which were all about charging, or fading, through time and space and ideas. Then horses went toward a barn with its angles, but not as sturdy as rooms of a castle’s squared tower, twelve by twelves, very sturdy.

Who is Grayson? He is the long tangled rows of bicycles in Cambridge, the original Cambridge in England the hungry new Cambridge in America. He is the dusky dawn and the dull afternoon. He is the horses who have disappeared but are in the mind always kept. He is the indifferent son and he is the conception of ideas as they form in childhood. He is the farmer who succeeds with his crops and he is the father of a daughter with palsy who must depend on servants. He is the belief he may not outdo his father but he may stand on an equal step perhaps someday or have the illusion he does.

He is the black of dark and he is the white of light only rarely. He is between, he is dappled horses with dark hooves: he is Grayson. Murky, still unrevealed awkwardnesses, which he smoothes continually with the the graying mixture of their combinations. He is the gray stone which shines dully and reluctantly in the light and the dark. He is no grace at all and all graces. He is Batman’s helper Dick Grayson. He helps the rich man and he helps the hero. He knows the root of evil is jealousy. And so: his heart contains it, will never be rid of it.

But the corridor is not jealous of the room; the street is not jealous of the square; the middle walkway of the stable is not jealous of the stall or the tack room. Each is pleased to be the thoughtful flux, the passageway.

Grayson himself is jealous of those who achieve more. But on any bridge he almost forgets that his father manufactured fame.

He will give her the square stone. There is, as he imagines this, strange crashing repetitive music, proving something, rehearsing something. Arguing something?

She is never waiting, so he will surprise her (or not.) Her laughter is neither too dark nor too light. She is far beyond the precipices of beginnings. But his memories of her will be like horses disappearing, he thinks, if he does nothing. If he does nothing, he is her white horses, trudging through mists, their sad white coats speckled with gray and fog and the feeling of boats departing. She is an apprehensive judge: she only possibly might tell him whether he has stood on bridges enough. Will only possibly finally really tell him what in life he was wise to change his mind about, what or who was good to give up. What he didn’t sacrifice enough for? What he sacrificed for, too late?

Perhaps a given gray square stone will meet the same fate, and laughter. But he will try.

For once, he decides, it is good to be alone, and it is not bad to be old: age and aloneness urge him on, through their corridors, to a last, castle place, with its four sides of outlook far above Chinese fortune cookies, and bridges, and property: sees out to sullen sea.

famous son loneliness

Editor's Pick, Loneliness Issue, Poetry, Print Issues, Spring 2021: Japan Issue

THREE POEMS FROM ONLY YESTERDAY

by mutsuotakahashi • June 21, 2021June 21, 2021

Translated by Jeffrey Angles

ENCOUNTERS ARE

A twenty-year-old two thousand five hundred years ago and

An eighty-year-old two thousand five hundred years later

Loved one another—who are you to call this couple unbecoming?

The eighty-year-old’s love for the twenty-year-old,

No matter how you look at it, is pure gold, no exaggeration

The twenty-year-old’s feelings for the eighty-year-old

Are not just gold-plate, or so I’d like to believe

The author of this miraculous tale of erotic love is chance

Or perhaps inevitability wearing the mask of chance as disguise

Whichever it might be, with the greatest of ease

Encounters transcend the bonds of both time and space

RUIN

Long ago, the Greeks built cities and colonies

Dotting mountainsides and coastal shores

Sparks flew from there to this city in what is now the Far East

But these tiny colonies grow full with just ten people

Shinjuku, Shibuya, Shinbashi, Ueno, Asakusa—each night hopping

From place to place, I drifted through my youth

Tethering my line to the bar’s footrest, I encountered

Many eyes, lips, thighs before setting off again

I learned many aspects of Greek love before I forgot

Now decades later, the bow of desire’s boat

Rarely points to such pleasure-filled harbors

But when I close my eyes, they come alive again

Countless burning gazes, feverishly whispered words

After so much time, I find that I’ve become

The distorted ruin left by those colonies of love

DECADES LATER

This morning, decades later, I heard a rumor about you

A rumor you died completely, utterly alone—

You with whom I exchanged such warm whispers and embraces

You who, even so, betrayed me in such a cruel, calculated way

(Wasn’t, however, the backstabbing entirely mutual?)

Those delirious nights and youthful afternoons

Decades later, have suddenly drawn close

Near me are not just those hours from long ago

The underworld, once so unknown, has suddenly drawn close

(Now that I notice, I have descended into it too)

There, you and I are just as young as before

What differs is that we haven’t yet loved one another

Therefore, we have not yet betrayed one another

And when we collide, we merely pass right through

community friendship marriage

THE PLANETS

by José Sotolongo • June 20, 2021June 20, 2021

The four of them were good friends. When Jerry and Meg got married twenty years ago, right after college, Chloe had been the maid of honor. The following year, Chloe married Mat, and Meg was her matron of honor, her long auburn hair piled up alarmingly on her head. The two couples lived a mile from each other in a quiet, verdant town an hour north of New York City, a sedate and enlightened community.

Of the four, Meg was by far the best cook. Jerry made himself available to her in the kitchen, washing cutting boards and knives after she was done with them, opening stubborn jars, setting water to boil for pasta.

Across town, Mat was the wine expert, or so they all thought of him. Of course, Mat shook his brown curls in denial if any of them called him that, the expert, but there was no denying that he knew grapes and vintages and winemakers like Jerry knew football minutae, Meg about braising, and Chloe about digital technology, a field as opaque as a foggy night for the rest of them.

There were no children. Meg had miscarried twice, and Mat and Chloe just didn’t talk about it.

They traveled together once a year, to Rome, Buenos Aires, Paris, their glittering time together stress-free until at the end of the week or ten days when the slightest thing—one couple late for dinner, someone not wanting to visit a church—would create cracks in the crystal that was their harmony. It was as if knowing that their time together was drawing to a close, they allowed themselves the disgruntlements they had suppressed for most of the vacation, perhaps to make parting easier.

“We should do a wine region this fall,” Jerry said. “Spain, Portugal.”

They were at Mat and Chloe’s. Mat had grilled steaks and was pouring a South African red that tasted, to the rest of them, like mentholated cold medicine. Jerry surmised it was an expensive bottle. Mat worked in a financial firm and made a good income, which he wasn’t shy about displaying without actually boasting about it.

“How about the Bordeaux region?” Chloe offered, and looked at Mat.

“Or Napa,” said Meg, cutting into her rare steak. She sopped up the red juices with her mashed potatoes.

Mat said, “You know, the Finger Lakes region is making some very good wine. They’re getting a lot of press.”

“That sounds good. We could just drive,” Jerry said, and looked at Meg. He had made less money this year, his commissions slashed with the dip in the real estate frenzy.

“Sounds good to me,” Meg said. She was a travel agent, and it fell to her to make the arrangements. There’d be no flights for this one, just hotels or B&B’s. “What do you say, Chloe?”

Chloe, her golden hair sporting an expensive glisten, nodded as she chewed, swallowed and said, “Why not? We can have fun anywhere.”

Mat looked at Jerry and said, “That’s right. It doesn’t always take a lot of money to have a good time.”

Later at home Jerry stayed in the den listening to John Coltrane, sipping an aged rum from Nicaragua, he thought. It had been a gift from Mat and Chloe for his birthday, and he hadn’t looked at the label carefully. He pondered Mat’s comment about money not being necessary to have a good time. Was that a preachy point Mat was making, aimed at him and Meg, the couple with less discretionary income?

Meg had gone to bed to read her chick-lit, as Jerry thought of it. Women protagonists by women writers and a happy ending. Yesterday he had read a New York Times editorial bemoaning the lack of male interest in the latest film version of Little Women. Mat and Chloe had liked it, and Meg wanted to see it, but he didn’t. What was wrong with everyone having different interests?

When Meg had miscarried the second time, twelve years ago, Jerry had been secretly relieved. He had been truly excited with anticipation during the first pregnancy, but by the second one he was unsure. By then he was thirty, his thinning hair showed grey, and he was in a floating ambivalence about his life. Was real estate such a smart profession, buffeted by economic winds like laundry left out in a storm? Was Meg—or anyone else—such a desirable element to have in one’s life constantly and forever? After the passion had dissipated, a year into the marriage, he had come to love Meg in a lukewarm, almost indifferent way. She was a wonderful person, devoted to the household and, he was pretty sure, the marriage, but in what had become a mechanical, unenthusiastic routine that made him have doubts about the union. And it seemed to him that he was equally happy whether she was around or not.

But maybe the whole point at their age was to have children, not so much the companionship. You’d have children who as adults would monitor and care for you when the time came. And yet he had read that having a child and seeing them through college came with a two hundred thousand dollar price tag, more if they went to private schools. There had to be an Aesop’s fable in which the consequence of wanting too much was an ironic disaster, wasn’t there? Did being put in a nursing home by a cherished child count as a bitter, ironic disaster? The most unkindest cut?

He couldn’t help but be convinced that Mat and Chloe had figured this out. They were smart, knew the ways of the world. Mat, with his modesty despite his encyclopedic vinicultural knowledge, Wall Street wizardry, his bespoke suits. And what was with that hair, insistently and richly brown despite silver specks which testified to the lack of dye, a crown on an angular, handsome face despite the long nose?

Jerry rubbed the sparse grey buzzcut on his scalp and finished the rest of the rum. The drink had warmed him, and he felt the beginning of an erection, but when he got to bed Meg was already asleep. Oh, well. Maybe in the morning, if it worked out. Sometimes, the timing was off, one or the other interested, but not both.

When Jerry came home in the evenings, often after seven if he had been out showing—no, peddling—properties, he sat at the kitchen counter and watched Meg cook, her sturdy, recently plump figure constantly moving, a pinball from stove to counter to sink. Occasionally he asked if he could help, not wanting to appear disengaged, but she rarely said yes. She kept her long hair tied back into a pony tail with a kerchief so frayed it might have a nun’s panties, chopping the necessary ingredients so fast that the knife hitting the cutting surface sounded like a woodpecker gone berserk. Without being asked, Jerry occasionally wiped the counter of the diaspora of onions and garlic, fled from the mayhem on the cutting board. She measured nothing, threw handfuls of salt and herbs into pots and sauté pans with barely a glance.

“I looked into lodgings at the Finger Lakes,” Meg said later as they loaded the dishwasher. She kept rearranging the dishes and utensils Jerry racked.

“Find any you like?” He gave up on the dishwasher and started on the pots in the sink, where he wouldn’t be made to feel incompetent.

“Actually, we can stay at one of the wineries if we reserve soon.”

“Sounds good. Expensive?” He wished the new, pretentious McMansion in Scarsdale would sell already.

“Not too,” she said, and she patted his back as he bent over the sink, meant, he was sure, as a reassurance.

He admired this about Meg, this ability to show concern and support so effortlessly, though he wasn’t sure he wanted to be on the receiving end of it when it came to finances. He wished he could show compassion just as easily, like when she made a fuss over the neighbors’ sick children. But whatever part of her was able to sprout these spontaneous gestures was as barren as a sand dune in him.

So what was he good at, really? What did he contribute to his world, the world that contained Meg, with her generosity of spirit, her energy, her astonishing lack of bile? And to the world of his friends? Chloe, with her dazzling, mathematical brain encased in a beautiful head, the mouth emitting expressions of bonhomie without subtext? Odd that for such a logical, numerical mind, the subtleties of expenses when they traveled together seemed non-existent to her on the surface, although she made sure that the divided sums never favored her and Mat, but if anything were tilted to benefit him and Meg.

And then Mat. Of what value was he to Mat, with his looks, his affability, his easy affection? Mat was the only man who could be spontaneously and physically demonstrative with him, a hand on the shoulder or on his back, an embrace that ignored the conventional separation of abdomens when men hugged. Mat was the benevolent leader when the four of them were together, the principal player in a finely tuned musical quartet.

As far as Jerry could see, he brought nothing to the card table where the four of them played out their relationship. Not wit, nor any particular skill or knowledge. So what, then? Was he just a hanger-on, an accidental component, a satellite moon to the three incandescent planets?

Jerry and Meg were already engaged when they met Chloe and her then-boyfriend Mat for lunch in New Paltz, where all but Mat were seniors at the state university there. Mat was two years older, already in a graduate program for business administration. Even during that first encounter, when a less secure individual might have cloaked himself in the mantle of advantage, because of age, education, and ambition, he was immediately their new, jocund acquaintance.

After that lunch, Meg said to Jerry, “What did you think of Mat?”

They were walking back to their dorms, the skittish November sun already behind the buildings on Main Street.

“He seemed nice,” Jerry said. “Are they serious?”

“I think so. Chloe has talked about their life together after graduation.” Meg paused. “He’s so handsome.”

“Yes. He’s a good-looking guy.”

He had been mechanically agreeable with Meg. Since he could remember, Jerry reacted not to people’s looks, but to how they behaved. A stranger, man or woman, might be spectacularly beautiful, but the physical dazzle that would impress most people went unnoticed by him. But during lunch, Mat had taken what seemed like a real interest in Jerry, finding common ground with him in their mutual interest in rugby, that Methuselah of sports that had begat American football. He had also asked about Jerry’s plans after graduation, which were as shapeless as smoke. The same question from his tuition-paying parents, shackled with middle-class finances, had elicited an abrupt “Don’t really know yet” that summer. But Jerry had felt no unease talking to Mat about his hazy future, entranced by his personality like a cobra by a snake charmer.

When the time came for their trip to the Finger Lakes, they took separate cars. Abroad, they had toured in a single rented vehicle, but two trunks meant an abundance of space in which to transport cases of wine back home.

The winery where they were staying, Bon Point, consisted of two buildings nestled in fields of grapevines, and was awash in sunlight when they arrived near noon. One of the buildings, the winemaking facility, was a two-story rectangle that could be mistaken for a six-car garage. The other structure, which was the house, was a splendid, oversized A frame, three stories high, a dwelling masquerading as a royal pavilion. Every level had floor-to-ceiling windows looking out at the perfectly ordered rows of grapevines that seemed to vibrate in the sunlight, a pointillist masterpiece.

Jerry and Meg had a room on the third floor, Mat and Chloe on the second. There was one other couple, they were told at lunch that first day, served by Claudia, the winemaker’s wife. She was a dark, short woman with a huge smile, and her hair was like a chocolate twist at the nape.

The ample dining room, where they would be served breakfast and dinner, had four dark oak tables set for two. One of the walls was mostly glass, looking out at the fields of grapes.

“I can move two tables together to seat four, if you like,” Claudia said. She spoke with an accent that might have been Hispanic, or perhaps Middle-Eastern.

The four of them looked at each other briefly and said “Sure,” not in unison, but convincingly. Jerry immediately thought it might have been better to have some meals just the two of them, but it had worked out well in previous travels, and he buried his doubt.

Surrounded by plain but polished dark wood, and presided over by the large window and a sense of privilege, every meal was excellent. Claudia poured wine for them from one of the many bottles that stood guard on a mahogany credenza. They saw the only other couple occasionally at meal times, two handsome men in their thirties with disconcertingly similar clothes. Both had shaved heads and multiple sparkly earrings, smiled and said hello, but didn’t seem to welcome any other interaction, looking at their phones while they ate.

Claudia obliged Mat’s request for guidance, and she suggested wineries to visit. She also offered to arrange for limousines for them to enjoy serious wine-tastings without risking a driving or legal catastrophe. Every day brought with it the promise of a new discovery: an architecturally striking winery, a vibrant, commanding wine, a charming winemaker proud of his or her product.

The evening before their last full day Claudia’s husband Henry, who had been a rare sight, approached them as they finished dinner. He had red cheeks and brown hair that covered the tops of his ears, and a pugilist’s biceps strained the sleeves of a yellowing white tee shirt. He was no taller than Claudia.

“I have a proposition for you,” he said in an unmistakable German accent. “I need to harvest some of the white sauvignon grapes tomorrow morning, and I’m short two workers. If you help me, I’ll give each couple a case of my best chardonnay.”

“That sounds like fun,” Mat said.

Jerry gave a little nod of approval, the idea of a break in their now predictable routine a pleasant prospect.

Chloe said, “Oh, I don’t know. That sounds like work.”

“It’s our last day,” Meg said with a tone of protest.

Henry’s eyebrows arched in distress. “They have to be picked at sunrise, before the sun warms them, otherwise they’ll ferment too soon. So you’ll have most of the day free.”

“What do you say, Jerry? Do it before the ladies are up?”

Mat’s enthusiasm seeped into him like the scent of a garden through a window, and he said, “Sounds good. Firsthand experience, behind the scenes.”

“Wonderful!” Henry shook the men’s hands. “I’ll meet you right here for coffee tomorrow morning at five, and we’ll have breakfast after we harvest.”

Henry led the way to the fields the next morning. Inside the rows of green vines, the world was close, the landscape of linear plantings hidden by the gnarly, leafy branches heavy with fruit. The light from the pale grey sky was dim on their faces, and a still, cold air feathered their cheeks and chilled Jerry’s scalp, still warm from bed. Henry stood at the end of an aisle between two rows of plantings and showed them what to look for in fruit to be harvested. He gave them pruning clippers and shoulder sacs, and then went to work his own rows. “If you each do one row, we’ll be done in two hours,” he said as he left.

Jerry had been looking forward to being alone among the grapevines, psychological space to reflect on his future, driven by having spent more money on wine than he had anticipated. He had imagined they’d work separately, but Mat stayed in the same aisle, eyeing and fingering the hanging fruit while Jerry got to work.

The slump in the real estate market was not letting up. He was forty-two, almost too late to embark on a new career. He could switch professions, but what did he know except selling real estate? The amount of money he earned was variable, and on balance it was just adequate. But even when a successful and lucrative sale brought with it the relief of fresh income, and the gratification of a completed task, there was a hollow feel to it, like he had accomplished nothing of value. He imagined that teachers, physicians, engineers, all felt a deep satisfaction with the fruit of their labor, something they just took for granted, so abundant the rewards.

“So peaceful here,” Mat said. His sling sac, hanging across his chest, still looked empty.

Jerry didn’t look at him, didn’t nod, kept cutting the stems, pulling the chartreuse bunches from the foliage.

“You okay?” Mat said. He wasn’t making a move with the clippers.

Jerry turned to him. “It is peaceful.” He paused, his lips tensed into a line. “Maybe we should work in separate aisles, get done faster.”

Mat frowned. “We can work side by side. You do the left, I’ll do the right, and then we just move on to the next aisle.”

Jerry turned back to the cutting, his eyebrows diving into the bridge of his nose, his eyes all but hidden.

Mat took a step towards Jerry. “You look annoyed,” he said.

Jerry shook his head, baffled that his friend could be so obtuse, missing signposts.

“What’s wrong?” Mat said with an edge of alarm.

“Nothing. Nothing’s wrong. I just need some time to myself. I thought this would be a good opportunity for that.”

“All right,” Mat said, sounding abrupt. In a softer tone, he added, “I’ll go to the next aisle. But you know I’m here for you if anything’s the matter. Whatever it is, count on me.” He put his hands on Jerry’s shoulders, kissed him on the forehead, and left.

The sky had gotten lighter, a tint of violet towards the east promising full daylight. The grapes were easier to see now, and the work went faster. Unexpectedly, with every new bunch in his sac, the uncertainties about his profession receded. Nothing had changed materially, he saw that his future held no different promises or opportunities for validation, but this seemed unimportant now, displaced by a new, perhaps more momentous disturbance that he couldn’t quite define. And yet he sensed a sort of liberation, and became aware of his forehead and eyebrows relaxing as he continued cutting the bunches of grapes, dropping them into his sac.

The three men were back in the dining room by eight o’clock, the work completed. Meg and Chloe were just starting breakfast. Henry was exuberant. “I’m so grateful to you gentlemen,” he said, and went into the kitchen to find Claudia.

Jerry and Mat joined their wives at the table. During the meal, Mat initiated conversation with Jerry, as if the incident in the vineyard had never occurred.

Later that morning Meg arranged for a limousine with Claudia for this, their last day in the region. They elected to have an elaborate lunch at a large, imposing winery with a fine restaurant, where they would taste several wines before the meal.

“This is perfectly delicious food,” Chloe said later at lunch. She was having an appetizer of grilled octopus with a drizzle of good olive oil. “I don’t know how they get it so tender.”

“I’ve never made octopus,” Meg said. “I’m intimidated by the idea. I’ve read so many different techniques for it.”

“You’re going to love this,” Chloe said, and forked some tentacles onto Meg’s plate of sausage and lentils.

Jerry and Mat watched as Meg put some octopus in her mouth, closed her eyes and said, “Oh, my God.”

“You can do this, Meg. You can do anything,” Chloe said.

“We’ll be your guinea pigs,” Mat said. “We’ll make the sacrifice.”

Jerry looked at Meg, who was grinning proudly, perhaps smugly, he thought. He nodded and said, “The ‘can-do’ cook,” but the smile that might have accompanied the comment never appeared.

Mat grinned and said, “You’re one lucky dude.”

Lunch wasn’t over until three, and nobody was hungry for dinner back at the Bon Point winery. They napped and then played cards in the wood-paneled den, lit by lamps with tasseled, yellow satin shades.

At nine o’clock Mat and Chloe went to their room, claiming exhaustion.

Meg said, “I’m all in. You ready for bed?”

“Not yet. I’ll stay and read for a while.” From their room, he had brought to the den one of the “Struggle” novels by Knausgaard.

He got up from the card table and sat on a plush brocade sofa, but couldn’t read. The apprehension that had left him in the vineyard had been gradually replaced by a knowledge that his relationship with Meg and with his friends had changed, a different trajectory going forward. It became clear to him that he was different from them and that they saw that, had probably seen or sensed it on some level all along.

The next morning they said their good-byes before getting into their respective cars, Mat and Chloe in their Mercedes, Jerry and Meg in their Hyundai. It had been, on the surface, a low key, happy trip, and as always they were bathed in a vague sense of relief that it was over. Jerry kissed Chloe on her smooth, sweet-smelling cheek, and saw Mat hug Meg. Then Mat, without hesitation or allowance of any awkwardness, embraced Jerry full on, arms wrapping around his shoulders and kissing him on the face, near his sideburn, as he had done many times before. Jerry didn’t hug back this time, but instead put his hands on Mat’s arms, ready to separate himself if the embrace went on too long.

The sun was already high on this warm October day, and in the Hyundai the air conditioner shot cold vectors at their heads. The icy blast felt noxious on Jerry’s scalp, and he blamed the car’s careless, economical design. Meg seemed oblivious to it, strands from her mane whipping and dancing as she fiddled with the radio, trying to find some familiar, comfortable music.

Why was he still with Meg? And why was he friends with Mat and Chloe?

It wasn’t that he didn’t bring anything to the table they shared. No, actually, he had it wrong. The game they all played wasn’t at a card table, but on the uneven field of their relationship, chasing the ball that symbolized accomplishment, or knowledge, or affluence. And the three of them, once they had the ball in their hands, passed it around to the other two, never to him, as if he wasn’t even in the running to be the best at anything.

Jerry saw Mat’s kiss on the forehead as a paternalistic gesture of superiority, as if he was pathetic and merited compassion. It crystallized his mediocre standing, a fatal jarring of the four-way imbalanced magnetic attraction that had kept them orbiting around one another. And he wondered, in a species of masochistic, cynical curiosity, what Mat and Chloe were talking about at this very moment. Were they discussing him and Meg in condescending terms in the velvet quiet of their fine sedan, caressed by the perfectly controlled ambient temperature?

“Is this all right?” Meg said. She had evidently found a station she liked. Jerry thought it sounded blandly pleasant, like their marriage.

“It’ll do for now,” he said.

children mothers women writers

THE METAMORPHOSIS OF MOTHER

by Emily Flanagan • June 19, 2021June 19, 2021

Like moss creeping up the trunk of a tree or daylight fading into dusk, the transformation of my body into hers happened slowly. In the early hours of the morning, when the house was still and the birds were quiet, I watched her hands stroke my daughter’s cheek; puffy blue veins, wrinkled skin, and swollen fingers illuminated in the soft yellow glow of the nightlight. Known to me, I felt them combing through my hair, wiping away my tears, and lifting up my chin. Shaping themselves into a form familiar and strong, hers are the hands that now scrub my dishes, wipe noses, pray with my children, and have the power to scare away the monsters hidden beneath the bed.

Like bird nests popping up in once-empty trees or spider webs hanging from once clean corners, the transformation of my body into hers happened secretly. In the mirror, I study her sagging breasts, wide hips, and cushioned tummy, tracing the purple stretches with my eyes like I trace worm tracks in old logs with my finger. Under my cheek, I feel the pillow of her tummy cushioning the blow of schoolyard taunts and broken hearts. With her hands, I trace the laugh lines around my eyes. I lift breasts that fed my children and follow the curves of the hips that bore them. This body is lover, power, creator; a mother.

As the child enveloped in the womb grows, the woman of before vanishes too, within a cocoon of mounding flesh and raging hormones. Unbeknownst to her, the transition from woman to mother takes place in the early hours of the morning and late hours of the night. Love, worry, fear, and excitement alter her mind, body, and spirit, until she emerges with her child, exhausted and raw, as the vessel of strength that came before her. My body into my mother’s and her body into her mother’s, like a series of dominoes falling backward through time; our cycle continues and strength passes down through the women of history.

mystery neighbors suspicion

CUL-DE-SAC

by Paul Lamar • June 18, 2021June 18, 2021

Photo by Francisco Anzola (copied from Flickr)

We have narrowed it down to two possibilities: they’re doing drugs or they’re having sex with other men.

Janice said it was probably just a broken dishwasher or something, that the guys who come to the house are repairmen, but we pointed out that not all these visitors come in a truck, that even the guy with the truck comes early in the morning or late at night. I mean, no repairman ever comes at those times, and no one has ever seen one of these men carry a tool box or a ladder or anything else someone on the job would bring into a client’s house. Plus how many repairs do they need! Come on, Janice, we said, use your brain. It’s either sex or drugs.

Once we got her to think like that, we started timing. If it is drugs — and we don’t know if the visitors are picking up from or delivering to Dave and Daryl — that might explain the brief visits, like 15 or 20 minutes. But no one can have sex that fast! I mean, you don’t just jump in bed and do it. You warm up. At least that’s been my experience with Jerry.

Then Rosemary said maybe they don’t even bother to do it in bed. Maybe they do it in the living room, but they have modern furniture, so we don’t know where they could be actually doing it. There are no soft surfaces, not at least that we saw when they had the open house last spring. Very modern. Not our taste, but that’s not our business. They can do what they like. Live and let live.

And then some visits are about an hour, which seems long enough for sex and smoking pot. Maybe they’re not dealers or buying. Maybe they just have friends who come over and smoke. I don’t know. They don’t act loopy, and Dave and Daryl are always going to the gym. We don’t know exactly.

So far we’ve seen a white truck, a sporty foreign car, and a van. The van looks like it could belong to a married guy. Which disgusts us. I mean, why would you want to bust up somebody’s marriage? Unless they don’t know he’s married. We’ve got to get a look at his ring finger, and Rosemary lives the closest. She could see from her kitchen window if the guy comes in the morning.

Oh, we like Dave and Daryl well enough, that’s not the problem. It’s just that we don’t know what they’re up to! And we’ve all agreed that this kind of behavior doesn’t suit this neighborhood. Apparently they lived in an apartment in Boston before they moved here. We have only single-family homes up here, with kids. Most of ours are grown, of course, thank God, but what about the little kids? What do they make of it? We decided that we’re not going to say anything to those neighbors. Maybe they don’t notice what’s going on, so what they don’t know can’t hurt them.

We’re not worried about our husbands, of course, those of us who still have them. Our husbands are homebodies most of the time, and when they associate with anyone else on the block it’s always with each other, guys they’ve known for a long time. Darts. Snowmobiling trips. The gym — just treadmill work. It’s even creepy to say that we might be worried about our husbands!

There is one strange thing that happened last week. Two guys came over, at almost the same time. The truck and the foreign sports car. They came at different times between 10 and 11 at night and stayed until midnight, all together. Why so late, that’s what we want to know. Who has guests then? Janice said that maybe they’re just getting out of work and coming by for a drink, but who drinks at that time of night? And Dave and Daryl both have to be at work by 8:30 in the morning, so late at night seems like an unusual time to have friends over. There must be something else going on that we don’t know. They’re having another open house in a couple of weeks, they said, so if we’re invited, we can maybe get some more information. Rosemary says that we should check the photos on the walls or the mantel and see if there are any clues there. I’m not sure what clues we’d be looking for, but that’s a place to start.

Poetry, Print Issues, Spring 2021: Japan Issue

TWO POEMS

by akehiroshirai • June 16, 2021June 16, 2021

“Time goes by so fast 28/52 Multiple Exposure” by JanetR3

Translated by Louise Heal Kawai and Matt Treyvaud

THIRTY-THREE
CENTIMETRES OF TIME

You cross the road
and follow the low stone wall to school
my child

I watch

You greet the people you meet
and, just about to disappear,
you turn your head a shade,
glance back

I wave,
and open a window

You turn your back.
I watch you walk away

But then
look back again

Perhaps
You knew your father would be watching still

Growing smaller, fading—

I wave to you again,
my child
you walk on, even smaller now

No satchel
on your back
but dressed for ceremony: white shirt
black shorts—
a special day

Before you left this morning, you said, “Look,”
and held up

A red ribbon.
The school nurse made one
for each of you

To show how much you’d grown
between first grade
and sixth:
A length of red ribbon
dangling from your fingers.

We spent
the same
time
separately

Thirty-three centimetres
of time

THE MOMENT WE WISH IT

How well I know
the things they call impossible
can change, one day, to done

I still believe the dream:
within the next ten years,
all island bases gone

Until the wall collapsed, no one
believed that it would fall
But who now still believes
that it never will be gone?

The moment we wish it
the bases will be gone
leaving grassy hilltops—
you’ll sit, and freely watch
the setting of the sun

I still believe the dream
that what they called impossible
will change, one day, to done
And who then will believe
that they never will be gone?

akehiro shirai time

Arts & Culture, Editor's Pick, Essays, Print Issues, Spring 2021: Japan Issue

AINU OTHELLO: THE STORY OF A PLAY

by alisonwatts • June 15, 2021June 15, 2021

There once was a play first performed four hundred years ago in England. It became known worldwide until eventually it was translated in an island country of Asia, and returned transformed to its country of origin. For the last four years I have been a fascinated observer of the story of this play. Let me tell you more, but first, some background notes:

A professor of English at a Japanese regional university dreams of building a replica of the Globe. He rallies supporters to the cause and founds an amateur acting troupe that, with permission from the Royal Shakespeare Company, is called The Shakespeare Company. The company’s adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays gain popularity, and in 2000 they stage Macbeth of Mt Osore at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Tragedy strikes in 2005 when the professor is widowed with three young daughters. He struggles on without his muse to write an adaptation of Othello called Atui Othello. This is the last play the company performs before the great earthquake and tsunami of March 2011. They give travelling performances in disaster zones for a year and then disperse. The professor continues holding workshops at schools in stricken communities and prepares the manuscripts of his adaptations for publication.

Forward to 2016, when I first encounter The Shakespeare Company at an international translators conference in Sendai, where the company is based. Sendai is a city of approximately one million, 300 kilometres north of Tokyo in the Tohoku region. One of the conference organizers had been unable to forget the company’s version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream she had seen twenty years earlier, and persuaded Kazumi Shimodate, the professor, to stage ten-minute excerpts from Shakespeare’s four great tragedies as the keynote speech.

This was no mean task, as company members had scattered far and wide since 2011. Shimodate, however, decided it was a chance to return to their mission of building a replica of the Globe, and therefore an opportunity not to be missed. He gave the call and the actors responded.

I had seen performances by professional Japanese theatre troupes, but nothing like The Shakespeare Company. We were treated to scenes from The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear – five plays, not four, as it turned out. The setting for most of these adaptations was Tohoku, and they had been translated into Tohoku dialect, not standard Japanese. The incongruity of hearing Shakespeare in such familiar, earthy language and novelty of seeing the characters as sushi company president, indigenous Ainu, feudal retainer and so on was a shock, but the plays were recognizably Shakespearean and as theatre it worked! In less than ideal conditions – basically a large conference centre auditorium with daytime lighting – the actors gave performances that were suffused with an energy and atmosphere that mesmerized the audience. As one we were drawn in; laughed, were moved and swept away by the drama.

Afterwards I met Professor Shimodate in person and my curiosity about the company was further piqued. He was debonair, and spoke English with a refined accent that in my Australian ears can only be described as posh. I was intrigued by the stark contrast between the lines of dialect he had written for the plays, and the elegant English that came from his lips. He seemed an anomaly in this regional Japanese city, but who was I to talk, since I too am from a country background, and my in-laws also speak Tohoku dialect. I should know that capital cities do not have a monopoly on sophistication, cosmopolitanism and learning; ergo country does not equal bumpkin, nor does dialect equal inferior or uneducated.

A respect for linguistic cultural diversity – the right to speak in one’s own language and reclaim the identity shaped by that language – has been one of the pivotal cultural about-turns of this century. In Japan, however, though a multitude of dialects and languages are spoken, national discourse is dominated by one of Tokyo’s dialects, which became the language of government, power and education long ago. It was designated “standard” when centuries of rule by the Tokugawa Shogunate ended in 1868 and the new imperial Meiji administration set out to unify the country. Generally speaking, one does not hear dialects spoken on national TV, except in the context of their quirky or entertainment value, and never will you hear the news read in anything other than standard Japanese. The Tohoku dialect is actually a group of dialects spoken in the northern region of Japan known as Tohoku, and not all of them are mutually intelligible. Historically, Tohoku dialects have had a negatively provincial image; a long way from the highbrow language of Shakespeare.

Shimodate, however, had an epiphany about language when he was studying Shakespeare at Cambridge in 1992. He observed how a London restaurant serving – in his opinion – inexcusably inauthentic ramen was a huge hit with British customers, while dinner guests reacted to his own painstakingly concocted authentic soup and noodles with mere politeness. London-style ramen for Londoners and Japanese-style ramen for Japanese… What could that mean for Shakespeare? It dawned on him that Tohoku audiences might prefer hearing Shakespeare in Tohoku dialect, with stories they could relate to. Shakespeare was, after all, supposed to be for everybody, not just scholars and the cultural elite. This was the beginning of his translating Shakespeare’s plays into dialect with plots adapted to regional history and locations.

Shimodate’s hometown is only sixteen kilometres from Sendai but the dialect spoken there is different. He translates the plays into his dialect and the actors accordingly adapt the lines to their own. This approach is a defining characteristic of The Shakespeare Company, and what makes their performances accessible to audiences in Tohoku, while those outside the region appreciate the local flavour and liveliness it gives the productions.

However, the starting point of all this was Shimodate’s dream of building a theatre. And not just any theatre, but a replica of the Globe. For him it is the ideal venue, a playhouse on a human scale, somewhere that can be a centre for community drama and education, and a place where people will gather from around Japan and the world to perform in Tohoku. For the last thirty years he has focused on this goal with an inventiveness and energy that draws others into the whirlpool of his vision and creates a self-perpetuating force. He often invites people from all walks of life to his home, to eat and talk over ramen. It was here he first shared his dream of building the theatre, and the idea of The Shakespeare Company was born.

My first glimpse in 2016 of the play that was to become Ainu Othello lasted merely ten minutes. Atui Othello, as it was still called – atui being the Ainu word for “sea” – had a recognizably Ainu flavour because of Osero’s (Othello) and Dezuma’s (Desdemona) costume and the few words of Ainu sprinkled in the dialogue. But it was not much to judge from.

This was the first time Shimodate had set an adaptation outside of Tohoku. Othello had long been on his agenda but he could not find exactly the right setting to fit the theme of racial discrimination. Hokkaido, however, had potential because of its history and on a research trip there in 2009, he found inspiration. The setting would be Hokkaido in 1860, when it was called Ezo, and it would be the tragedy of an ethnic Ainu general called Osero, who was raised by a Japanese retainer of the Sendai Clan, stationed in Hokkaido at the Shogunate’s behest to defend the land against Ainu rebellion and incursions by the Russians. Osero, who serves in the Sendai Clan force, falls in love with Dezuma, the Japanese daughter of another clan retainer.

Ainu are the indigenous people of Hokkaido, but in 1869, when it was annexed by the Japanese government, Japanese settlers poured in and they were forced to assimilate. The traditional Ainu culture and lifestyle was suppressed, and the Ainu language pushed to the brink of extinction, to the extent that it is listed by UNESCO as a critically endangered language.

In 2008 the Japanese government officially recognized the Ainu as a distinct culture for the first time and in 2019 passed a law recognizing them as an indigenous people of Japan, which now obliges it to protect the Ainu cultural identity and ban discrimination. However, the legacy of one hundred and fifty years of discrimination and cultural suppression remains, and it is no wonder that contemporary relations between the Ainu and Japanese peoples are fraught.

Atui Othello was staged twice in 2010, but Shimodate believes in the power of place, and insists on performing plays in the location where they are set, which in this case was Hokkaido. He was uneasy, however; how would Ainu people react to a troupe of Japanese actors staging a play about them, complete with derogatory language, on their home ground? He flew to Sapporo, the capital of Hokkaido, to inspect a theatre for a performance, but when the manager failed to turn up he took that as a sign and cancelled the theatre booking. The date he had booked for was March 20, 2011, nine days after the earthquake.

Five years passed and Atui Othello disappeared from the stage, until 2016 and the conference breathed life into it and the company again. It also led to much-needed funding, and so Shimodate, deciding that revision was necessary, along with a new name for the play, set out on a research trip to Hokkaido two months later, in the summer of 2016. A series of fortuitous coincidences – and thereby hangs another tale – lead to his meeting Debo Akibe, an Ainu activist, craft cooperative manager, and dance troupe director amongst other things, at the Lake Akan Ainu village. Akibe only agreed to meet Shimodate at a friend’s request, and had every intention of fobbing him off. But Shimodate’s zeal and enthusiasm won out. Akibe not only cooperated on the script of Ainu Othello, as the play was now called, he eventually became co-director as well.

In January 2018 I witnessed the result of their collaboration at the premiere performance of Ainu Othello in Sendai. It was unforgettably powerful. I was transported to Ezo in 1860, a world I knew nothing of, yet it felt as real and relevant as the world outside the theatre doors. Judging by the long, thunderous applause at the end, everybody else in the audience felt the same. A highlight for me was the music and dance performed by Pirikap, the Ainu dance troupe Akibe had invited to join the production. Shimodate and Aikbe’s candid talk on stage at the end also added to the drama of the evening.

One of Akibe’s motivations for collaborating was to ensure the authentic representation of Ainu culture. I had had only the most cursory exposure to it before, but I knew that every aspect of what I saw on stage, from the set, props and costume to music, dance and song, was genuine, and it gave me a sense of Ainu culture being something that was alive, not a museum piece.

Akibe’s contribution however was more than a stamp of cultural authenticity. He added Ainu language to the script and insisted that the historically correct discriminatory language Shimodate had cut be restored. Akibe has personally experienced much discrimination, but believes there is no point shirking from the fact it existed, and can only be eliminated through being brought into the open in the first place. His schooldays and experience of seeing Ainu people bully each other led to his suggestion that Yago (Iago) be of mixed Ainu-Japanese heritage, a masterstroke that added to the psychological complexity of Yago’s motivations and betrayal of Osero, and magnified the resonance of this character for a modern globalized audience.

The play continued to evolve. In June of 2018 I saw it again in Tokyo and could tell there were changes. The death scene of Dezuma, which sent shivers down my spine, was one in particular that stood out. It was enacted to a groaning chant that was apparently sung at a battle in 1789 and traditionally handed down.

In July 2018 the long-delayed Sapporo performance took place, at a time when the 150th anniversary celebrations of the naming – or annexing, depending on your point of view – of Hokkaido were imminent. Approximately one hundred of the Ainu community were in the audience of 360 and the performance was deemed a success. Unfortunately I could not be there, but one significant change I heard about was the Pirikap members having speaking parts in addition to performing dance and music.

Another outcome of the Sapporo production was an invitation to stage Ainu Othello in London. Jatinder Verma, Artistic Director at the Tara Theatre and long-time friend and advisor to Shimodate, travelled there specially to see it. Verma, who had co-founded the theatre in the 1970s in response to racism, believed it was a timely production in the midst of rising racial tensions on the eve of Brexit.

In August 2019 a group of fourteen actors and staff travelled to the UK to stage a shorter, leaner version of the play. Akibe was unable to go and Shimodate handed the baton of director to Verma. Thus on entirely neutral ground for the first time, the cast underwent intense rehearsal as Verma gave a whole new polish to an already remarkable production. The experience appears to have been profoundly constructive for both Japanese and Ainu cast members, who said that Verma gave them new insight into performing and introducing culture, showing how the smallest of changes can make an enormous difference.

Alas I was not at the London production either, but I was privileged to view a recording. There were many differences, but most significant and moving for me was to see the four women of Pirikap fully integrated into the performance; their voices audibly speaking Ainu, their music and dance as essential to the play as any character. The final scene was so quietly tragic and beautiful, that watching at home alone in my living room, tears filled my eyes and I spontaneously burst into applause.

Ainu Othello is about love destroyed through jealousy and prejudice, while the story of Ainu Othello is about breaking down obstacles of time, language and history to create art. But in the Ainu language “Ainu” means human, and ultimately is all about human drama and the human need for stories. Happily, it seems the collaboration between Pirikap and The Shakespeare Company will continue, so there will be more plays and more stories.

japan Othello Shakespeare theatre

Editor's Pick, Fiction, Print Issues, short story, Spring 2021: Japan Issue

PROUD

by wenyuju • June 14, 2021June 14, 2021

Translated by Thomas Brook

Another year, another birthday. Another year since my great uncle passed away. For nineteen years now, and forever more, we share this anniversary.

The day my great uncle took his last breath, I, having just turned twenty, was absorbed in a monologue about my grandfather. My grandfather used to boast to me about how he had once been Japanese. My great uncle, on the other hand, lectured me about how he’d been turned Japanese. The two were not brothers.

My grandfather was my mother’s father; my great uncle my father’s uncle.

− Granddad’s Japanese was so fluent, I said, not pausing for a moment to think of my great uncle. − He spoke it so much better than my mum and dad, who both still speak like foreigners even though they’ve lived here so long already.

I kept chattering on about my grandfather, almost giddily, buoyed by the idea that I alone possessed a rare insight into the world.

− Granddad learnt Japanese long before I was even born. That’s right, in Taiwan, back when it was a Japanese colony.

Mr Shiraishi enjoyed encouraging me to do this talk. I, for my part, was quite aware of my ability to choose a topic he liked and speak about it in a way that would please him. I enjoyed it too, back then. Mr Shiraishi made me feel like I was the most sensitive and intelligent girl in the world.

It was about half a year before my great uncle passed away that Mr Shiraishi and I grew close.

− My mother’s cousin used to call the neighbourhood stray dog “Tanaka”, and would beat it with a stick. She couldn’t forgive the Tanaka Kakuei government for betraying Taiwan and getting cosy with China, so she gave the poor dog hell. And so my mother, after coming to Japan, would think of that cousin whenever she met a person called Tanaka.

The classroom sank into silence. I looked across to the students opposite me, and a few of them looked down at their desks. The entire room went chilly. I’d said the wrong thing. Ever since I was a child I had the habit of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, no matter how hard I tried to fit in and avoid making a scene. I’m just glad – to this day in fact – that none of the ten or so other students in the room had the name Tanaka.

− You should all listen carefully to what Shū san has to say. She knows what she’s talking about, and she talks about it well.

It was Mr Shiraishi who broke the uncomfortable silence. He was just fulfilling his duty as the teacher in the room, doing his best to save one of his students’ misjudged words from giving rise to unneeded animosity. But from the very start I could already feel him undressing me with his eyes.

“Shin-ee.” That’s how Mr Shiraishi called me. The Chinese pronunciation, with the “ee” at the end reaching upwards.

Xīn yí.

Whenever Mr Shiraishi called me by my name in Chinese, I felt like I’d been put under a spell, as if I was somehow special. Ever since I started school, I’d always introduced myself with the Japanese reading: “Shū Kin’i” for 周欣怡. Mr Shiraishi was the first Japanese person to say my name the Chinese way.

− You know, Zhōu Xīn yí, you’re an extraordinary girl.

Mr Shiraishi’s compliments never failed to give me the flutters. From around that time, my friends, few to begin with, became fewer still, but I didn’t particularly care. So long as Mr Shiraishi was beside me, people could say whatever they liked. Mr Shiraishi himself seemed aware of the influence he had on me, and I don’t doubt for a moment that it gave him pleasure too.

Within weeks of our first intimate contact, I was well versed in the workings of the love hotel. I lived with my parents, and Mr Shiraishi with his wife and children, so it was only in those compact rooms, shut off from the outside world, where the two of us could get the privacy we needed.

Once again on that very afternoon – on the day my great uncle was to pass away – I set off with Mr Shiraishi towards one of our rendezvous spots.

Dusk is the love child of day and night, Mr Shiraishi whispered in my ear, and I purred back in his: When the wild things come out. It was the perfect time of day for us to be walking together outside, side-by-side with our fingers entwined. Our destination was a place down an alleyway at the end of a long sloping road that ran alongside a Shinto shrine. Had it been an auspicious day, there would have been far more passersby, but on that day we had the entire street to ourselves.

Almost, that is.

There was a single man on the road, dressed in dirty rags, with his head hung low; by his side was an old bowl into which a few coins had been thrown. He was sat, it appeared, with his legs crossed, but as Mr Shiraishi and I noticed more or less at the same time, one of them was missing. He took a glance at us, but then quickly averted his gaze, and mumbled something incoherently. Mr Shiraishi was ready to keep on walking, but I stopped him and motioned with my eyes towards the sign propped up next to the man.

I FOUGHT FOR THE JAPANESE EMPIRE, BUT THE GOVERNMENT WON’T HELP ME NOW. SPARE SOME CHANGE FOR THIS POOR OLD SOLDIER.

It was my first encounter, I think, with a so-called “wounded returnee”. Actually, I can’t be sure. As I stood there vacantly Mr Shiraishi drew close to me and said in a hushed voice: If he was for real he’d be a lot older; he’s way too young – but he didn’t go so far as to stop me from giving the man some of my “charity”. I dropped a one-hundred-yen coin into the old, cracked bowl on the ground by his side. He murmured something but didn’t look up. I saw the underside of his only foot glinting a dull gold colour in the remaining light.

− What if he’d been Taiwanese…

As I lay upon the bed, staring at the ceiling – some of what was left of the daylight filtering through the single, sealed-shut window – my thoughts drifted back towards the one-legged man.

Only a few days prior, I had been walking alongside an imposing wall, which was taller than me and seemed to go on forever. Here and there, posters had been plastered onto its grey surface. Probably due to long exposure to the elements, the writing on them had begun to expand, and it looked as if they might fall down at any moment.

DEAR GOVERNMENT OF JAPAN. PLEASE PROVIDE FAIR COMPENSATION TO TAIWANESE VETERANS OF THE IMPERIAL JAPANESE ARMY WHO DO NOT POSSESS JAPANESE NATIONALITY!

—ASSOCIATION FOR COMPENSATION FOR TAIWANESE VETERANS OF THE IMPERIAL ARMY

I stopped in my tracks as I glanced up and saw the bold, handwritten letters. On the other side of the wall were the inner grounds of the shrine dedicated to those who had martyred themselves for Japan. Taiwanese veterans of the Imperial Japanese Army. Until that day, only days before my twentieth birthday, it had never occurred to me that there had been Taiwanese who fought for the “Japanese Empire”; who had given their own lives to protect the Emperor of Japan.

Another echo of my own voice.

− You get it? Up until he was twenty years old, my granddad was Japanese.

My grandfather was always eager to talk with me in Japanese. He liked to show off to the rest of his family that the Japanese buried deep within his memory still made sense to his granddaughter now being raised in modern-day Japan. He especially liked it when I called him “Ojī-chan”: “Granddad” in Japanese. My paternal grandfather passed away before I was born, so it was only my maternal grandfather who I could directly call “Ojī-chan”. I was talking into Mr Shiraishi’s chest. I waited for him to nod before continuing. Once, I asked him: How come your Japanese is so much better than Mummy and Daddy’s? He thought for a while and then replied: A long time ago, before your mother had even been born, Ojī-chan was Japanese. “Ojī-chan” is how he referred to himself too.

I could see Mr Shiraishi smirking in the dim light. − Well, if you ask me… He, on the other hand, always referred to himself as “ore”, the most masculine Japanese pronoun. He cleared his throat and then sneered. − Anything’s better than a Japanese.

That was one of his sayings. Mr Shiraishi was always mocking Japan and Japanese people.

− Even though you’re Japanese?

− It’s because I’m Japanese! He laughed, his mouth opening at one side. − Back when I was a boy… he continued, while stroking the inside of my thigh. Mr Shiraishi was eighteen years my senior; a massive gap for me at the time. − …I often saw veterans playing harmonicas and accordions outside on the street, whenever there was a festival at the local Shinto shrine, among the stalls selling toys and junk food. All of them wearing white robes, every time. There was always at least one who was missing an arm or a leg. If they were real veterans, my father would say, they’d be receiving proper compensation, they’re all just fraudsters; but my mother still gave them her change. Even if they’re not telling the truth, they’re still amputees, she’d say. My mother was just like you, Xīn yí – way too sentimental.

Too sentimental?

Mr Shiraishi was always revealing to me a me I never knew existed. Telling me how kind and sentimental I was. As if he’d forgotten that he’d just compared her to me, he continued to badmouth his mother.

− She’s a country bumpkin, so whenever it’s a national holiday she hoists up the Japanese flag. Just because that’s what everybody’s done since as far back as she can remember. That’s the kind of person my mother is. No ideas or beliefs of her own. That’s the problem. It’s always people like that you’ve got to watch out for, those are the real dangerous ones. And the easiest for the state to control…

I didn’t say anything in return. I’d learnt from our half a year of liaisons that that was the best way to make Mr Shiraishi feel like I was giving him my undivided attention.

− I’ll put it plain, she’s a dumbnut, he said, his tone growing ever less sympathetic. − If the Japanese government ever said to me, you’ve got to do service in the armed forces, I’d get out of this hole without a moment’s notice. Whose life is worth giving up for a country like this?

A country like this, I say to myself, the words not reaching my mouth. I feel Mr Shiraishi’s gaze, and say the words again silently. A country like this. I FOUGHT FOR THE JAPANESE EMPIRE. The words from the man on the street’s placard spring back up in my mind. So what did he give up his leg for? What if in fact he was “for real”? But I couldn’t bring myself to start this conversation with Mr Shiraishi, and I remained silent. Mr Shiraishi lifted up my legs, and I felt all of my strength slipping away. As I felt my breath seeping out, I closed my eyes shut, and suddenly noticed the backs of my eyelids were brighter than usual. That’s when it hit me. I’m twenty years old. If the Showa era hadn’t ended, what year would it be now?

− Your granddad was born in the first year of Showa.

As always, my grandfather was referring to himself as “Ojī-chan”.

Every year in the summer my parents took me on a trip to Taiwan. My grandfather would look over my shoulder as I worked on the homework assignment for my Japanese class. He followed the hiragana characters I had written on the page, reading out the sounds one by one – he-i-se-i, ga-n-ne-n – and then he must have remembered the year of his own birth – sho-u-wa, ga-n-ne-n. He said to me:

− Now it’s “Heisei gan’nen”, the first year of Heisei. Granddad was a “Showa gan’nen” baby.

At the age of nine, my grandfather’s expression delighted me no end and I repeated it again and again.

− Now it’s “Heisei gan’nen”, Granddad was a “Showa gan’nen” baby. Granddad was a “Showa gan’nen” baby, now it’s “Heisei gan’nen”.

To put it another way, during the summer in which the emperor’s voice was broadcast on radio for the very first time, not only in Japan but in Taiwan too, my grandfather had been just twenty years old.

− So Granddad, until he was twenty, had really been Japanese.

Which means that this would be the seventy-fifth year of the Showa era.

Mr Shiraishi stroked my face by the corner of my eye. − What are you thinking about?

− Why do you ask? I reply, and he touches my lips.

− Another man?

− Don’t be stupid – well… actually yes. Maybe I was. I was thinking about my grandfather. And the Japanese Emperor. When my grandfather said to me: Your granddad remembers the day when His Imperial Majesty the Emperor of Japan was born, I was just nine years old.

− Granddad was the same age as you are now. When I went to school that day, my teachers all said that today is a truly magnificent day…

My grandfather’s Japanese, as he reminisced to me about his youth, was far more fluent than that which my mother and father spoke, and it sounded far more refined. I remember thinking, in a mixture of adoration and pride: Granddad is just like a Japanese person.

− But now I realise of course it was only because I never really thought of my granddad the same way I thought of Japanese people that I could think something like that in the first place. Just like the way I thought of my parents, I only ever saw my granddad as Taiwanese, never really truly Japanese. But for Granddad it was different. As he saw things, he really had been Japanese. He told me so that day, several times. Before I turned twenty, I had really been Japanese, he said. So when I said to him, you’re just like a Japanese person, how must he have felt?

The more I worked myself up, the more infantile my voice and body language became.

− So what about me? Am I a real Japanese? Or am I just a fake? Come on, tell me! Which am I?

It wasn’t enough for me to just plead with Mr Shiraishi; I started to flap my legs up and down as though I was having a tantrum, until he extended his arms and stroked my tummy, the way someone might try to settle a small child. I took a few deep breaths, as if to show him he had succeeded in calming me down. It wasn’t that I was faking my emotions. But if I had really tried to, I could have managed to keep them in check. However, I knew that Mr Shiraishi liked it when I lost control. As if that was irrefutable evidence that there were things I could only ever confide in him; that there was nobody except he himself who had the capacity to accept me fully for who I was – to feel like that gave Mr Shiraishi an elusive high. And that’s why, at the time, I also needed him. I needed a place where I could expose myself completely without reservation. − Granddad… I started to say again, but was cut short by Mr Shiraishi’s unaffected tutting. − Just another dumbnut.

− Taiwan was Japan’s first colony. Your granddad, Xīn yí, he was a victim of Japanese imperialism.

A victim?

I felt my voice catching in my throat.

Outside, the sun must have set completely; the window was pitch black. I quietly patted my thighs, now damp with sweat, to which Mr Shiraishi, who kept talking, seemed oblivious. For a while, I continued to lie there saying nothing.

I arrived home just before it struck midnight. Somewhat deterred by the fact the lights were still on – it was unusual for my parents to be up so late – I peered into the living room and saw my mother and father both sat up wide awake. As I braced for a scolding, I heard my mother say to me:

− Goh-dyuu-gon died.

My mother’s voice was almost placid; it took me a while to register what she had said.

− What happened to Goh-dyuu-gon?

− He finally passed away, my father replied, his voice just as flat.

According to my aunt, who lived with my great uncle, earlier that afternoon my uncle had been nodding on and off in his rocking chair as usual, but when she went to call on him after preparing dinner, she noticed he’d stopped breathing.

As I remained silent and still, my father smiled at me. − There’s no need to be so tense. He’s gone to the Pure Land, he added, his voice a bit brighter.

We all know how old Goh-dyuu-gon is, my mother and father had often said.

− He’s the same age as the Republic of China!

My great uncle was born the year after the Xinhai Revolution, in other words the same year in which the Republic of China’s calendar begins. The year I turned twenty was the eighty-ninth year of the Republic of China.

Eighty-nine years old.

Certainly, there’s no denying that he had a good running.

As I soon learned, the notice of my great uncle’s death had arrived little more than half an hour before I had, and my parents had stayed up to discuss what to do about his funeral and all of the associated travel arrangements. As far as I could tell, neither of them was particularly fazed by my great uncle’s passing away. To think of the state my mother had been in back when my grandfather died of lung cancer, the difference was palpable. My grandfather, who was my mother’s father, passed away when I was ten years old.

− Your granddad was born in the first year of Showa.

Which means, it must have been the last summer I spent with my grandfather. I remember him coughing heavily. Don’t get your granddad so excited, my mother chided me. Despite having been told by his doctor in no uncertain terms that he was to ease off his smoking, my grandfather, much to the consternation of my onlooking relatives, would reach for another cigarette, while saying in Japanese, “Mō ippon dake” (Just one more). And as he puffed away, the very picture of contentment, he would always announce:

− Wa ga ringon, tabako shi, rippun ei meekyah za hoh! (You can’t beat a Japanese cigarette!)

Every time my mother travelled back to Taiwan, she would take a carton of Mild Seven with her for my grandfather. Later she admonished herself, saying if only she’d known how bad her father’s lungs were she would’ve never encouraged him to smoke. And then she’d remark, sadly shaking her head: Why did your grandfather have to pass away so soon, when your great uncle keeps on going…

My great uncle was born fourteen years before my grandfather and managed to outlive him by a whole ten years.

− Just like always, he smoked a cigarette before taking his nap. Even now, the stub of Goh-dyuu’s final cigarette is lying in his ashtray.

That’s how my aunt announced my great uncle’s death to my father.

I can picture the yellow box of cigarettes that my great uncle always had by his side. My great uncle was even more of a heavy smoker than my grandfather. And a lot more talkative.

− Come along, young lady.

Among all of my cousins on my father’s side, I received the biggest share of my great uncle’s affection. It’s because he can speak Japanese with you, everyone would say. As soon as he saw me a smile would reach across his face, and he’d call to me in Japanese, “Oide!” (Come over here!) He’d sit me on his knee, one arm around my waist, the other holding a cigarette, and the words would flow out of his mouth.

− Kin’i. You hear? Japan turned its back on Taiwan twice. Twice! First it was the Emperor. Then Tanaka Kakuei. You understand? We were abandoned.

My great uncle also referred to himself as “ore”. Though I didn’t really understand even half of what he was saying to me at the time, I can still hear his voice now – ten’nō heika, tanaka kakuei. I also remember thinking at the time that it sounded just right when he said “ore”. Although my grandfather could speak Japanese just as well, he would never call himself “ore”. It wouldn’t have fit his character. The more formal “boku” would have suited him far better, but he didn’t call himself “boku” either. At least when he was talking to me, he always, without exception, referred to himself as “Ojī-chan”. My grandfather liked it when I called him “Ojī-chan” too, but my great uncle was different. Although his Japanese was completely fluent, he much preferred it when I replied to him in Taiwanese.

− Kin’i. You’re a smart girl. You live in Japan. But you’re also Taiwanese. Even if people say to you that you’re like a Japanese person, don’t you forget that you’re Taiwanese. Okay, Kin’i. You understand what I’m saying, don’t you?

− Wa tia oo. (I understand.)

− Hao guai. (Good girl.) Kin’i, you’re such a bright young lady.

My great uncle ruffled my hair and then lit up another cigarette. Although I couldn’t read Chinese I could read Japanese, so when I looked at the writing on my uncle’s cigarette I could imagine the name of the brand: “chōju” for 長壽. I was good at reading Chinese characters. The grown-ups all used the Chinese pronunciation: “zhǎng shòu”. Unlike my grandfather, my great uncle only smoked Taiwanese brands. Once my uncle had finished talking to me and let me go, my mother and father, even my aunt, would discreetly praise me for putting up with him for so long. My cousins too would thank me, as though I had sacrificed myself for them. I myself was more than happy to listen to my great uncle’s stories. One day, I realised, when my great uncle said “ore”, although sometimes he was indeed referring to himself, some of the time he was actually meaning Taiwanese people in general.

− When we went to school, they told us to become Japanese. Kin’i, you understand what I’m saying? We were taught that we should live for Japan, that we should live for His Majesty the Emperor. That’s what our Japanese teachers told us. So that’s what we did – that’s what I did – we tried to become Japanese. I had to – we had to – become Japanese.

My grandfather used to boast to me about how he’d been Japanese.

My great uncle, on the other hand, lectured me about how he’d been turned Japanese.

− So what about me? Am I a real Japanese? Or am I just a fake? Come on, tell me! Which am I?

As I soaked in the bath that night, it occurred to me that it might have been at the very moment Mr Shiraishi was stroking my tummy that my great uncle passed away. The more I thought about the possibility, the more convinced I became of the fact. Actually, I’m sure beyond an inch of a doubt. Even if there’s no sense in me banging on about it now when there’s no way to prove it, for some reason, and I can’t explain why, at that moment it was as clear as day to me. I hear Mr Shiraishi’s voice. Your granddad, Xīn yí, he was a victim of Japanese imperialism.

− If the Japanese government ever said to me, you’ve got to do service in the armed forces, I’d get out of this hole without a moment’s notice.

I lay submerged in the bath, eyes closed, picturing the ashtray with the stub of my great uncle’s last cigarette. I took a few deep breaths. Mr Shiraishi doesn’t understand. To think that you can throw something away is just proof that you believe with your body and soul that it belongs to you entirely. In other words, Mr Shiraishi really is a bona fide, hundred percent genuine Japanese. Whether he wants to admit it or not, it’s a fact. I slowly opened my eyes, and was struck by how seductive my own naked body looked. As I flailed my arms, splashing the water around, and pinched myself, I suddenly saw again the golden light reflecting upon the sole of the one-legged man I’d passed earlier that day. Watashi no ojī-chan tachi – My granddads. What am I thinking, I thought to myself. I felt like I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t. So maybe, in fact, I hadn’t really wanted to cry in the first place.

The characters for Heisei – 平成 – had been crossed out with two diagonal lines.

− We’ve got heaps of documents in the old format; better than throwing them away, isn’t it, the office worker said to me with an awkward smile. It had only been one week since the new era had officially begun. A colleague standing next to me muttered that it was about time they just had done with it all and switched everything to the Western calendar. She wasn’t alone; it was quite common for my work friends to show disdain for Japan’s “unique” calendar – to use it was to show your support for the Japanese imperial system. I myself, however, can’t deny that I still have a soft spot for “Showa” and “Heisei”.

− Your granddad was born in the first year of Showa.

My grandfather looked over my shoulder as I wrote the characters for “Heisei” on my homework sheet.

− Your granddad remembers the day when His Imperial Majesty the Emperor of Japan was born.

Could he ever have imagined that the Heisei era would end like this, on a day decided far in advance, while the previous Emperor, his junior in age, was still in good health and of sound mind?

Conscious of the crossed-out characters at the top of the page next to the new era name, I filled in today’s date. And then I remembered that it was my birthday. Although in recent years it hadn’t always occurred to me, today, for some reason, it struck me that it had been exactly nineteen years since my great uncle passed away.

− It’d be such a waste for someone like you to just live an ordinary life, Xīn yí.

Once I’d realised that I wasn’t actually so different from my peers, neither in my kindness nor my sympathy, I also noticed that the words of my lover, which had previously made me feel so special, began to feel a lot less sincere. Mr Shiraishi was just looking out for himself. He always had been. He was never going to leave his wife for me. Even had I not made this discovery, by the time I reached my mid-twenties I was already drifting away from Mr Shiraishi.

− What happened, Xīn yí? You’re not as cute as you used to be.

I took those words as my cue. I made up my mind and left him.

…What am I wasting my time thinking about? I handed in the paperwork and headed back to my office. The graduate student I was using as a teaching assistant was waiting outside; she passed me the reaction sheets from the class I’d just finished. Back inside my room, I leafed through the fifty-odd sheets of paper.

− Whenever I go abroad, I always come back feeling more Japanese than I felt when I left. It may have its flaws, but Japan is the country where I was born and raised, and I feel at home here. For me, and for most Japanese people, “patriotism” is just a natural emotion.

I had to stop myself from grimacing and remind myself that the comments I had my students write were just a reflection of my teaching. At the start of term, over eighty students had signed up for my class on “Japan within East Asia”, but the number present seemed to dwindle each week.

− I want to be able to feel pride in my country as a Japanese.

All of the comments were in the same vein. At first, I was despondent, but the more I read the more I felt my resolve hardening. This is really how the majority think, and that’s why I’m here to teach history – why I have a duty to teach my students how to face up to history themselves, even if it means, at times, demonstrating my own lived experience in front of them. Finally I came across the odd one out.

− I would never call myself a patriot. Nationalism is just the final stronghold of the ignorant.

In the name column, as expected, was “Shiraishi Takahiro”. I had to chuckle to myself. Some things really do run in the family.

The young Shiraishi called over to me at the end of my first lecture, after I had finished explaining the schedule and contents of the class and was preparing to leave the room. I turned to face him and was met by an intense gaze. I’d never seen him before.

− My name is Shiraishi Takahiro…

Later, I realised. His father had probably told him in advance that all he need do was say his name. But I assumed he was just another student with a question about the class, and simply encouraged him to continue. Caught off guard, he explained:

− When my dad saw your name in the syllabus, he said it brought back lots of memories.

He straightened himself up and announced his father’s name. I swallowed. The boy was around the same age I had been during my fling with Mr Shiraishi. He didn’t seem to have any ulterior motives; if anything he seemed to want to befriend me. I quickly tried to calculate what was going on. Does he really not know? Or is he just pretending?

− My son is the spitting image of me. Not just in looks, but in character too. Fortunately, my wife seems to have found her purpose in life by doting on him. For an ordinary woman like her, that’s about as good as it gets.

Mr Shiraishi would talk about his wife the same way he talked about his mother. I took a deep breath and looked the young Shiraishi in the eyes. Even for a first-year student, he had a baby face.

− Well it’s certainly been a long time. Sorry, I took a moment to remember. And how is Mr Shiraishi these days?

A wide smile beamed across the young Shiraishi’s face, and I knew instantly. The boy has no idea.

− He told me to pass on his best wishes. My dad said that I absolutely have to sign up for your class, Ms Shū. I’m really looking forward to learning a lot.

The boy certainly has a lot of respect for his father. That’s probably why I couldn’t help myself from issuing what was probably an unnecessary warning.

− Well, whatever your father says, you don’t need to feel an obligation to come to my class. You can make your own decision, please.

Whether out of complacency or a genuine interest I cannot say, but a month later Shiraishi Takahiro was still attending my class. Once, as I was tidying up my things at the lectern, he waved at me like he might to one of his classmates, and called over: See you next week, Sensei! Although there was something charmingly innocent about a young student who clearly wanted to show off to his friends that he was on friendly terms with his teacher, I just nodded, lightly so as not to encourage him. A few days later, Shiraishi Takahiro came knocking on the door of my office.

− Sensei. To tell the truth, before I came to your class I’d never really took an interest in Asia. But I realised after hearing your lecture that I have a duty to make myself more knowledgeable. And so, you see…

Unable to conceal his excitement, the young Shiraishi began to unfold a world map he had brought with him. “Republic of China” and “Manchukuo” – written in the old, pre-war script – flashed before my eyes, and I instantly recognised it as a replica of the 1936 atlas produced by the Tokyo Nichinichi Shimbun. It was a map I had introduced in the class a few weeks prior, and although it may not have been titled “Empire of Great Japan”, it highlighted all of the Japanese “territories” – Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, the Korean Peninsula and Taiwan – in the same crimson colour as the Japanese archipelago.

− When I searched online, I found there were a few print versions for sale on auction, so I decided to put in a bid. I’m going to make it my mission to visit as many of the red locations on this map as I can. First, in the summer vacation, I’m going to visit Taiwan.

Shiraishi Takahiro spoke with a glint in his eye. Perhaps he had forgotten that he was talking to his teacher – for he was referring to himself as “ore”, too. Again, I nodded slightly to indicate my understanding, but this time with a smile. Encouraged, he continued with his declaration.

− Sensei. I remember you telling us all in the very first class. Your granddad was Taiwanese but spoke Japanese fluently, right? But half the population of Japan today doesn’t even know that Japan used to possess its own colonies in Asia. And building relations with other countries in Asia has to begin with an understanding of that fact…

My own mind was drifting elsewhere; to the large yellow area on the map marked “Republic of China” and the smaller characters written just below it, reading “China Proper”. The eleventh year of Showa. Back when my grandfather and his friends were just young boys, the Japanese and Chinese “territories” were more expansive than today. Before I knew it, the young Shiraishi had crept up to my side. I heard his voice right beside my ear.

− What a map, eh? When I look at this map, I feel like I can really grasp that Japan is just a part of Asia. You told us in class, Sensei, about how your granddad was forced to learn Japanese; that that’s how they tried to turn him into a Japanese person. But no matter how perfect his Japanese became, he would never be treated as a true Japanese. When I heard that, I got so angry. It’s just stupid to think that Japanese people are special, when we’re all the same – we’re all Asian.

The young Shiraishi’s impassioned speech and burning gaze began to make me feel uneasy. I had to interrupt him when he started to talk about his father again.

− I’m sorry. I haven’t time.

It doesn’t matter who his father is; Shiraishi Takahiro is just one among my many students. I don’t have any inclination to become more familiar with him than I absolutely need to.

But what a nerve his father has – sure, it was a long time ago, but what makes him so cocksure that I’m not going to tell his prized son about the way he treated me twenty years ago? Or better yet, that I’m not going to try and tempt him myself? If I were to return that impassioned gaze, how would the young Shiraishi – so much more innocent than his father – react? I felt a chill run down my spine. As if I was going to waste my precious time like that.

− I don’t want to be held back by my Japaneseness.

Even the handwriting seemed to run in the family. I put the reaction sheets in an envelope and left my office. Outside, to the east, I saw the clear white shape of the moon in the sky. The sky itself was still light.

− Xīn yí, please just promise me that you’ll follow your own path. You don’t need to get trapped trying to live somebody else’s dream, stuck in an ordinary marriage with an ordinary man.

I began to picture the world map that the all too innocent son of that oh so arrogant man, so convinced of his own extraordinariness, had just spread out in front of me. I wasn’t thinking of the crimson areas, but the area shaded yellow. I was thinking of the Taiwanese men who had fought as Japanese imperial subjects against the Republic of China Army; and who, despite managing to emerge from that conflict with their lives intact, had failed to return to their homeland and were now reduced to begging for the charity of strangers in a foreign country.

The twentieth year of the Showa era. The year of Japan’s defeat, in which Taiwan was returned to the Republic of China.

That’s when my grandfathers ceased to be imperial subjects of Japan.

The thirty-fourth year of the Republic of China.

My grandfather was twenty years old. My great uncle thirty-four.

That’s when it hit me. Today is the anniversary of my great uncle’s death. Since the day he passed away nineteen years ago, my birthday and the anniversary of his death have been, and will be forever more, the very same day. My students and I don’t really have so much between us. When I was their age, before I turned nineteen, I didn’t know anything, almost anything about my place in the world. And then, another revelation. Without me even noticing it, I’d managed to live longer than the entire period that not only my grandfather, but also my great uncle had lived as “Japanese”.

− So what about me? Am I a real Japanese? Or am I just a fake? Come on, tell me! Which am I?

Wanting to stamp out that needy voice, rising up from the depths of my memory, I strode forward with a newfound determination, a spring in my step.

Asia family history japan pride

husbands and wives painkillers

WHO I AM NOW

by Josephine Galvin • June 13, 2021June 13, 2021

In the dream you hover on the lip of the volcano. Vertigo compels you to take a further step; the scorching siren call of its molten heart offering release.

Eric is still behind you, all restraint, wisdoms, warnings. But you’d blotted out his gentle guidelines a long way back. You always did. ‘You go too far’: a frequent accusation from childhood. And now you will pay for your extremes in nature’s Salem. You step out beyond the ledge.

But dreams swerve their climax by thrusting you back to consciousness. The potential of searing skin twists into a wakeful agitation that offers no relief. The cracking pain behind your eyes, and the bleak constricted heaviness of your skull, forces you to lie still; to ride through the swollen aftermath of excess.

You are lying on your stomach. Your face, creased into the pillow, is damp and salty. The under sheet is clammy with seepage and wrinkled into a thousand discomforts. You peer through your left eye at the blinking digits – 06:10. Eric’s alarm is always set for 7am. Little chance of further rest, without assistance.

Outside, there is little footfall yet. You live within walking distance of the college. It was Eric’s plan to simplify your morning routines: eradicating traffic chaos and keeping you fit. Your enthusiasm for any plan had existed in inverse proportion to his. But you had once benefited from this proximity to work. Any appreciation you felt, was carefully hidden.

You don’t work anymore. You make him sandwiches every morning. Something you refused to countenance in your first years of marriage. How disdainful would your younger self be if she scrutinised your routines now. The stand-out drama graduate with great promise. The leading lady: predictably nonconformist, anti-marriage. You just weren’t anti-Eric.

Your arm stretches towards the bedside table, pulling open the small drawer on the third attempt. Within the drawer, your hand settles on the box of preferred painkiller; soluble discs of paracetamol, codeine and caffeine. Max strength. Retrieving two white packets you rip across the red lettering with your teeth, and drop them into cup you hope contains some liquid. You listen as the reassuring fizz promises comfort to come, counting the seconds until you can lift the cup to your lips using minimal head movements. You taste the pharmaceutical mix within the remnants of cold tea, and feel momentarily calm.

You sleep on. This is a day when the relaxant effects of the codeine outweigh the stimulus of caffeine. By 10:20 you are in the kitchen blinking at the coffee machine; an expensive impulse buy years ago, when you were both unaware of how costly refills are.

The house is quiet, external noise largely removed by your situation in a cul-de-sac. Next door, the new baby is wailing. A thin, reedy cry twisting nerves on your skin surface.

His sandwiches lie unclaimed on the counter, together with the pastries you bought yesterday. Sometimes you take them in to him, but they don’t like it. His chemistry classroom overlooks the main road. It’s possible to attract his attention if he’s actually looking out. It saves you having to explain yourself at reception. That’s the trouble with the admin staff, they never forget.

After your first absence, you returned to your job expecting things to resume as before. You floundered, displaced. Something had shifted and you felt exposed, ill-fitted in the wrong costume; an actor clutching last season’s script. And the students you had fired with your beliefs, seemed solipsistic, rehashing old ideas as if freshly discovered.

The baby’s cries intensify. Your nerves grate. You’ve forgotten your beta-blocker. You’ll have to take it with your acid inhibitors or you will not manage to accomplish all your daily tasks.

You hadn’t wanted a baby; your body had betrayed you. Eric effervesced with excitement, cooking for you, fussing you. Right up until that 18 week scan you threatened not to go through with it. Although, you don’t think you actually said those words aloud. You made your appointment in secret. It was increasingly hard to extricate yourself from your solicitous husband, but you did. A rush of relief in the 24hours afterwards. Then the drop. The sickening sense of hollow.

The sympathy in the staff room was cloying. The care at home asphyxiated you. But nothing went back to normal. Without your fiery sparkle, as Eric kindly termed it, you must have just appeared shrill. You certainly closed yourself off to Eric.

With your coffee you dissolve two more painkillers. It must be over the four-hour restriction. The caffeine will give you a lift.

Automatically, you switch on the computer in your small lounge overlooking the road. You had tried working from home, but it never seemed to work out.

‘I am sorry your home delivery order was missing some items.’

Actually, I couldn’t give a shit.

‘On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the highest, how would you rate my service today?

‘What am I wearing? What do you want me to be wearing?’

Before you go out you take two of his shirts, and a pair of his pyjamas, from the wash basket, leaving your assorted underwear for another day. You put them on a fast wash which you will dry when you’re back.

Eric’s wellies are in the small porch. You lift them towards you, unsettling a pile of leaflets and envelopes. You push your bare feet into the pressed down shape of his insoles and open the door to late September sunshine.

In the pastry shop on your road, Neville always knows his customers by name and he always winks as if there is some conspiracy hidden in the transaction.

‘Good afternoon Mrs Davies. Some lovely iced fingers left over from the morning rush.’

The best selections are picked over, with most of the cakes bought by students on the way to college. The pastries he indicates look inferior, misshapen.

‘Iced fingers will be fine.’ Your voice is thin, mumbled. No remnants of your graduate-year Ophelia, nor your flirtatious yet resolute Gwendoline.

‘Two or Four, Mrs Davies?’ His eyebrows a question mark. You frown and you’re not sure why. You only wanted one for Eric, but you feel bad about the leaving the others. Inanimate items induce a dislocated guilt. ‘Four… yes, fine thanks.’

You changed the way you were addressed just over a year ago. Not officially, but just as emphatically as you had rejected it. Mrs Davies. It’s how you introduce yourself now, even if no-one is asking. You once hated titles, articulating the reasons loudly, insisting on keeping your own name. In college, you were informal with your students, let them call you Clara. You believed you were fighting for something. But in this small Northern suburb, no-one fought back.

Now it’s a comfort and you won’t have it taken away. You are Mrs Eric Davies.

Clutching the bag, and with a slight nod to Neville’s cheery wave, you turn to the door. Two bodies empirically block the entrance; two faces you recognise but can’t place. Half smiles hover, but your gaze drops too slowly and you catch them transforming into smirks.

Dilemma. You can’t go to the supermarket now for Eric’s dinner, despite it being within your sightline. You need to go home to stabilise yourself. And to put his washing in the dryer. You walk the two blocks through a heavy dark sludge.

Back in your kitchen, you struggle for breath. Palpitations. Where are the beta blockers? Did you miss this morning’s? Things have slipped out of order. Take two immediately.

He had noticed you on his first day, the flamboyant drama teacher with a devoted following of would-be actors. And you began to notice him because he was always flustered when you caught his eye, and he had almost-blonde hair with a frizzy bit at the fringe where a classroom experiment backfired. And he was tall, and gentle, and although you never wanted to get married, although you believed it would suffocate you, you somehow did.

You boil the kettle for instant coffee. Moving the pastries nearer to the fridge you select a cup that looks unwashed. Eric seemed to enjoy washing up. Why had you found that irritating?

You had lost something of your allure after your absence, Time had moved on surprisingly swiftly. The supply teacher had been a younger male. You lost patience with the frequency he cropped up on the lips of your fickle disciples. The gilt had tarnished on last year’s brightest star.

As Eric devoted himself to your care, you armoured yourself to tell him what you’d done. Blood-letting to alleviate your own pain. Making his hurt exceed yours.

Whistling to himself, he had been clearing the remnants of a stir-fry prepared to tempt you. The night you severed all that held him to you.

After the school negotiated some kind of agreement with you, you had summoned a final flounce declaring that you would leave teaching to write. And you made a couple of weak attempts. But your tone was savage, sarcastic. There was no market for it. You had notions of writing a play for students, but you were no longer sure you spoke their language.

Focus on being organised. Go to Morrisons and select something nice for dinner. Maybe fish. Eric likes fish.

You don’t think you’re due another beta blocker but an anti-inflammatory may help through your second excursion. You place two in a glass that looks quite murky. You take his clothes from the dryer and place them on the radiators to air. The radiators are cold as economies have had to be made.

Morrisons can be an ordeal, depending on whether anyone knows you or not. Each aisle quivers with the possibility of recognition. That look that contains truth, before lies leave their lips.

‘Clara! …you look well…’

You get two lots of fish: sea bass and salmon. Fish seems to be getting more expensive. You won’t need to come tomorrow.

Tuesday is usually Eric’s later finish. It’s homework club for pupils retaking sciences. He’s devoted is Eric; still believing he makes a difference. You used to ridicule him for that.

You steady yourself outside the next-door pharmacy. Check that it’s not that woman who interrogated you last week. It’s a young man.

‘Nytol please.’

‘Short term use only – three days and then see a doctor.’

You assemble an expression to prove you’re listening to new words.

‘Are you on any other medication?’

Two seconds to act ‘thinking’.

‘Er…nothing.’ Not quite Shakespeare but still credible, you crush the printed prescription into your fleece pocket. ‘I’ll take some dissolving painkillers whilst I’m here please. Large box’.

Tomorrow you will travel to the precinct to get your prescription and more painkillers. Next week you’ll travel further afield.

At home, you leave the wellies in the porch and shuffle in bare feet across sticky lino to the fridge. You are very shaken. Try to make room for the fish. It’s very full in there and smells unpleasant. You manage to find a little space, by squeezing it on top of fish already in there.

You get the shirts from the radiator to take upstairs to iron. You really want to lie down but you can’t deviate from your domestic routine. You are reinvented. You pour yourself the last of the brandy from his ingredients cupboard. You meant to go to the wine aisle, but there is very little on offer at the moment. A box would be cheaper, but heavier to carry home. There is one bottle of raw-tasting sauvignon left from a late-night trip to Bargain Booze; its aftertaste, tainted with shame. Drop a painkiller into your brandy. Take some antacid as your tummy seems sore.

After ironing, you place the two shirts on hangers and put them in his wardrobe and you fold his pyjamas with care. The shirts look too small for him. He seems to have put weight on lately. You have noticed that.

You used to wait for him at the bus stop outside the college. Sometimes he walked, sometimes he got the bus, but either way you could always spot him. At first, he used to sit with you on the wall. He seemed concerned, caring. Gradually he became cooler until he stopped speaking. Then he stopped walking alone.

It was after you’d been to her house that Sunday – hands shaking – clutching an oval plate of roast chicken. Walking through streets holding it out at arm’s length. Gravy congealing on clenched knuckles. Standing in that garden with your offering; the first Sunday dinner you’d ever made. Shouting to get his attention, in case she prevented him from answering the door. He didn’t have to eat it, you just wanted him to come and look at it. Please just look at who I am now!

She came out, haughty, holding her baby, a strange repulsed expression on her face. He hovered behind her, chubbier in a sweatshirt you didn’t recognise; his hair shorter, his frizzy fringe tamed.

It’s 5 o’clock and the two youngish men from the cul-de-sac arrive back in separate cars. They’re in marketing, you’re not sure of the details as you hadn’t really listened. They invited you both for dinner when they first moved in but you avoided them afterwards, reluctant to descend into suburban cliche. You sit on your paved patio with a glass of the bitter sauvignon and listen to the build-up of distant commuter traffic. People returning to people. Next door’s baby is still crying. The woman you have never spoken to brings it outside. She looks tired, and older than you’d expect a new mother to be. She knows not to look at you.

You stay until the sky darkens and everyone is settled somewhere. All new-intake students are back from college and the building, freshly cleaned, will be locked. An early September dusk. You stay until you’ve finished the Sauvignon. Your tummy is unsettled, borborygmus, reminding you that you’ve neglected to eat today. Back inside, you take the last of the beta blockers. The pile of pastries doesn’t tempt you and there is no point in cooking for one.

You clear all unused food into a bin liner. You begin to prepare sandwiches for tomorrow.

Back in the bedroom, you take the two shirts from his otherwise empty wardrobe, and you lift the abandoned pyjamas from under the pillow that is still his, and place them in the wash basket. You’d make a list for tomorrow, but your headache is brutal. You lower your body, with its non-specific aching, under the stale sheets. Take two sleeping tablets from the one-a-night pack and lie silently.

Somewhere inside your veins, Juliet rages at the dying of love, an eloquent Lady Macbeth is consumed by destructive guilt and Blanche Dubois crumbles behind her painted facade. You know all their words, but you have no remaining lines of your own.

Poetry, Print Issues, Spring 2021: Japan Issue

BLOOPY

by Michelle Morouse • June 11, 2021June 11, 2021

Photo by christina rutz (copied from Flickr)

I wasn’t even going to go to that party, but my sister was sick, and Aiden calls me, “Please, Aunt Sarah, please!”

So, we’re at my cousin Brad’s — his boy turned five — dogs on the grill, Sponge Bob cake, Disney tunes, then a kid screams “Bloopy, Bloopy!” Big dude, on a bitsy unicycle, complete face paint, fake red nose, rainbow wig, all that shit. You know how I feel about clowns. I’m like “God, I need a beer” and all they have is soft drinks.

I suck down my iced tea, but my throat’s still dry. It’s eighty degrees out and I’ve got goose bumps. The kids start chasing him around the yard. Bloopy does balloon animals, then he walks up — flap, flap, flap — with the shoes. He yells, “What’s that behind your ear?” the old quarter trick. He touched me! I say, “I need to use the rest room.” No lie — I damn near peed my pants. So, I go in the house, hang out with Grandpa. Then, my nephew comes in, and I talk him into leaving early, tell him we’ll play his new video game.

Bloopy leaves the same time we do, but after a minute, he’s all over the road — like he’s drunk — slows down, crashes into a parked car. So, I stop, we go over, and his face is red, nose is gone, eyes are watering. I say, “What’s wrong?” He squirms and clutches his neck, looks like he’s trying to say something, then he slumps over.

There’s a half-eaten apple on the seat. I think maybe he choked on it, maybe I should do the Heimlich, but it’s been six years since I took CPR — middle school — and he’s like six feet tall. I’m not even five-two. Would it even work?

I could get past the clown thing, really, but I just wasn’t sure. I think maybe the apple was there before, because that car was trashed — fast food wrappers, newspapers, socks.

Then I think, maybe someone in this neighborhood is a nurse. We run to the nearest house. No one answers. We go back to the car. Bloopy’s still slumped over, his tongue is sticking out and it’s purple. I think “What if he’s already dead?” I never touched a dead person. When grandma died, everyone gave her one last peck on the cheek, but I faked it.

We run to another house. This old lady answers and she calls 911, and a guy down the street, who’s a paramedic. We go back to the car. I smell the greasepaint, and there’s this string of drool hanging from his tongue. Then my mouth fills with spit. I run to the gutter and lose my lunch.

Then, this guy, in cut-offs and flip flops, bushy white beard, huffs down the sidewalk, big hairy belly bouncing. Malibu fucking Santa! He finally gets to the car, sees the apple, says, “He choked!” He grabs Bloopy, shoves his fist into his gut and this slimy chunk pops out, then he feels for a pulse, starts pumping on his chest.

They got there fast: two cop cars, an ambulance, the volunteer fire department. They did everything, maybe it was just his time to go. They say that CPR doesn’t always work, even if you do it right away.

My cousin’s kid actually goes to school with Bloopy’s grandson. I know this sounds lame, but I never thought of clowns as having kids of their own.

I’ll take CPR again, after it slows down at Home Depot. What are the chances it would be a clown again? Although, I could get past that in an emergency, now.

My cousin says Bloopy was a great guy, always at Children’s Village, volunteering. He asked if I wanted to attend the memorial, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable, because I didn’t know Bloopy . . . George Pappas. What if people found out I was with him when it happened? Some people would want details, but someone else, overhearing it, could freak out.

My cousin said I should go, because it was so traumatic, and I need closure. No, I’m good, I told him. I’m good.

clowns party

SIX POEMS

by tianyuan • June 9, 2021June 9, 2021

Translated by Jordan A. Y. Smith

TSUYU – PLUM RAINS

The scent of falling plums does not get wet from plum-rain season,

A stutter of raindrops on wind-bent umbrella

Yearns to travel the Silk Road,

The only thing wet is the horizon vanished underfoot.

Mountains conceal the wind’s echo,

And like a sponge, greedily suck up the rainwater.

Tree leaves resolutely weather the green-deepening raindrops,

In the depths of the sky, the sputtering sun tires of waiting for pure nudity,

As mold stealthily spreads across the far side of the moon,

A rotten tree conceives the forms of mushrooms.

YOZAKURA – CHERRY BLOSSOMS IN THE NIGHT

Moonlight’s lamp is lit,

branchtips flicker into flames.

The earnestness permeates silence,

the earnestness exudes grace.

Above the white, the pale red

like the first blush on a girl’s cheek,

softly warming the chill of a spring night,

pushing the winking stars even further away.

The stagnant water reflects the yozakura from below,

reviving memories of currents.

So lively as they traverse the moonlight

and the skin of night and

flow through the interstices of the flock of petals

Tiny flames,

the yozakura blooming in the sky and on the water

light up the darkness before our eyes.

The towering castle has long lost its majesty,

and the blood of history ceases to provoke trembling.

No force can hinder the yozakura bloom,

not even ten-billion tons of darkness

could suppress their frail petals.

Not even the Milky Way pouring down

could extinguish their yearning for freedom.

A breeze brushing over the sea and onto the land

teases stamen and pistil of the yozakura

and leaps over the high castle wall

to carry the whisperings of petals

far off into the dawn.

OCTOBER

The wind steps into shoes

a cloud dropped, too loose for its feet,

glides over the river surface,

stumbles over a wave and falls,

sinking to the bottom.

The drowned wind grows colder than the riverbed,

whips out bubbles colder than the depths,

scattering the fish far and wide.

The last leaves have shed,

quarreling into the wind’s funeral,

mournful face after mournful face,

decaying in the mid-prayer silence.

The fiery fragments in bright foliage on distant
mountains

combust because that heart of magma at the
mountain’s core

is beating.

I pause in front of a window shut tight,

grieving the fact that the birds in the treetops

have nowhere to hide their singing voices.

Like a cat moving in tiny steps,

October falls silent,

Fleeing from color heading for darkness.

One of my shoes floats eternally

on the surface of the western river,

a ship with no one aboard,

filling people’s breasts with loneliness.

THE DEER

In the middle of the white wall,

it is raising its head.

The living beauty it brought out after death.

Its eyes that once darted

to harmonize sunlight,

were unmoving.

In one corner like the crutch of a tree,

blood had flowed, congealed,

a so-called nominal power,

representing maleness.

The white wall like an enormous axe,

Cutting away all flesh below the neck,

ushering all the more wind

into the attentive ears.

Beauty wiped away the memory of blood’s raw smell.

The flowing clouds drifted from the retinas,

the once breathing nostrils hardened fast.

Its mouth tightened to preserve the silence.

I stand facing the wall,

wishing I had some magical means

by which to transform this white wall into grassland

and sketch the line of a river

and send this deer back upstream to its forest home.

ONE NIGHT

In one night, the horse escapes its bridle

In one night, the path is blocked

In one night, the snow melts away

In one night, the cloud scatters

In one night, the traveler dreams of home

In one night, the ideal is realized

In one night, the harbor welcomes back the sinking
ship

In one night, the lake dries up

In one night, the rose sheds every last petal

In one night, the maiden loses her virginity

In one night, the camel dies of thirst

In one night, the hero draws suspicion

In one night, the lingering spirits find a land to rest
in peace

In one night, the stars become raindrops

In one night, the ghostly flame defies the darkness

In one night, the wasteland becomes rich fields

In one night, the pond overflows starlight

In one night, the wild horse returns to the grasslands

In one night, the goddess falls to the world of mortals

In one night, the tulip makes love’s proverb bloom

In one night bread placed before the starving

In one night hope placed before the despairing

In one night nightmares blow away in the wind

In one night all battlefields become the children’s
paradise

HAND

Everything in the world began

with a hand.

Before being called “hand”

it was a foot, they say,

before becoming a hand

the word hand itself

did not exist.

Before the hand was born

the world was all tranquility perhaps.

After it became a hand

rocks and trees and plants

were made into all types of tools,

until final the world revealed

its form.

When arrows for shooting beasts and fowl were set
fly at humans,

the world began to crumble.

And then

earthenware and bronze were made,

letters were invented,

glass and textiles and paper.

Everything in the world today

is here thanks to the hand.

The original home of civilization is the hand,

that vestige of memory.

The Neolithic Hemudu and Cerveteri necropolis,

They Pyramids and the Great Wall,

and so on and so on,

all born of the human hand.

The hand is humanity’s universal language,

with the body’s heat, with love,

patting a child on the head.

Lovers join hands.

When someone falls, you help them up.

When someone is lost,

you point them on their way.

By the hand’s labor,

humans are able to travel anywhere they please,

be it to the ocean’s floor, the sky, the stars, or the
future.

By the hand’s movement,

the world is built and destroyed.

Hands traverse the world round,

yet no matter how they move,

they can never return to the past.

Hands touch everything,

cuddling infants

and placing flowers for the dead,

putting on rings and removing rings,

signing and affixing seals.

At times, hands are linked to grim verbs,

to steal

to strike

to snatch

to strangle

to slap

to stab

Hands do not try to change the reality of being hands,

nor do they try to change the fact that desire rules.

And as hands are humans’ second face,

once in a while, we should look in the mirror.

japan Tian Yuan

Arts & Culture, Editor's Pick, Interviews, Print Issues, Spring 2021: Japan Issue

INTERVIEW WITH MARI KATAYAMA

by naokomabon • June 8, 2021June 8, 2021

“tools,” 2012, Still Image from Video Work, 3:54, Mari Katayama
Courtesy of Akio Nagasawa Gallery

Naoko Mabon: Mari, thank you for giving up your time for this interview today.

Mari Katayama: Thank you very much too.

Mabon: Thank you also for agreeing to come on board for shaping Litro’s World Series together with us. It is really exciting to have your work for the cover of our Drifting Islands issue. Especially this particular piece from your bystander series, which was developed during a residency in Naoshima in 2016. In the piece, you seem to have just landed on the Naoshima beach, in front of the beautiful backdrop of the Seto Inland Seascape, with the little pointy Ozuchi island floating at the top right, and The Great Seto Bridge connecting Okayama and Kagawa prefectures in the distance. At first glance, the image seems merely beautiful, but there is more to it than that. In the photograph, your facial expression doesn’t seem to be completely happy yet you hold strong eyes, while your upper posture is upright as if indicating a tension or firm will within you. As this body language may suggest, Naoshima, although it is now known to the world as “Japan’s art island”, had suffered from air pollution by smoke from a copper smelter, as well as a shrinking and aging population. On Teshima, another island within the same Naoshima island chain, for a long time there had been the largest legal case in the country about the disposal of industrial waste. Thinking of the relation to and the direction of the theme of Drifting Islands, we therefore thought this image is the perfect face for our issue.

Here I would like to ask you a few questions relating to the work, so that this interview will naturally become an introduction of you and your practice to the readership of Litro Magazine, which is not necessarily exclusive to a contemporary visual art audience.

One of the factors that makes the bystander series stand out – possibly a turning point – in your artistic trajectory is that this is the first time you feature bodies that are not your own in your photographs or work. Up until this series, mostly you alone had been creating self-portrait photography amongst a flood of embroidered objects and decorated prosthesis in your personal space. I recall you mentioned that, even though you gained a result you never achieved on your own in the end, you were a little scared by and took some time to understand and accept the shift. Can you tell us about this shift in the dynamics between yourself and others, and the impact that it has brought?

Katayama: In recent years, there have been gradually more and more things that I cannot do myself. Parenting is one example. So the shift, I think, is a positive consequence of my sort of surrender to things that I cannot do on my own. The topic jumps a little, but since I was little, I had been the kind of person who gives things up quite easily. I was really into Manga, illustration or fashion in the past, but gave all of these up in my teens. I thought “I don’t think I can become a Manga artist or an illustrator. I don’t think I have a standout sense of fashion,” so I quit. When you make a clean break like that, I think you can move on and concentrate more on the next thing. If I still made Manga or illustration, perhaps I wouldn’t have achieved what I create now. Giving up something leads us to the next thing. For me, this is one of the positive actions.

Until about 2016, “do everything myself” was my motto. I set a rule, to always release the shutter myself, which at the same time constrains me. That rule is still valid today. But I realised around the time of working on Naoshima that I cannot live without asking someone for help on other things. The more occasions I had to go out from home and engage with communities and people in the outside world, the more I felt that I lived within a web of human-made society and within the limit of what one person can do. So the shift has occurred alongside the art-making process. Ah, but wait. Maybe because I felt like that in my daily life, then the art-making process might have changed accordingly to asking for a hand from others. Or maybe this has happened simultaneously in both life and work.

At the beginning of the residency programme on Naoshima, I was thinking I should make something to do with Naoshima. At the same time, I really didn’t want to disturb the people of Naoshima with what I will make. Naoshima has been characterised as the “art island” of Japan. However, I think that just coming in from somewhere else and disturbing the beautiful rules and rhythms of the local life there is not an artist’s privilege, it is just blasphemy. I really wanted to avoid that. So I focused on the approach of “borrowing” and “listening to their stories”. The overall project took a whole year to complete. I think the first visit was in Autumn 2015. To begin with, I was given an introductory lecture on the Setouchi region and Naoshima. After that, I visited Naoshima about ten times altogether. One week stay for each visit. I took a long time for research too, over one month. Then it gradually became apparent that the society and lives of people here are, in many aspects, tightly interconnected. The scale of my project became bigger and bigger at the same time. It felt like a circle of people holding each other’s hands, which got bigger and bigger.

Mabon: Another significant point of this bystander series, I think, is your source of inspiration, Naoshima Onna Bunraku, which is likely the only Bunraku company in Japan run exclusively by women. Seemingly there were two main points that you found striking when you visited them. First was seeing them saying how important it is to remove your own existence as a puppeteer, by wearing all black while performing. And second was seeing the importance and versatile ability of the puppeteers’ hands. Sorry for this long question, but could you tell us a little bit about your experience with the group?

Katayama: This might repeat what I said, but I put extra care into what I do on Naoshima because I wanted to avoid becoming an artist who just comes into a particular local culture, creates disturbance, and leaves. I spent much time on research and listening to stories. However, I was not accepted at all, in the beginning. Before my first visit, I told my rough ideas, such as “hands” and “dolls”, to the coordinator of the host organisation. She told me that Naoshima’s Bunraku puppet dolls are quite large, but have no legs. Puppeteers’ hands are a substitute for legs. Normally three puppeteers hold one doll. For instance, they put their elbows into the doll’s Kimono to represent the knees of the doll. Another person will make noise with their hands to express the sounds of steps. Some dolls have legs but mostly they are operated like that, she told me.

When I first visited the company, as an introduction of myself and what I do, I showed them pictures of the latest series at the time, shadow puppet, and explained that the concept of this series is the versatile characteristic of hands – they function in many ways, they can be anything, they can break and recreate at the same time. But it wasn’t received so well and somehow made them feel that I might misinterpret their well-established Bunraku dolls and use them carelessly. Actually, I took quite a lot of photographs of the faces of Bunraku dolls while I was researching. Since they have many dolls, the company members were saying that pictures of the faces would be very useful when they sort out the archival material of each doll. So I took photographs to help them. But I didn’t use those doll-face pictures for my new work. Instead, I asked if I can photograph the puppeteers’ hands. The relationship with them never became bad, but we built a relationship while sometimes probing each other, sometimes doubting each other.

Naoshima is now known as an art island, and so the locals have had various experiences of art. Many have good feelings about art but when there are supporters, this means that there are opponents too. It is obvious but it gave me, as an artist, a very important influence. I think this recognition has also influenced my artistic production and activity. The recognition towards the fact that society is not only composed of a good side. When there is a good side, there is always a bad side. I have built my communication with the members of Naoshima Onna Bunraku, and in the end they have supported me tremendously. At the opening of my exhibition, they came with Bunraku dolls and opened Kusudama (the decorative paper balls to open at celebratory occasions) with the dolls. In the end, we became very close. I spent almost every day with locals. We still exchange emails.

Mabon: As this Litro World Series is focusing on contemporary Japan, I wanted to ask about your view of Japan. For a long time while working as an artist, for instance from your High Heel project to your series on Naoshima or the Ashio copper mine, I feel that you have come across many aspects of the country such as histories, systems and future hopes. Also, last January, you had your first solo exhibition outside of Japan, at the White Rainbow gallery in London, and later at the Venice Biennale in Italy, and a solo exhibition at University of Michigan Museum of Art in the USA. I myself feel that once you step out of a situation, you see it better. And as you work more often outside of your country of origin, I wonder if you now think about Japan more often or see your background better. This is another broad question I am afraid, but can you tell us a little bit about your view towards Japan?

Katayama: Hmm, it’s not an easy question to answer… I lately think “But then, why am I still here?” The negative feeling towards Japan is growing, yet I am still here, in Kunisada in Gunma. It is not that I like Japan. Instead, how do I say, I think this place just suits me. It is possible that there are other places in the world that could also suit me, but when I think of my living pattern right now and of my family, living here is after all the most comfortable choice. Indeed there are many things in politics and cultural affairs that disappoint us in Japan. In terms of culture, I recently feel that artwork cannot become artwork in this country, probably because art professionals such as artists and people who value artworks are not cared for properly.

For example, even if an artist claims this cup is an artwork, the cup cannot become an artwork without professionals who are able to judge its worth, such as curators or critics. But I think there is a tendency that the country is only trying to protect works that have been already established and valued by someone else. This is seen not only in the contemporary art world, but also in arts and culture in general. There is no collectiveness growing amongst artists who work overseas, for instance. There is no occasion to share our experiences or information of the overseas art world, which means there is no discussion on how we can keep going as artists. It is actually a little doubtful whether Japan is a country where artists who gain experience overseas would like to come back to. So, when thinking of my daughter’s future, I sometimes wonder whether we should go somewhere abroad for her. Indeed, the more I have a chance to go and work overseas, the more I think about Japan. But definitely not optimistically.

Mabon: Although Litro features visual elements such as photography and comics, it is primarily a creative platform for literature such as short stories and poems. I wonder if we could ask about your relationship with literature – either reading or writing – such as novels, creative writings or poems?

Katayama: First of all, about words. I hadn’t really trusted the power of words. When we say “apple”, one person might imagine a red apple, the other might think of a blue apple, while another imagines a green apple. The words are so loaded. There is a level when you say “happy”. It may be a lie when you say “happy”. I was therefore believing that, as soon as you turn your feelings into words, they become all lies. This belief had made me only have small, unimportant talk when I have conversations with friends. Of course I speak more properly in an interview like this. But when I speak with friends, I could make funny stories without any problem, but was scared to tell them my opinion or thoughts. I didn’t really believe in the power of words like that. But nowadays I recognise that people don’t get what you are trying to say if you don’t clearly tell it to them. Nothing new really, but people don’t know until you say “yes” or “no”. This realisation is very much related to the fact that I became a mother. To make things easy to understand for my daughter, how can I say? When she asks “why”, what is the clearest explanation to use? I now spend more time on choosing my words for her, and this is gradually making me trust words.

Last year, I had a talk event with the novelist Keiichiro Hirano and read his novels. They are so wonderful. I first read Artificial Love (2010), and At the End of the Matinee (2016). I read his essays too. They are novels, but I just got surprised to see how much you can describe what you think. This is just what I felt, but I was astonished by the power of words. To me, books had been objects I used to collect information. I am otaku (geek), you see. Rather than reading literature or culture and arts, to me it is more for information. Same with music, I listen to music to check it out and get new information. So I had almost never really appreciated novels or texts in a way like appreciating a favourite painting or a particular pianist of classical music. But lately, I have more moments of learning, for instance through Hirano-san’s amazing works and how to deal with words for my daughter. This led me to write texts myself. I have just finished writing a text looking back at the last five years of my artistic journey.

Mabon: I read the text, and somehow imagined that you must be someone who has been reading constantly since you were little.

Katayama: In my opinion, we can only say “I listen to the music”, when we have followed the sounds of all the instrumentals involved. Same with books. I think we can only say we’ve read a book when we have memorised the lines of characters in the story. So in terms of quantity, I have indeed read so much so far, but I don’t know if I can say that I have properly read them, or like them. This is because once I realise that I like it, I read it so many times, like thirty times. Lately I am obsessed with a series of Manga called I Want To Hold Aono-kun So Badly I Could Die by Umi Shiina (2016–), and oh my goodness, how many times have I read it, definitely more than thirty times. Before going to sleep, I usually read from volume one to six. And before I know it, it’s something like three in the morning (laugh). I am so excited to read volume seven and when I think of it, it makes me almost unable to sleep. But recently my interest is gradually shifting to Fargo (2014–). It is a TV drama series based on the film directed by the Coen brothers. The series hasn’t started recently, but I started watching lately and now can’t stop. I watch one season, and usually watch the same season again before moving to the next. Similar with novels. I usually read three or four novels simultaneously.

Mabon: Goodness, that sounds impossible!

Katayama: I suppose I am such an otaku. When I focus on reading only one book, I get bored. So when I read, I read this, and this, and this, something like that. But once I got drawn into it, I read the same book all the time, over and over. Same with music. When I read a book to collect words as data, I read as if I am taking photographs. It is like picking those words by photographing them in high-speed. Music is similar. I memorise a song through my throat. My throat remembers the melody so I can sing instantly. The lyrics are remembered by the throat too. I recall what the song says by singing, because lyrics first come into my ear and are memorised through my throat. Rather than thinking in my head and singing, it is like converting what you heard through the throat into words. Maybe this is not so ordinary. For example, my husband, who is a DJ (HIROAKI WATANABE aka PSYCHOGEM), says he can’t identify the lyrics here. Indeed it is incomprehensible when I hear or think in my head. But once I sing, I know it. It might be the same with words.

Mabon: Maybe words don’t go through your brain. Sounds more like the words go through your body.

Katayama: Yes, perhaps. I recall the scenes described in a book in my head. Making installation plans for exhibitions too. When I make a plan, while walking in an empty exhibition venue, I input the images of the venue in my head first. Then back in home, while looking at the photographs I took in the venue on my computer, the reproduction of what I saw in the venue will be built in my head as a 3D imagination.

Mabon: Composing it in a physical manner.

Katayama: Yes, I think so. That is why, when someone says please place this work on the right, I become confused. Something like which side should be on my back?! It is confusing because I am always in my 3D imagination myself. Maybe this is the same as when I read a book. Words and body are so intimate. Like how I learn song through my throat.

Mabon: Were you writing lyrics when you were a singer?

Katayama: Yes, I was. When I was in a band. In bands, usually there are two types of people. One type comes from music, and the other comes from words. Music types would say “No, we cannot fit four words here” (laughs). For example, when we want to say spring, summer, autumn, winter, there is a moment when the music type can say “We need to cut winter”. Even though you complain “No way, it will become three seasons rather than four and it will change the whole context”, sometimes it is fine for the music type. It is not the reason of course, but band activity didn’t quite work out for me so well, and I quite quickly gave up.

Mabon: So you are more the word type person?

Katayama: Yes, I suppose so.

Mabon: Last question. Do you have anything that you forgot to mention or you would like to say here? Also, if you could tell us a little bit about your ongoing or future plans and developments, that would be great.

Katayama: I am planning to release a debut music CD this year. I know that I just said I gave up on music, but I like music after all. When I was seriously making music in the past, I always felt that I was half-baked. My husband is a music professional, and we have been talking about doing something together for a while, so it just became more realistic in these days. Another intention is that I just simply love what he creates. I just want to make the most comfortable environment for him and his creation. If we can do something together, even better. We just made a club event SPHERE together in Takasaki in Gunma, but we wouldn’t like to limit the locations or situations for the activities. But also, I guess that I am responding to a physical urgency. Within our bodies, it is quite obvious to us when we can do something only now. So I thought maybe quicker action is better, and I am now thinking to try to focus on music-related activity for next ten years. The experience there will definitely become an influence for my visual art activity, so I think that having periods for different activities may not be a bad idea at all. I do what I would like to do, while continuing to work on art on one side. I believe that both creative activities – music and art – are connected. Maybe vinyl is better than CD, actually? Yes, vinyl it is!

Mabon: That’s all for now. Mari, thank you very much indeed for your time. It was such a pleasure to be able to talk with you and hear more of your in-depth stories and thoughts, beyond what we can see through the finished artwork. Thank you so much!

Katayama: Thank you very much!

According to one Japanese-English dictionary, “bystander” can also indicate “Waki”, the supporting role in a traditional Noh play. There are some rules for Waki: it is an opposite role to Shi’te, the principal role; and Waki never wears Omote, the mask. Shi’te wear masks most of the time, as they often play phantom characters such as gods, spirits, vengeful ghosts and ogres. On the other hand, Waki don’t wear masks because they are usually illustrated as characters living in real life. Hence Waki is an existence standing on the same side as the audience, which acts as a mediator connecting the audience to the separate world created on the stage. Similar to the female puppeteers of Naoshima Onna Bunraku, wearing all black to try to be invisible, Mari Katayama is also someone who, while putting herself a little aside, is devoted to play the role of “bystander” mediating in between us, the viewers, and her creative world – no matter whether in the form of visual art, music or written, spoken or sung words. The conversation with Mari was provocative – and now I can’t wait to listen to their new record!

japan Mari Katayama

Editor's Pick, Essays, Spring 2021: Japan Issue

A HIGH-TECH ANCIENT STILLNESS

by picoiyer • June 7, 2021June 7, 2021

By pushing deep into the future, the stunning “art island” of Naoshima leads you into the best of the Japanese past.

You’ve surely never seen anything like the Chichu Art Museum, tucked away on the remote, silent island of Naoshima, in Japan’s Inland Sea. You walk along a narrow mountain road – the great blue expanse of the sea on one side of you and, the first time I visited, slopes flooded with the rich scarlets and oranges and russets of late autumn on the other – and come to a cool glass-and-concrete box placed in the middle of an empty parking lot. You get your ticket, then walk for six or seven minutes up a spotless, deserted driveway, past a garden featuring Monet’s favorite flowers from Giverny, up to a long series of high, grey, enclosing tunnels designed by the maverick architect Tadao Ando. All the workers around you are wearing white and, being mostly Japanese, stand as silently and motionlessly as installations along the corridors. There are few doors or windows to be seen, and you’re not allowed to use ink in the museum.

You proceed along these industrial spaces for a while – every now and then a dazzling rock garden flashes out beside you – and then come to a set of rooms built underground and illuminated only by natural light. In one of them are five late Monet Water Lilies, all framed in stark white Greek marble and coaxed out from the background by shaded light from an opening high above. In another is a single 7-foot granite sphere at the center of a huge chamber, installed by the American “land artist” Walter de Maria, surrounded by 27 wooden sculptures covered in gold leaf. Thanks to the light coming into the room, the piece changes every time you walk towards it, around it, implicating you in the act of creation. The only other three galleries are devoted to installations by the contemporary American master of light, James Turrell. In the most remarkable of them, “Open Sky,” you enter a small space, silent as a church, and sit on a pew against one of its four grey walls. Then you look up to where a small rectangular slab has been cut out of the ceiling, to reveal the sky.

Two black birds suddenly bisect the blue. A fleece of cloud drifts past. The small room, you realize, is always changing, and transfixing. A yellow butterfly appears, and becomes an event.

Walk out of “Open Sky” and back to Monet around the corner, and you see that the Impressionist is really doing a Turrell: separating out a great rectangle of Nature and watching how it’s transformed by the changing light. Return from Monet back to Turrell, and you see how the blue has softened in the past ten minutes, and the American is showing us, as the Frenchman did, how much Nature is a work of art, if only we can wake up to the fact.

So many museums offer you something to see; this one, I came to feel, was teaching me how to see. And as I began walking round it on a radiant December day, I realized that nowhere I had seen in my quarter-century of living in Japan had, unexpectedly, taken me deeper into the classic old Japan I sought out when first I moved here. The three very distinctive artists, I realized, all work together (in the Japanese way) so you soon lose a sense of who is who; but each enhances and throws light on the other, so the whole becomes something greater than the sum of its parts. This was not a competition but a choir.

By framing a piece of Nature, Turrell (like Monet) was doing just what a wooden gateway does in a Japanese garden, giving it shape by imposing sharp limits. And in all the rhyming pieces – as throughout the museum – I was reminded of the classical Japanese principle of emptiness: take nearly everything out of a room and what remains becomes a revelation, everything. “The less there was to see,” as Don DeLillo writes in his mystical novel, Point Omega, of a man at a slowed-down screening of Psycho in a New York gallery, “the harder he looked, the more he saw. This was the point.”

I’m rightly notorious among my friends as the worst person in the world with whom to go to a museum; set me in the Prado or the Met, and I’m instantly stealing towards the café. At the wondrous Art Institute of Chicago, some years ago, I spent two hours in the gift shop and never even made it to the galleries. Yet in Naoshima, I became a stranger to myself. My first stop, within an hour of arriving on the island, was, by chance, the Chichu Art Museum, and I stayed there till the doors were closing on me (the Monets, as the sun began to fall, becoming as massive and sepulchral as Rothkos, almost black). Next morning I was the first to arrive at the solitary ticket office, and for four hours I just walked back and forth between “Open Sky” and the “Water Lilies” and de Maria’s reflecting sphere.

When I wandered down a grey Ando corridor to the museum’s tiny café – a small room with a single blond-wood bench placed in front of a long horizontal window looking out on the blue sea – I couldn’t tell at first if I was looking at a Monet pond or a Turrell sky.

I would have stayed all day if I didn’t have other things to do, so alive and transported had I become. And when I walked back along the deserted mountain road to my hotel, Benesse House, twenty minutes away, everything I passed seemed an astonishment. A white heron out on the rocks looked like an installation. The 88 Buddhas a local artist had placed by the side of the road, made out of industrial waste, stopped me in my tracks. The sea itself, the outline of islands in the distance, had become a marvel. I’d walked along the same stretch of road on my arrival, less than 24 hours before, and noticed nothing much at all.

The story of how the art island – once known as the “Naoshima Cultural Village” – came into being might almost be a parable about how to turn the old into the very new, the poor into the sumptuous and then the new into the old again. In the early 1980s, Naoshima was just another forgotten island, with three thousand or so people on it, more or less left behind by Japan’s fast-rising new economy. When Donald Richie, the great American writer who lived in Japan for the better part of 66 years, visited in the 1960s, he saw at first (he describes in his classic book, The Inland Sea) nothing but an old man sorting through dried squid, on a “sad little island” so small you can walk to all its sights in an hour.

But in 1985 Tetsuhiko Fukutake, the founder of a publishing company in the nearby town of Okayama, joined with the then mayor of Naoshima, Chikatsugu Miyake, and decided that the very neglectedness of the place made it a perfect opportunity, a tabula rasa. They would take the entire southern part of the island and convert it into a cultural and educational centre (the northern part, true to allegory, has been home, since 1918, to a huge Mitsubishi copper refinery, and occasionally, from the hills around the Chichu Art Museum, you can see its huge chimneys belching smoke into the otherwise cloudless sky).

Though Fukutake died six months later, his son Soichiro took over the project and, in 1988, invited the self-taught Ando to design, in effect, a whole swatch of its southern half. It was an inspired choice. Fukutake had visited the “Church of the Light” Ando had designed in a small, non-descript building in suburban Osaka. On a typically grey, forbidding wall, the architect had simply cut out one long, thin horizontal strip, and one long, thin vertical. Every morning, when the sun comes up, the two straight openings form a glowing, living cross, and the almost empty slab of concrete becomes an uncanny spiritual illumination.

Soon Ando was installing 10 Mongolian yurts on a beach in Naoshima, as if to suggest that this outpost of traditional Japan would be a home to the world; you can stay in them, for not very much money, even now. In 1992 he built the Benesse House Museum, including ten hotel rooms on its second and third floors, so that guests could wander around the galleries after nightfall, or simply enjoy the museum’s holdings above their beds. Then, in 1995, he added an Annex (now called Oval), which took his futuristic classicism even further: to get to one of the six rooms there, you find a secret door on the second floor of the museum, open it with a special key, ride a private, six-seat monorail to the top of a mountain – and find yourself with a dazzling view of the sea below, and a nearby roof that offers 360-degree views over much of the island, its bays and the winking lights of fishing boats drifting slowly across the water.

Then, he built Benesse House, more regular hotels, a few minutes away, with rooms along the beach (Fukutake had long since changed the name of his company to “Benesse,” his phrase for “ Well-Being”). Each of the chic structure’s 49 rooms looks out on the sea, and there is original art in every room, as well as along the corridors. Walk to the bathroom and you pass eerie light sculptures, and minimalist photographs of seascapes that take you into a quiet, meditative state of mind.

The beauty of the idea is that every aspect of the complex comes from the same imagination, which means that all is of a piece. The hole in Oval’s roof echoes and deepens the space in Turrell’s “Open Sky.” And the brilliance of the notion is to realize that two contemporary foreigners, associated with the American Southwest, and a 19th century Frenchman, are all working with the same principles of light and sky and emptiness to create works of reflection more Japanese than many Japanese artists are.

And everywhere you look, as you stroll between Benesse House and the Chichu Art Museum, you come upon other art: an unworldly glass cube stands alone on a beach; a giant fiber-glass Yayoi Kusama “Pumpkin” adorns a pier; at one point, a Hiroshi Sugimoto series of black-and-white photographs of the horizon – “Time Exposed” – is hung up on the cliffs, so that wind and seaspray and Time itself can have their way with it. Very soon you are losing all sense of what is officially in the museum and outside it, and coming to see everything with the reverent attention you might bring to a canvas on a wall.

This is not a designed city like those famous white elephants Brasilia and Chandigarh. It’s more like the quintessential Japanese traditional meal, in which you are served five tiny, exquisite, seasonally perfect items and each one, consumed slowly and deliberately, sets off detonations inside you.

True to Ando’s sense of these places as the object of a “pilgrimage” – you take off your shoes to enter the room full of Monets, for example, and walk through a large, darkened, entirely empty antechamber just to get to it – Naoshima is a long way from everywhere. I live in Nara, which looks, on the map, very close to the Inland Sea. But still I had to take a bus, a train, another train to Kyoto, a bullet-train to Okayama, then a local train and a ferry and a bus to complete my five-hour journey (those coming from Tokyo can fly to Takamatsu, eight miles from Naoshima, but still need to take an occasional hour-long ferry from there, and then a bus to get to Benesse House). The island is ever more favored by black-clad trendies from New York and Milan – as well as the chic young Japanese art students I see at local Lou Reed concerts – and yet the typical Japanese has never heard of it, and might express little interest in something so far from the go-go-excitement of clamorous modern urban Japan. There are few convenience stores on Naoshima and no video arcades; you can call a taxi, but are reminded, if you do, that there’s only one on the entire island.

Instead, a 40-minute walk from Benesse House will bring you to a local village, Honmura, that is all old wooden houses, laid out on a grid after a fire in 1791, surrounded by Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples. The place could not look more like a (rare these days) vision of traditional Japan. But as a series of hyper-contemporary artists have been invited to come in and make installations around the village, an ancient castle town that seemed out of date a generation ago, and a little embarrassed about its antiquity, has been reborn as a haven for the most up-to-date visitors.

Slip into a centuries-old tatami building in Honmura, and you may find a towering Statue of Liberty bursting through the floor. Go to the local Shinto shrine on the hill and you see an illuminated glass staircase that Hiroshi Sugimoto has constructed underground, as if to link the old to the new and our world to the next. Visit the site of a former Buddhist temple and you’ll come upon another unworldly Ando and Turrell construction. You walk into a room of absolute darkness and, hand against a wall, are led towards a bench, on which to sit. For eight or ten minutes you stare into the distance and make out nothing. Then slowly, very slowly, you realize that the space is not empty, after all; a cool blue rectangle is pulsing against the wall at the other end. It takes time and stillness and attention, Turrell is suggesting, to (quite literally) see the light.

And just as the works in the Chichu Art Museum are changing with every hour of the day – following the organic rhythms of Nature more than the more static declarations of Art – so the whole island is perpetually in development, as if to invite a closer and another view. In 2010 a new Ando structure came up in a field to house the Lee Ufan Museum, featuring minimalist rock-and-light works by a Korean artist (with spaces, characteristically, called “Shadow Room,” “Silence Room” and “Meditation Room”). That same year, the Setouchi Triennale was inaugurated to invite international artists to come, every three years, to set up installations in Naoshima, and on eleven other islands across the Inland Sea, and two port towns. A whole large region is being made new with the Pygmalion eye of art.

When first I began walking through the Chichu Art Museum, I’ll confess, a part of me was unnerved; the whole experience seemed a little too controlling, too unsparing and self-conscious, even fascistic. All choices are eliminated, and all openings erased; it’s easy to feel as if there’s no escape from the mind of Tadao Ando. In certain rooms only one person is allowed to enter at a time. “You feel like you’re in a laboratory,” said a lawyer from Melbourne, as we watched white-clad women disappearing down the long, steel-grey corridors, as if to the Starship Enterprise’s control room.

But after a while I came to see that this sort of immaculate selection was, in fact, what made the place so special; by surrendering a part of yourself, you open up much more. Indeed, the place helped to explain all Japan and the heart of Japan’s pragmatic perfectionism, which can seem inflexible and rule-bound to many an outsider until she finds the freedom within that. The effect is like that of stepping out of a clangorous city street and into a silent meditation room. The only time I’d ever felt this kind of intimacy – and luxuriousness – was when I stayed in the super-lavish 17th century Tawaraya ryokan, or traditional inn, in Kyoto.

Indeed, when I made it to the Benesse House Museum at last, and came upon a stunning collection of modern art – a Warhol, a Hockney and a Rauschenberg hung in a single small room – my first response was disappointment. Each of the works was striking, but each took me into a completely different world from the others. I started thinking about which one was my “favorite” and I lost any sense of whether I was in Santa Monica or Zurich. It was like hearing several loud, distinctive voices all shouting at once.

In the Chichu Art Museum, by comparison, each work becomes part of the others and disappears into a whole. As the afternoon began to wane, tubes of light appeared along Ando’s grey, cold corridors and in one place produced a great field of light.

Every now and then, it’s true, I was reminded that architectural conceits are sometimes made to be seen and not lived in. My first morning in Benesse House, I found the nozzle in my shower so ingeniously contrived that I wrestled with it for several minutes before inadvertently spraying the entire room with a kind of rainforest effect. When I moved to Oval, I had to call the front desk (four minutes away by monorail) just to find out how to open the door to my terrace – and, having succeeded at last, realized it would be no easy thing now to close it.

But when I went to dinner that evening, I walked past 15,000 blue glass cubes – a newly installed artwork – that gave me back a shivery reflection of myself. Even I had become a museum-piece! And when, my last night on Naoshima, I climbed up to the roof above Oval, I realized I hadn’t felt so calm, so opened out, so quietly ecstatic in years. Indeed, I wondered if I’d ever been in Japan before.

The next morning – inspired by the island’s sense of attention – I hurried out before dawn to see how the rising sun would set off golden reflections on two great de Maria spheres placed inside a custom-built Ando underground structure on the beach. The whole event became so exciting I almost missed the characteristically tasteful and impeccable breakfast served in the Museum. By then I couldn’t have told you if I was in the future or the past; I knew only that I’d found at last the Japan of stillness, clarity and perfection that can hide within the most everyday, and super-contemporary, of details.

Chichu Art Museum Claude Monet james turrell japan museums Naoshima Tadao Ando

Editor, Editor's Pick, Letters from the Editor, Print Issues, Spring 2021: Japan Issue

EDITORS’ LETTERS: SPRING 2021 JAPAN ISSUE

by Eric Akoto • June 7, 2021June 7, 2021

By Eric Akoto

The world changed between the initial planning and the delayed completion of this issue.

Beginning in early 2020, Covid-19 spread across the world, becoming a pandemic that has claimed, at the time of writing, over 2.7 million people globally. The two countries with the highest death tolls are the USA, with 554,899 dead, and Brazil, which has an official death toll of more than 292,856. All of these numbers will be higher by the time you read this.

Just as it has exposed the strengths and frailties of global systems, the virus has exposed deeply ingrained historical, societal, and institutional racism. It has disproportionately taken the lives of black and brown people, not least because more of them have been on the frontlines during the pandemic, in hospitals and care homes and as all kinds of key workers. The virus, and the economic hardship that has inevitably followed in its wake, harms poor people, particularly people of colour, far more than the better-off who have much more chances to insulate themselves while benefiting from those on the frontlines who keep services running.

Into this already fraught period came further upheavals. On May 25, 2020, the world witnessed, at the hands of four Minneapolis police officers – under the knee of one of them – the brutal, horrifying murder of George Floyd. Such atrocities are not new, but a wave of outraged protests and marches unlike any that had gone before erupted across many US cities, defying bans on mass gatherings, shouting clearly Black Lives Matter! Ever since those horrifying scenes of police brutality against an unarmed black man went viral, Americans in every state, from small towns to major cities, have been gathering and marching to protest state-based violence against black people. In March 2021, it was announced that the city of Minneapolis would settle a lawsuit with George Floyd’s family for $27 million (£19 million). The trial of the police officer accused of killing Floyd is set to begin at the end of March.*

The Black Lives Matter protests have not stopped at the doors of these states. They’ve taken place across Europe and as far away as New Zealand and Japan, with protesters showing solidarity, drawing parallels to racist violence in their own countries, and highlighting the struggle to dismantle the racist present and the racist past – as in Bristol, England, when the statue of a slave-trader was rightfully torn down and thrown into the river. This is the biggest global collective demonstration of civil unrest in reaction to state-based violence in our generation’s memory. And it is no overnight occurrence – remember Trayvon Martin in 2012, who was killed by Florida police as he walked home from a convenience store carrying iced tea and Skittles. His death and the lack of accountability were catalysts of the movement, which was formed with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter in protest of his killer’s acquittal. There is a sense that the unifying theme, for the first time in America’s history, and globally, is that black lives matter at last. Things have to change, and perhaps this can be a long, long overdue reckoning with the past and present, a genuine turning point. With Joseph R. Biden’s election to the US presidency, it is hoped that real reform of American institutions is possible after a four-year period which saw white supremacy condoned from the highest echelons of American power.

The protests were given further impetus by last year’s US Open winner (and 2021 Australian Open winner), the black Japanese tennis sensation, 23-year-old Naomi Osaka. Winning grand slams is nothing new for Osaka; it’s her activism on and off the court that distinguishes her, and the face masks she’s worn while playing during the pandemic record a tragic litany of black and brown American men, women, and children who have been killed by police. Osaka’s first-round match of the US Open saw her wear a mask honouring Breonna Taylor, a black woman killed by police officers who burst into her apartment in March 2020. For her second match, she stepped into the Arthur Ashe Stadium wearing a mask that read Elijah McClain, the name of a 23-year-old massage therapist who was stopped by three officers in the Denver suburb of Aurora in August 2019 as he was walking home from a convenience store with an iced tea. He died in police custody after being put into a carotid hold, which restricts blood flow to the brain. Osaka wore Ahmaud Arbery’s name on her face mask as she walked out for her third- round match against Marta Kostyuk. Arbery, a 25-year-old unarmed black man, died of shotgun wounds after he was chased by two white men while jogging in Brunswick, Georgia. In her fourth-round match, Osaka honoured Trayvon Martin, and she would defeat her quarter-final opponent honouring the death of George Floyd. In her semifinal appearance, Osaka honoured Philando Castile, who was fatally shot in July 2016 by a Minnesota police officer during a traffic stop. Osaka recovered from losing the first set to claim her second US Open championship while wearing a mask bearing the name of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy who was killed by police gunfire in November 2014 in Cleveland, Ohio, while he was holding a toy replica pistol.

So, as we turn our pages to Japan, Naomi Osaka we salute you!

*The police officer was found guilty of three charges – second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and manslaughter – on April 21, 2021.

Guest Editors’ Letter

By Naoko Mabon and Kyoko Yoshida

Reportedly, today Japan consists of over 6,800 islands (1). At a time of change and crisis, how can we see and write about Japan? Is it still as golden as Marco Polo described and imagined? Is it a land that goes beyond “Sushi,” “Manga,” or “Geisha”? In which direction is each island of Japan drifting?

We started planning this special issue at the end of 2019. It almost feels that 2019 was a totally different era compared to where we are today at the end of 2020. Not only taking away a colossal number of lives and livelihoods, coronavirus has caused postponements and cancellations of numerous events across the world, including the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Not knowing the new dates yet, Japan has lost a central driving force to reconstruct its unified national imaginary once again, after the 1964 Olympics showed the world Japan’s miraculous recovery from the ashes of the World War II. Instead, pre-existing weaknesses, gaps and corrosions that the country has been suffering for the past twenty-five years have come to the surface.

At the same time, we are still in an ongoing crisis of global warming, racial and gender inequality, and many other critical social issues, such as how to deal with radioactive waste and – as Yoshiro Sakamoto’s essay mentions – how to tackle marine pollution from plastics. The pandemic has forced us to rethink our way of living – how we once were, and how we can possibly be now and hereafter, as one of many living organisms on earth.

In this issue, we have a truly amazing lineup of contributors to respond to the issues that we face in the context of Japan today. They span different locations, fields of profession, and cultures, reflecting the complex societal ecology of this small island nation. Although most of the contributions were written or prepared before the pandemic, together with you, the readers, we hope to collectively imagine an alternative map of the drifting islands today.

The cover artist is Mari Katayama. Katayama is known for self-portrait photography created with hand-sewn objects and decorated prostheses. She uses her own body as a living sculpture. Born with a rare congenital disorder, Katayama chose when she was nine years old to have both of her legs amputated. On the cover, Katayama is sitting on a beach wearing a soft object with many arms and hands as if they were part of her own body. This was one of the artistic outcomes of her 2016 residency on Naoshima island in the Seto Inland Sea, which is also pictured in the essay by Pico Iyer. Katayama photographed the hands of members of Naoshima Onna Bunraku, a traditional puppet theatre performed exclusively by women from the Naoshima region, printed them onto material, and sewed them into a multi-armed soft sculptural object. In later pages, you can read Naoko’s interview with Mari.

While Mari was inspired by bunraku puppeteers’ bodies and hands back in 2016, throughout 2020, we have been experiencing the absence of physicality and human warmth as well as the limitation of locomotions under lockdowns and the new social-distancing normality. Many of us now spend lots of time at home and most of our social activities happen in virtual realms within our domestic environment. A domestic space – this ambiguous realm can be a bounded area of safety and freedom one day, and a walled cage or prison the next. Yet, it is still a location for us to receive visits from outside world – whether scheduled or unexpected.

Kyoko’s Poetry Dispatch (www.kyokoyoshida.net/archives/219) has started to respond to this period of isolation and lack of anything we can physically touch and hold in our hands. It is a series of small handmade booklets of poems, which she randomly posts to her friends’ home addresses. It is a little, surprising visit. Like birds and small animals living on the canal in neighbourhoods, venturing out of their former territories and ending up napping on our doorstep. These visitors cannot replace our families’ and friends’ visits, so they remind us of our isolation and may even intensify our loneliness, but they are all the more precious because they reveal that this loneliness connects us.

We hope our Drifting Islands issue finds its way to visit to your home – ideally physically but even virtually – so that it can connect us over distance while your hands or eyes travel through each page.

Last but not least, we send our deepest gratitude to all the writers, translators and artists who joined our endeavour to shape this Drifting Islands issue. We also thank Editor-in-Chief & Art Director Eric Akoto, as well as the team at Litro, particularly Assistant Editor Barney Walsh and Designer Brigita Butvila, for inviting us to join such a special opportunity.

(1) Islands with a perimeter longer than 100m at high tide. Based on the information published in 1987 by the Japan Coast Guard.

Note: In accordance with Japanese custom, in several works in this issue the family name is given first.

Black Lives Matter japan Naomi Osaka pandemic print issue

Editor's Pick, Fiction, short story, StorySunday

THIS IS WHY WE STOPPED NAMING THE HORSES

by Charlie Galbraith • June 6, 2021June 6, 2021

The noonday sun is high and fierce, the air thick with drifting pollen. Inside the stables it’s uncomfortably close. The hum of hay and horse shit is louder than ever. We’re all of us drowsy – the men, the horses. Peering out from under drooping eyelids, we wade through the treacle-coloured light that drips from the rafters. Even the flies are affected. They turn lazy figure 8s above the horses’ backsides. I reach out and snatch one out of the air. It throbs angrily inside my fist. I open my palm and it flies away.

Then the wind changes, and with it everything else.

One by one the horses’ heads rise up, eyes and nostrils dilated. Their necks are straight and taut, all of them pointing the exact same way: towards the house on the hill. They begin to stamp and snort. Some whinny to each other and rise up on their hind legs. Others turn around in their stalls, around and around, looking for some way out. They know what is coming. And by now, so do we.

We open up the main doors just in time to see the car crest the hill. The rattling of its axles on the bumpy road down to the yard causes the horses to kick out at their stalls. The sound is like the fall of a woodsman’s axe. Thock. Thock. Thock.

We send Jacob away to the storeroom at the rear to fetch the master’s saddle. He scurries away without a backwards glance, leaving Aaron and I to choose.

‘The white one?’ ventures Aaron, nodding at the stall nearest the door.

Damn. The white one. I always liked the white one, though I’m not sure I ever realised until now. I try hard not to let it show. ‘Ok, the white one,’ I say, nodding vigorously. Perhaps a little too vigorously, for Aaron’s face stiffens. He catches my eye.

‘Or, you know, one of the others? The brown one?’

‘Which brown one?’ I say, looking around at the stalls. There are at least four different horses that could be described that way.

‘The mare with the white mark right here,’ says Aaron. He gestures at his right buttock, drawing a rough circle in the air above it.

‘Oh, that one.’ Angel is what I’d call her, if we were still in the habit of naming the horses. Though Aaron wasn’t keen, I always did favour names with an ironical twist. Trixie for the carthorse, Hermes for the short-legged shetland, Angel for the wild one with the halo on her arse. Last month she bit my little finger down to the bone when I went to attach the nosebag. The wound throbs with the memory. I clutch it to me. Not a smart move to bite the hand that feeds, especially not in these stables.

Except that, when it comes to it, I find that I like her too. Angel. No, not Angel; the brown one with the white mark on her hind parts. One time she took a dump directly on to Jacob’s head while he was mucking out her stall. We still laugh about that, Aaron and I. Jacob doesn’t, understandably, and that only makes it funnier. Lord knows we could use a laugh round here.

‘What’s so funny?’ says Aaron.

‘Nothing,’ I say, wiping the smile off my face with my hand.

‘So which is it?’

I don’t know what to say.

Aaron is looking at me. I know exactly what he’s thinking; we’ve been doing this together so long. He’s thinking, ‘Don’t make me choose. Not again. Not this time. You bastard. You’re going to make me do it, aren’t you?’

Over his shoulder I see the car pull up in the yard, just as Jacob arrives with the saddle. The engine snorts and grumbles, then dies.

‘The white one,’ I say. Aaron looks relieved. He takes the saddle from Jacob and disappears into the stall nearest the door. Jacob stares after him, his mouth drooping at the corners. He liked the white one too, it seems. Nevermind. It’s done. Spilt milk and all that.

Out in the yard the car sparkles and gleams in the sun. Mr. Gormley, the driver, opens his door and climbs down with long spidery limbs. He dusts off his trousers, lifts the hat from his head – though not on our account. Not hardly. Sweat glistens on his pasty dome, runs in little gullies down the grooves of his face. Grimacing, he pulls a faded hanky from his pocket and wipes himself from brow to chin. The now sweat-dampened hanky returns to the pocket. The hat takes its rightful place on his head. He adjusts it slightly, turning it a little to the right, as if he were screwing it in place. Then he moves towards the rear door. ‘Deep breath,’ I tell Jacob out of the corner of my mouth. The boy takes a generous swallow of air. Mr. Gormley’s fingers close around the handle and the door swings open.

There is nothing behind it. In the bright noonday sun, the aperture presents as solid black. Three blessed seconds pass without event, then it hits us like a wave. The stench. It is thick and sweet, like clotted cream gone wrong. We reel but keep our feet. Jacob gags. I don’t. The horses in the stable erupt in snorts and whinnies. We turn as the white one rears in its stall. ‘Woah! Hey! Shushushush!’ says Aaron. He pivots away from the horse’s flailing forehooves and grabs the halter. Jacob retches a second time and brings the back of his hand to his mouth.

‘You’re standing in a forest on a mountain. Thick carpet of pine needles underfoot. Can you smell them?’

‘No.’

‘Close your eyes.’ Jacob does. He takes a breath.

‘The ocean,’ he says.

‘Whatever works, lad.’

We hear the soughing of oats in the stall by the main door, the splash and gurgle of whiskey as it empties from the bottle. Aaron’s voice whispers encouragement. ‘There you go, that’s it, down the hatch, that’s right.’ The soft pat of his hand on the horse’s neck. He straightens, his head and shoulders rising into view above the stall, his sleeve across his mouth and nose. ‘You all right?’ I mouth at him.

There’s no time for him to answer. A painful creaking in the yard is like a fish hook in my ear; it jerks my attention away.

The car is rocking now from side to side. The wood groans and sighs from the strain. We look on as the car wobbles and lists towards us. We peer into the black void within. Like a kraken surfacing from the depths, an enormous whey-coloured hand emerges and grasps the frame of the door. Then a head the size of a quarter barrel keg comes panting and squinting into the light. Its hair is matted. The bags under its eyes are so large that they resemble overripe fruit. Mr. Gormley rushes to offer his support. The hand detaches from the door frame and grasps him by the elbow. Leaning heavily on the driver, who staggers under his master’s weight, Mr Routledge attempts to alight. With his other hand, he plants the ferrule of his walking stick into the dirt of the yard. His bad leg is splinted and wrapped in a yellow-stained towel. He lowers it gingerly to the earth. Then he stands there, wheezing, shoulders heaving, sweating like a ball of butter as he tries to catch his breath.

Mr. Gormley is plainly struggling. He’s doing his very best, but the weight is too much for him to bear. His knees buckle, first the left and then the right. Mr. Routledge begins to list to one side. Jacob and I rush over to help. But Mr. Gormley is proud. He waves us away with aggressive jerks of his chin, even as his body folds up like a suitcase. ‘I’ve got him,’ he says in a strangulated voice. Jacob muscles him out of the way. At fifteen he is two-thirds as tall as the driver, but easily three times as broad. He takes the weight – with a grunt and a grimace, but he takes it. The coachman sprawls in the dirt, fighting for breath. I take Mr Routledge’s other side. He seems not to register the change, staring straight ahead of him, his eyes like undercooked eggs. He mutters something in a ghost of a whisper. I can’t catch it. I look over at Jacob and he shakes his head, just as Mr. Routledge’s feet start to move. It takes us by surprise. We lurch to the left, but somehow – between Jacob and I and the stick – we manage to keep him upright. Mr. Routledge gives a satisfied grunt. I think I’ve pulled a muscle in my lower back.

The crane is no more than fifty yards away. It takes us the best part of five minutes to reach it. We have to stop three times to rest along the way, and still our knees are screaming by the time we arrive. Mr. Gormley, now recovered, is waiting for us there, beside the dangling harness. He stands sentinel-like, hands clasped behind his back, the nubbin he calls a chin thrust out – though the effect is somewhat spoiled by the little bits of hay in his moustaches.

We bring Mr. Routledge to a halt just in front of him, closer than is strictly necessary. Mr. Gormley’s nose twitches; he can’t help it. His lips shrivel like a chilled nipple, but he holds his position. He snatches up the harness and unbuckles the straps, which are longer than most men are tall. Between the three of us we manage to fasten it around Mr. Routledge, working in silence as he sways and nods. ‘That’s it, yes,’ he croaks as I tighten the final strap. ‘Now hoist me,’ he says. ‘Hoist me up.’

Jacob and I head around to the side of the crane to man the windlass. Mr. Gormley remains by Mr Routledge’s side. Jacob spits in his hands and rubs them together. I rotate my shoulders a few times and crack my neck. I claim the left hand position. Jacob takes the right. Hunkering down low, we grasp the spokes of the wheel. ‘Ready?’ I ask Jacob. He nods, his face set. ‘Ready!’ I shout. Nothing for a beat, and then:

‘Hoist!’ comes the call from Mr Routledge.

The first turn is easy. We take up the slack until the rope grows taut. There’s an audible grunt from Mr. Routledge as the harness rises into his crotch. We pause for a moment as he adjusts his person. The second turn tests our strength. I have to put my shoulder to the wheel to get it to move. It groans as it turns and so do we. Mr. Routledge rises onto his tiptoes. Another turn of the wheel lifts him up into the air, where he spins, globe-like, until Mr. Gormley’s hand stays him. Ten turns later and he’s over Mr. Gormley’s head. ‘That’ll do,’ says the voice from on high. We secure the rope and stand back, bent double, hands on knees, exhausted – I a little more than Jacob, it seems. He stretches and straightens. I ease myself down to the ground.

‘Tell Aaron it’s time,’ I say, flat on my back.

Jacob scampers off, back across the yard to the stables. I watch the clouds pass overhead. Mr Routledge’s shadow fidgets on the ground beside me. It sways in the meagre breeze. I close my eyes. I can hear the rope creaking. Mr Gormley stifles a sneeze. When I open them again, there is Jacob looming over me, dark against the blue of the sky. He holds out his hand and I take it. He pulls me to my feet. There’s the soft sound of hoofbeats now, slow and halting. I look across the yard. There’s Aaron. He has the white one on a short lead. Full cup blinkers. Its gait is loose and uncertain. It staggers once, twice – a little too much medicine, not that it matters really.

The lads from the gluemakers, Richard and Andy Burnham, are reclining on their cart outside the gate. A trail of blue-grey smoke rises from Richard’s pipe. Andy sends a cheery wave our way. I raise a hand and so does Jacob as we take up our positions at the windlass. The soles of Mr. Routledge’s boots skim the white one’s ears, which twitch, as Aaron leads it underneath him.

‘Ready, sir?’ says Mr Gormley, when the horse is in position. Mr Routledge grunts his assent. Jacob is looking up at me now, waiting to see what I do. It’s an innocent, questioning look. I know that if I were to walk away now, he would come with me. But then, who is there for me to follow?

Together we tighten our grip on the wheel and commence to let the rope out.

horses treatment of animals

connection hope hopelessness

HOPELESS

by Jeanne Farewell • June 5, 2021June 5, 2021

I hope this missive finds you well. But the sad reality is, you are not well. You will not be well. Things will not get better. It is futile being optimistic, pointless being positive. You are a bonehead if you hope. “Hope is nothing but the paint on the face of Existence and the least touch of truth rubs it off.” So says Byron. Listen to him.

But hope saves me from despair, you argue. It gives me confidence, reassurance, pluck.

And what of that? What good is confidence, reassurance, pluck? They are just futile feelings. Completely without effect. Can pluck stop an asteroid from hurtling toward you? Can reassurance right a wrong? Can confidence curry favor with a wrathful opponent? Can hope change an outcome, give you strength, confer control, have any bearing whatsoever on efficacy? Does hope endow you with the power to reconfigure your life?

No. Work does that. Effort does that. Action and ability do that. An alliance with the cold, hard facts of the world does that. Not hope. Commonsensicality should supplant these mutton-headed notions of hope of yours–yes, commonsensicality is a word. A fine word. And one that has nothing to do with hope.

Benjamin Franklin agrees with me: “He that lives upon hope will die fasting.”

Yet hopelessness continues to be associated with all that is negative. It is considered a fault, a failing, a weakness. Poor thing: she lost all hope. He’s hopeless! In despair! “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.” The loss of hope is Hell.

But is it a fault to be realistic? Is it a failing to banish the feather-brained notion that a dreadful situation will change for the better? Is it a defect to confront a circumstance head-on and take it for what it is, however distressing? Is it a weakness to acknowledge that you have been defrauded by hope, time and time again? And again? Is it self-defeating to say: this is it, and it will not get any better?

It’s 1610. The Hudson Bay. Henry Hudson is set adrift in a tiny open boat by his mutinous crew. Ice in the water. Scant provisions. He is never seen again. Did he have hope? Did it help?

Hope is strong, I grant you that. It has supreme power over your mind. You never reach the end of your rope with hope, even if you reach the end of your rope with everything else. What is that Italian proverb? “Hope is the last thing ever lost.”

Mary Queen of Scots had hope, even as her head was placed on the block. “I forgive you with all my heart,” she said to her executioner, a Mr. Bull, “for now, I hope, you shall make an end of all my troubles.”

What think you? Is hope a need, or not?

I hope I have not caused you to squirm.

I do hope this finds you well.

Hope to hear from you soon…

Farewell,

Jeanne.

desire gay love relationships

WANTING

by Jennifer London • June 4, 2021June 4, 2021

Photo by Mysi(new stream: www.flickr.com/photos/mysianne) (copied from Flckr)

When their lips touch, Marcel swears his heart stops for that split second, that instant it takes to realize here and him and me, he didn’t know he wanted this until it was happening and now he wants, more than he knew a person could want, he just wants, all of him hungry and yearning and the points where his lips meet Ty’s burning, all these months of staring at those full lips, the way one side quirked up at the edges when Ty was being cruel, all this time Marcel thinking Ty hated him, couldn’t stand to be around him, go back to France you fag even though Marcel was born and raised here in Houston, and now Marcel finds he isn’t even really that surprised, the word fag lighting him up from the inside, moments coming to him in flashes — the feel of a boy’s hand in second grade when the teacher told them to buddy up, the way his eyes were drawn and drawn back to Greg Howard’s naked shoulders in the locker room after lacrosse, and that time he was hauled off the field for elbowing a player in the stomach and he didn’t even care because he was so busy replaying the way the man’s breath had huffed out into his face, the puff of air electric — and now he’s grabbing Ty and pulling him hard until their bodies are lined up, pressed into each other, reckless in the Texas heat where anyone might see, all that tension thrumming through him, and he thinks in some primal part of himself that if Ty pulls away now he will die, literally die, all his cells will burst in an instant, but that might happen anyway, all of him wired and his skin barely able to contain it, and Ty is pushing back, hands in Marcel’s hair yanking, little noises escaping his mouth that reveal a vulnerability Marcel never thought to hear, Ty’s whimpering begging Marcel not to stop, and Marcel wonders if Ty is strung just as tightly as he is, if he wants as much, but how could anyone hold this much want and not explode with it, and when finally Ty pulls away, it’s with a jerk, a sudden move that leaves Marcel tipping forward, dizzy, but it turns out it’s just so Ty can look back and forth between Marcel’s eyes, breathing ragged, before tugging him close again.

Editor's Pick, Fiction, Loneliness Issue

WHAT’S MINE IS MINE

by Chelsea Tokuno-Lynk • May 31, 2021May 31, 2021

In June, Ami and Kick take the train from Seattle to Portland. Kick is quiet, as always, on his dead mother’s birthday. This year he brings a book with him and does not look up from its pages. Ami passes the hours staring out of the window at the motionless surface of the sound reflecting the flat grey sky, listening to Radiohead albums on repeat so the aching timber of Thom Yorke’s voice fills the void that always, without fail, opens up on this annual trip, but this year feels especially dark and yawning.

They have not had sex in two weeks.

“I don’t understand you,” Kick said when she admitted her fertile window had come and gone. Another wasted month. Ami had hidden the results of the ovulation monitor, and Kick was too distracted to notice. The week before the Portland trip, he moved through the world in a daze. His boss had denied his request for promotion, citing budget cuts and some other vague excuses. And there was, of course, the dullness that always followed him like a shadow in the days before his mother’s birthday.

“Do you not want this?” Kick had asked.

By this he meant a baby, a pregnancy. But the word had expanded inside of Ami. This meant Kick, their marriage, the little world they had pieced together delicately over the years. The question felt too huge and the uncertainty of her answer too daunting. So she met Kick’s question with silence, and ignited his frustration. Her husband is slow to anger, but once angered he simmers for days, quietly stewing the emotions until they are reduced to a thin layer of hurt that his better nature finally scrapes away and discards.

The train stops at Union Station, and they catch a cab to the same flower shop they visit each year. Kick picks out a bouquet of sunflowers while Ami wanders the aisles, pressing her face to the roses and crushing sprigs of lavender between her fingers. They leave the store in silence.

Only when they step onto the cemetery grounds does Ami attempt to slip her hand into Kick’s. He allows her to press her palm to his as they leave the cemetery office, a borrowed brush and watering can in hand, and move through the maze of headstones. When they reach the dark marble headstone for the mother Kick lost in the winter accident a decade ago, Ami expects her husband to stop her as she kneels to wash the headstone. But he doesn’t.

Ami fills the watering can to bathe the grave of her mother-in-law, a woman she never had the opportunity to meet, but whose memory her husband carries like a talisman. She brushes off a year’s worth of dirt from the engravings and washes away the debris. This is the task her own mother taught her the summer she turned eight, the summer her mother, Shizuka, took Ami and her brother Jin to a far corner of California’s East Bay to visit the grave of their grandparents. The summer Shizuka gave her children one of the few Japanese words she could remember from her own childhood: ohaka mairi, honoring the graves of your deceased family. The memory floats, uninvited, to the surface of Ami’s consciousness as she rinses the headstone.

“The stone should sparkle when you’re finished,” Shizuka had said as she guided Ami’s hand across the marble. After the washing, Shizuka laid out an array of food. A green apple, a can of beer, a carton of cigarettes, the frosted rice crackers Ami and Jin loved.

That was the day Ami realized her mother was beautiful. Her face had been gentle and smiling, her dark hair pulled into a loose bun at the nape of her neck.

Ami shakes away the memory of her mother and blots out the accompanying ache that lurks closer to the surface than usual these days. Her knees pressing into the grass, she takes a tangerine and an almond-studded chocolate bar from her purse and arranges them on the clean headstone. These are the treats Kick said his mother loved.

When she rises, Kick brushes his lips against her hair.

“Thank you,” he says. The words and the gentle pressure of his body are an apology for the hours of silence he has lodged between them.

Ami nods, a tightness in her throat.

Kick kneels to arrange the sunflowers across his mother’s headstone. Ami steps back to give her husband privacy, opening up enough distance to hear only the low tone of Kick’s murmurs to his mother’s grave. She stations herself beneath the shade of a tree. A breeze rustles the leaves overhead and Ami tries to focus on the coolness of the light wind on her face. She tries to focus on breathing from her stomach, on releasing the tightness that has been forming like a fist in her chest all day.

Then, maybe in the lull of the breeze, or perhaps in the deliberate, slightest raising of his voice, she overhears Kick say, “Ami and I are gonna make you a grandma soon, Ma. We’re trying.”

His words drop into the pit of her stomach. A dull thud. The tears, hot in her eyes, pool and spill. And the old urge to run takes over.

Her feet carry her down the paved road, towards the cemetery office. She calls a cab. When the driver arrives, he looks startled at the tears on her face but says nothing as she climbs into the back seat and shuts the door behind her. As the cab pulls into the street, she sees Kick striding down the cemetery road, searching for her. She sees him stop. She sees the hurt bloom across his face as he watches the cab drive her away.

Kick had appeared all at once, charming his way into an introduction at Simone’s birthday party. Kick, who was not outrageously attractive. Too tall, a head full of unruly curls and a smile that took up too much space on his face. Ami had watched him weave his way through the crowd toward the corner table where she and Simone sat enjoying glasses of champagne.

“I had to come say happy birthday to you,” Kick said, bending down to give Simone a hug. He extended a hand to Ami. “I’m Kick.”

“Nice to meet you,” Ami said, letting him shake her hand. When he held on for a few beats longer than necessary, Ami looked up to see a smile pulling up the corners of his mouth.

Simone adored Kick, who worked with her at the university. She thought he was a great catch, and kept telling Ami so after he stepped away to buy a drink.

“Why don’t you ask him out?” Ami had asked.

“No way. He’s not my type. Too nice.” Simone tilted back her glass and downed the rest of her champagne. “Come on, let’s get another drink.”

At the bar, Ami wound up sandwiched between Simone and Kick. Simone insisted on buying the next round, flagging down the bartender as Ami asked Kick about his work at the university. Kick leaned against the counter as he spoke, his curls tumbling over his forehead, the smile never leaving his face, his gaze drifting from Ami’s eyes to her mouth and back again. At some point, Simone slipped away without Ami noticing. Ami felt as if she were sinking into a delicious trance as she and Kick talked about their respective careers, their mutual obsession with the new izakaya in Capitol Hill, about everything and nothing. When they finally emerged from their conversation, the bar was practically empty, the party was over, and Kick offered to give Ami a ride home.

Kick expects the hotel room to be empty when he walks in. But the first thing he sees is Ami’s running clothes in a crumpled pile on the floor. Then he hears the shower running. Relief rolls over him all at once. He leans against the wall and closes his eyes. She is here.

In as little time, the anger flares back. His selfish wife. The thought feels ugly, the remnants of the frustration that overtook him in the cemetery as he watched Ami disappear down the road. He didn’t bother calling her, knowing her phone would be turned off or silenced. Instead he wandered back up to his mother’s grave site and sprawled out on the grass, his head resting between the headstones, and stared up at the dull Portland sky. He called his cousin instead of a cab. Prentice, the only person Kick wanted to see when he was in town and one of the few relatives who could carry a conversation with Kick without bringing up his mother, without looking him over for any visible scars of grief.

Prentice picked him up in the same busted Honda he’d been driving around since college. No questions asked, he took Kick straight to a dingy dive bar and bought them both tall glasses of beer. He didn’t comment on the fact that Kick kept checking his phone every three seconds. They talked about Kick’s job, his pain-in-the-ass boss who refused to promote him, and Prentice’s new girl, a fresh college graduate who was eight years younger than him. The conversation never broached the subject Ami, though Kick had to fight the urge to hard pivot into a confession and spill everything to his cousin, to admit his fears that he and Ami might not be able to have children, that Ami did not want children, or worst that Ami was on the verge of abandoning him. But saying these fears aloud, even to Prentice, would give them shape and texture, make them real. So he forced the words down and bought them each another glass of beer. Two hours later, Prentice dropped him off at the front of the hotel.

Before driving off, Prentice said, “Call me if you need some more air tonight, man.”

Kick hears the shower turn off. He isn’t sure if he wants to be angry or sorry when Ami steps out of the bathroom. He knows she was hurt by his stubborn silence over the past few days and his admittedly childish silent treatment on the train. He knows that a part of him wants her to hurt. A part of him wants to punish her for not needing him as much as he needs her.

The bathroom door opens and Ami emerges, a towel wrapped around her. When she sees him she inhales quickly. Her hands pull the towel tight across her chest. The realization hits him suddenly, knocks the lingering anger out of him: She doesn’t want him to see her naked. He wants to walk over to his wife and pull her slim, damp body into his. He wants to press his nose into her hair to find out what kind of perfume the hotel shampoo has concocted, mingled with her scent. But instead he sinks down in the hotel chair. He presses his hands into his knees and looks up at Ami. She stands in the bathroom doorway, unmoving.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

“Yes. Are you?”

“I’ve been better.”

Ami stares at him, and for a moment Kick thinks she will say something more. But then she moves to the duffel bag lying open on the hotel bed, snapping off the tension stretching between them, diverting them both in her scavenge for jeans, a bra, a blouse.

“You went for a run. How many miles?”

“Three. And where were you? At a bar with Prentice?”

“Maybe. Are you going to tell me why you left me at the cemetery?”

She pulls out the clothes, holds them to her chest.

“Probably for the same reason you went drinking with Prentice for hours.”

“That’s not an answer.”

She takes a breath. “Can we talk about this after I change? Please.”

Kick pushes a hand through his hair. “Fine.”

He wants her to let go of the towel, to let herself be naked in front of him. But she turns and walks back into the bathroom, closing the door behind her.

The first time Ami slept with Kick, he traced the shiny brown line on her wrist and asked, “What’s this?” and she told him how she had once burned herself with an iron. He kissed the white scar along her calf when she told him of the lump that had lived there, how long the incision took to heal after an infection. He discovered the beauty spot tucked into the tender flesh behind her knee, the birthmark that rested at the base of her neck. Kick explored her body with a tenderness that made her heart sing. He entered her and Ami felt her walls shift, wanting to make room for him. And suddenly there was a Kick-sized space inside her, a space Kick could enter with a freedom that surprised and excited her.

“I think this could be it,” she had told Simone.

“Didn’t I tell you?” Simone laughed her full-bodied laugh and squeezed her hand.

But on the night of their second anniversary, when Kick grasped her hand across the table and asked if they could start trying to conceive, trying to make a family, something slipped out from a hidden recess. As she kissed her husband and told him yes, she felt something like fear darken the air.

Ami dreamt of her mother that night. In the dream, Shizuka, still pregnant with Jin, rested in a rocking chair in the sunny corner of an unfamiliar room. Her hand rested on a belly that swelled with unnatural quickness. In the dream, Ami watched her mother from a careful distance until Shizuka opened her eyes, snatched up her daughter’s hand, and planted it against her firm stomach.

“Your baby, Ami,” Shizuka said, her voice strangely harsh and feral. Through her mother’s flesh, Ami felt the baby move, its body pressing against her hand. She felt a surge of revulsion. She looked down at her own stomach to see it huge and swollen against her shirt, a baby’s handprint pressing through her own skin. The force of her panic snapped her awake.

That first month of trying, Ami spent her days imagining a baby forming in the base of her belly. Her body suddenly felt foreign and mutinous. Any tinge of nausea, every ache of tenderness in her breasts, triggered a rush of anxiety. She had more dreams of her body swollen with child. When her period came, a wet dark smear on her underwear, she hid her relief from Kick, who could not hide his disappointment.

He rubbed his hand across her back and said, “It’s okay. We’d be too lucky if it happened right away.”

She wanted to tell Kick she was having recurring nightmares about being pregnant, that she was afraid of losing control of her body. She wanted to tell him that, for the first time in ages, she had the urge to contact her mother, to ask Shizuka to help her dislodge the fears sprouting inside her like mushrooms. Tell me how to be pregnant. Tell me how you carried me, how you carried Jin. But she could not expect Shizuka to be a source of comfort in this. Shizuka, who refused to attend their wedding. Shizuka, who refused to speak to Kick after she looked into his face and took in the curls, the large dark eyes, the un-Japanese-ness of him, and took in the fact that this man would be the one to carry her daughter away from her. Her mother would give Ami no comfort. She had not seen or spoke to Shizuka in over a year. How could Ami expect to mother a child when she herself felt so wholly unmothered.

She wanted to tell Kick she wasn’t so sure about the baby anymore. But it felt too much like tugging on a linchpin; if she revealed her doubts to him, their carefully constructed world would collapse.

By their second month of trying, Ami began to catch herself bracing for Kick’s touch, anticipating his fingers behind her neck when they sat on the couch, his arm curving its way around her waist when she stood at the kitchen sink. She started to find relief in the hours they spent apart. During the day, her body became her own again. She imagined shedding tainted skin along the highway on her drive to work. Her body took on a lightness that lasted into the hour she had to herself before Kick came home. At the sound of him unlocking the front door her body became heavy again. She would feel his body drawing hers like a magnet.

The wine from dinner put color into his wife’s face. Kick can see the warming glow on Ami’s cheeks even under the dim street lighting. The night is cool and quiet. Ami’s arm is twined around his as they walk the five blocks back to the hotel. A truce has nestled between them since they left the hotel for dinner. Ami had emerged from the bathroom, fully clothed. She cupped his face in her hands, kissed him gently and said, “I’m sorry I left you at the cemetery, babe. Can we just leave it alone for now?”

Kick wants more than a truce. He wants to love his wife and believe she loves him in return. He wants to forget his dead mother in the ground and the cloud of grief that follows him when the earth swings back around to another year without her. He wants to forget that he and Ami are half a year into their attempts to start a family of their own. He wants to shake his fears that Ami’s attempts are half-hearted. He wants the delirious fullness that seems to have drained away from their marriage.

The hotel’s marquee comes into view, and Kick stops walking.

“What’s wrong?” Ami asks.

Kick pulls her close, wrapping both arms around her.

“I want to feel you again,” he says, his mouth pressed against her hair. “Just feel you to feel you.”

He is grateful he cannot see Ami’s face as he says this. With her head tucked between his chin and shoulder, he can pretend she is smiling into his jacket. He can pretend that in a moment she will turn her face up to him and kiss him. And, as if she’d heard his quiet hopes, Ami does look up at him. She pushes back to look at him fully. Kick can see that her eyes are wet, but he cannot tell if this is from tears or the wine. She frowns, peering into his face like she is looking for something. Then she smiles. And before he can doubt if her smile is real, Kick closes his eyes and kisses his wife.

In the bathroom mirror, Ami watches Kick as he watches her. She wipes the toothpaste from her lips and rinses her mouth. He kisses her shoulder and moves his hands over her hips, slipping his hands under her nightshirt. His fingers feel rough against her skin.

Salty saliva pools beneath her tongue, and she pushes his hands down, trying to be gentle. She does not want him to sense the revulsion rising up like a tide inside her.

“I need to freshen up for a bit,” she tells him.

He smiles at her reflection and kisses her again. She watches him pretend that he can’t see her lack of desire. Or maybe he isn’t pretending. She can’t be sure.

Kick’s hand slides over the curve of her bottom. “Let me know when you’re ready.”

Ami nods. She closes the door and tries to breathe from her stomach. She grips the cold porcelain edges of the sink. Her heartbeat has moved up into her skull and throbs dully behind her temples. The languid buzz from the wine has worn off, and beneath the thickening layer of queasiness, she feels tired and heavy. She splashes cool water on her face and reminds herself that she owes this to Kick, the comfort of her body, an overdue offering of her love. Especially tonight. She tries to convince herself that tonight will not be about a baby, even though she knows there will be no protection between her skin and his.

When she steps out of the bathroom, Kick is standing in his boxers, lighting candles he has set along the nightstand. The air in the hotel room smells of hot wax and pine. An earthy smell. She knows Kick is trying to make this romantic, but the candles make her think of rituals and sacrifices.

Kick turns to her, and that magnetic feeling comes over her. His body, pulling her to him.

“You smell nice,” Kick tells her as he folds his arms across her back, pressing her into him. He bends himself half over to kiss her neck and breathe in the smell of her. He lifts her off the floor and carries her to the bed. She must feel so slight in Kick’s long arms. She has inherited her mother’s small frame, her thin bones.

If they have a daughter, what will she inherit?

“Look at me, baby,” Kick says.

Already he has removed his boxers. Already she is on her back, stretched across the mattress. He trails kisses down her neck, across the soft skin of her stomach. His mouth finds the warm center of her, setting fire to her nerves. She grips the bedcovers and focuses on taking deep gulps of air.

“I love you,” he tells her when he pushes inside her. She watches him. She watches him watch her pretend she enjoys this. But he must see the disgust flickering behind her eyes, mirroring the candlelight throwing shadows onto the walls. She knows he is trying to comfort her.

Kick has gone too long without release. She senses him holding back for the first few minutes. She can see the restraint cording his neck and shaking his arms as he moves his body over her, inside her. He wants this to feel good for her, too, he tells her.

Afterwards, when Kick has slipped off to sleep, Ami slips out from his arms. She makes it to the bathroom. She spits a thin stream of bile into the sink. She sits back on her heels, collecting herself as the faucet runs. She wills herself to find the fortitude to tell Kick she needs space, she needs time. She feels the urge to run again, to silently collect her things and disappear from the hotel. It would be easier to run. But she must try to tell Kick about the fears that have been following her these past months. Tomorrow she will try, she promises herself. She rinses her mouth, turns the faucet off, and climbs back into bed without waking Kick.

Editor’s Note on the Loneliness Issue

We want to thank the contributors who have made this month’s Loneliness issue possible. These stories, essays and works of art have given an exquisitely creative window into the realities of everyday human experiences, with their loss, memory, love, solace, pain and joy.

This past year has seen a steep rise in loneliness and mental health concerns due to the necessary Covid-19 isolation practices.

We at Litro acknowledge and support the need to address these concerns and stand in solidarity with those suffering from mental illnesses and loneliness.

Here’s a short list of resources for the United Kingdom and the United States:

United Kingdom

Samaritans provides confidential, non-judgemental, emotional support for people experiencing feelings of distress or despair, including those that could lead to suicide. You can phone, email, write a letter, or speak to someone face-to-face.

Side by Side is an online community where you can listen, share, and be heard. Side by Side is run by Mind.

ChildLine is a private and confidential service for children and young people up to the age of nineteen. You can contact a ChildLine counsellor for free about anything.

For further UK resources, visit Time for Change

United States

The Jed Foundation is an organization committed to the mental and emotional health of college students. It offers training tools for campus professionals to improve their mental health services for students.

Freedom and Fear is an online non-profit advocacy organization that contains a wealth of research-based information and treatment referrals for anxiety and depression.

Here are 60 Digital Resources available to the American public across a wide range of needs, from depression and anxiety to substance abuse and domestic circumstances.

For more resources, and information on getting help and taking action, visit Mental Health America’s site.

alienation relationships romance

Editor's Pick, Fiction, short story, StorySunday

A SUNNY PLACE

by Jacob Vincent • May 30, 2021May 30, 2021

Not long before we left, I displayed my bad habit.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, I know you don’t notice.”

I winced at her words, utterly sincere which was why they pained me. Despite her acceptance, curiosity lingered filling the silence between us.

Our room was perfect, small, and looking out at the shore. As it was winter, the inn was quiet and the beach mostly deserted. She went ahead into the room while I lingered on the landing. On the wall was a traditional nioh mask. I appreciated the simplicity of such a design, clarity of the expression so clean the stillness was unnerving.

Days passed breezily, our thoughts absorbed in each moment. Whether she hunted for shells along the rocks or we hiked through the forest. Despite the freezing cold, at the end of each day we rushed into the water. She swam for a minute or two before darting back to shore, savoring the challenge and exhilaration. I stayed in the water, swimming and floating but in fact waiting for the cold to subside and to lose all sensation except for the motion of waves. Back in the room she showered but her hair still smelled of the ocean even after it was dry.

Occasionally my thoughts drifted beyond our stay. At first there was relief, to experience weightless days felt as a first and my body became light. In such moments I imagined we came in spring when trees shivered with pleasure in the wind, young leaves a firm green. In such a state, sunlight would be vivid yet gentle glimmers between the foliage. I bathed in this sense of relief, but the gloom began to cluster. Could not help but think of our departure and suddenly the weightlessness became fickle, each day drawn to the blackhole of our return. I hid the darkening of my mood out of concern it would spill over from secluded moments and sour the entire day.

“I have never been to the coast in winter before,” she said.

On the fourth morning, we were finally walking the length of the shore. Heading towards the black rocks. She wanted to look for rockpools, to hopefully spy a starfish.

“Even when you went abroad?” I asked.

“Well, I went to sunny places. Always wanted to travel,” she sighed.

“You have.”

“No, how you dream to. To really lose yourself in far places, not staying in some resort. Always moving.”

Sand began to thin to a mere thread as the ocean heaved with greater effort. Water was a lifeless grey yet the surge of waves gave the impression of trying to form an expression beyond color, eager to flood the beach.

“I’m so going to slip,” she laughed.

Despite the muted light, black rocks glistened.

“I will help you.”

She laughed again, “we seem so much higher from up here.”

We steadied one another while she crept along, hoping to see crabs or starfish while I gazed out at the horizon.

“Only been here a couple of days, can’t ever imagine going back.”

Her words struck me, seeming to mirror my own before I noted her tone. Certainly melancholic yet this was the basis of her wistfulness.

I recalled the facets comprising my life, how much I detested them. The job, the faces, worries and memories… all of it. Yet away from it all, my dislike was similar to the distaste when passing unappealing architecture. A purely aesthetic revulsion. Rather than reveal a positive attitude able to move beyond negativity, such a state revealed my intellectual feebleness. Grief with which I met each day would forever be shallow, no matter how authentic or how much it pained me. None of this was new to me, yet I had never questioned the sparse moments of joy before. On the rocks I found an ambiguous spell had been cast over our stay, similar to the winter mist shrouding the hills that had just moments ago loomed above the forest.

“Let’s go back. Getting dark soon,” I muttered.

The following morning, I displayed my bad habit.

“It really is okay,” she assured.

I could not stand the sight of her face, the sympathetic expression appeared repulsive as if smoothing her features into that of a mannequin. And so I glanced for the window, for the ocean.

Sunshine had descended for the first time since our arrival, bathing in a particular spot near the water.

From nowhere, a wave of self hatred swept through me. Something I had never experienced before. While having little regard for myself, I had only been able to summon the same contempt I had for others.

I had long since been in the habit of staring into space. At first I called it zoning out, as this seemed common. But as I got older and noted the agitated demeanour of others, I realised this habit was something different. This staring was not an active effort on my part but the opposite, a natural alignment allowing each muscle to sigh with relief after being forced to support a contorted posture.

I noted this habit without giving it a label, without considering the experience itself or caring about those in my immediate vicinity. As such I could not stand the sense of reproach forcing me to fixate on the spot of the beach suffused in sunlight. Waves behind this light glistened, appearing silver as if glimpsed from another world.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

I forced my gaze back to her.

“Of course. Did you say you wanted to go to the cafe beside the beach front.”

She nodded eagerly, seeming to forget the occurrence.

“They had all that cool ship stuff on the walls, like the wheel. Is that what it’s called, wheel – do you think any of it is real…”

During the rest of the day and without a change in my demeanor, I gave this habit of mine serious thought for the first time. I remembered sneaking outside as a child, world beyond those rooms was utterly estranged from the routines comprising life and reserved for the day. It was the night they took my mother, leaving me in a house filled with strangers. Worst than strangers in fact given how they laid a claim on my space and time I did not recognise even as a ten year old, based on some abstract notion of family. Unsure whether my mother would come back, I was plagued with doubt as to how to meet the morning. An owl was calling and I focused on that sound, and the sensation of the cold which was so vivid it seemed to swallow me up.

Another memory – concerned a reprimand for something or other. Don’t remember from who or where, I only remember the pattern of the carpet. My eyes traced it and it occupied my mind, as if searching for a dropped pin.

I let someone down once. While she expressed herself, I focused on the peculiar yellow shards in her otherwise brown eyes.

By the time I was nineteen, I no longer needed to focus or make an effort at all. I could look past my mother’s face as she was told she was dying, for the window and murky sky.

“You okay? Been a little quiet?” she asked.

I looked up and found myself in the cafe. She was eating a sundae with some cream on her chin.

I smiled, both relieved and terrified to find her.

“I’m good. You have a little something on your face.”

“Shame we don’t have enough ice cream to make more of a mess,” she smiled. Eyes as dark as her hair, glistened like the black rocks.

After we ate, we headed for the sand.

“You know. Sometimes it helps to talk when you get like that. Might make you feel less alone,” she said.

“Not used to that.”

“Never too late to learn,” she replied.

Her hand was sticky against my own and she glowed, seemingly encouraged by my relieved smile. Guilt almost made itself known but I swallowed it down.

Her misconception was the idea I was overcome with emotion, that I was dwelling on things. During such spells, I truly did not feel much at all. I could not correct her. Because of my inability to describe complete apathy, to ascribe words to how feelings and thoughts could flee in a flash. Real reason however was the fear, fear I would detect suspicion creasing her expression. To see her try and figure out whether I was looking through her.

My fears were no doubt baseless but it was easier to relax into silence than take a chance.

“Too cold for me today,” she said with a trembling voice.

Sunny spot had vanished by the time we were by the water. I shed my clothes and dived in.

I only stopped swimming when I was far enough out for her figure to lose all perspective. By then sunlight began to glimmer through the clouds, eventually forming a circle of light around my floating form. Within this sunny place, the water turn from a cloudy grey to an emerald green.

bad habits relationships

Essays, EssaySaturday, Loneliness Issue

MARY

by Melissa Goodnight • May 29, 2021May 29, 2021

Christmas Eve 1980 my mother sat on the brick steps of her low-income apartment complex wrapped in a coat. The buzzing porch light kept watch above her scarfed head. She sipped a Bloody Mary from a pint glass she’d swiped from the bar she tended. My mother knew she shouldn’t be drinking a Bloody Mary. She’d known for a week that she had to quit. She’d known since that cold day in Dr. Johnson’s office when he confirmed that she didn’t have the flu. Instead, she was pregnant at an “advanced maternal age” with her fourth child. My mother knew she shouldn’t be drinking a Bloody Mary, but she was cold and tired. She was tired of that year, of that apartment, that buzzing light. She was tired of being afraid, tired of trying to make the ends meet, tired of the loneliness. So my mother sipped her Bloody Mary, and she prayed. She prayed under that porchlight for 417 seconds. She prayed with many Americans that night, sitting under different porch lights. My mother and her country sat vigil for the 52 American diplomats taken hostage by Ayatollah 417 days before. They prayed for the men and women in captivity. They prayed for resilience, they prayed for President Jimmy Carter, and for President-Elect Ronald Reagan. For 417 seconds my mother sipped her Bloody Mary on her small, brick porch, comforted by the fact that she was no longer alone.

Robert Ode, one of the American diplomats held captive from November 1979 to January 1981, kept a detailed diary of life in captivity. The diary sits in a protected case at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library. I’ve never seen it, but I have read it. In his diary, Ode’s emotions change from day to day, his optimism soars when he receives letters from his wife then plummets when he’s had a bout of food poisoning. Back up again when he’s told negotiations are underway, down when resolutions are denied. I’ve wondered for years now how it would feel to be cut off from the world, scared for your life, betrayed by the country you love.

Ode’s Christmas Eve 1980 entry says he attended a “religious service conducted by the Catholic Archbishop of Tehran…” He noted there was a tree, unlike the previous year. A tree, some sweet treats, and a few gifts for each of them. He mentioned the presence of the Algerian Ambassador to Iran and several cameramen. Ode thought it was a good evening. Maybe it was the gifts, maybe it was the sweets, but the last line of Ode’s entry simply says, “Surely hope something good will happen this time!”

My father was not sitting on his porch on Christmas Eve 1980. My father was at Sacred Heart Catholic Church, the same as every Christmas Eve and Easter morning, year after year, without fail. He was seated in a wooden pew, having genuflected before moving to the end of a polished row, making room for his wife and their children in patent leather, crushed red-velvet, matching suits and ties. My father wouldn’t know there was a vigil, until the candles were lit, until the priest called for 417 seconds of silence, in which my father sat, head bowed, surrounded by his family, friends, and neighbors. And prayed.

Days later my father learned of the existence of his last child when he answered his home telephone, secretly snaked the long cord into a quiet hall closet, and heard my mother’s urgent voice on the other end of the line.

“I’m pregnant, and it’s yours,” my mother said, emotionless, waiting.

“It isn’t,” my father said.

“It is,” my mother assured.

“Don’t call me again,” my father said, hastily walking out of the closet.

My mother sat motionless on her plaid couch, the dial tone ringing in her ear, remembering the night my father promised to divorce his wife, leave his family, marry her instead. The night my father told my mother that he loved her, and only her.

Ode’s last diary entry is a summary of the final days of his captivity. He was interviewed by a young woman in a black chador who’d spent her childhood in Philadelphia learning English. Years later she came back to Iran, with the American name Mary, and become a well-known news anchor on an anti-American propaganda show. Mary’s show was known for its closing statement, Marg bar Āmrikā, Farsi for Death to America. Mary asked Ode a series of questions, and Ode replied with a simple yes or no, until Mary asked Ode if he felt there was justification in his captivity.

“No,” Ode replied. “There was absolutely no justification.”

Mary’s eyes widened.

“There never was,” Ode finished.

Mary then looked directly at the camera and cried out in English, “The interview is over!”

On January 20, 1981, my mother sat on the edge of her plaid couch, a tape recorder on the coffee table in front of her, the television blaring a news broadcast. She put a yellow and orange cassette tape in and she hit record. Years later, I’d sit behind that same plaid couch, that same recorder resting on my belly, and I’d listen ad nauseum to the recording that my mother made eight months before I was born. I’d listen, as I laid on my back, feet kicked up against the wall, my chubby, preschool hands working the buttons. Play. Stop. Rewind. I listened as the Iranian hostages were released from the tyrannical control of the Ayatollah, between spurts of my sister crying for strawberry ice cream and my mom telling her to be quiet.

I don’t know why, as a child, I was comforted by listening to that recording. I don’t know why my mother felt compelled to record that moment at all. The moment when Ode and the others embraced President Jimmy Carter on the safety of a West German tarmac. Maybe many Americans recorded that event. Gathered around their television screens, waiting for the release, feeling it their patriotic duty to listen, record. I can’t be sure. I don’t know that country. That world. That mother.

I do recognize the emotions, though. I know the feeling of waiting for an answer that will never come, the anticipation, rejection, release. I recognize the notion that what’s happening right now, in the present, is so important we feel called to record it, write it down, etch it into our collective memory for future generations to dust off and listen, chubby fingers sliding between Play and Rewind, while the voices of those now gone, cry out to be heard.

Iran Iran hostage crisis Jimmy Carter parents and children USA

#FlashFriday exile forbidden love

A SISYPHEAN EXILE

by Pei Wen • May 28, 2021May 28, 2021

Photo by Natalia Medd (copied from Flickr)

Raindrops hurtle towards her, burst and stream down the glass pane. She stands on the inside, watching the cityscape languish into a bleary painting. The skyline is washed away under gray strokes, but whenever slashes of silvery fire fracture the sky, the skyscrapers unveil themselves fleetingly in the space between the raindrops. She is obsessed with storms. Here they are winds coursing through veins of a metropolis to purge defiled air and thunders convulsing concrete bones to quell urban dissonance.

She tears herself away from the window and crawls back into bed, sidling close enough to feel the warmth radiating from his body without rousing him – outside the city is getting colder. His chest swells and sinks to steady oscillations, she watches, synchronising her breaths to his, musing over each passing second.

An interminable journey chases, place to place, century to century. She is by now no stranger to the absurdity of her existence, but when circumstances necessitate the loss of a lover, or her life, old scars aggrieve into fresh wounds.

She recalls how the wandering swordsman swore to free her from the okiya. They had hatched a plan to elope, settle in the county up north, where he would open a dojo to teach kenjutsu and she would help him run the school. She entrusted him with all the gold and pearls her wealthy patrons had lavished on her, but at the riverbank, he never turned up.

Then there was the other time the emperor orchestrated her death. She was an offering to appease his army, a pawn in his elaborate plot designed to subjugate an impending rebellion. “It has to be you,” he said, with tears glazing his cold eyes. She was his favorite consort, he had claimed, but traded her life for the dragon throne.

The chain of incarnations stretches back too far for her to remember every name she had existed in. But storms spilling from the firmament smells like home. She remembers the roots of her existence: her earliest name echoing in soaring domes, the whitish otherworldly light in the atmosphere, the tenderness of feathers enveloping her body, her foray into forbidden love, and the excruciating pain erupting into her flesh when they severed her wings.

Editor's Pick, Fiction, Loneliness Issue, short story

THE STAIRS

by Andrew Jankowski • May 28, 2021May 28, 2021

Even at nearly seven in the morning this time of year the sun is yet to rise; in fact, the blue tint to the dome of the sky can only be imagined. I try to imagine it as I let the blinds back down and dress in the darkness, the desk lamp having blown and the overhead light being too brutal for me at this unaccustomed time of day.

When my phone rings, I walk down the stairs and into the narrow street. Aaron tries to smile visibly from within the half-lit front seat of his car, nodding his head at me in a gesture of acquiescence more than one of greeting. But the moment I get in, it is already clear that his mood is going to remain steely. He anticipates the embarrassment, actually the shame that he will feel when I am in his childhood home, near his family. He is deeply embarrassed and wishes to hide from such a moment, a kind of reckoning for him, I am sure. But he has no choice: his brother is out of town, his cousins are working today; I am the only adult male he can find whom he is willing to ask such a favor. He has told me, in unguarded moments, small details taken from this life, from this segment of his life; but to bring me face to face with it, I imagine he never anticipated or intended such a moment.

Still, there is no help for it now: his mother has to get to the doctor today, and there is no one else to help him carry her down the stairs; to pick her up in her wheelchair and take her carefully down the winding, treacherous, decaying staircase of her apartment building. It is a two-man job, however helpless that makes Aaron today.

Leaving the city on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, I begin to feel nauseous. It is terrible to be so close to someone, on an errand like this, yoked together, it seems, as the car hugs the endless curves and hills above the Schuylkill River. The colorful row houses seem to rise out of the shadows as we pass Manayunk and Roxborough, leaving the city. They too hug the rounded terrain, extending in lines across the terraced hillsides, the grey stone that distinguishes these homes from other parts of the city reminding me of the house I left in Chicago. I feel that in the pit of my stomach, an aching for home, even if it is a home I voluntarily surrendered.

Aaron looks at me as if he senses the import of my thoughts. There is nothing secret on days like these. This terrible proximity is a kind of revenge on us for our unending helplessness. And instantly the presence of another becomes unendurable.

Finally the sun rises on a cloudless early winter day, angling down and through the windshield, refusing to leave in obscurity the many painful imperfections and inadequacies of the landscape, debris on the highway, the dust that rises in the car, creases and dry patches of our skin.

At least the small talk of the first few minutes is over. He pretends to focus on driving; I happily let him and look out on the familiar terrain, feeling this actual homecoming to be somehow less real than the memory of the place I have left behind. In fact, the edges of the city do feel dreamlike as the morning sun blurs and obscures them. Against this surfeit of feeling, I sip my coffee and try to prepare myself for the blankness I know I am going to need when we arrive.

Rural Pennsylvania on this surprisingly mild winter day feels like Spring at home: the earth is dark and wet and the smell of rich soil pours in through my cracked window. The whole atmosphere suggests a softening, an unbinding, as when the ice finally cracks and the crusts of snow suddenly crystallize and then disappear, the unfrozen earth finally taking the water into itself, the soil softening as it blackens and turns the grass a deep dark green. Except that at home, this is almost always done under a still-frozen white sky, the blades of grass waving violently in the hard rushes of wind.

Maybe the strange disappointment I feel at this mildness is enough to take all emotion out of me, at least as far as others’ perception will be concerned. There is something matter-of-fact in this lack of winter: as if I am being driven on and pushed in front of some unrelenting impersonal impulse. No rest, it wants to say, but it leaves me to draw the conclusions, showing rather than telling. No rest because, look, nature is not resting – here, the birds are still singing, which means they are still here, weeks after they should have flown south. Look there, the sun is so bright it makes you nauseous; you cannot so much as glance in that direction without becoming sick. Even nature is not resting. It is fine to think of hibernation when the earth around you is resting, but this is not really winter, so for now you must continue on your narrow and empty path, devoid of any pause, however sincerely hoped for and maybe even earned.

We pull up to the building. The apartment complex is at the back of the town and looks built as an afterthought – cheap, splintered brick exterior with strangely small windows in plastic frames; the bushes are rigidly symmetrical, and the grass looks ripped rather than cut. Aaron shrugs and prepares himself as I suppress any and every emotion, thinking repeatedly that I must not shame anyone, that they must be acknowledged but not examined.

We walk up the narrow carpeted staircase as he tells me his plan.

“We’ll each have to take a side – there’s no other way to do it, even though the stairs are really too narrow.”

“However you want to do it, just direct me.”

“Be careful,” he says, deliberately, “because the carpet bunches up and you can trip.”

I realize that he is doing this now in order to avoid discussing it in front of his mother. It is a small kindness and one that could easily be overlooked, but he does not want her to hear herself discussed as either a problem or, still less, an object to be dealt with.

“We’re going to have to tilt her so that she’s leaning backward down the stairs, so that we can balance her legs in front of her and center the weight of the chair.”

The only response I think reasonable is a muted okay.

He puts his hand on the doorknob. “Here we go,” he says as he raises his eyebrows and sighs, trying to seem casual about the thing, as if it were just some odd chore that could not be avoided. Here we are, let’s get it done, his expression seems to say, running completely counter to the moment we are actually in and the pain that must be overwhelming him.

But once inside he seems to calm down a bit, even smiling and laughing a few times as he talks with his mother. I do my best to trust things to take care of themselves, yet I cannot help but remain anxious in my repose; never quite letting the muscles in my back and shoulders slacken, I hold my coffee rigidly in front of me and make as little noise as possible, except in those rare instances when she looks directly at me or asks me a question.

It is not merely the fact that he sees her so infrequently or the fact that she has to spend so much time alone here, with only her part-time nurse for company; nor is it simply her poverty or even both of these things together; instead, what pervades the room when I look for something to define it is his inability to do anything to alter the situation.

But what help can he give? Divorced, half-employed, miserable himself – he can’t afford a decent facility for her nor can he take her into his home, now that he is back in a small one-bedroom apartment, his ex-wife alone in their house while it sits on the market. He cannot afford anything more than the four hours a day for the home healthcare worker and the occasional visit which he ties into a doctor’s appointment, in order to avoid driving the hour and a half out here more than a few times a month.

The smell of urine is here, faint but definite. It mingles with the stale odor of cigarette smoke and disinfectant. Today the healthcare worker has already left, and the three of us have an hour to “visit” before we have to leave for the doctor’s appointment. Happily, it is dark inside the living room, the curtains blocking that intense slanting sunshine from getting in.

I do my best not to look at him, especially his face, but he manages to catch my eye anyway, with a look like a wounded dog.

“We’re probably going to stop on the way back and get lunch, so we can get back on the road before rush hour,” he tells his mother, and she responds with a nod of understanding, confirmation that it must be so.

Managing the conversation with his mother, he curates it for the situation, conscious more of being overheard than of what either of them are saying. He deflects. With words, he calls attention away from the living room, from the smell, from his mother. He focuses on inanities, the very thing the mother would normally be dealing with in the presence of a grown son and his friend. But here, it is as if he must help her into them, ease the small talk into being, as if she has forgotten how and he senses how important it is that she is permitted that safety. Rather than evade the little points of conversation as most grown sons, he lovingly delivers them to her, as if he were wrapping a blanket around her pitched shoulders.

Her speech is hard to comprehend. She has had two strokes, and the left side of her face is nearly paralyzed. She draws out odd syllables, emphasizing sounds almost at random and rarely the expected syllables. This makes it very difficult to follow what she is saying, and I find myself indulging in a kind of free-form daydream, each tangent beginning from some phrase or some piece of a thought that she manages to force out; but my own associations fill in the gaps so that after a few minutes I find myself in a kind of reverie both melancholy and soothing. After all, my participation, other than a few words of assent here and there, is not expected, it being impossible rather than unwelcome.

Her soft voice seems to fade in and out, though it is my attention that is parsing the moments. She is proud of her son; no words would be necessary to draw that conclusion. Just the way she looks at him makes it clear. But she doesn’t seem able to settle upon words that would draw out either her pride or her questions. Her pride is instinctual, not even half-comprehended, as his shame and, in this instant, his hesitance to indulge her pride, especially in my presence. They speak to each other, but their meaning cannot help but aim wide; it misses them almost entirely.

When the softly tortuous hour is over, we arrange things as we discussed in the hall, him rolling her onto the landing as I close the door behind us and crouch down by the large back wheels of her chair. We try to hoist her without shaking her, to keep everything steady, but it is impossible, and she is pitched about, though not violently. To my amazement, she betrays absolutely no fear through any of it, but instead looks straight ahead calmly and quietly, merely waiting to be placed down again at the bottom and thinking nothing more of the time in between. I imagine, or rather cannot help but imagine, and so compare, my own mother’s probable reaction if she were to be lifted up in a wheelchair, knowing that every moment would be subject to scrutiny, calculations of probable outcome, possible danger, and all manner of things particular and uncontrollable, and so terrifying to her. But Aaron’s mother is perfectly still, unperturbed, and I realize that it is for no other reason than that she trusts her son completely, as a young woman might trust her husband. Many would never get used to this procedure, and each iteration would remain terrifying, trying, and a new source of shame and embarrassment. It is her trust, an almost religious trust in her son, who all the while is counting himself a failure in her eyes; but that boundless confidence comes from him, returns to him, and could not possibly outlast him.

And so in pure repose we carry her down the stairs.

We drive her to the doctor’s office then sit and read in the waiting room, talking only infrequently to one another. When they bring her back out, she seems tired and in need of rest. Therefore, in the car we talk even less, and I spend the time looking out of the window once more, as I did on the ride out here, at a landscape I know I will never see again, one that, in memory, will always hold this connotation for me – Aaron’s sick mother, exhausted in the front seat, Aaron brooding beside her.

Some clouds have emerged now, and the light is no longer hostile and ungracious. The temperature seems about to drop. I am always grateful for soft light, it seems merciful to me, not only because it obscures and renders more gently the world around me, but also because of the contradiction that objects and tones emerge more clearly against it, no longer washed out by the unmatted distinctness of a bright sun. The towns seems more livable in this light, and as we drive through these old main streets, there is a kind of sudden longing for generosity inside of me, an unaccountable and possibly unwise impulse to believe the silences endurable, whatever my rational mind might suggest later, alone in the dark in my dingy room, the noises of the city distended through the window, sagging and weighing on my conscience, an impossible homesickness choking my heart.

elderly parents Pennsylvania shame

A Flash of Inspiration: “Bad Qi” by Lucy Zhang

by Christy Hallberg • May 28, 2021May 28, 2021

By Christy Alexander Hallberg

For this installment of A Flash of Inspiration, we’re featuring “Bad Qi,” a story that originally ran in Litro on August 21, 2020. Author Lucy Zhang employs lyrical language and an amalgam of folklore and realism to create a mood that is both familiar and esoteric. I was intrigued by the depiction of the main character as a juxtaposition of the corporeal and metaphysical, as though the two states of being were at war for possession of her. The result is a story that is allegorical and shocking.

CAH: How long have you been writing flash fiction? Do you write in other genres? Do you find that you return to certain themes in your writing repeatedly?

LZ: I have been writing flash fiction for about two years now. I’ve also dabbled in short fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, hybrids, and multimedia pieces that incorporate code and writing. I love that flash packs such a punch, how it exists between genres, how it’s so open to breaking rules (as we writers so often like to do). A lot of my writing revolves around hunger (of all forms), the body, a lack of belonging.

CAH: What inspired the subject matter of “Bad Qi”? Does the story have any autobiographical elements?

LZ: I’ll admit “Bad Qi” started because of my husband’s foot fetish. I don’t think feet are all that great (besides getting me from point A to point B), but I was interested in his interest and ran with it. On a broader level, I wanted to explore the character relationships and how objectification can be interiorized — how after a certain point, the object that others see as representative of you can become you.

CAH: You use a lot of medical jargon related to the anatomy of the foot in the piece. What kind of research did you conduct to prepare to write that aspect of the story?

LZ: I love doing research for my writing. It’s honestly just another excuse for me to go down the rabbit hole of Wikipedia and research articles in a completely different knowledge sphere. I didn’t do any research beforehand. Rather, as I wrote, I looked up things about anatomy, which ended up informing what I wrote. That happens for a lot of my work: I’ll read about something and feel inspired, write a bit, continue reading about the thing, continue writing.

CAH: Eastern folklore, myth, and religion play a large role in “Bad Qi.” For example, you allude to the ancient Chinese custom of foot binding. What interests you about these cultural references and what do they reveal about the nature of these characters and their relationship in the story?

LZ: I grew up with a lot of these Chinese tales about vengeful ghosts or fox women, and I was always fascinated by how the “evil” women were always beautiful. A lot of those beauty standards (pale skin, small face, small everything) in Chinese culture have always seemed to make the women disappear rather than stand out. In “Bad Qi,” the main character is disappearing both spiritually and physically.

CAH: Where do you turn for creative inspiration? Which artists have most inspired your own work? What books are on your nightstand?

LZ: Anime is a huge influence on my writing. Sometimes when I don’t have any story ideas, I’ll go through the shows I’ve watched on MyAnimeList and try to write something inspired by one of them. There are pretty much no books on my nightstand! Haha, I’m truly a soul of the 21st century. I prefer to read everything on a device, and even then, it has been a long time since I’ve actually read a novel. I prefer to read short fiction, manga, webtoons, etc.

CAH: What are you working on now?

LZ: I’ve been branching out of flash fiction more this year with multimedia pieces, poetry, and short fiction. Emphasis on short fiction. I’ll often get impatient by the 2k word mark and the ending suffers for it. But there’s no way but forward! And I’ve already cranked out my first story over 3k words!

folkore Lucy Zhang realism

Arts & Culture, Editor's Pick

POSTER BOARDS AT THE PROTEST

by delaneycostello • May 25, 2021January 24, 2022

Editor’s Note: One year ago today, the world witnessed a fatal interaction, the type that too often happens and is too often dismissed. In honor of Mr. George Floyd and countless others, this short, moving essay finds a home at Litro because of its inherent power and because we share in the urgency of the issues it grapples with.

Written by a young American student, the essay allows us a glimpse of a youth’s understanding of Black identity – the color of which is not a crime – and the need for racial solidarity.

George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Ma’Khia Bryant, Daunte Wright, Daniel Prude, Rayshard Brooks, Adam Toledo, Marvin David Scott III…Today we echo past names so that tomorrow there won’t be new ones.

Expression: making thoughts or feelings known. Lying on my back on my bedroom floor, searching my ceiling for a way to articulate 400 years of oppression. Biting the cap of a Sharpie, because centuries of suffering just don’t fit onto a poster board. Taking a break by scrolling through Facebook and finding a cousin ranting about how privilege is a lie, how he really doesn’t care.

Do you?

Slapping the computer shut, because what do you say to someone who’s so far gone? A clenched fist, a three-word phrase, an MLK quote? Could any of it persuade someone like him? Flipping through a thesaurus and Malcolm X to get this right, trying to find the perfect soundbite. If I can’t express myself to him, what’s the point? Checking my watch and running out of time. The protest is in two hours, and I have to finish this sign. I have to change at least one mind. I settle for the expressions on their faces in better times: Elijah’s warmth, Breonna’s joy, George’s peace and Ahmaud’s glee. Two words: too many.

At the march, I find my voice and we voice our rage. No justice, no peace, no racist police! We’re strong, we’re powerful, we’re conveying our message. We walk two miles, our signs held high, and we stare down the cars as they pass us by. I pray none of them are like my cousin. We walk to City Hall, and our voices are so heard that we can’t say a word.

Police break the silence, start shouting orders. Back, back, back. To the eighteenth century? We have power in numbers, but they have earplugs and handguns. Tear gas and targets. Suddenly, they step back, the canister high in the air. You should have seen their expressions.

Black Tuesday BLM Platform for Peace race

Editor's Pick, Fiction, Loneliness Issue, short story

BITS AND PIECES

by Michael Giddings • May 25, 2021May 25, 2021

I’ve lived above Bits and Pieces for almost a year now and have never had occasion to go inside.

There’s a distinctive kind of loneliness to passing a specialty sex shop each time you come and go from your home.

There’s a distinctive kind of loneliness to everything when I think about it, but Bits and Pieces has that obvious subtext to it, really cuts to the quick of everything one doesn’t have and isn’t doing.

The store itself is cheerful and welcoming, its name spelled out in soft pink neon in the front window. At a glance, you would guess they sold knitting supplies or pottery. The items on display, usually nestled in cotton ball clouds, do not make their functions immediately clear. You could be looking at an Easter egg hunt, a candy convention in heaven, possibly a new type of digital microphone favored by podcasters. Then you take a second look. Oh wait. I wonder what that one does. Finally, you get carried away by dissatisfaction and, feeling uncomfortable with yourself—uncomfortable most of all with the fact that you’re not comfortable—you shuffle along to buy your bagel a couple doors down, to refill your MetroCard, to hop along to the next part of your day.

I’m sad, by the way. I might as well just put it out on Front Street. I’m very, very sad.

Like Bits and Pieces, all the businesses on this block are boutiques, or at least boutique aspirationals. There’s a bar approximating a honky-tonk tavern, an actual yarn and pottery shop, and my personal favorite place to fill the void, an indie comics nook called Panels. Even the bagel store recently replaced its awning, tossed up some posters of smiling pastries dancing around puns: holy rollers, Darwin’s Bagel Voyage. I overpay for another bacon, egg, and cheese, wondering if this is going to be the one that kills me. The L-train rumbles below the sidewalk.

It’s not that I’ve never been in love, although now I’m approaching an age where it’s hard to admit that’s what it was. Old partners have become so distant they appear to me like nonspecific Shakespearian ghosts. Their entities are preserved in amber. I’m a realist, so I know that’s not how they are anymore. The most recent woman I loved went to Italy for graduate school. We had the requisite series of chats about it. The program was only a year. This was a hurdle we could overcome.

She cut off communication almost instantly. I tried a couple of emails before I started to feel stupid. I sat around the apartment all day. I went out and bought a bagel, an indie comic book, a bag of organic coffee.

The clientele at Bits and Pieces appears to be almost exclusively happy people in love. That’s true for most of the business on the block. It should be understood that this neighborhood recently became a bastion of youth and prettiness, absolutely wall-to-wall with bangs, sundresses, stubbly jaw lines, vintage band T-shirts, high-waisted jeans, and handholding both palm-to-palm or with fingers interlocked. Often, I feel like the only one with flab and too much body hair. Do any of these people get canker sores?

To shop at Bits and Pieces with your partner—your boyfriend, girlfriend, significant other, fuck buddy, pillow pal, fiancé, spouse, mutual, special one, your love, your best friend, your passion-bone—must require trust and comfort. I’m making this guess from the outside looking in, shyly, pretending not to be looking in as I leave my apartment in my ratty coat and return fifteen minutes later with Chinese food. But imagine browsing the spare, whitewashed shelves under the soft overhead lights. Would you like me to put this on you? In you? That’s a good scent. We could try it. I might not like it, but we could try it.

Since I’m being honest: I’m terrified of sex.

My friends don’t have this problem, least of all Ruby Apathy who I have drinks with once a week at the approximation honky-tonk bar. Ruby has murky blonde hair and a perpetual sniffle. Her front teeth overlap slightly and it’s tough to make her laugh. She spends ten hours a day drawing cartoons. Apathy is a penname. It’s a joke, I guess, because she’s constantly jittery with caffeine or sodden with alcohol. Ruby is not afraid of anyone. I ask her if she has experience with Bits and Pieces.

Yeah, duh, she says. She takes women there all the time, she says. They find it romantic.

But, like, I have to know. Do you buy things?

Sometimes. Or we just get ideas.

Ruby finishes her tall can of Pabst. She buys two more. There are always four or five bro-types at this bar, and we have a standing bet as to how long it will take them to play Ring of Fire on the jukebox. The song is starting now, so she bought me a beer. She squints at me, cartoonist eyes like X-ray specs.

Do you want me to take you on a friend-date to Bits and Pieces?

Flustered, I decline the offer and this makes Ruby cackle, mouth full of teeth.

Soggy with cheap beer, I head home. The bagel store is shuttered. The lights are off in Panels. There’s a hardcover in the window I’ll have to pick up tomorrow.

Of course, the neon Bits and Pieces sign still glows in the night. A woman reads a book of poems at the counter, her cheek on her palm. The L-train passes below, and I realize it’s my responsibility to yank this sweater of gloomy narcissism up over my head. The ghosts of lost lovers are not going to rematerialize. At no point was there a bottle of scented lubricant or a vibrating rubber animal that could have saved the partnership. Let unanswered emails lie. Gradually the sting will fade.

And, for now, the bodega on the corner – the dirty one without a hint of prestige – is open for my business, fortifying icy cans of Yoo-hoo nestled like elixirs within.

loneliness New York City sex shop

#FlashFriday flash fiction micro fiction short fiction short stories

WHAT WE USED TO SAY

by Crispin Anderlini • May 23, 2021May 23, 2021

We used to say our son will be a neurologist exploring the upper limits of the human mind’s mechanics, an aeronautical engineer devising methods of time travel, or a sober general treating life as something to be valued — a different kind of man, for a different era. But you didn’t agree. None of it was for you, somehow.

You were your own person. A special case of interest we watched grow through one phase of obsession after another.

First it was wheels and hugely cumbersome blades that churned energy from the air like butter from milk — anything that rotated and was round. Then came garages, their crinkled doors and hidden recesses an endless source of fascination and delight. Heavy trucks were also captivating. And like so many boys that age, you learned all their names and sang them to any tune you could snatch from the air.

At seven you found rocks and tiny plants, and the many varied creatures that lived amongst them, to be the most intriguing. We played along, nourishing your fascinations and imagining archaeology, botany, geology, volcanology and other -ologies as your chosen profession.

The next year you only cared for skateboards and bikes.

Those microscopes and feathery brushes used to illuminate geological wonders lay under their own layers of dust and grit — abandoned in the forgotten corners of your cavernous wardrobe. In their place were muddy wheels, scratched and torn pants, and gaudy stickers half-peeling from your vehicles.

We contemplated sports stardom and X-air competitions, foolishly letting you launch yourself off any ramp you could find.

The accident changed your mind and drew you back into yourself — a hermit crab retreating to the safety of books and Lego. And the endless wonders of tiny wheeled toys.

You built a city around a train set, and we returned to dreams of engineering or architecture. We bought you more blocks, more toys, and you formed a shell; piece by piece, until only your fearful brown eyes could be seen. You peered out at the world as a threat, and we covered you in bubble wrap that popped with every second step.

And then one day you smashed those blocks to pieces. You broke out of your cage, moulted that fragile shell, and scattered your fears like confetti — taking a paper run, earning pocket money, combing the neighbourhood for the chance at a few dollars. You wanted to acquire and accrue.

For what? It was never clear.

We pondered your entrepreneurship, your magnate aspirations, your desire to fill a room with gold. We set up a bank account for you to store your loot in. It grew like a weed, but you never touched the money. The saving was what pleased you.

Until at ten it didn’t.

You spent it all in one single turn around a theme park, throwing those sweaty coins at one ride after another — leaping, soaring, flinging and tangling yourself upside down and round-about. There was nothing you didn’t try. We couldn’t keep up.

When you were eleven, twelve and then thirteen you were unstoppable, insatiable. Determined to know the world with your wild, wide eyes. We hoped for adventure, resolve, beautiful friendships and the safety of an enduring love. But you weren’t interested. Experience was all you cared for.

Those whirling, joyful years sprang quickly behind us, and your childhood became a teenagehood of surgical looks and blunt words. That was expected. We were the same, and punished our parents unreasonably for their existence.

But you locked the doors on us. You closed the shutters and hid yourself away.

At sixteen you became a rival, a combatant, a dry and colourless thing without joy. We didn’t blame you. We stretched out our arms to warm you, to bridge your distance.

You were not there. You had departed. Retreated to your mind’s fickle games of left is right, wrong is light, and chemical exploration the only way to reach up. We couldn’t catch you — tether you to things real, things with definite weight. You just floated up, up, up, and then plummeted frightfully downwards.

When we found you on the floor that day you were the blue of forget-me-nots. A delicate shade of pale limbo, drifting between this place and that dimmer land of pallid remembrance. We gathered you up like a bundle of twigs and burned you with our tears — dancing frantically around the blaze like zealots.

You didn’t smile when you woke, just turned your floating eyes away and held counsel with yourself. We were shadows on a wall at your back. But the pulsing at your neck was enough for us.

For two slender years your pulse beat strong. You smiled and laughed, you chuckled and beamed. You went through the motions, keeping our fears at bay. We limped along beside you, glancing ever-sideways at the dark and gaping mouth of possibilities at your feet.

It nearly swallowed you whole the next time you tried to flee — to drift away into your dreams, and beyond to our nightmares.

We collected what help we could find. We tried to stitch you back together. But the pieces were frayed and beyond our meagre skills. You didn’t want to be re-made, and our fears spread like mould over the rind of our family.

At twenty you lashed out, tearing the delicate skein of our care. Your mother recovered, but we were no longer three, just two. Our wary looks danced around each other, catching the guilt of our choices in the edge of a mirror or a darkened window. We weren’t really there, and you were elsewhere.

You returned to us as a man. Not made whole again, but you once more occupied the space around you.

We washed the dry-grey lines from your face, undid the knots of institutional adherence, and let you walk again in the freedom of sunlight and shifting air. We dared to dream of your future — a life of balance and chemical regulation, of caution and steadiness. A life with clear limits, but one that was your own.

You didn’t want it. It wasn’t for you, somehow.

When that patter of dirt fell onto your wooden bed, we broke. We spread like dandelion seeds on a quiet breeze. There was nothing left but the mournful play of wind on stone.

We still talk, but there is nothing to hold onto. We have flown apart, and can only drift endlessly between those bright fields of memory you now live in.

It is she and I — not we. We are separate, and you are not here.

WE’RE PROMISED RAIN

by Marty Thornton • May 21, 2021May 21, 2021

Photo by simpleinsomnia (copied from Flickr)

Old photographs of a married couple fade away on a living room mantel. The Crying Boy sheds a tear for the peeling nicotine stained wallpaper. A record player withers in the corner, flanked by a small scrapheap of neglected vinyl scratched with forgotten songs. Across the room, a towering bookcase full of damp Digests and stagnant newspapers are stacked in various stages of discoloration. Volume cranked, a portable TV spews weather forecasts and bland reruns from yesteryear drowning in canned laughter. We’re promised rain.

He sits hunched over. Poor unkempt cardigan cratur with a hook nose and perennial cough. He squints through bifocals, mutters at anything that resembles life on the miniature screen. Occasionally he stares at his slippers planted thick in the infinite pattern of the nylon carpet and waits for the bells of the Angelus.

He used to read the newspaper and think about things when he was straddling the can. Not just day-to-day stuff like the price of milk or which horse to back in the three-thirty, but curios about life and death and right and wrong, up and down and why one man’s meat was another man’s poison. And then there were the little things, the awkward stuff he could never discuss with the wife with the lights turned on, let alone in the dark.

Sometimes he’d lose track of time and his missus would rap her puffy knuckles on the door and ask was he writing a book? He’d ruffle the newspaper, bark he was trying to finish the crossword in peace and tell her to take the clothes off the line before the heavens opened. That was then.

Staring into his filth, he pulls the chain. Empty heaves, whines and whistles. The cistern fills at a snail’s pace, a geriatric water torture where time is measured drip by drip. A hairline crack in the Belfast sink. Pressure down to a rusty trickle in the tap. He stares at old man’s hands, soaps slivers between the palms and folds, whilst overhead a fluorescent tube flickers a semaphore for moths and those adrift. And his eye, which once twinkled, is drawn to the light and he forgets.

Perched on the edge of a mattress, he loosens the belt. A trapeze of aching bones and tired springs. The groan and rusted screech before the nightly grind. Off come the slacks. Down past the knock of the knees to the ankles and the concertina of the tweed. Right leg first, a half-arsed buck and they’re free. Then still half-dressed, he crawls under pink Chatham blankets and stares at the ceiling and the mold cowering black in the corner. And there he mouths a rambling galloping decade from imprint then waits for morning or death.

MATCH THE PERSON TO THE LIGHTS THEY LOVE

by Daniel Crasnow • May 20, 2021May 20, 2021

Context and Instructions: Recently, I created seven people, whom I have described in the People list below. Each person shared three of their favorite memories with me. Then we worked together to discover within that memory a source of light whose existence allowed the memory to be the way it is. All of the entries in the Lights They Love list are the responses from the people I interviewed, translated into present tense. Each entry in the Lights They Love list also has three subsections. This is because I took the lights from each of the three memories. The memories are not listed in any particular order. One person’s favorite memory may be attached to the first light on the list, or their favorite memory might be attached to the last light on the list. The people are also not in any particular order. The first person on the People list may have the last set of memories in the Lights They Love list. Your goal is to match each person to the lights they love.

People

_____ The old woman stands in her kitchen with frazzled grey hair, heart-eye sunglasses, and a blunt. She takes another hit and tucks the blunt behind her ear, rubbing the junk off her hands and onto the satin bathrobe. She pours another glass of champagne for herself and glances at the second cup on the bar: untouched vodka in her husband’s favorite glass. She sighs, corks the bottle, and returns it to the butler’s fridge. Turning around, she takes in the giant, empty house – its 20-foot roof soaring above her head, interrupting her view of the sky. She hates that house. Hates all this damn wealth… But she can’t leave.

The Lights They Love

—A blinding white medical light haunts a ghostly hospital and frames an occupied bed.

—Three mirrors – one is cracked, one is nearly shattered, and one is just a frame.

—A double-layered, five-colored, glow-stick choker.

_____The child is excited to read more about Greek monsters and hide beneath his stars-and-rocket-ship blanket. He always enjoys the night. Whatever monster he helps Percy Jackson kill will be easier to kill in his dreams. He looks at his wall. Enjoys the contrasting red, orange, blue, purple, yellow, and green. The colors gave his mom a headache. He wasn’t going to change them. Not ever.

—Two dim desk lamps light a book from every angle.

—An old-wood-table bonfire; the tinder is mahogany and oak and spruce.

—A paintless, dusty window frame. A window kept clean to frame the morning sun.

_____ The woman finishes her chalk sunset and sits back against the brick building. Her legs pulse from the upright effort, though she can’t take too long to rest. There is so much more to do. She has pictures for every sidewalk square, and though she has a friend helping, the work will take the majority of the night. She grins. She wouldn’t make it home tonight; she rarely did. Her third floor apartment is just a place to store her clothes. An officer will shake her awake in the morning and arrest her on a minor loitering charge that will be dropped in 20 minutes. The woman wonders how the janitor is doing.

—The lake’s surface reflects the moon. The half moon, setting beneath the waves, looks whole.

—A giant, red, neon light tints a white-walled room; a pair of hands make a shadow-bird against the back wall.

—A vibrant, green-bottomed lava lamp with a white lava bubble.

_____The corpse rests in the mahogany coffin, name carved into the top. The body is lifelike; the morticians do their jobs well. The family hasn’t seen their loved one yet. He died suddenly but not violently. Most of his family live out of state. A few members came down early and are helping the widow through the mourning process. They cry in the second pew. The friends give the family privacy. If the widow is to give the memorial speech tomorrow, they need to cry now.

—Thirty memorial candles on a table cloth that reaches the floor.

—A giant, flat screen TV that fills the wall.

—A rusting spotlight growing dusty in an attic.

_____The man boards his Shanghai plane, bound for Cambodia. He’d soaked up Shanghai from skin to marrow. He’d learned to speak the language well enough to speak it in love. His lover waves at him, a slow tear rolling down her face – she always knew he would leave, yet he is a captivating man: his wild hair and silly grin…his piercing green eyes. His many lovers loved that look; it was one of the reasons he kept it. He loved that they loved that look. He loved all thirty-something of them – one in every country he visited. But just as he loved them, he left them. He finds no satisfaction in what he has.

—The light above their lover’s bed; their haloed lover.

—New Year’s Day fireworks from a third-story rooftop.

—Grandma’s “dancing fairy” Christmas light atop a pine tree.

_____The imaginary friends I have are actually an imaginary family. The father and mother allow me to hang with their kids. My friend and I constantly prank his sister. Our jokes are harmless. Inevitably, his sister goes to their mother. The mother gets her husband to confront us, and he grins as he tells us to stop. We never leave her alone, though sometimes we join her at the dollhouse or the tea table in order to repent. We don’t mind. Eventually, just as the pranks become tradition, so does our repentant tea.

—A late night/early morning campfire covered in burning marshmallow.

—The light of God for the second time.

—A flickering, unreachable hall bulb that never goes out.

_____The doctor stumbles out of the casino with nothing but the clothes on his back and a flip phone. He tries to check the time but sees nothing on his wrist. He liked that watch. He wasn’t sure whom to call. He doesn’t have a house anymore. He doesn’t have friends. He hasn’t talked to his college buddies in three years. His wife left six months ago. She took the dog. He could always call his parents, but a man never likes to do that.

—A brilliant, amber ballroom chandelier enveloping the roof.

—A reflective fish-scale dress swimming with the light and shadow.

—Vibrant black skin.

the sky the ground

by Zoë Fairtlough • May 18, 2021May 18, 2021

The waiter has taken your orders and Fa says, ‘Ah, it’s good to be back in Rome,’ but Ma demands that you go and live with them in Spain. Again. You reply as kindly as you can that it’s impractical for you to uproot just like that. ‘The children are still at school, but if you’d like to come and live near us in Philadelphia, I’ll make enquiries,’ you add, turning up the warmth but purposely saying near rather than with us. Your mother’s eyes well up and your father shakes his head, and it’s not clear whom he’s addressing.

You do not want to have this conversation with your parents in public. It would be more appropriate in the privacy of a hotel room, but the wedding of a favourite cousin has brought you together here in Rome, on the street where you once lived with these two people you knew better than yourself. But perhaps it is appropriate here, in the restaurant where the waiters would pinch your cheeks and offer you crusts of bread dipped in wine. In your ears are the cries of the street sellers, in your nostrils the sting of spoiling fruit—you’d know this street with your eyes closed. And closing your eyes recalls the sense of locked windows and forbidden gates. You open your eyes and the rows of green-shuttered windows, where spikes have replaced pigeons on the sills, and laundry no longer hangs, move you almost to tears.

Not the Rome of postcards, were it not a Thursday, this might be any quiet residential street this side of Parioli. But today Via Tirso is jammed with stalls and packed with people despite siesta time. The closest stall sells fruit, and the tiny slates scribbled with chalk prices inwardly delight you. It’s the same as it was but different. The prices are in euros now, not hundreds of lire, and the sellers appear to have been selected from a Benetton advertisement. Your eyes wander to the spot where the ancient toy lady used to sit and sew trinkets onto cards, opposite where Romano had stood behind his mounds of potatoes. Today’s sellers look new but less innocent. They have all their teeth.

‘What do you think about moving to the US to live near us?’ you ask Fa, trying again. He smiles and thanks you for the thought but no, America is no country for old people. ‘We’re staying in Europe,’ he says with uncharacteristic finality.

Relief arrives with a carafe of wine, and Fa pours it out in all the glasses despite you asking for water—the wedding and party the prior evening, compounded with jet lag, have left you feeling hungover. The earlier espresso at the hotel bar has not had its desired brightening effect, and now there’s a whole afternoon and evening before you accompany your parents back to the airport in the morning. You breathe in and out slowly and say you enjoyed seeing your aunt again, she was looking well. Fa nods and takes a yellow tube from his pocket, counts out three different pills onto the napkin in front of Ma. ‘Here you go. Have a grissino with them.’ She hunches her shoulders and tucks her head in. ‘Non voglio—don’t want to.’ When you ask her what she might like to do after lunch, she stares blankly at her plate. Earlier, she had demanded to return to the old house in the Roman countryside, but you said it would take too long to drive all the way there and back, and in the end she agreed that she would be just as happy to see her first home in the city as her last, a rare concession on her part. Now, you regret not agreeing with enthusiasm to her original desire—it’s unlikely you’ll ever return to Rome together. ‘It’s Thursday,’ Ma says, and Fa replies that yes, it is.

Thursdays were loud-flavoured air and restless pigeons on the windowsill, watching the street market below for crumbs. You observed those birds through the bars of your crib, until orange and black bead eyes fastened on yours and plump bodies jerked like they were waking. ‘I can fly like them,’ you said, but Mamma said, ‘Don’t be silly. Be a good girl and lie down now. She latched together the green shutters, ‘Time for your siesta.’ The pigeon’s rainbow wings exploded, the room darkened, but down in the market the sellers cried, ‘Pataaate! fiori belliiissimi! peeesceeee!’— like a beloved nursery rhyme.

Two pastas arrive for your parents, a salad for you, and Ma rouses herself enough to scowl at your lettuce like it’s a crime. Her hand trembles as she turns her fork into her spaghetti, but years of practice enable her to twist a perfect coil. You regret not ordering the pasta. Fa’s Roman carbonara stirs golden memories of protracted family lunches under the pergola. Languorous afternoons and evenings. ‘Looks like proper guanciale,’ you say, and Fa offers his fork, ‘Have some.’ You don’t remember Ma eating any other spaghetti than al pomodoro, the basil leaves resting jewel-like on the tomato sauce that tints the strands dark rust. She used to say that you could tell a good restaurant by this dish alone, while Fa’s measure was the quality of the house red. He says the wine is good. ‘How’s your pasta, Ma?’ you ask. She says nothing and the memory of her irrepressible chatter aches.

Mamma wore a yellow dress in the park, her friends gathered around her on the tartan picnic blanket and listened entranced to her stories. So much laughter. You played with Mark, Indira, Giulia, upside down on the swings, the sky the ground.

The food is finished, the plates are taken away. Fa asks for the bill. Ma’s eyes lose their fog and she sits up straight. Over the last 48 hours you have observed this happen after she has eaten and wonder what is going on inside of her, at the molecular level. ‘Si! I know this street!’ she declares suddenly. ‘We lived up there!’ Stiffly, she points at a window three stories up from the pavement. That she recognizes it after all this time is a surprise, considering. Fa hesitates before confirming it is indeed where you lived fifty years ago. He chose the restaurant so he must have known—he never gives up on helping Ma engage with reality. She looks around, the most interested she has been in her external world in two days. It feels longer than that. Ma’s superpower is expanding time, you joke to yourself as Fa pays the bill, then feel disloyal or somehow not like a good daughter should feel. You suggest taking an Uber back to the hotel, perhaps a detour through Villa Borghese, the park your parents used to take you and your brothers. ‘Down memory lane,’ Fa says, and the cliché irritates you. You expect Ma to agree but instead she insists on visiting Signora Maria. When you try to persuade her otherwise, agitation pearls her brow. ‘I don’t think Signora Maria lives here anymore,’ Fa says, which you know is his euphemism for she’s probably dead, a necessary euphemism but Ma ignores him. ‘Go and look, the name will be on the doorbell. Vai.’

Fa personifies patience although occasionally, like now, his lips pressed tight together reveal his effort to contain himself. Holding onto your mother’s hand, you follow him along the road to the massive iron gate. Above, the green shutters stay latched at the windows. Behind one of them was your room, behind another the kitchen.

Lunch was a crinkle-edged fried egg on white rice. Siesta was darkness and waiting for Mamma and your brothers in the other room to wake. The window was ajar to let the air in.

‘Her name is here,’ Fa shouts, childlike with excitement. You hold Ma’s hand and help her shamble across the road. Her hand shakes like she’s waving and yet she insists on pressing the button several times, slowly and deliberately. No reply. Again, you suggest calling an Uber but she’s not ready to leave. Perspiring from the effort of walking just a few meters, she demands a cold drink. You’ve just left the restaurant, but Fa says he wouldn’t mind a coffee as he watches his wife, eyes narrowed. He looks weary. Regret creeps back that you have not been there for them—the less-than-weekly phone calls cannot make up for years of absence. Christmases, birthdays, summers: you’ve missed quite a few. Your siblings have done more than their part.

Fa catches your eye and nods to the nearby bar with tables outside. Still holding your mother’s hand, you guide her to an empty chrome chair. Fa orders an espresso for himself and a Lemonsoda for Ma. You’re fine with plain water. When it comes, you hug your fingers around the cool tall condensation. Breathing in and out, you work on that pit forming in your stomach. Ma squeezes your hand and says she’s happy Fa brought her here. ‘I am glad we are here together,’ she says, scanning each word. ‘Do you remember Romano?’ she asks suddenly, and Fa says of course, ‘He was the potato seller.’ They both look at you and you know what they’re thinking.

Market day on Via Tirso, the sounds from the street were different and larger than other days. Romano’s voice rises like heat into the bedroom, ‘Ducento lire. Grazie, signó.’ His potato stall was right under the window, just around the corner from the iron gate all the way downstairs, six sets of stairs, you could count them, but your brothers couldn’t.

Seated at the table outside the bar, you have a direct view of the windows of the flat where you lived as a child. You consider that, since then, Fa has relaxed a great deal. You glance at his unbuttoned polo shirt and sandalled feet—time was when Father always wore a tie and lace-up shoes. A narrow grey, a tight little knot at the neck. He’d loosen it when he came home, which meant the end of siesta.

He loosened his tie and pushed out the green shutters to let in the light. He picked you up out of the crib and took you to the window to watch the street, all the stalls lined up and down the road—fat tomatoes and braided garlic, rainbows of fruits, strident gladioli spears, gleaming dead fish on glittering hills of ice shavings.

Once Mamma bought you a little pink milk bottle from the lady with the walnut shell face, who sold cross-eyed dolls and plastic water guns that hung from rusty hooks. You’d spend hours inspecting her boxes of cards stuck with pink plastic combs, matching mirrors, and sundry cheap toys. The milk bottle emptied when you tipped it back but, when you twisted it open to see inside, there was no milk, just bitter white paint. Father asked Mamma about her day and she shrugged, ‘The boys were good but that one’s driving me mad.’ She told him how you’d broken the milk bottle. You hadn’t meant to. When she made to pick you up you pushed her away.

The drinks arrive. Ma picks hers up in both hands and jerks it up to her face. Before it can get to her lips, she puts it down undrunk. ‘Wait,’ Fa says, and removes a straw from its paper wrapper. He puts the straw in the drink and leans her forward. Eyes closed, she sucks up the liquid noisily. You tell yourself not to be angry at her, that it’s not her fault she won’t believe plain exercise could help improve her symptoms. When you suggest walking back to the hotel, ‘to oxygenate the brain’, she rolls her eyes.

Fa asks you if you’re tired. ‘You seem quiet.’ He means quieter than usual. It’s strange being here with them after all these years, your surroundings at once familiar and foreign. But before you can make conversation, he looks past you. ‘Signora Maria!’ your parents exclaim in unison. As your brain connects the name, you turn and see her.

She’d been a massive presence, hair like a lion’s mane, a mouthful of teeth and roar to match, her bosom like she’d stuffed a pillow into her black dress. Now you stand to greet her and she cranes her neck to look up to your face. ‘Do you remember me?’ she asks, like it matters, although she hasn’t seen you in decades. ‘Do you remember me?’ Her eyes still shine like polished amber.

You say of course you do, ‘You’d give me sweet espresso with sambuca to make me sleep.’

She laughs. ‘You never would nap.’

‘We tried your doorbell,’ Ma says.

Signora Maria’s head shakes but not like Ma’s. ‘I was out visiting my son in hospital.’ She crosses herself and Ma copies her. Signora Maria insists we must take coffee in her house, and won’t hear otherwise. Fa leaves a ten euro note on the table as you help Ma out of her chair. The green gate unlocks and you remember that sound.

The portinaro always stopped you before you could get away. Gripping your ear, he’d call to the window for Mamma, and she’d rush down and smack your legs.

Signora Maria is laughing and wheezing as she recounts anecdotes from your childhood. ‘You had a doll, Teresa you called her, treated her like she was a real person.’ Her fingers reach for the packet of Marlboros next to the smartphone on the coffee table. On the wall you recognize the picture of Pope John XXIII, the jolly-looking one. Faded now, it hasn’t moved from its spot above the pink marble console table, but the old grey telephone set has been replaced by a plastic plant.

Teresa had a soft body, hard head, sharp little nose. You talked together, but Mamma didn’t let you sleep with her. You leant over the crib rail to reach her and fell onto hard speckled tiles. You rubbed your arm better, pulled your doll to your chest, made her blue eyes open and shut. ‘How did you get out of the crib?’ Mamma asked. She picked you up and smiled, her eyes warmer than chestnuts.

Ma’s irises are smoky and blue-rimmed now, but her scent has never changed. Roses and lemons, you’d know it anywhere. You sit and let the conversation flow around you until it reaches the end of the sprawlings about children and grandchildren. Signora Maria looks exhausted. When Ma begins to talk about her fears of climate change, like at a playdate for your kids, you stand and say you need to be going, ‘Thank you for the kind hospitality, it’s been lovely to see you again.’ Ma gets Fa to write down their address to keep in touch and Signora Maria receives it in her hands like a precious gift. ‘Write to us, even if it’s only at Christmas, we want to hear from you,’ Ma adds. Being with someone from the past appears to have reminded her what she’s supposed to say to people, not the recitation of her endless list of fears, which nobody wants to hear. People have their own lists.

Back in the street, while Fa books a car from his phone, Ma grabs your hand. She appears to have gained some energy from meeting with her old friend. ‘Signora Maria has aged,’ she says with satisfaction.

‘She’s in her eighties, Ma,’ you reply.

‘I look better than her,’ Ma says. Although her perception is not reality, it’s important for Ma to look better than others. She hates being old. Fa isn’t like her. To your eyes he seems always to have hovered around the 40-year-old mark. He used to say he never felt a year older than twenty. That seems a long time ago now. ‘The Uber will meet us in a hundred meters, on the corner of Via Basento and Viale Regina Margherita, because of the one-way system,’ he says. You all walk slowly past Lucarelli’s and thankfully the baker’s is shut until 5pm or there would have been another hour of reminiscing.

A lovely sour smell. Mamma bought springy bread there, red-wrapped Rossana sweets too, and the lady with the white coat used a silver scoop to fill a little bag. You stood on tiptoe at the counter to choose a soft shiny roll with mortadella. You picked out the glistening white fat squares and dropped them on the street cobbles for the pigeons who scattered as Mamma pulled you through string bags and legs and shoes.

At the potato stall, Romano was finishing with a customer. ‘We’re next,’ Mamma said. Romano asked about the family. Slipping your hand out of hot fingers, you watched your brothers’ red shorts jiggle on the line three windows up from the street. A fly landed on Romano’s weighing scales. Its wings had the same rainbows as a pigeon’s. The fly crawled and stopped to rub its hands together, all-seeing orange eyes twitching. You peeked through the dark gap between the canvas table-covers that hid full sacks of potatoes. When you came out from under there, red-faced Mamma, a deep cleft between her eyes, grabbed your hand. ‘Never leave me.’ She squeezed your fingers hard. ‘I was here,’ you cried. ‘I was always here.’

Fa directs the Uber driver to towards Villa Borghese, ‘The entrance off Viale Rossini.’ He hasn’t been back to Rome in at least a decade, but still remembers its maze of roads. He chats with the Moroccan driver about the Atlas Mountains as Ma stares out of the window. You recognize the stone urns on the monumental gateway at the park entrance, and excitement flutters.

Seated with your brothers in the blue pushchair, you glided through the gate. Next to you, Gian picked at a scab on his knee. In front, Alex wriggled. He’d just learnt to walk and wanted to be out of his seat. Fa pushed you along the path under the umbrella pines—red trunks, green needles, spiky pinecones. There were birds in the trees, not pigeons but little songbirds—uccellini. You took a ride in the red pony cart, you and your brothers sat behind the man with the tattered straw hat and the long bridle and the two plump ponies. Gian and Alex were pinching each other and giggling. Mamma waved and the ponies began to clop. The breeze blew your hair over your face and made the air taste of dust. You shut your eyes and held out your arms like you were flying.

‘Didn’t you take us to a little movie house here?’ you ask Fa. He replies that was a different park, Villa Ada, but Ma says it was definitely here in Villa Borghese. Her memory is often better about ancient times. You tell her you watched the three little pigs there and she is surprised you remember the tiny grey cinema, perhaps once a carriage house, its plain square room with just a few rough benches.

You sat between Mamma and Father, the boys on their laps. The room darkened and the three little pigs appeared on the cracked wall. The pigs sang and the air smelt of olives. You stretched your leg and pressed down your shoe on the satisfying crunch of fallen snacks. On the wall, the wolf’s enormous mouth was full of teeth. You told yourself he was not real, but Alex began to cry. In the dark, Mamma’s voice said don’t be afraid.

After the tour through the park, the Uber drops you off at the hotel, one of a generic chain but well-located for the wedding. Your room connects with your parents’—you made sure of that. Through the open door you hear Ma worrying about the shower head in the bathroom, as she does. ‘Dirty, dirty, dirty,’ she’s saying, although it’s likely just minute calcium deposits. Her phobias resurface with any break in her routine. Intending to help, you step into their room as Fa, ever prepared, pulls out a shiny chrome shower head from his suitcase and goes into the bathroom. You tell yourself that this is why it’s impractical for your parents to live with you—your house contains too many unacceptable furnishings and memories.

Ma sits on the bed. ‘I wonder what happened to your doll Teresa,’ she says. You say you don’t know because that’s easier. If she remembers, she’ll get upset and then she won’t sleep; a grim picture in a magazine, a black uniform, bunches of flowers left by the side of a road, are all it takes to distress her now. You talk about your daughter’s doll although she no longer plays with such things—she’s at university now. ‘She loves the doll you gave her, Ma.’ That happy deceit can be enough to ensure your mother will sleep like a baby tonight. ‘The shower head doesn’t fit,’ Fa says. ‘They’re sending up someone to help.’

Back in your room, you set your phone alarm for an hour and lie on the bed. You daydream of Romano’s song of potatoes—pataaate romaaane belliiisssime!—the soundtrack of your siesta in the apartment at Via Tirso.

The pigeon at the window shook its feathers, watched you a moment, paddled its feet, and turned to nod at the street below. You threw your doll out of the crib, grabbed the rail and swiftly lifted a leg over, the rest of your body following fluid as water. The bird shivered and turned to look at you, its beak black and pointed below its white moustache, short red legs under the fat grey belly. You crept closer but the window was too high.

Sometimes at bedtime, Father sat on the stool by the crib and told you a story until you closed your eyes. One day, you dragged the stool along the floor to the window and climbed on it but you were too small to see. Another day you were tall enough to rest your chin on the cold stone sill. You got down from the stool and dragged it back near the crib, pulled yourself back up into bed, stuck your thumb in your mouth, and made yourself small again.

The alarm buzzes. You stretch and get up to unpack your outfit and sandals—neutral, non-iron, and comfortable. Sensible. You are what you are. Through the wall come muffled voices. You knock on the interconnecting door, open it a fraction and ask if assistance is needed. ‘All fine,’ Fa calls back, but Ma is whimpering: ‘Are you sure it’s Thursday? Are you sure it’s not Tuesday?’ Fa says it’s definitely Thursday. You hear the shower come on and go in to help. It shouldn’t just be up to Fa but Ma’s embarrassed when you offer to undress her. ‘No,’ she says. ‘No.’

Back in your room you open your window and traffic sounds pour in. In the leafy square below, an old man is selling bags of seed. A child throws a handful up in the air and pigeons descend. The grey windowsill is marked with grime and time.

Mamma had put the doll on the sill, a punishment for something. You pulled yourself over the crib rail and landed noiselessly. You dragged the stool to the open window, and easily reached across the stone slab. You craned your neck to Romano below, you knew his curly black hair and his potato-brown shirt. The street was end-to-end heads, coloured hats, and overlapping umbrellas. Above them, birds flew and, at the windows opposite, shirts and shorts and socks fluttered on the lines. Your knee lifted up, you twisted and sat your bottom on the cold stone, your legs dangling. You pulled your doll in your lap and watched the birds swoop up and around, wings spread out.

Nights, darkness in the window, you’d had wings every bit as green and blue and purple as theirs. When you’d opened your wings, they’d filled the sky.

Suddenly, the doll arced out into the air and seemed to pause before dropping down onto the potatoes below. Her fixed blue eyes stared as you waved at Romano. He yelled, ‘Bambina! Che fai?’ The people around flapped and shouted but Romano’s voice was loudest. ‘Signora!’ he shouted, ‘Signora, la bambina!’ his face white as milk. Then the door was ringing and banging. You turned your ear to Mamma’s room, to the thud of steps, the clink of the front door chain, urgent voices. You turned your head and Mamma, white as Romano, stepped slowly towards you, arms open. Squeezing you hard against her chest, she held you until Father came home. Later, their words were sharp in the night, about the window, la finestra.

Dinner is more upbeat, as though the three of you have decided that come what may you will enjoy yourselves. Having conceded to a glass of wine, you’re relaxed for the first time since arriving in Rome. You tell Ma how much you appreciate your childhood, how special that was. You reminisce about the afternoons in Villa Borghese. She nods but cannot form the words she wants. ‘I am glad, I am so glad,’ she says again and again, just a fragment of her intention. You turn to Fa to include him, recalling favourite family stories about his concoctions of leftovers—’Spaghetti and sardine omelette surprise’—and he chuckles. You will remember this evening fondly.

Later, sleep comes at last.

In the morning at the airport, Ma whimpers, ‘Don’t leave me.’

Shushing her, Fa holds her hand, ‘It’s all right, we’ve all got to go home.’

You say you have to get back to your own children.

‘You always leave,’ she says.

‘Not always,’ you say, although that’s not the point.

Overly cheerful, Fa says, ‘We had a lovely time, didn’t we. We’ll see you again soon?’ Couched as a question, it’s a statement.

‘Yes, soon.’ You mean it, although soon is relative along time’s continuum.

Their flight is departing earlier than yours, and you say it’s lucky there are no delays. When you kiss your mother, she won’t let go. ‘We’ll come and visit at Christmas,’ you hear yourself promise, a fixed date, something for them to look forward to, which satisfies her enough to release her grip.

You stand there watching them shuffle through departures. The unwritten rule is that you never leave until you lose sight of each other. At the far end of the security hall, just before they turn to the gates, Fa and Ma are smiling, holding hands, waving. Suddenly afraid, you wave back with enthusiasm and make a wide grin, so they’ll remember you happy too.

Italy Rome

IT’S CLINICAL

by Drew Pisarra • May 18, 2021May 18, 2021

This week has been particularly rough: an overdose, a stroke, a random homophobic attack. Everything comes with a twist: the death takes a nephew I barely know, the stroke is a ministroke and not mine, the rock thrown at my head does not hit. And yet…

It’s all a bit much. I call the local hotline. The woman who answers is young, conscientious, and kind. Empathetic if that word applies when the facts are misheard. To hear her tell it, my brother is dead, my friends have abandoned me, a nasty bruise sent me to the ER. Well, she isn’t that wrong.

Kindness has its own kind of power to heal even if the details get messed up or mixed up. I want to sob in thanks for her caring mistakes. I’m willing to be the man stuck with different losses, the guy who shoulders different pains. Who cares if she’s performing when the script is this good? My tragedy needed a rewrite, a reader. She’s up to the task. Her phone voice is strong.

In no time flat, my name is Peter. I’m no longer 50. I don’t live alone. I’m one of the city’s unwell, unfed millions, which may be why she’s emailed intake forms for the parents of troubled children, for Spanish-speaking groups focused on depression, for geriatrics living in the Bronx. Grief is universal. We are everyman, everywoman, everything everywhere. It gets better when you’re not who you are. Fuck me. I mean that sincerely.

I am giving up on myself. I’m letting my impostor be my stand-in for an indeterminate future from here on out. I’m courting my own doppelganger, luring my twin to take over, letting my double do double-duty as both himself and some version of me. Call him what you will. Why not Peter? Oh, do call him, whatever you do. Peter too needs his confidantes and his cohorts. I’d like to say co-hurts but is that yet a thing?

This week was the week to end all weeks. I didn’t die. I didn’t live. I didn’t cry. I didn’t not cry. I didn’t run in the other direction. I ran in every direction. I stepped outside my body and hovered in the air where I watched the commonplace me sit in my kitchen chair to type a poem about the weak and the meek and the mess and the rest is the Year of the Rat.

FAR FROM FORSAKEN

by Ronit Plank • May 15, 2021May 15, 2021

“Calculations of Angels,” Ann-Marie Brown

When I think about the last weekends we spent with my mother in the city I think of her homemade lasagna, walking everywhere, and the movies she took us to, like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Starman, and Terms of Endearment, which was the first movie that made me cry. My throat tight, my nose running, I tried to dab my eyes dry in the dark as nonchalantly as I could so that she and my younger sister Nava wouldn’t see. I was embarrassed that a movie had gutted me. I didn’t yet understand why a fictional story of a mother and daughter’s tumultuous and ultimately loving relationship had left me wrecked.

One Saturday my mother took us bike riding for the first time, renting bicycles near the East River, where we could practice on the long, winding, wide path that ran along the water. Our father didn’t want to get us bikes. He didn’t even want to teach us how to ride. The several times we had asked, he said he was afraid we’d go too far and accidentally wander into the unsafe areas of Flushing. So my mother used one of her weekends to introduce us to something new, the way she had with roller-skating.

I don’t remember the learning part, only the hours of cycling afterward: the trees and people blowing by, the power I felt in being able to move as fast as I wanted. I rarely spent time in parks and never went hiking or traveled to new places like other kids my age seemed to. For the most part, my scenery never changed; apart from time in the summer at camp, city living was all I knew.

From where we cycled along the East River, I could look across and see Brooklyn, where two of my cousins lived with Uncle Bobby – the one who called me Miss Piggy – and Queens, where my father would be waiting for us in our quiet apartment when we got back home on Sunday. I pedaled harder and allowed myself to forget about them.

With the river on one side and my sister and mother on the other, I traveled away from the confines of my life, fast. I was uncatchable.

I could see a glint of who I would become, the distances I could go when I was no longer stuck in my Flushing childhood. Did my mother know she was offering me this kind of freedom?

Maybe this is how she’d felt when she moved to Israel, left for India, left my father, or dropped Nava and me off on Sunday nights.

I loved my body moving at high speed, the wind against my face and through my hair, my heart pounding in my chest. I had not felt this lightness, this kind of abandon, with my father. Perhaps when I was a toddler on the kibbutz and he took me swimming, but not for years and years. In fact, over the last year my father had become cranky and irritated more and more of the time. Being around him felt bad, like wearing a scratchy sweater, like having tired, burning eyes. I remember thinking he must be sexually frustrated, but I don’t recall where I had heard the term or how I knew it. His irritation seemed to bubble and seethe, his energy was jagged and angry, and his feelings escalated quickly. He had punched a hole in my bedroom door and had cracked a dustpan into several pieces when he threw it across the kitchen. He’d never hit me, but there was a palpable level of rage inside of him.

Even before this period with my father, I had always believed something was missing with him, and it was not his fault. How could he compare with my mother? She didn’t provide for our day-to-day needs, but she was the one I wanted. Being with my mother was like breathing again, being with my source. I belonged to her before I belonged to anyone else. She gave us experiences and freedom. She was the gift parent, the one who showed me new places, who fed me new foods, who I could be a girl around, and then later, a teenager comfortable with my changing body in a way I never was and would never be around my father.

I was twelve years old and over the last several months, Nava, my mother, and I had started talking about having us live with her again sometime soon. My mother said she was thinking of getting a farm upstate where the three of us would be together, have a couple of dogs and some cats and a garden and a cow. But then she stopped talking about a farm and said just a regular house upstate would be better. Shortly after that she told us that renting an apartment was more practical and even took Nava to look at one with her in Queens. I let myself imagine what our life would be like – waking up with her there every morning, seeing her after school each day, and having dinner together every night. It was what I had wanted for as long as we’d been apart. She had always felt out of reach. And soon, though I didn’t know it yet, she would be gone again.

On a Saturday night in early June, Nava and I were on our way to a restaurant with her when she said she wanted us to meet somebody, a new friend she’d made named Karma.

“Karma,” I said. “What kind of name is that? What does it mean?”

“It means destiny,” my mother said, still walking and looking ahead.

Karma was already at a table when we got there. A tall woman with fair skin and fluffy, light brown, shoulder-length hair, she smiled in a way I didn’t like, and though I didn’t realize why at the time, she had a familiar presence. She spoke to me from a remove, sitting back in her metal chair with her puffy halo of hair. There was a stillness to her, and she was watchful, as if she were assessing me. Maybe I was on edge because I knew to be wary of new people my mother brought into her life – like boyfriends and spiritual leaders. Or maybe my intuition was that good. Part of me already knew my mother’s judgment was suspect, and Karma struck me as fake, like she was hiding something.

“Ronit has a show coming up at school. She loves to sing,” my mother said, trying to fill the silence at the table.

“Oh?” Karma said nodding her head in my direction.

“Yep,” I said taking a sip of ice water. “I’m Rizzo in Grease.”

“Hmm,” she said with the same static smile stuck to her face, her eyes drifting to passersby.

Our dinner went on in much the same way, with Karma reclining in her chair and reacting to what the rest of us talked about but not saying much. I kept my eye on her.

My mother leaned over and moved Nava’s hair from where it was still tucked into the back of her T-shirt, and Nava giggled.

“That tickles,” she said, hiking her shoulders up.

“Do you want me to play with your hair?” Karma asked.

“Yes!” Nava said, her big green eyes twinkling.

“Scoot your chair over,” Karma said.

Nava moved closer to her and Karma began smoothing back her hair and massaging her head.

Nava closed her eyes and tilted her head forward.

I couldn’t believe Nava wanted this weirdo touching her – didn’t she see what I saw? It seemed like I was the only one who thought something was off with this lady. What was wrong with everyone?

Couples and people walking alone passed by on the other side of the restaurant’s rope, set out on the sidewalk to separate diners from foot traffic. I didn’t know what Karma was up to. I looked at my mother. She seemed to be doing fine but I was on guard from the beginning.

Did I sense my mother was making plans without Nava and me? Or did I simply dislike the intrusion this woman posed on my time with my mother? Whatever it was, the next day my mother revealed that Karma was involved with her old guru, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. The disinterested smile on her face when she’d sat with Nava and me made sense then. I had seen that smile back in Seattle at the Rajneeshee center when I was five years old. It reminded me that when it came to my mother, I couldn’t ever be sure what was about to happen, that she was uniquely capable of disrupting my world.

I could think of only one time when I had liked how she surprised me. A couple of years earlier, she told us to pack something nice in our overnight bags because we had a special plan on Saturday night. When she picked us up on Friday, she wouldn’t tell us where we were going that weekend. By early Saturday evening when she and Nava and I headed toward midtown together – me wearing my favorite black dress with pink flowers and a ruffle on the bottom, white tights, and patent leather shoes – she still wouldn’t say.

We walked to 49th Street, then 52nd, Nava and I continuing to guess what it was we were doing. My mind zigged and zagged, trying to figure it out. I kept asking my mother where we were headed and she kept saying, “Hmmm…I don’t know.” I hadn’t seen my mother act coy like that before. I hoped the surprise was good. I believed it was, but I wasn’t ruling out that it was something I didn’t actually want to do, like going to one of her parties or visiting one of her friends.

At 52nd Street, she stopped and told us we were waiting for someone. Nava and I kept asking her questions, and my mother looked like she was trying to hold back a smile. The less she said, the more incredible I imagined the surprise was. I thought maybe she was getting married and wanted us to meet the guy. Maybe we were going on a trip together. Or, I thought, the closer we got to midtown and the theater district, maybe I was going to meet my favorite star, Christopher Reeve. Only a year or two had passed since I’d sent off my fan letter soaked in the tears I’d shed out of my desperation to meet him.

We stood back from the street near a brick building. Taxicabs clogged the road and honked, their headlights glowing brighter and brighter in the darkening night. The smell of hot pretzels and hot dogs from the carts nearby wafted by in the chilly air. Adults and a few families passed us on their way to different Broadway shows. Twenty feet away lots of little girls and their mothers walked into the Alvin Theatre, whose marquees advertised the musical Annie.

After we had waited about five minutes, my incessant, “What is it? What is it?” punctuating the time, my mother looked at Nava and me and said, “Oh, well, we might as well see Annie.”

Nava and I stood there looking at her.

“Come on,” she said, “let’s go in!” and she led the way.

I had never seen a show with my mother, only with my father and Nava once, and one time with Tracy. I followed my mother as she wove her way into the lobby. This was really happening. A true, good surprise with no complications. But it was only after we’d moved past the throngs crowding the concession and souvenir stands and made it to our assigned aisle that I began to believe there wasn’t any part of the plan I needed to second-guess.

My mother sat between Nava and me, and I marveled at the velvet seats, the ornate proscenium, the twinkling chandeliers in the impossibly high ceiling. I was flipping through the program when the lights went down. The overture played and when it ended, Annie’s voice rung out through the theatre. I hadn’t heard someone young sing like that, with a voice so strong and certain. Soon the rest of the orphans romped across the stage, their voices blending and rising together. My mouth agape, goosebumps running down my arms, I could think of nothing better than this. It was as if the cells of my body were vibrating, my insides stirred up and buzzing from the sounds pouring over me from these actresses – these girls my age.

That night I realized I wanted to be like them. I wanted to not only be in school choruses but sing leading roles in musicals. I wondered how my voice compared to theirs, if I could ever have enough of what it took to be like them. I wasn’t jealous exactly but enthralled and aching to do what they did. To mesmerize an audience with my talent and to be seen. To be surrounded by castmates – friends, even – performing together on stage night after night only pretending to be orphaned, in real life far from forsaken. In real life a star.

I didn’t question my mother’s choice of shows, the fact that Annie might be a painful story for me and Nava. All that mattered was the happy ending. Watching this performance, I was the most content I could recall having ever been. My mother had thought of us, known what we would like, and had gone ahead and organized this night for us. This was what I wanted above all else, the story I wanted to tell myself more than anything: that my mother loved us so much she was willing to arrange her life around Nava and me.

But now, a year later, she was leaving. I have no memory of whether or not she did this on the phone or in person, but a few weeks after we met Karma, just before Nava and I left for sleepaway camp, my mother told us she was going out for a few weeks to Rancho Rajneesh, the 64,000-acre ranch Bhagwan had established in Antelope, Oregon. She said she’d be back by midsummer. I wonder if she knew then she’d be gone longer than that. I don’t know how much she lied to herself and how much she lied to us.

I blamed Karma. If she hadn’t come into my mother’s life and reminded her about Bhagwan, she wouldn’t have wanted to leave us. Once again, I didn’t hold my mother responsible.

For many years I wanted to believe my relationship with my mother was like that of most kids, just broken up into weekends. I didn’t want to acknowledge the obvious, that I was growing up without her. I don’t think I could have tolerated knowing my sister and I would never be enough to keep her rooted.

memoir

KEEPING UP WITH MYSELF, KEEPING UP WITH YOU

by M. Leland Oroquieta • May 14, 2021May 14, 2021

Years ago, I used to star my nails with moons, and beam their light into my brows, my lips, and, of course, my hair. I saw myself on billboard signs I passed from school each day, a face you can’t ignore, a face that everyone adores.

Then I curtsied to a media darling once, and styled her hair into the kind of Paris blonde I want to shape in me. She was the drive-test for a line of beauty products in my hopes, a brand devoted to the contours of the face. Because my dream is you, your face: the way you look into its pores, the way you brush yourself into the rank of It-Girl in your school, your neighborhood, or the man you keep at home who only sees the void after the nine-to-five.

Now as you know, I’ve had a few of them, men with locker-rooms as brains, men who only see the porn around my curves, until I met the one who breathes for revolutions in his songs, and found a home inside the madness in my brain. Sometimes I think we’re lost, dismembered in the flash of paparazzi cameras, and all the tales of wealth we’d show for everyone to talk about and sneer. Then he’d wrap his tongue inside my name, as though he’d feel the sun again in myths I lather on my hair.

But recently, he’d hum refrains, as though he’s somewhere else, as though he’d shaved my face already from the color of his notes. I miss his smell. He loves to wear Rabanne and Drakkar Noir. They filled my loneliness, longing for the breaths of God.

These days, there is a silence on the skies of Hidden Hills, as though, for once, I’m on a kind of pause, after the kids have gone to bed. Or maybe it’s my eyes, drenched with hearts you click on Instagram: Because you are the lullaby I want to see and hear, before I star the pages of my plans with things that make me feel like I’m born again.

EARLY THERMAL WEAPONS

by Roy Endean • May 13, 2021May 13, 2021

I wrote a paper once, long ago, on the need for war, on the necessity of violence. I presented it up on stage, my first time speaking in public outside of my childhood classrooms. While no longer a child, I was still young then and some people thought me brilliant and wanted to listen to what I had to say, and although I felt ill, I knew I could not disappoint them. The details escape me now. It was an argument for the greater good, that I remember.

When I left the university that day, I took the bus back into the city to the small apartment I was sharing. On the street outside, the police were clubbing a man who was pinned to the ground. I stood and watched for a while, wondering what someone could have done to deserve that. When I went inside, my roommate told me that there was a telephone call and that I needed to go home.

Home, this house, yes, I am always returning. I cannot seem to stay away as much as my body wants to. My body more than my mind. I feel uneasy here, sickly, flushed with heat. Even in winter I feel a fever about me. It must be something in the walls.

My father always busy in the fields. He liked to dig and to chop, piling wood and earth into mounds, great dirt pyramids for the ants. He called it clearance; my mother called it abdication. He’s a spoon when you need an iron lung, she said. She often spoke in this way, full of riddles and superstition.

It was an old house, so different to those around it, baronial in a way, standing on a plot of land that crested into a valley. And my mother the Baroness, so high and mighty, she fought in a golden age with knives and paper, a proud Kentucky woman. It was her that I had to come back for.

She called me into the kitchen. I need your help to deface New England, she said. I did not ask her what she meant. She was making dough. I helped her as I could, clumsy and imprecise. I asked her how long they gave her and she said something softly about weeks and months and it didn’t really matter because what do they know. She will die an autumn death, a witch told her so. She lingers on into the winter but doesn’t see the New Year. The witch, I imagine, said nothing.

Little is left where there was so much, a few cleared fields where there were once so many, the treeline, the shrubs. The house still stands, and that is where we are, my daughter and I. The Kamikaze. The reckless young woman of eight short years. She wouldn’t know fear if it shot her, my mother would say.

Everything is overgrown now. The neighbour’s goats will soon come down to graze. They are full of humour, much like their master, who is a small man with small eyes that remind me of a bird’s. Across the low field are the remnants of the hut where my father kept his tools. In the summer he would smoke and drink here, and take some rabbits from the field. He would skin them and leave the pelts on sticks. He wanted to show the woods that he was a conqueror.

What had he conquered? The moon perhaps. Everyone loves a fallen moon.

He kept his rifle open on the small table inside. I went there often to touch it. I remember it being very cool, slightly apart from the rest of the world, a thing outside itself, and that was its power. The cabin went up one night when my father was sleeping inside. Drunk perhaps, he never said. He sat in there surrounded by flammables. Another call, a nurse this time, and I came home again.

He told me his nights of recovery were filled with colour, a singular burning orange. It reminded him of a great painting he had once stood before in a New York gallery. This was the first time he heard the word transcendental. He was only a child then, staring up in defeat. His father told him these works were portals, a different plain hanging from the wall, and that is what saved him, knowing he could pass through the flames. When I brought him home from the hospital, he proclaimed that he was a changed man.

He asked me did I see it in him, could I see the difference?

No, I said, you just seem quieter.

What about the scars?

Yes, I said, that is different.

I spent the summer there, working on a book through the dismal heat, trying to renounce all that I had once believed in. Experience is not always enough to wash away the convictions of youth, but I tried, hacked away at it. My own form of clearance.

When the summer was over and my father was able to fend for himself I went north to my husband. I needed to be cold. He suggested we take a sabbatical, fly across the ocean, see his family. So we go then, we see his family, see the town of his birth. Castlemartyr. A strange name, an Irish town you imagine the pilgrims touched on their voyages. He said you dream of castles and martyrs and all you get is sadness. We walked in the rain and said nothing of consequence. We visited the ruined castle with its glaring teeth, the church with its small arches and slighted tombstones. We did not talk much. He asked me what was wrong.

I said I had no more faith left anymore.

He said he would have faith enough for the both of us.

I laughed at how sincere he was.

He took that to mean that I was happy.

We both teach. I have the skill, and he has the passion. His words. Soon he has more passion than I have skill. We speak less. We move to different universities. Then to different countries. We separate. We reconcile in hotel rooms and separate again. I ask for a divorce, and he is understanding. Years later he tells me he is finding it difficult being alone. I tell him everyone finds it difficult whether we are alone or not.

You know that is not true, he said.

When his wounds healed, my father rebuilt the cabin, but inside he did little with it. It stands as it was back then. There is no table, no worktop, no tools, no purpose. I think that as he finished the shell, he realised he was alone and had no one he needed to hide from anymore.

There was a skirmish on this land once. The Confederates set fire to the treeline to smoke out the encamped Union soldiers. The winds picked up, and the fire spread before the wind turned and took the fire back to them. It is just one small story amongst many. We are alone here. There are no neighbours coming to gossip, no young men looking for a day’s work. Even the ghosts of the battle have grown weary and resigned themselves to the nothingness. So we make our own noise, Kamikaze and I. We walk through the fields every day, and I find great delight in seeing her head bobbing up and down in the long grass. This is her ocean now, and she has set her wings upon it.

I wonder if those men that started the fire ever felt guilt for what they did. It is said that when Jerusalem fell, it was those trapped inside who lit the first fires, trying to push the Romans away, burning the city from within. Others say it happened differently, but this is the story I like to tell. History and its victors. All that jazz.

The cabin is mine now, and I am to make it my own. I will put in a comfortable chair and my typewriter from the attic, maybe a plastic plant that does not require my attention. I have notions of building my own table. I will make it my private sanctuary and tell my daughter it is off limits. I will put a lock upon the door, to give her something to aim for, and when I find her inside, I will look away and pretend I saw nothing. It will be something just between us. I know already there are great differences. She sees the world as a mystery while I see it as a puzzle.

We make our own fire. We place rocks in a circle and pile sticks across and sit around it into the evening. We skewer marshmallows onto dry sticks and I drink coffee from an ancient cup. She has swapped her goggles for glasses and is all mouth and planning. The summer is ending, and we will go north again and she will see her friends and talk in secrets, and I will stand in large rooms and speak only of the facts. Another semester. Another question of the loser’s tongue.

We all know history is written by the victor, someone will say, but what of the defeated, who will speak for them?

Then they watch me as I contemplate this as if for the first time.

You will, I say.

And then they are content. Every year is the same.

I put my daughter to bed. She is tired here and does not fight it as she does in the city. I expect she is weary of her mother and longs for adventures that I can no longer give her. Could I have ever? I was never the adventurous type. What have I done that compels me to be without motion? Why am I so rooted in a past that brought me such little comfort? My father kept bourbon underneath the sink, a reminder of his changed ways. After the fire, he never touched a drop. I pour myself one and sit in the dark. I tell myself I should make a list of my failures or weaknesses or do some such nonsense to guide me into the light. My skin, my elbows, my marriage, my lack of wonder. When I floss, even the mirror retreats.

I try, but I do not believe in sudden revelations. Everything must be examined, everything put into context. Maybe that is what brings me back. I go outside and stand on the porch in the moonlight and look into the thicket. There, where the branches twist like turned ivory, I see the faces of all those who have injured me.

Editor's Pick online fiction short stories

THE LONELINESS ISSUE

by Jack Garrett • May 11, 2021May 11, 2021

We’ve all felt lonely at some time in our lives, and for many of us, the Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated these feelings. Since early 2020, we have probably ended up spending even more time online — often in a state of “connected detachment” — than we normally would have. Consolation can seem in short supply under such conditions. And they can make it hard to trust others, harder still to work through our divisions.

Fortunately, there is a solution. Reading and writing are generally solitary acts, but they don’t need to be lonely acts. On the contrary, at their heart is a wager that we can make connections and improvise communities around our best thoughts and experiences, our hunger to identify and understand.

So, over the next few weeks, let’s turn to Litro Magazine’s Loneliness issue for some much-needed consolation. As we read these compelling stories and essays — heart-breaking, funny, and sage in turn — let’s reach out and make some meaningful connections. Let’s be lonely together.

(If you haven’t heard back from us regarding your submission, worry not. The theme of “loneliness” inspired many writers and artists to send us work, and our editors are working through the submissions, which will be considered for other online sections of Litro Magazine. Thank you for your patience.)

WHAT STAYS

The screen was glazed with schmutz, so he pulled a baby wipe from his backpack and rubbed it down. Belly against the bar, he fed in a twenty and played a few hands, and when his cocktail came, he took a long sip and felt better. He couldn’t complain. The free room upstairs had fallen out of the sky. Usually that only happened with cheap T-shirts and caps with corporate logos, and he didn’t mind wandering around LA like a clown in a sandwich board. But with the economy tanked, they’d pay even someone like him to come to Vegas.

Besides, his ex-wife lived here. It would have been their 40th anniversary next New Year’s if they’d gotten past those first eight months. He’d last spoken with her around the time of the Jimmy Carter malaise speech, and she’d talked him down. A lot of dread in those days – 22 and 62 had something in common, he guessed.

Before he took the hotel bait, he’d Googled her, found her and her third husband’s testimonial for some steakhouse and an over-40 5K fundraiser she’d run fifteen years ago. No pics but eventually a landline. Where was the harm? Happen to be in town, buy you a drink type of thing. She seemed to care about him once, in another lifetime. So he caught the 6 a.m. ten dollar Chinatown bus that Tuesday and sat trying to remember her face. He’d almost have it, then up would pop some TV actress from the 70s, somebody else no longer there. But he remembered how she felt. Head against the bus window passing a car lot, he caught the day’s first ascent of Floppy Inflatable Tube Man.

Down a martini and up a few bucks, he heard, “You know you can’t win, right?” Three stools down sat a guy in a white shirt, tie loose, gelled hair, 40s, giving him the fish eye with a smirk.

“Sorry?”

“You can’t win. Not that. That video shit. Those machines don’t know how to lose, not for more than a few minutes. Like vending machines that fuck with you, give you candy now and then.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Programmed to paralyze, keep you playing, plus the casinos save on tits and bowties. Look around, what keeps this town alive – losers.”

Just what he needed. “Look, I’ve had a long day.”

“Man, you are not alone.” The guy signaled to the bartender, a finger wave at both their glasses.

“No, please, I don’t – ”

“Yeah, I know.” Then quieter, “Don’t worry about it.”

“Okay.” Shit. “Thanks.”

“Forget it,” he said. “Now play your game, lose your game.”

He did. Won. Lost. Lost. Nursed his second free martini.

“Retired?” the guy asked.

“No.” Hated that question. “I mean, more or less.”

“Hard to get used to, right? My Pops – ” he started to say. Then, “Fuck my Pops, right?”

“If you say so.” He was losing steadily now, like the guy told him, but feeling the gin.

“I could retire,” the guy said. “But why should I? Look at me working. Could I do better than this?”

“This?”

“Yeah, this,” he said, then frowned. “Hey, can I ask you a personal question? Your ear – is that a prosthesis?”

“Huh? Oh – . No – ” He’d sunburned it dozing on the bus from LA then slathered it with the lotion sample in his room.

“I was gonna say, they didn’t bother to match the skin tone.”

“It’s just – ”

“I used to box so I know.”

“ – nothing serious.”

“Sure. We’re all gonna die.”

“Sure.”

“Can’t win that one either. ‘The longer you’re here, the more you shall lose.’ That’s fucking Scripture.”

“Sure.” The guy wouldn’t shut up, but it wouldn’t matter soon. Playing by rote, now he was down to a few bucks. Though he didn’t really want to go back to his room, watch TV again. It used to relax, reassure him, TV, when it was one thing or something else, you made a choice. Now it was everything and nothing, and everybody was in on the joke, if that’s what it was. They weren’t just there to be watched like Andy Griffith or Beaver Cleaver. Now it was all a big party and they were watching him, sometimes directly, sometimes out of the corner of their eye, leering, making sure he wasn’t going anywhere. It was annoying, if sort of flattering. Soon as he checked in, he’d turned on some free soft porn – a reality show about a middle-aged schoolteacher paying to get rogered by a dry-wall guy. They showed almost everything. He wanked, napped, figured he’d call his ex later.

“They call me Beltran.”

Gabby guy had his hand out so he had to lean over to reach it, shake it, haltingly say, “Johnson” – sounded a little more likely than Smith or Jones.

“Last names, man to man,” Beltran said. “My father’s Puerto Rican, but I take after my Moms – she was Dutch or something.”

“I see.”

“The little Dutch girl. European occupation. Anyway. I’m Beltran.”

Game about over and drinking for free, he felt some obligation to talk to the guy. “You said,” losing another dollar, “you’re working right now?”

“Yes, I am,” said Beltran with a wink.

“For the casino?”

“Not exactly.” He tossed back his drink, signaled for two more, then got serious. “Let me ask you something, Johnson,” he said. “What do you notice about this place – like, where we are right now, sitting here.”

He frowned, shrugged.

“Look around,” Beltran said, “or no, close your eyes – shit, doesn’t matter what you do. Just ask yourself, what is it about this place, about all these mooks and mullet models wandering around, drinking, playing, goofing, farting, that’s just completely fucking astounding?”

He looked around, no idea what the guy was getting at but sure he’d tell him. “What?”

Beltran took a moment, swept an arm out over the gaming floor. “Each and every one of these human people, Johnson, is quite – fucking – comfortable. Sure, they don’t know their assholes from Mount St. Helens and may be miserable or manic or just stupid, but check it out. We are in the middle of the fucking desert, in the middle of fucking July, in the middle of the fucking night when it is still ninety-fucking-something degrees outside, and short, tall, fat, small, one and all – arereasonablybodily comfortable.”

“So?”

“So. That’s me. What I do. Doing right now. Auditing the HVAC, amigo.”

Another cocktail landed in front of him. “H – huh?”

“Heating Ventilation Air Conditioning, with the emphasis on the latter. This place is not here without it. No existe, ese! A figment of some mobster’s imagination.”

“Actually, my room is kind of warm.”

“Yeah, they do that, fuck with you, try to get you downstairs. Can’t spend enough money in your room.”

“They do?”

“Tell you what, Johnson, you broke yet?”

He looked at the screen. “Close enough.”

“Finish up. I’m gonna show you something.”

Too woozy to protest, he gulped down the third martini, studied the glass for a moment before deciding where to put it, then sort of flowed off his stool – probably a mistake, but he needed to move anyway. This Beltran seemed harmless enough, just one of those characters.

He followed him out of the bar and down a hallway behind the restaurant then right through the kitchen – like Ray Liotta at the Copacabana, if not Bobby Kennedy at the Ambassador. Fun, kind of. Beltran grabbed a plastic bucket and filled it from an ice machine, handed it to him, took two towels off a housekeeping cart and led him out a back door into the hot night. He beeped open the trunk of a white Acura and pulled out a bottle and two plastic cups, then kept on across the parking lot. As they passed the big fountain out front Beltran dunked the towels then carried them dripping to the emptiest end of the lot, near a loading dock.

There he stopped, glanced back at him, then flung both his arms wide. “Mira, ese!” he shouted, “the Big Unit.” Behind a chain-link fence beyond the pavement rose an enormous array of droning machinery. “One of my favorite places in the world: the most accessible HVAC plant in Vegas, where the comfort comes from. Sabotage this and the hotel, the casino – boom, out of business. Go down the Strip, take ’em all out – bing bang boom, destroy a city.”

A guy in uniform stepped out on the loading dock. “Solo yo, Carlos!” Beltran called, and after a moment, the guy withdrew. “He was looking at your backpack. What have you got in there, anyway – wait, don’t tell me, the most important shit that you possess at this moment, right?”

He swayed slightly, trying to recall. Aside from his journal and marked-up If You Find Me directive, nothing seemed that crucial. “Sure,” he said, and looking back at the hotel handed Beltran the ice bucket. “Listen, I gotta pee.”

“Over there,” said Beltran, “by the fence. Where I go.”

Abruptly critical, the urge sent him stumbling over the curb. He grabbed a handful of chain-link, unzipped, and, easing his stream past his prostate, patiently watched it fall, smelling asparagus from the dinner buffet. He was very drunk.

By the time he got back, Beltran was sitting on the curb, shirt undone, spreading the wet towels on the asphalt. He poured on the ice then rolled them tight. “Here, pull your shirt up and wrap this around you, just above your waist,” he said, “then tie off the ends.” He took off his shirt and demonstrated. “Like this, bellybutton high. Cools down your core, man. Little trick,” he said, “for life in hell.”

He hesitated then did as he was told, barely getting it around his paunch. He shivered. “It’s already melting, running into my pants!”

“That’s the way, ese! Let it go, let it flow. Air’s too dry for crotch rot, bro.”

He managed to sit down next to Beltran who handed him a cup and poured a couple of inches of something clear. “Viva la vida,” he said and they drank.

All right, he thought, here he was, wrapped in ice, feeling no pain, sitting with a stranger in a parking lot off the Vegas Strip. And out beyond the hotels, the casinos, the lights, his ex-wife likewise sat somewhere. He would know soon, he would see her. But what would she say when she saw him? She’d only known him a lifetime ago. Who was that? he would ask her. Who should he have been? Did he seem any different now?

Beltran eyed him. “Johnson, you know the one about the frog in the pot of water on the stove?”

“Sounds familiar.”

“See, that’s my dream. Vegas is the frog, and we’re the cooks. That’s one of the stoves behind us. One by one we hack into the HVAC systems of all the casinos in town, program the compressors to gradually put out less and less, and day by day, little by little, every gaming pit, every show lounge, every cum-stained VIP suite in Sin City gets hotter and hotter, maybe half a degree a day so nobody bitches much, till by the end of the summer all the assholes in Vegas will have crawled up inside themselves to die.”

“You could do that?”

“Me, I’m in sales. But I know a guy. Kid in tech. Untraceable, he told me.”

“That’s funny.”

“You think it’s funny?” Beltran glared at him – then grinned, kissed his fingertips. “Fuck yeah it is. Like that movie? Call it Beltran’s Eleven: you, me, the kid – and who needs the other eight motherfuckers.”

He had to laugh. Beltran was okay. And he was happy enough to sit there with him in an empty corner of no-place, pants soaking wet, drunk. Maybe he’d made a friend. The moon was up. He felt like a man.

“So, Johnson,” Beltran said, “what the fuck you doing here?”

He shrugged. “They gave me a free room.”

“Of course they did.”

“Plus, my ex-wife lives here.”

“Say what?”

“Yeah.”

“She lives here? What is she, a pro?” Beltran poked him in the side. “Just fucking with you.”

“I don’t know what she is,” he said, shook his head, “but I want to see her.”

“When you guys split?”

“1977.”

Beltran did a spit take. “The year I was fucking born?”

“If you say so.”

“You could be my Papi, Papi!”

“Yeah, right.”

“Motherfucker.”

“I haven’t even talked to her in 35 years.”

“Jesus. She find you on Facebook or some shit?”

“No, nobody found anybody. I mean, I did find her phone number, but I haven’t used it yet.”

“She’s gonna shit, man. How long you married?”

“Less than a year.”

“Fuck me.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

Beltran wagged his tongue. “You want some more of that?”

“She’s remarried.”

“Never stopped anybody.”

“It’s not like that.”

“What the fuck’s it like?”

He took a drink, watched a Winnebago float into the lot. “I just want to talk to her.”

“About what?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I don’t remembermuch.”

“Yeah?”

“There was one time, before we got married, I went to her house, met her family. Her stepdad had a bar in the garage, had a curtain around it he made out of pull-top tabs from beer cans – remember those?”

Beltran shrugged. “Seen pictures maybe.”

“Big jangly aluminum curtain. Tens of thousands of beer can tabs. Said he drank every one.”

“Sounds like a funny dude.”

“Was, sort of. But he didn’t like me. Hardly looked at me.”

“Perv had a chubby for his stepdaughter,” Beltran said. “So why’d you marry her?”

“She let me sleep with her.”

“Sucker.”

“Every day.”

“Lucky you.”

“Beltran, I was barely 21,” he said, “and she was making me happy. So I tried to make her happy. I worked at it, you know? Kept at it. But after a while I just – lost heart. I mean, it was wearing me out. Nobody told you that. Day after day the same, more or less. Soon enough she figured out all I really wanted was to get off. But then I had to remind myself: I loved her. So when she left I took sixty aspirin and a bottle of NyQuil.”

“Fuck that. What happened?

“I puked.”

“Good job,” Beltran said, and topped him off. “Live free or die,” he toasted, and they drank. “Don’t get me wrong, Johnson, I love women. Yo, they’re like natural – phenomena, know what I’m saying? Like, I don’t fucking know – these mountains. Barely see them now, but they’re all around us. Some nicer to look at than others, sure, but each has a pull, has a power, am I right? And they’re good for the downtime – a morning climb, the view from the ridge, picnics in the canyon – poontang, yeah?” He smiled. “I got a wife. Not going anywhere. Knows who I am. I don’t always know what the fuck’s with her, but so what? You can’t know everything, man, much as I like to prove otherwise. Some things you never know.”

“But why, Beltran,” he said, “does everybody seem to know more than me?”

“Because they’re afraid not to. Nobody knows, man.”

He turned away, closed his eyes, and though he still couldn’t see her face, went straight back to the time they first touched, kissed, that sinking surrender to her eyes and arms and mouth, to being squeezed and tasted and eaten up by someone. There she’d been. She really had been. Was she still? God, he needed to talk to her. He’d meant to call already and it was getting late. By this time, she was probably lying in bed with the husband, watching TV, snacking. That’s what they used to do. TV was on the dresser to one side so they had to sit sideways with their pillows against the wall. After sex. “I hope she likes me, Beltran.”

“Yo, whatever,” he said. “All this talk about fucking’s got me jacked. Check it out.”

A glance and he jumped. Beltran lay back on his elbows, his wet pants scrunched down, his dick out and standing up. “Mira, can you still make your Johnson do this, Johnson?”

“I gotta go.”

“Oh, no you don’t.” Beltran grabbed at him, laughing, but he scrambled out of reach to his knees. “Yo, don’t stress, I’ll leave you a little for wifey.”

He lurched to his feet, almost fell, pulled off the towel then reeled away, moving as quickly as he could and still stay upright.

“Aw, c’mon man, what’s the difference?” he heard behind him. “Two minutes! Help a friend out here!”

“Sorry,” he said, not looking back.

“Yeah? Well go fuck yourself then, loser! Sorry old teddy bear.”

He left Beltran like that, staggered back across the parking lot. He pushed headlong into the chilled casino, his sodden clothes turning icy, sucked in a breath, and got a lungful of tobacco smoke. People gawked at him – shirt open, pants wet, hacking – but there was a tolerance for such displays here. When he got to his room, he knelt at the toilet to puke, Beltran’s necktie swinging against the bowl. He couldn’t remember how he’d ended up with it.

He woke in a sweat, terrified. It was dark. Someone was in bed next to him, passed out. He didn’t dare look, but he could sense it, smell it. Shit, how did he get in here? Well, nothing he could do about it now. He was exhausted. As long as the guy stayed on his side he figured he could make it till morning. Then he’d call her. He just needed a little rest. He tried to roll over away from him but couldn’t move. He strained, twitching, trying to make his body obey. Was he tied down? Finally, with a whimper, he went up on an elbow –

Eyes wide, he was on the bathroom floor, panting, damp. Alone. He looked out at the bed. No one. The light was on, and he was suffering. He got his head back over the toilet, let go the rest of it.

He stripped and left his clothes where they fell, climbed under the covers, and lay trembling. Felt like he was dying, but he’d lived through worse. He watched the lights of the Strip faintly play on the popcorn ceiling, calming him.

And there, at last, he saw her, her face smiling down at him, bold and open, just as she’d been forty years ago. “Stay where you are,” he said out loud. “I’m coming.”

When he woke again the room was bright. Someone knocking. He jumped, looked at his phone – after eleven. Checkout time, maid at the door. He took a 30-second shower, stuffed everything into his backpack, went downstairs. Bought a coffee and some aspirin, found a quiet corner of the lobby. Shaky, he sat, unfolded the soggy scrap of paper from his wallet and pulled out his phone.

“Hello?” a kid’s voice answered. He asked to speak with her. “Who? Oh. Um. Wait.” A shout: “Gram!” A muffled answer, and the boy saying, “I don’t know, some man.”

Then, “Hello?” Her voice, tentative, abstracted, reached him through the years. Her voice, but buried.

He identified himself. A moment passed.

“My word,” she said, “is it really?”

“It’s been a long time,” he said.

“Well, it certainly – Lindsay, don’t run!” Then: “Pardon me.”

He said, “So how are you?” and without waiting for an answer asked if she’d like to have a cup of coffee or how about breakfast, he was only in town for the day, wondered if she might like to get together and talk.

“Oh? Well, that might be nice, but my grandson is here. He has his little friends from school over for a pool party. As a matter of fact, they’re out there now and I should be with them – I mean, they know how to swim, these are 11-year-old boys, but I really should be keeping an eye. Lindsay! Lindsay, wait! I’m sorry, he’s a smart boy, my grandbaby, but he doesn’t always do what’s smart, if you know what I mean. Of course, they’re a little wild at that age, they take risks and somebody needs to be there to keep the worst from happening. Though what could I do, jump in and sink like a stone? Still, my daughter-in-law is trusting me to keep an eye, so. Let me just see how far I can stretch this cord. Lindsay! Boys, please, don’t go in the pool till I come out!” He heard a splash, giggling. “I’m sorry, I really do have to go,” she said. “Is there another time?”

“Well, I mean – I just have a few questions.”

“Questions?”

More laughter, screams, splashing, louder now. He pictured her there, phone pulled to the window, watching the kids as best she could while trying to listen to him.

“You know what?” he said, “that’s okay. I’ll call back. Another time.”

“All right then, sorry, thanks very much for calling,” she said. “Goodbye.”

“Goodbye,” he said, once he knew she’d hung up.

He put the phone in his pocket, her number back in his wallet, then went in for the breakfast buffet. Scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, home fries, biscuits and gravy, strawberry waffle with whipped cream, coffee, stashing a few muffins in his backpack for later. He knew the more he ate the better he’d feel. The restaurant had a nice, gently used men’s, and before he finished, he went and sat there a while, another good idea.

Later, when he took the last of his money out to pay the check, the number fell out on the counter. When the cashier handed him his change, he nodded at the scrap. “Would you mind tossing that for me?” he said. “Thanks.”

Then he went back to the lobby, stood at the window looking out at another blinding day, and began wondering how he was going to find his way home.

Editor's Pick online fiction short stories trinkets

Trinkets

by Haniya Habib • May 9, 2021May 18, 2021

When Ameera was four, Dadi Ammi bought her a jewelry box. It was the size of a small shoebox. On its front was a pair of pink daisies and a latch that locked with a soft click.

“It’s for keeping special things safe,” Dadi Ammi explained. “When you get your ears pierced, we can put all your earrings here.”

But as Ameera darted around the garden, the only thing that pierced her ears was the wind. On most days, she chased crows around the backyard, longing to feel their wings. On other days, she drew her own crows on the sidewalk, chalk carving out what remained beyond reach.

Indoors, the jewelry box collected dust, empty and forgotten.

One Sunday morning, Ameera watched Dada Abbu buff wax onto his car. The smell of his car polish tugged her away from the crows. It prickled her nose, like the bubbles in a bottle of Fanta. Dada Abbu stood in front of his Corolla in his brown shalwar kameez. He dipped a yellow rag into a plastic tub and rubbed the wax onto the bonnet in circular motions. His fingers moved with certainty as he drew swirls of polish. Next Sunday, when Dada Abbu came outside, Ameera was waiting for him, a yellow rag in little hands. She followed him around, mimicking his practiced movements, chasing his certainty.

At night before bed, Ameera pulled down the jewelry box from her bookshelf. She folded the stained yellow rag to fit and placed it inside.

Ameera was five when Dadi Ammi first told her about the trains. She had been sitting on Dada Abbu’s lap one August evening as he watched the news. They were showing a black and white video of a man with a pointed hat on his head. He was standing in front of a crescent moon and telling a large group of people something. Ameera decided he must be someone important because when he was done talking everyone cheered. But then his image disappeared from the screen and Ameera saw the trains. They took over the entire television with their compartments. Men with heads wrapped in white cloth hung from the sides and huddled on top. The rust brown cars reminded her of matchboxes. Some of them were even on fire.

Ameera looked up at Dada Abbu. The lines around his mouth had deepened like someone had traced them with a marker. His eyes were fixed on the television.

“Dada Abbu, why are there so many people on that train?” Ameera asked.

Dada Abbu’s eyes snapped to hers. He grabbed the television remote and changed the channel until Sesame Street dubbed in Urdu blared from the screen.

Later that night, after Dada Abbu had gone to sleep, Dadi Ammi told Ameera about the trains. They sat cross legged on the bed. The room was dark but a sliver of light from the hallway snuck through the door. It trickled over Dadi Ammi’s white dupatta, playing with the shadows on her face. And in that haunting glow, Dadi Ammi began her story. She told Ameera about a land from a long time ago; an empire with a queen and a palace just like Ameera’s fairytales. Dada Abbu had grown up in this land, in a city called Delhi. When he turned eighteen, it was time for the queen to leave her empire. But before she left, the man with the pointed hat on television began asking for the land to be divided in two. He and many other people wanted their own land. So, the queen split the empire into two and ran away. It was in those trains that Dada Abbu and his family came to live in a new country with the man in the pointed hat.

“But the trains were on fire, Dadi Ammi.” Ameera was puzzled. “Was Dada Abbu’s train on fire too?”

“I don’t know, meri jaan,” Dadi Ammi replied. “It was a long time ago.”

Soon, the story about the trains became one of Ameera’s favorites. She asked Dadi Ammi to tell it again and again. Dadi Ammi did, rocking back and forth, her white dupatta playing hide and seek with the hallway light. Most of the time, she talked about the way the empire was split or why so many people agreed with the man in the pointed hat. But sometimes, when Ameera pressed her with question after question, she described the trains. Every time she did, her voice dropped to a hush so low that Ameera held her breath, afraid an exhale would blow the words away. She clung to every word. She pictured her Dada Abbu living in a fairytale kingdom with a queen and a man with a pointed hat. But her imagination deserted her when Dadi Ammi spoke about the trains. Try as she might, she could not see Dada Abbu on them.

Dadi Ammi ended every story about the trains the same way. “You must never ask Dada Abbu about the trains, meri jaan,” she would warn. “He doesn’t like to talk about them.”

The day after Ameera heard the story for the first time, she drew an empire in chalk on the sidewalk. Crowning herself queen, she paraded around the amorphous shape next to the garden. “By my royal command, I will split you in two!” she declared. But Ameera wasn’t sure where to draw the partition. Her chalk hung in the air but never came down.

Ameera couldn’t ask Dada Abbu about the trains, so she asked him about fruits instead. Dada Abbu was something of a fruit connoisseur. At any given point in the year, he could tell you what was in season, what was going out of season, and where to buy the best variety at the best prices. Once a week, he walked to the bazaar to buy fruits for the house. On those days, the dining table hid under bags of produce handpicked by him and sweetness cut through the air.

At the age of seven, Ameera committed herself to learning about fruits. Uninspired by the verses from her Quran class, she decided to memorize fruit seasons instead. It became her favorite game at the dining table. She sat across Dada Abbu and summoned the self-assurance of her Quran teacher. Her voice chimed off the walls of the dining room as she recited the fruits that were in season and asked him what was coming next.

“Apricots, peaches, cherries, plums…what’s next Dada Abbu?”

“Grapes,” he replied.

The day Ameera correctly predicted that grapes were next in line, Dada Abbu looked up at her from the head of the table, beaming. A week later, he came home clutching bags full of bright green bunches and a blue packet of chips.

That evening, an empty chips packet joined the yellow rag in the jewelry box.

By the time Ameera turned ten, she had stopped reading fairy tales and started living them instead. She built herself an empire of bits and baubles. Her jewelry box overflowed with stick-on earrings and friendship bracelets. The drawers of her desk were littered with faded newspaper clippings and old birthday cards. Entire baskets full of handmade lanyards replaced the sidewalk chalk. Ameera was a magpie queen, reigning over her treasures.

And then, one Saturday morning, Ameera and Dadi Ammi discovered gold.

Dadi Ammi was cleaning the closet in her living room. It was built into the walls, encased in the warp and weft of the house. Its wooden panels grazed the ceiling, and it was near the top that Dadi Ammi discovered a hidden alcove full of gold jewelry.

Ameera came down to an array of pendants and jhumkas, bangles and maalas, laid out on the dining table. She peered over Dadi Ammi’s shoulder. Her eyes took in the dull gold jewels, catching the pricks of brilliant burnish poking through.

“Whose jewelry is this, Dadi Ammi?” Ameera asked.

Dadi Ammi took in a deep breath and held onto it. Her eyes were fixed on her husband. Dada Abbu sat at the opposite end of the table, sprinkling black pepper over his orange wedges. He did not look up.

“They belong to the people who lived here before us,” she said in a low voice.

Ameera’s face scrunched in confusion. “But Dadi Ammi, we’ve always lived in this house.”

Dadi Ammi’s fingers stroked the pendant nearest to her. One by one, she picked up the delicate pieces and wrapped them in an old bedsheet. She carried the makeshift parcel into her bedroom, placed it on the bed and stared at it. Ameera hung in the doorway, Dadi Ammi’s back turned towards her.

“Dadi Ammi, where did those people go?” she prodded hesitantly.

“On the trains,” Dadi Ammi replied. She did not turn around.

Back in her bedroom, Ameera placed her jewelry box on her bed and mirrored Dadi Ammi’s wistful stare. Her fingers pried open the metal latch to reveal the trivial treasures buried within. Ameera imagined a different time where a different girl with a different Dadi Ammi and Dada Abbu and a different jewelry box lived in this house. She imagined her jewelry box full of the dull gold jewels Dadi Ammi had found. She imagined leaving her house on the trains. She imagined taking everything with her. She imagined leaving everything behind.

When Ameera turned fifteen, Dadi Ammi bought her a diary. It came with a padlock and a set of keys smaller than Ameera’s pinky finger.

“This way you can keep your words safe too,” said Dadi Ammi.

Soon, the pages of Ameera’s diary filled with words. She wrote down the lilting cries of neighborhood hawkers, the things Baba yelled during cricket matches, the lyrics to her favorite Taylor Swift songs. All the gems in her jewelry box were now made of ink.

But the ink dried anytime she tried writing about Dada Abbu. In school, Ameera read pages of Shakespeare. Nose in her textbook, she listened to characters handing out their innermost thoughts like cheap commodities. At home, the only soliloquies she heard were the beating sounds of Dada Abbu’s presence around the house; the slight shuffle of his flip flops while he walked in the garden, the soft click of the front door before he left for prayers, the clarifying rasp of his throat as he drank his evening coffee. There were no words beyond respectful salaams and occasional kisses on the back of Ameera’s hand. Ameera didn’t know how to save those.

On the evening of Dada Abbu’s birthday, everyone gathered around the dining table. Dada Abbu sat at its head, dressed in a white shalwar kameez for Asr prayers. His fingers trembled slightly as he lifted a mug of coffee to his lips. Ameera settled herself next to him. Dada Abbu raised his mug to his lips once more. A drop of coffee sloshed onto his kameez as his fingers shook. They both watched as a stain bloomed on the carefully starched material. They both pretended not to notice.

Dadi Ammi entered the dining room carrying a cake already portioned into even slices. The clinking of plates filled the room. Ameera looked at her grandfather. His head hung low, bushy eyebrows tucked into the furrows of his forehead. The thinning bald patch on the center of his head caught the light, making his hair almost translucent. His finger traced the now dried coffee stain on his kameez. Ameera felt as if the blot was there to stay, part of the wordless rhythm they were building.

Rhythms change. Ameera knew this. In her diary, she recorded the quickening pulse of a hummingbird taking flight, the lagging tempo of a falling kite, the alternating beat of applause. But her and Dada Abbu’s rhythm had become a held note.

Tangled in its unrelenting stretch, Ameera turned to Dadi Ammi for release. They spent many afternoons together, Ameera leaning against the kitchen door, Dadi Ammi animating the stove. And with the steady cadence of her stirring spoon, Dadi Ammi became the guiding meter of their offbeat song. They spoke about Ameera’s A Levels and discussed Dadi Ammi’s favorite television serials. But, after fifty years of marriage, Dadi Ammi always circled around to talk about Dada Abbu. In her cloud of spices, she described what she was making for his lunch, lamented his growing vegetarianism, and asked Ameera if she would please pull out the steel dishes he ate in. Ameera did, crouching low to reach into the cabinets in the dining room. Dull grey and slightly rough to the touch, the steel dishes were the only thing Dada Abbu’s food was served in. His mother had brought them with her on the trains, Dadi Ammi told Ameera one afternoon. They had collected dents from years of use ever since. Every day, at 2pm sharp, Dadi Ammi presented one in front of him, filled with a vegetarian dish of his choosing. His trembling fingers grasped a matching dull gray spoon as he scooped the sabzi onto his plate. Ameera pictured the dishes on the bustling trains, the clang of steel on steel, rattling their way to this table.

At the age of eighteen, Ameera watched Dada Abbu vomit into the same steel pot.

Dadi Ammi had summoned everyone downstairs, her voice frantic on the phone.

“He is not doing well,” were her only words.

Ameera heard the heaving from the staircase. From the edge of her grandparents’ living room, she watched as Dadi Ammi held the dish that typically contained her culinary magic up to Dada Abbu’s mouth. His face was unrecognizable. Bushy eyebrows dissolved into lines of tension. A deep rasp emerged from his throat as he hunched over the bowl, coughing up vomit and mucus and blood. He had been throwing up uncontrollably. The bowl had been the only thing in arm’s reach.

Ameera’s parents assessed the scene with a resolve only their medical degrees could provide. Mama left to go through the medicine cabinet. Baba called his colleague to confer. But Ameera hovered in the corner. She listened to Dadi Ammi softly shushing as she stroked Dada Abbu’s back and hung onto the deep rattling monologue of sickness.

Ameera was twenty-one when Dada Abbu was wheeled into surgery.

Initially, there were talks of routine procedures and assurances of short hospital stays. They were followed by side effects from medications and unforeseen complications with his breathing. When he finally came home, two weeks later than expected, it was with a squeaky wheelchair and a prolonged recovery ahead. In the months and years that followed, Dada Abbu and Dadi Ammi’s living space was transformed into an extension of the hospital ward. The dining table was cleared to house rows of thermometers, supplements, and medications. Furniture was removed to make space for a walker. Chairs were placed strategically around the house so they were never out of reach. Nurses and physiotherapists cycled in and out and in and out. Everything was put in place to help Dada Abbu restore his life to what it had once been. But bodies, Ameera soon learned, are one-way trains with no return.

Sickness brought its own unsettling harmony. The shuffling of flip flops and clicking of doors came to an abrupt halt. Instead, Dadi Ammi’s spoon stirred to the beep of blood pressure monitors. Now, as Ameera leaned against the kitchen door, Dadi Ammi described Dada Abbu’s medication dosages, lamented the growing side effects, and asked Ameera if she would please go out and buy more adult diapers. And for the first time, Ameera had words to write down: Levodopa, hemodialysis, Canped adult pants. The ink flowed, heavy and thick.

Dada Abbu had been sleeping in the guest bedroom since the surgery. It was the only room downstairs with doors big enough for a walker to fit through. The side door opened into the hallway and when Ameera stood behind the pillar nearest to it, she could see Dada Abbu’s feet propped up on a pillow in bed. It became her vantage point. Every evening, when Dadi Ammi lay down for a nap, she paused in the hallway to catch a glimpse of Dada Abbu. He was almost always lying down. The ceiling fan whirred above him. Ameera counted the slow rounds of its blades. One round, two rounds, three…until they melted into a wheel endlessly spinning around.

One evening, as Ameera hung in the hallway, she heard a familiar rasp. She approached the bed, her feet wavering with each step. Dada Abbu was awake but his pills had left him untethered. His eyes evaded her, fixed on what she could not see. He coughed again and Ameera moved to adjust his pillow the way she had often seen Dadi Ammi do. She allowed herself a faint whisper of a touch against the back of Dada Abbu’s head, applying just enough pressure to keep it upright as she propped up his pillow. Even then, she could feel the prickle of his hair on her fingertips and the slight greasiness of his scalp where he had been balding. As she lay his head back down, his eyes found hers and flickered with recognition. His swollen fingers grasped Ameera’s hand and squeezed.

“I carried you around in my lap the most,” he said.

And Ameera felt his certain fingers, saw his beaming smile, and held her most precious jewels one last time.

It was a Friday afternoon. Outside, cars idled in the lull before Jumma prayers. Inside, Ameera stood by the kitchen as Dadi Ammi prepared soup for Dada Abbu’s lunch. It was the only thing she could still persuade down his throat. Her spoon swam streams in the pot. She poured the soup into a bowl and left the kitchen to check on her husband. Ameera stayed, tracing the wisps of steam with her eyes. They grew thinner and thinner, but Dadi Ammi did not return. Ameera made her way to her hallway vantage point and heard Dada Abbu’s gasping wheeze, Dadi Ammi’s voice laced with alarm, desperate steps on the staircase, the complaining creak of a wheelchair, someone calling her name, the wail of an ambulance siren, already in mourning, the pressing whispers of adults, the demanding ringing of mobile phones, hiccuping sobs, and then, the deafening silence of a held note finally being released.

On the kitchen counter sat the bowl of soup, now cold to the touch.

When Ameera was five, Dadi Ammi weaved a fairytale with a haunting glow. Through the sparse threads of matchbox trains and pointed hats, she told Ameera a story about Dada Abbu’s past.

But when Ameera turned twenty-four, Dada Abbu was no more. Ameera sat cross-legged on her bed with her own collection of loose threads. They were latched in a pink jewelry box, in rhythms silent and loud. They spoke in moments when words failed. They endured when bodies withered. So, with her mixed bag of trinkets, Ameera began her own story.

#FlashFriday Editor's Pick flash fiction micro fiction short fiction short stories

VIETNAMESE GUY AT THE NAIL SALON

by Francesca Ferrauto • May 7, 2021May 7, 2021

Photo by Johnny Silvercloud (copied from Flickr)

there’s a Vietnamese guy

at the nail salon

The Vietnamese guy at the nail salon asks me how my day’s going. I sit down and smile politely answering proudly in flawless German “alles gut, und dir?” My language certificate being not even a year old, it still feels weird to be fluent, so I flaunt it. He smiles politely behind his mask, nods. He doesn’t answer so I talk about the weather, the pandemic, the moody clouds that come and go in this late-winter almost-spring March. I choose a red nail polish and try to lose the tension while he works. His hands are sloppy.

he paints, corrects, restarts

— hypnotic hands

Not batting an eye if a guy paints my nails is such a big city girl move; I’m a true Berliner now. His hands dance on mine; I lose myself in the textile sensation. His hands are warm, firm, he’s trying to be gentle but his grip is male. He only asks questions, answers mine in monosyllables. I say “work has been busy lately” and “I’m stressed” to answer his “why you here?” He probably wanted compliments on his place of employment. Shoot. He nods. He says “work is good,” and “I didn’t work for four months.” I say “sorry,” and I mean it but now I don’t know what else to talk about.

he cleans mistakes on clients’ skin

with his skin

The girls at the entrance mentioned he is a trainee. The employees at the salon seem to all be Vietnamese; is it safe to assume all the Asians employed here are Vietnamese? There might be some Germans with Vietnamese parents. If he is a trainee, that explains the trial-and-error approach to my nails: paint, correct, restart. Most of the red nail polish he uses is on his hands and not mine. I wonder how he looks like behind his mask. He seems young. I ask. Age: 20 years. He asks me to be polite in return. I say “I’m 29”; naturally he asks if I have children. I say “no, only a fiancé.”

his hands are hoarders

they steal colors

I bet the numbers of fiancés has gone up in the last year. How many weddings have been postponed? I need to re-book a room for Nina & André’s wedding in July. My hands are cosily getting toasted in the little lamps at the nail salon. My aunt had one of those; I haven’t seen her since last summer. Now I’m sad; I’m not supposed to be sad. I concentrate on his hands: paint, correct, restart. Two steps ahead and one back, a solid way to learn. I ask if he has family here; he says “a wife and two children.”

he goes home every night

with rainbow hands

I was enquiring actually about his parents. It didn’t occur to me a guy so young could be a father. Now my story — the story I’ll tell my older friends from my hometown — changed: there’s a Vietnamese father working at my nail salon. We’re both foreign to this country but our worlds are universes apart. He asks if I have family here; I say “no, I have no family in Germany.” He looks sad now; “I’m sorry” he says to me. The Vietnamese guy at the nail salon, 20 years old, married with two children, who hasn’t been working for four months is sorry about me. The big city girl doesn’t know what do with her privilege now.

his kids know dad

plays with colors all day

At the end of our session his hands are bloody red with nail polish where nail polish shouldn’t be. My hands are carefully cared for and the nail polish obediently remains within the confines of my nails.

I pay, I leave, sad again.

Two steps ahead, one back, repeat.

Editor's Pick online fiction short stories

Necropolis

by J Pascutazz • May 2, 2021May 2, 2021

Twisted vines wrap a tall black iron gate. In the street nearby a carriage with a horse and driver waits to take pilgrims on tours of the old forest. The driver looks ancient and weary in his tattered black livery coat. He holds his decapitated head in his lap. His cobwebbed vehicle appears not to have moved in centuries. The ashen draft horse harnessed to the contraption stands stiff as if stuffed with cotton batting. When he sees us he picks up his head and slots it on his shoulders.

—Welcome! May I interest you two lovebirds in a romantic carriage ride through the park? Sit back and relax in my stylish coach while we take you on a tour of the park’s most salient attractions.

—No thanks.

—Suit yourself. But be wary. The park is dangerous at night. Stick together <wink> and never leave the path.

The driver raises his whip and lets it fall with a crack over the dead horse’s head.

—What kind of sword is that?

—This sword possesses epic intelligence with id and ego to match. Like myself it’s of chaotic neutral alignment.

—So it swings around a fulcrum of unrepentant self-satisfaction to and away from chaotic evil and chaotic good respectively?

—Yes. It’s lesser powers are ‘charm person’, ‘hold person’, and ‘minor illusion’. It’s greater powers, ‘dimensional anchor,’ ‘deeper darkness,’ and ‘cause fear.’ It’s dedicated power is ‘greater shout.’

—Formidable.

—Living swords always have a special purpose. Mine was imbued with its forger’s intent to eradicate errant spell-casters, especially those of lawful good alignment like yourself. It’s unpredictable and difficult to control to say the least, with a strong tendency to propel its wielder without warning into frenzied melee.

—How did you procure this temperamental artifact?

—I killed the original owner.

—Does the sword have a name?

—Bitch Cleaver. What about the staff you always carry?

—It’s an old stick I picked up somewhere.

As we pass through the iron gate, Ba taps me on the shoulder with his weapon, but the sword jerks back, vibrating like a struck gong in his hands.

—I keep trying to pick a fight with a jellyfish but I always get stung.

—That’ll learn you. What’re you doing now?

—Scanning your aura. I feel a purple shadow, a bruise on a deep ethereal layer.

—Stop probing me.

—Magic users are known for being frail in contrast to their reality-bending powers.

—It’s true.

—You’ll notice I’m wearing bearskin armor for this outing.

—Ah. Very nice. I’m looking forward to seeing you go all berserk on whatever gets in our way.

I follow Ba along the edge of a mist-filled chasm. Framed in the waxing moon his fuzzy armor gives him an animal outline that makes me think of Wolfie.

Next to a picturesque stone bridge spanning a stream draining into a stagnant mere–we stop on a grassy knoll for a picnic. Luminescent slime scums the mere water like fluorescent green paint. I unpack a blanket from my satchel and spread it on the grass. Ba tucks into a BLT.

—Ba, you represent the Wolfie archetype in my life. My old friend was even more outlandish than you. A bad drunk, a relentless provocateur, a free-spirited wanderer with writerly ambitions.

—Another of your burnt bridges?

—He died.

—I’m sorry.

—Wolfie and I weren’t close. He had this utter vulnerability and openness. I was one of many lives he he passed thru.

—How did he die?

—He was living in an Institution for animals waiting to be released back into the wild. He broke out and traveled west. On the west coast he fell into a coma. His great heart stopped three days later.

—I’m sorry.

—He lived more in his twenty-nine years than most people do in twenty-nine lifetimes.

–Hmmm.

—You’re not worried about what the medium said about your imminent demise are you?

The setting sun dwindles over the Necropolis. Shadows stretch to infinite length and melt into singular darkness. The night forest soundtrack of chirping insects, rustling underbrush, and trees sighing in the breeze muffles the city’s screams, revving engines, blaring horns. Lines of flickering lamp posts converge along the path. Somewhere off in the forest drumming throbs with slow unnerving insistence.

—These branching cobblestone ways were originally built for pleasure strolls and scenic walking tours.

—I’d like to get as far away from that drumming as possible.

Ba chooses the path most likely to lead away from the ominous syncopations. We ramble through disorienting forest corridors. The paths seem to branch off in every direction. But no matter which way we turn the communal drumming is louder.

—That drumming is getting on my nerves.

—The drumming represents something repugnant to your sensibilities. Is it because they’re not war drums, but the drums of sensuality?

—This is serious.

—I’m going to climb this tree. It looks tall enough to show us the edge of the bramble.

Ba boosts me into the tree. I wriggle up the trunk, needles poking, sappy branches gumming my hands. Finally, near the pointy top, illuminated by a waxing gibbous moon, iridescent purple moths flutter about in the mist. Disturbed by my intrusion they pepper me with rude questions, ask who the hell I think I am, laugh when I tell them, make fun of my platinum hair, say my crooked pointy nose looks like an arrowhead, call me a pretender, dare me to fuck with them, boast of their miraculous powers of metamorphosis, wonder why with all my energy and wherewithal I don’t transform into an adult with beautiful wings and fly off to the mating grounds. The purple emperors’ wings flash the eye of my predatory foe; the eye blinks coquettishly as the wings flit about my head. I shoo them away with sparks from my driftwood wand. The forest extends in all directions, a sea of trees between the the Necropolis’s sheer cliff walls.

Along a straight cobblestone avenue stand statues of great warriors of old. Plaques on their plinths describe in horrific detail how each of these famous fighters was brought low by the spirit of the forest, a malignant entity lurking somewhere deep in these woods.

—Kind of intimidating isn’t it? All these great men who made their big noise and bit it hard in the end?

Ba takes a deep puff off his American Spirit cigarette, smoke billowing ghost-like from his lips.

—Whatever.

—You still think you’re gonna live forever?

—Watch me.

Ba flicks his still glowing butt into the shadow at the base of a once-great man’s bust and rolls off like a tank down the promenade. The drumming grows louder. Despite his reckless machismo the unsettling groove has the Barbarian spooked. His boasting tapers off into ominous silence. I run after him.

—I’m sure it’s only a black-licorice gummy bear tribe’s drum-circle.

—If you say so.

It’s not like Ba to let something so benign rile him. He thinks if we find the drumming bears we’ll be compelled by the groove to drum too. It’s kind of weird how the drum sound is all around us now, like no matter where we turn we’ll always be in the center of the drum circle. Ba’s steel-and-flint eyes glint in the relative darkness. He sets off at a canter not at all his usual easygoing pace.

In his keenness to avoid the source of the dark wood’s polyrhythmic heartbeat, Ba pushes me from behind. We march across a bowed wooden bridge, past sleepy tulip trees and cut-leaf beech, along an acid-green lake, to a fountain where an angel statue weeps healing water into a basin. The two weary adventurers bathe and refresh themselves in the basin. The water heals them of the many wounds inflicted along the path.

The duo climb the first of many stairs and stroll along a promenade overhung with limbs of Sour Gum, Willow Oak, and Honeylocust. The wide avenue runs straight through a shadow world of dancing black flames and shiny watchful eyes that vanish when approached. Panic makes me have to pee. The ancient watery fear. But no public restrooms here. I leap the fence and plunge into tall wet grass. Ba follows me into the deeper shadow.

I reach a tall wire fence. Some kind of construction going on here. Freshly dug soil. A sign on the fence says, DANGER.

Fly re-buttoned, I turn around. Ba has wandered off, is hiding from me, or has disappeared. I call out for him a few times, but my voice sounds too huge. Afraid I’ll attract the demon of the forest, I whisper the Barbarian’s name. Ba Ba Ba. I retrace my steps back toward the path thinking he must have left me behind. Is this another of his pranks? He intended to abandon me all along. Yes. He hopes to make a man of me by stranding me in this evil woodland with no glasses, money, or map. But I’m not a man, I’m a little girl—alone in the dark.

I walk. It’s starting to get chilly and I didn’t bring a coat. Giant feral raccoons with golden eyes leap from garbage cans and stand on hind legs. I find the path again by my staff light and continue down the forest’s central meridian.

The drumming is all around now, polyrhythms in shifting time, synchronized with my skipping heartbeat. Hot and cold waves beat on my brow like an icy fireball is speeding toward me out of the sky. Cold sweat wets my armpits and my hands shake like they’re someone else’s. I’ve always been a live wire, though I’ve hidden it well, it comes out in the faces I make when I can’t stand still. Heightened sensibilities have guided me through life without much thought or reflection on my part. But I’m alone in the dark wood in a city in the middle of the night. And the big freak-out is coming that conjures bad things into being. Where is Ba and his mighty bastard sword? Some friend! Oh, blow your mighty ram’s horn, Ba. I probably shouldn’t have pissed on that freshly dug grave.

I’m looking for Ba but I can’t find him anywhere. I beat the shadow and made it past the black door without falling through, but I never got to see what was on the other side. Lot of pretty trees here. Osage Orange, Pin Oak, Camperdown Elm, Wisteria Pergola. All dead. Their names spring from seeds in my head. The trees grow at even-spaced intervals along the promenade. Gnarled branches of Quercus palustris reach with rough hands for my light. In a hollow cold stone open-air amphitheater ghosts enact a historical drama of shipwrecked exile and betrayal. The horror-show night sounds simmer down to a steadily percolating afterhours pulse, echoing every hollow tree, leaf, stone, and sodden clump of turf.

Where is Ba? I hope he’s alright. He’s probably riding the Blue Buffalo home right now, smiling like he’s done me a big favor by ditching me here. Ok. Keep it together. Don’t lose your shit again. Let’s see. This way is north by the cold tingle in my kidneys. So this way must must be south. The trees seem to point that way. All woods must end at last. Let’s go.

Off in the false twilight two silhouettes leisurely stroll one of the confused Escherian pathways. I follow the shapes through cracked staircases and flowerless gardens. These networks must have once been manicured by green-thumbed Gnome maintenance teams before the park was abandoned after the war. I keep an innocent distance between myself and the girls—if they’re really girls.

They lead me to a grassy hill-top guarded by an ancient Larch’s outspread limbs. The girls glance back at me, giggling and whispering. I catch up with them at the tree’s massive knob-encrusted trunk. Their eyes shine in my staff’s reflected light. Oddly beautiful girls. The short one with her wild strawberry head and leaf-green skirt and tunic has a fairy-like vibe. The other shifts restlessly between her long stork legs.

—Excuse me ladies, but do you know the way out of the forest?

The girls laugh and beckon me to follow. I shadow them into a crack in the tree’s great trunk. We pass in line through a woodgrained passageway. Forest sounds recede to hissing funneled silence behind. A glow ahead grows into a brightly lit street. Noisy yellow taxi cabs waiting for traffic lights to change, and tall glass hotels filled with heavenly scenes. Look, there’s Apple City Corporate Headquarters!

Our triangle emerges at the foot of a translucent tower, the bright afterimage of a golden age. The magnificent gold revolving door spins with a whoosh whoosh whoosh. I love revolving doors. They’re like all doors rolled into one, portals to far flung worlds; the combine harvester reaping, threshing, and winnowing in one sure mechanical scythe. This one spins too quickly for my taste.

A doorman in salmon livery stands stiffly before the building, his hand on the brass hook of a red-velvet rope. He sights me down the bridge of his nose; his eyes narrow to gun scopes. The girls walk up without hesitation and greet the doorman with easygoing familiarity. At the sight of them he lightens, unlatches the symbolic barricade, and motions the girls past with a pristine white-gloved hand. Strawberry-head and Stork-legs pause before the revolving door and look back at me with puppy eyes. When I make no move to join them, they shrug their shoulders, turn away, and pass through the door. It spins so fast its blades blur into one. Why can’t I follow them? Ba would follow. Ba would be the steaming hot beef in their juicy Reuben Sandwich. So hungry. Oh, Lard, where the hell are you Ba? Did the shadow of the forest suck you through the black door? Here I stand frozen before the door of possibility. Have I failed you, my seeing eye guide and faithful friend? Did I give up on you too soon? Should I go back into the forest and search for you? Why won’t you sound your barbaric yawp from the rooftop of the world?

FridayFlash, Interviews, Writing Fuel

A Flash of Inspiration: “It Wasn’t For Me” by Katy Ward

by Christy Hallberg • April 30, 2021January 14, 2022

Welcome to Litro’s A Flash of Inspiration series! Once a month we will select a flash fiction or short story submission that we find especially intriguing and run a brief interview with the author about the piece and writing in general.

For our inaugural installment, #FridayFlashUSA editor Christy Alexander Hallberg has chosen “It Wasn’t For Me” by Katy Ward, a story that originally ran in Litro on June 26, 2020. Hallberg was immediately impressed by the story’s structure and how it augmented the complexity of the subject matter. She was also struck by the correlation of the fertile natural world with the barrenness of the closed spaces in which the characters find themselves. Through unexpected voices, the story elevates itself above what can be a trite topic to something far more substantive, with its commentary on socioeconomics and the effect of poverty on young women. It is a story that begs to be read and contemplated repeatedly.

CAH: How long have you been writing flash fiction? Do you write in other genres? Do you find that you return to certain themes in your writing repeatedly?

KW: I am a real newcomer to flash fiction and only started writing my own stories during the coronavirus lockdown. “It Wasn’t for Me” was actually the first piece I ever had published, which was a great boost for my confidence.

I’ve always been fascinated by the subject of mother/daughter relationships, which tend to be a recurring theme in my stories. These relationships can be unremittingly intense and, whether healthy or toxic, can underpin almost every decision we make in adult life.

CAH: What inspired you to write “It Wasn’t For Me”? Does the story have any autobiographical elements?

KW: The story does have a basis in my own life, but any autobiographical elements definitely don’t relate to my relationships with my own family. They would be furious if I suggested they did.

The autobiographical elements come from individuals I knew or observed as a child and teenager. The city I grew up in (Hull) traditionally has the lowest educational achievement in the UK and I encountered many families trapped in poverty and struggling with issues such as drugs, alcoholism, and domestic violence.

I often remember a girl I went to school with who was rumoured to be pregnant when she was 15. Her family suddenly took her out of school and it seemed to me as though she had completely disappeared. She became a mythical figure in my imagination. I often wonder what it would have been like to be in her situation and whether she had her baby.

CAH: The style of the piece is quite interesting. It’s divided into three parts. The beginning and ending are told in third-person point of view, which creates a bit of distance from the gravity of the subject matter — abortion — but the middle part is told in first-person from the perspective of the main character’s aborted baby. What inspired you to construct the story in this fashion?

KW: In all honesty, this shift could reflect the fact I am constantly unable to decide whether to write my stories in the first or third person. On many occasions, I’ve written a piece from one perspective and then gone back to totally rewrite it in another voice.

For the first section of the story, I was inspired by people I often see when I’m sitting in a park by myself. Although I observe these strangers in minute detail, I have no idea what is going on in their minds.

In the second section, I felt this stream of consciousness spoken by a child who never existed could reflect the frantic and disjointed way in which we often think. I frequently plan conversations with other people in my own mind, knowing I’ll never have the opportunity to carry these out in real life. The notion of giving a voice to an aborted fetus, something often seen as dirty or shameful, was also strangely appealing.

For the final section, I tried to create two disembodied voices floating around a sterile, whitewashed room. I felt the distance could reinforce the main character’s sense of feeling drained and empty. However well-meaning the counsellor in the story may be, I wanted to create the impression she is reading from a checklist of pre-prepared questions when interrogating the main character on an incredibly traumatic and personal experience.

CAH: Nature is a motif in “It Wasn’t For Me.” How do you see it functioning in terms of the overall execution of the story?

KW: There are, of course, obvious connections to fertility and pregnancy, which are key to the story. From an autobiographical point of view, this focus on nature could reflect the fact I started writing this story in lockdown. As we were all trapped inside, the natural world suddenly represented a means of escaping these feelings of suffocation we were all experiencing. I also wanted to use the first and final sections of the story to emphasize the juxtaposition between the ripeness of the natural word and the sterility of certain medical environments. Having gone to counselling myself several years ago to cope with anxiety, I based the description of the therapy room on settings from my own memory.

CAH: Where do you turn for creative inspiration? Which artists have most inspired your own work? What books are on your nightstand?

KW: Virginia Woolf has been a favorite of mine since I was a teenager and I especially love To the Lighthouse. Although I would never have the audacity to draw any parallels between Woolf’s writing and my own, my fondness for her work foreshadowed my later affection for micro stories. I’m fascinated by the idea that a character’s entire life can be contained in a fleeting moment.

I also love memoirs and am constantly in awe of the shrewdness with which certain writers (often, but not always, women) can observe their own lives without becoming maudlin or self-indulgent. I’ve read The Outrun by Amy Liptrot more than once and I also really enjoyed Lowborn by Kerry Hudson.

In terms of fiction, I’m currently rereading Her by Harriet Lane and find its bleakness totally compelling. I am really drawn to its depiction of the all-consuming obsession a certain type of person can have with someone who, on the face of it, is a near total stranger.

CAH: What are you working on now?

KW: Although I studied English Literature at university, I never had the confidence to write anything of my own until I hit my mid-thirties. After university, I started working in journalism, and reporting other people’s stories seemed less exposing than writing my own fiction.

I’ve now overcome my earlier reluctance to turn to myself for subject matter and would love to attempt a memoir based around my experiences of coming from a working-class area and attending elite universities. In these environments, I felt like a total outsider and this sense of alienation has affected almost every aspect of my life. I’m just trying to figure out if my story is worthy of the genre.

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#FlashFriday Editor's Pick flash fiction micro fiction

CONCENTRIC CIRCLES

by Litro • April 30, 2021April 30, 2021

I first tasted broodjes on holiday – bought at the haring stall beside Oosterkerk on Wittenburgergracht, stuffed with raw fish and red onion. Tom wasn’t keen, but there was no choice near the jetty before we caught the tour boat, and anyway I loved them – the sharpness of the vinegar against the sweet white roll.

The boats are great for snoopers – the ground floor curtains in the grand manor houses lining the Herengracht are typically left open – “Look Tom, you can see right in, it’s traditional, Calvinist – showing they’ve nothing to hide and they carry on that tradition.” “Really, maybe they’re just vain, lazy.” He adjusts his headphones – I guess he believes what the audio guide tells him, even if he thinks I’m making up stories. The rooms remind me of Dutch paintings of interiors, screen sets, living museums.

There is something intoxicating about Amsterdam’s self confidence, its easy going-ness. The bikes lining every narrow street, the mime artists and hustlers in Dam Square, even the graffiti is art, not a mess. But it’s the canals that absorb me. The second morning I creep out of bed at dawn and wander down to the Prinsengracht.

The crinkles of light on the water, catching the fragments of shadows of the houseboats. White arrows through the dark water. I insist we walk by the canals each evening – the glow before sunset on the water and the buildings gradually darkening – the morning’s film wound back in slow motion.

Sometimes I am aware of a smell from a canal – not fetid, but clammy, dank. Tom says they are odorless – they were cleared up years ago. It would have been rank when those grand houses were built – excrement, waste, everything dumped in the water. Rich women carried a pomander on a chain to protect themselves against dangerous smells, a barrier between the putrid and the sublime.

Amsterdam was born of global commerce, where tulip bulbs and slaves were currency. A city built on land taken from the sea, and somehow precarious, even though the modern city is so vibrant.

I try and explain this to Tom, but he isn’t having any of it – “why can’t you just enjoy being here, it was your choice for fucks sake.” But even Tom is thoughtful in Ann Frank House.

I now live in Amsterdam. This is my city. Late at night I often walk through the noiseless streets.

The black water is still between the wharves. When there is a full moon I see the shadows of the elegant slave ships, even though I am nowhere near the Port of Amsterdam. Plantation products were shipped back to the city, refined in sugar factories and coffee plants which were mostly in the Jordaan district. The Jordaan has always been my favorite part of the city, with its narrow paths and curious buildings. The graffiti stands out, red, blue, screeches. There are boutiques and coffee houses now, but nothing to commemorate the dead from the boats.

I read Camus’s The Fall. On my night walks I trace the steps of his narrator, Jean-Baptiste Clamence, as he unfolds his story night after night in the Mexico City bar in the Zeedijk – Dante’s Inferno transformed into the canals’ “concentric circles.” Clamence’s “fall” begins when he sees a woman standing ominously on the edge of the canal and hearing her screams as she falls into the water, he walks past.

I research into the history of the Zeedijk – built as a seawall to protect the city, how it turned from respectability to notoriety as the rich merchants moved on, and sailors moved in to drink and womanize. Later, it was deep in alternative culture, anarchy and protest. There was a violent riot when hundreds of squatters took to the streets and the army were brought in, and, fascinating to me, where one of my favorite jazz musicians, Chet Baker, died, falling from the window of the Prins Hendrik Hotel. Was he pushed? Did he kill himself? Listening to his music, his cool music, it is hard to believe this happened to him, but his life belies the notes.

The Zeedijk is now regenerated, its smells are from the Chinese cafes and there are no police raids, no addicts you can see. But not so far away women are “sold” in lit up shop windows, women who were traded in distant places and trafficked to here. Tourist attractions. As resonant as statues of slavers, they are stone still.

Alone, I still take the occasional boat to admire the opulent canal houses, built on the wealth of the East Dutch India Company. But each time, I step tentatively into the boat. I am afraid of the gap between the shore and the vessel. I am always afraid of drowning.

by Janet Silver

Central Park Editor's Pick online fiction short stories

Manhattan Schist

by Rachelle Pinnow • April 18, 2021April 18, 2021

Reid drums his fingers on the photocopied sushi list as we wait for our waitress to return. I fidget with my chopsticks and deny the urge to reach across the table and take his hand.

‘You’re stressing me out. Why sushi?’ I sigh and try to laugh. Reid is deathly allergic to shellfish. “We could’ve had burgers in a pub.’

‘I survived a year here without you, Mom,’ Reid says, crinkling his nose in a mocking smile. He came to New York City on a film scholarship, but that was before Jeremy’s accident. This year is different and we both know it. Reid flips his hair out of his eyes. Lately, he wears it short in back and around the ears with a long wave sprawling over from a deep side-part. I’ve gotten used to it, except for the new streak of blue.

We’re dining in Hell’s Kitchen, a long way from Reid’s campus apartment. He wants to show me the town. I came down last year, but barely got him settled before I had to be back at work. This time, I have no deadlines. Reid is my priority.

‘I hope you have your medication with you,’ I say, although I still carry an Epi-pen around in my purse. ‘This city has roasted nuts on every corner!’

At least a dozen times in his life, I had to inject Reid with epinephrine. The kid is allergic to everything. At age eight, he ate hemp hearts (that was a new one) in my sister’s homemade granola bars. He swelled almost immediately. As a distraction, his dad waved a shiny gold C-3PO while I jabbed him in his left quad. The ride to emergency was less about his itchy hives and more about his mother’s betrayal.

‘You tricked me,’ he moaned. ‘Why did you trick me?’

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, rubbing his back. ‘I guess you’re not a little boy anymore. Next time, I’ll tell you I have to give you a needle – but you can’t fight me, okay? You have to let me do it.’

He narrowed his eyes and glared out the window. ‘You tricked me,’ he said again as his lips swelled and cheeks puffed. I tore off his t-shirt and watched ridges of red welts grow outward from his armpits and up across his neck.

‘I won’t ever do that again,’ I promised. ‘From now on, Reid, I’ll always tell you straight.’

‘Dad left us,’ I was forced to say to my boys a few years later, when Steven didn’t return home from a business trip. I couldn’t explain to them why. I still don’t know. It might have been another woman. There were some signs. Or maybe it was simply the mid-life malaise that comes in some form to all of us. Whatever the reason, Steven moved to Vancouver Island, a thousand kilometers away.

Reid was in grade seven at the time. Jeremy had just started high school, and soon afterward, his drinking began. My once passionate, competitive, athletic Jeremy sank into the routine of endless weekend parties. There was always someone to pull for the underagers. There was always a couch to crash on. By December, Jeremy had quit all his sports. Through the school week, he sulked around from the basement where he played drums, to the 7-11, and back to the basement. The amount of time Jeremy spent holed up down there worried me. I had him paired with a Big Brother, a second-year university kid who played on the Dinos football team, but Jeremy refused to meet him. When I talked with his school counselor, she said it was normal at his age to experiment with alcohol, but was this in the normal range? Keep an eye on him, she’d said, but give him some space. I didn’t tell her his father had left us. I told myself it would all be okay.

A necklace of mine went missing, a gift from Steven with a gold skier charm – our first Christmas together. Steven was a great skier and had Jeremy on skis by age two. Like his dad, Jeremy was a natural athlete, and within a couple of years was flying down the mountain with no fear. We’d practically lived on the slopes in those early years of marriage. I used to wear that necklace every Christmas. I thought maybe I’d just misplaced it, but then my silver hoop earrings were gone, then a bracelet. I started watching where I kept my purse. I never caught Jeremy red-handed, but it was pretty clear what was going on. Where else would he get booze money?

I pleaded with Jeremy to stay in on the weekends. I bribed him, I threatened. The harder I tried, the more he resisted. If we fought on Friday morning, sometimes I didn’t see him again until Sunday night. And Reid, my baby, was witness to it all. He was always there watching.

Reid insisted that the best introduction to New York City was from a distance: making sense of the scale, orienting yourself to the boroughs, naming the rivers. From the vantage of our water taxi on the Hudson, the skyscrapers seemed to rise and fall like a great mountain range, the city arrayed around the twin peaks of Downtown and Midtown. Reid told me that the island of Manhattan has special bedrock unusually suited to the construction of very tall buildings, thus named the Manhattan Schist. Without this particular foundation, the incredible skyline wouldn’t be possible.

We’ve moved on from sushi to the patio at St. James Gate, an Irish pub. I’m drinking Manhattans, of course. ‘I’m allowed. I’m a tourist.’

Reid laughs and says that I’m ridiculous.

I take another sip and shudder again. It’s strange and special having a drink with my grownup son. He’s not even legal age, but that didn’t seem to be an issue for the waitress, and maybe that’s why Reid suggested this place. There are so many things I want to say to him. Instead, I say, ‘Second year will be half as hard as first year.’

‘Most of first year I spent looking for a decent place to live.’ Reid grins and takes a long draw on his Guinness. ‘Can’t get much worse than Crazy Llewellyn and that disgusting bathroom.’

Now I laugh, although it had been a worry last year. ‘Was that place number three or four?’ If Steven had helped out, Reid could’ve been more comfortable. I can’t do it all. New York is as expensive as they say.

A neat row of maraschino cherry stems lines my side of the table. The whiskey swirls my blood to the surface of my skin, and I can feel my cheeks tingling. It’s only been two months. If I could go back, I’d do everything differently.

Some of Jeremy’s friends were found wandering the 2A highway, out of their minds. They were reported when a driver nearly hit one with his Ford F250. He caught them in his high beams: shirtless, at two o’clock in the morning, some barefoot on the asphalt or fumbling in the weedy culverts.

Jeremy was missing. Police descended on that A-frame cabin on Ghost Lake, the home of the weekend-long party, their searches fanning out into the woods like deltas, tumbling down the mountainous valley.

Reid came out to the cabin with me while the police continued to search. It was still night. We drove around for hours, finally ending up in the party-cabin to wait for first light. Who were all those people? Parents of Jeremy’s friends, but I didn’t recognize a single face. That’s how far gone Jeremy was. I didn’t know any of his friends. What kind of mother was I?

Dozens of tiny glass bottles were scattered across the living room with godknowswhat inside. Rubber droppers, charred butter knives, straw-like pipettes. ‘A goddamn apothecary,’ said the police detective when he walked into the cabin. He snagged a few bottles, but otherwise let the cleanup proceed. The cabin reeked a pungent, earthy smell, and beneath that, the sour tang of bile. A policewoman opened the sliding patio doors and the crisp mountain air swept in. The other nameless mothers cleared coffee tables, as if among the dwindling crowd of a bridal shower, and soon they were chatting quietly with the comfort that their sons were safe. Certainly troubled, but not injured… Not missing.

Reid had worried about his brother all through freshman year in New York. The only reason Reid came home for the summer was to help me get Jeremy back on track. ‘I’ve barely seen him, Mom,’ Reid said earlier that day while anxiously smoothing his hand over his wave of hair, not yet blue. “Why’d I bother coming home at all?’

That endless night at the cabin, Reid washed dishes for hours, his eyes fixed on the dark window above the kitchen sink. I remember the water running, the clinking and scraping of plates, dusty with white powder, mugs still half full. I kept picking up my phone to call Steven and then putting it back in my jacket pocket. Looking back, I never should have let Reid stay.

When the pink of morning trembled at the edges of the sky, we set out in groups. Reid chose to stay back. ‘Hang in there,’ said one of the dads and clapped Reid on the shoulder as though he were Reid’s little league coach. ‘It’ll be okay.’

This next Manhattan is taller with a sugar rim and two cherries. There must have been a bartender shift-change. Have we been here that long?

I pound my fist on the table as if to make a point, but Reid has left his seat, and I’m only trying to prove things to myself. I don’t care if I have to support my filmmaker son the rest of his adult life. Reid was the most observant, sensitive child, compassionate to a fault – and we need people in this world devoted entirely to beauty. His animated short film in eleventh grade brought me to hiccupping tears – and landed him a spot at NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

When Reid returns, he wants to take me to the MoMA. I just want to sit here with him, endlessly, in the cool shade of this St. James patio. I’m floating in a stream and I haven’t gone sad yet. The avenue swells with September sunlight, the shadows lengthen. Slow down, slow down. Lanky university kids stroll on by, some ride long boards and wear huge headphones, blocking out the world’s noise to hear their own. There was a ballerina in Washington Square Park yesterday doing pliés and jetés beside a lamppost while her friend took photographs. What the lens must have seen: a tranquil pink leotard in frozen poise against a frenetic smear of background people.

I don’t want to move. We’ve been talking for hours, yet we still haven’t gone to that dreaded place we need to go. Maybe it’s too late in the day to begin. I’m so tired. Instead, I want Reid to tell me about every single thing in his life. His voice is unique, timbered now that he’s a man, but it had a lilting quality even when he was young, a particular way of raising his vowels: selt instead of salt, wise instead of was… Reid turned maladies into melodies. I want to curl up in that beautiful voice, the voice I’ve known through the most important part of my life, the mothering part, and float alongside him. I want Reid to tell me again about that girl in his Stop-Motion class. He mentioned her pretty name… Was it Hyacinth? I want him to tell me where he shops for groceries, to describe his film lectures. I want to listen to him explain a bridging shot, deep focus, after-image.

Reid stops talking, mid-sentence. He seems to know that the stream will not carry merrily on for much longer. He nudges me from my chair and at the first street corner, orders a pretzel with mustard. It smells heavenly, and through the checkered paper, it feels warm in my hands. Did he pay for all the drinks? Or did I give my credit card? I know I paid for the sushi. There are peanut shells scattered dangerously at the pretzel vendor’s feet.

‘Let’s walk,’ Reid says, with a swoosh of blue hair. He takes my arm, which almost brings me to sloppy tears. We crisscross streets for a long while until we pour out from the avenues into the vastness of Central Park.

Ghost Lake is glacier fed, ice cold in the month of July. It doesn’t have a sandy beach, only rock shards and jagged boulders. Jeremy’s body had washed up against the grey boulders at the farthest end.

I collapsed onto him. Breathless, impossible. And the next moment, inevitable. The pain branched out backward in my brain until I was cradling Jeremy on the kitchen floor, six years old, he was crying for some reason I don’t remember. Superimposed – both moments at once.

Someone pried me off of him. Covered him in a black, dusty tarp.

I sat for a long time on the shore of that lake, until I could feel the morning sun burning my forearms and the top of my head. I didn’t want anybody’s help. I stood slowly, blinded by the glare off the water, dizzy from the heat. How could I tell this to Reid? How could I tell him straight?

After the funeral, I found Reid lying flat on Jeremy’s bed, gripping his drumsticks to his chest. I squeezed to sit on the edge of the twin bed like I would have done over a decade ago. Reid never held back his tears the way Jeremy did. They ringed his eyes and wet the pillow.

‘I’m making a film about suicide,’ he said, staring at the ceiling.

‘Reid,’ I said, looking down at my hands. ‘It was an accident.’

‘The opening scene is a close-up of a middle-aged woman.’ His voice quivers at first then goes incredibly calm, strong, his stage voice. ‘Brown hair, tallish, kind of like you. She’s holding a green garden hose. It’s running. The sound of the water gushing is super loud. You can tell by her eyes that she’s a mother. Pan right. She’s watering a tree. Zoom out. It’s a dead tree.’

I repeated, barely audible, ‘It was an accident.’

He looked over at me and said, ‘How long has she been standing there with that hose? A really long time. Too long. Cut to the next scene.’

We sit shoulder to shoulder on a bench near Strawberry Fields in Central Park. There’s the Manhattan Schist, half a billion years old, dark and glittering, rising out of the grass like whalebacks. A dozen preschoolers grapple over the rocky hump closest to us, squealing and hollering.

For the past two months, I haven’t been able to picture my Jeremy – only the waterlogged body on the beach. My breath catches. I had a whole family once. We lived in a bungalow on Ash Street with a wide back lawn that rolled down to the Elbow River. This is my soul crumbling, my foundation collapsing inward. What was it really that took Jeremy away?

Come back to me, I think, but don’t say. Go out into the world, but come back. I squeeze Reid like he’s still a little boy – and he lets me. He’s so wise that he may as well be one hundred years old, and yet he’s only twenty, here in New York City with the dazzling skyscrapers, the theatres, the art galleries. I look at him sideways and his clear eyes reflect the skyline, reflect the world back to me. In this faraway city, among all this beauty, he is the most beautiful.

#FlashFriday Editor's Pick micro fiction short fiction short stories

WANDERING STARS

by Yuki Fuwa • April 16, 2021April 16, 2021

Manual labor suited Kiichi best. After the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923 killed his wife and young daughter, he ended up in Kobe and worked at the port as a stevedore, loading and unloading cargo vessels. He preferred to lose himself in his toil and keep negative thoughts out of his mind. The ruins of Tokyo, his old house that had burned to the ground, and even his three-year-old daughter Hisako’s smile haunted his memory. He could barely stand to relive his past. His daily routine now consisted of working, drinking, and going to bed. Five years had passed without incident. One day, his co-worker Yusaku pitched one of his get-rich-quick schemes to Kiichi.

“Brazil?”

“Yeah. You know about the National Emigration Camp, right? They’ve recently built their headquarters on the hill. The government will pay our passage. Let’s go to Brazil and make names for ourselves.”

“They say nothing but hardship awaits new arrivals.”

“Don’t be a wet blanket. For ordinary folks like us, it’s the only chance to strike it rich.”

Yusaku had made up his mind and expected Kiichi to follow suit. He practically dragged Kiichi to the Emigration Camp. Over five hundred prospective immigrants had gathered before the gate. Moving along with the flow of humans, Kiichi and Yusaku took turns going through physical exams and immunizations.

“Poor things,” Kiichi mumbled under his breath with a glance toward young mothers with babies in their arms. Unemployment skyrocketed. Hunger drove them out of the country.

“I’m tired of living in Japan,” a young man said. “This country is too small for me.” Despite his words, his eyes betrayed sorrow.

After the exams, Kiichi headed to the canteen. The meal included real beef for a change. He didn’t remember the last time he ate meat. As he mechanically shoveled food into his mouth, he felt someone’s gaze. When he looked up, he saw a young woman across the table. She sat by herself. Nobody wanted to sit by her. Her face and left arm were terribly scarred by burns. She showed no sign of eating her meal. She gazed at Kiichi. He wondered why she didn’t say anything.

A month passed after the ship left Kobe for Brazil. Kiichi stood on the deck, letting the sea breeze caress his face.

“Aren’t you Dr. Nakamura?” a female voice said, startling him. He’d never expected to be called by that name again when he left Tokyo. He turned and saw the burned woman.

“Yes.”

“Thank you for taking care of me right after the quake in Tokyo.” She bowed deeply. “My name is Saya.”

Saya was once his patient. He’d met her in a hospital crowded with earthquake victims.

The ship sailed through the vast expanse of dark water under a full moon. The moonbeams danced on the waves and shone on Saya’s unmarred profile. Before her face was disfigured, she’d been a beauty.

He wished he could take her place. Kiichi wished for the impossible. He silently took her left hand and examined it. It was partially paralyzed.

“Forgive me.”

“For what, Dr. Nakamura. You sound as if you were responsible for the earthquake.”

“No, that’s not what I mean—”

Saya covered his mouth with her right hand.

“I’m not here to reminisce about our past, doctor. My friend Ocho is in labor. Please follow me.”

Saya’s eyes told him she’d refuse to take no for an answer. But Kiichi didn’t nod. He wanted to get away from his past. He took a few steps back.

“Why don’t you ask the ship doctor?”

“Oh, that quack is useless.” She began to walk away.

“I can’t. Don’t make me,” he whined like a little boy.

Saya chuckled. “I know you, doctor. You can’t say no.”

Mixed with the scent of salt air, Saya’s gaudy perfume tickled Kiichi’s nose. It pained him to see how far the once innocent girl had fallen. Hard times forced many women to sell their bodies. He now knew why she’d been reluctant to approach him before.

Kiichi quickened his steps to catch up with Saya. The Big Dipper he was used to seeing in the night sky back home was nowhere in sight. Instead, the Southern Cross shone above his head, guiding him toward an unknown future.

Translated by TOSHIYA KAMEI

#FlashFriday Editor's Pick flash fiction micro fiction short fiction

EMILY, ANECHOIC

by Litro • April 9, 2021April 9, 2021

Photo by Guillaume Paumier (copied from Flickr)

The anechoic chamber lay at the heart of six concrete onion layers, a nesting of rooms within rooms, each room with twelve-inch thick walls. The chamber made no contact with the rest of the building around it, floating on damping springs mounted on a separate foundation slab of pure white alabaster. It was as though the chamber swung on nothing, a haunted space.

Since the slightest of sounds produced a small echo in the things around them, many technicians disliked working in the chamber. When the valves of the last door closed behind them like stone they would at once hear the blood pulsing in their veins, the squelch of their eyes in their sockets skewing inside their skull, the grinding of every bony joint. Overhearing the softest inhalation of another, the sly gurgle of a stomach, how each nervous swallow clarified as a saliva Niagara, some visitors to the chamber became sick and dizzy inside.

The craving for a perfect silence can drive a person mad.

It didn’t upset Emily. She enjoyed her lonesome hour in the chamber, the stillness in the room.

But leaving it was what she liked best. How, the instant she pushed open the last door, that waterfall of sound came rushing to smack against her skin, washing clean across her limbs. Then it was she heard birdsong she never had before, shrill lark cry and mockingbird hew, her senses set to reeling by the sudden sonic input. Emily stepped out of that chamber into a world ajar.

She realized there is no such thing as silence. Silence can be heard. Inside the chamber, floating on an eiderdown of the mind alone, Emily listened to its voice. Beneath the beating of her small heart, a little to the left, four chambers locked inside another, she dwelt on the possibility of sounds being lost to us forever. No more the chimes of cash registers, socks scrunched on washboards, click of a camera shutter, the wheezes of a pump, tiny clinking of milk bottles, a squeak of saddlebags, eerie creak of a kerosene lamp slid on its hinge, smooth stropping of a razor. Soon enough there would be no hum of bumblebee round a carnation’s pollen chamber or that butterfly flutter up, oars seamlessly parting a slash of molten blue!

Were these sounds lost forever, Emily wondered, or did they extend out through dimensions of time? Every wave dissipates. Did the sounds’ forgotten echo still in the vacuum of space, slip hushed and unnoticed through the arc and scoop of distant planets and maelstrom of crushing galaxies, only to die at the very edge of the universe?

Floating in the chamber soundless, delighting in some flight of thoughts no mere technician would entertain, Emily pushed on into the soft plush of the infinite, touched the hem of the universe, and it gave.

Her body became an ear, and filled with a crescent of white heat, and she knew she was finished knowing then —

Rob Smith

Story Sunday, StorySunday

Lemon Drop

by Clare Howdle • April 5, 2021April 5, 2021

Nouk runs. Her calves pull tight and her trainers fill up. This is not the way it’s meant to feel, she thinks as her feet sink deeper into the pavement. And yet this is how it always is now.

Four weeks, six days have gone by since the storm hit. Its impact is still being felt. Mounds of sand stretch across Swanpool Road. It drifts and clings. The path around the lake is flooded because sand has clogged the drains. The banks are suffocated and the emptiness it creates bows under its own weight. No ducks flapping. No seagulls fighting over breadcrumbs left for swans by walkers. No moorhens cackling or water rats shooting into the arching roots that a month ago freely tiptoed across the water’s edge.

Nouk cranks her music louder and tries to pick up pace but the sand saps her energy. Just press on, she tells herself, use it, work harder. As the road takes her closer to the sea, the wind throws up clouds of sand. It stings her skin, makes her eyes itch. With every breath, a gritty layer coats her teeth. She sweeps her tongue around her mouth trying to force it out. It crunches and grinds. She has to stop to spit. By the time she reaches the beach, her legs buckle and her rib cage can’t keep up. She bends double and pushes her fists into her waist. Her hot breath is whipped away into the brackish air.

Back at the house all she can see is sand. When she shuts her eyes, holds a glass under the tap, listens to the water running, it’s there. Stubborn mountains claiming everything from the café terrace to the mini golf course to the new builds that skirt the back of the lake. She pictures the plants beneath it, bare branches not yet woken up by spring, lost buds dead on the stem. All snuffed out by the choking sand.

‘Jesus Christ Nouk, you’re so bleak.’

Jonathan’s frying bacon. He’s got the heat too low. The sizzle is pathetic.

‘But isn’t it weird though? How no one’s doing anything?’

‘Not really. What does it matter? It’s just sand.’

‘They haven’t even tried to move it.’ Nouk sips her water and lifts herself up onto the counter. She puts her phone down, Gordon Lightfoot still tinny in her earbuds.

‘How can you run to that?’ he says, shaking his head.

She shrugs and flicks it off.

‘You’re reading too much into it, anyway,’ he prods the rashers in the pan. ‘It’ll sort itself out eventually. Two or three bits?’

She doesn’t answer, watches as he flips the bacon over. It slithers off his spatula with a flaccid wriggle.

‘This bloody hob.’

‘Have you turned it right up?’

‘I know how to fry bacon, Nouk. Get the ketchup, would you?’

He pokes the rashers with a finger and wipes it on his chest. He’s still wearing the T-shirt he slept in. His boxers droop around his legs. Nouk taps her socked foot against the cupboard. Under her fingernails, grains have gathered. She picks up a fork and runs a tine along each of them in turn, hooking out the sand and letting it fall onto the side. The pile builds, taking her mind back to the beach.

The storm has reshaped the tideline. Seaweed sits belligerent in fly-ridden heaps, reef newly exposed where the sand has been dragged away. She reaches out to touch the fresh rock, slides her fingers past the razor-like edges and finds purchase between the strata. Her breath rises and falls with the waves. Running the same route back down the sand road, her lungs thicken.

Jonathan clears his throat sharply, returning her to the kitchen’s steamed up windows, the barely spitting pan. He wraps a tea towel around its handle and carries it to the table, where white bread lies buttered. He shakes the pan so some of the bacon stutters onto the thickly cut slices, then squeezes out ketchup in a wheezing gust. ‘Help yourself,’ he shouts back through to her as he walks into the lounge.

She used to love their weekend mornings. The laziness of not unfolding the day until the afternoon. Lying with her head in Jonathan’s lap, both still in their pyjamas, both smelling a little of each other and neither minding. The coffee endlessly brewing, the grease stains on the corners of the paper, his fingers idly curling through her hair. Now he makes bacon sandwiches she can’t bring herself to eat. The thought clags and sticks to the roof of her mouth. She wants to say something. To explain why she’s running so much or why the sand bothers her or why it would be better if he could just get dressed, rather than loafing around in his boxers pushing ten o’clock in the morning. She wants to tell him why she listens to Gordon Lightfoot. Or Nick Drake. How you can hear them hurting in every word and what better thing is there to run from than that? But she knows he’ll just roll his eyes again and maybe call her ‘silly girl’ then talk about putting dishwasher salt on the shopping list, or that he needs to swing by the office later, okay? He’ll pull her to him and she’ll smell his sour sleep smell and taste the sticky, sweet grease and ketchup on his breath. She picks up her trainers and goes upstairs.

They’re in the car working around the sequence of roundabouts that takes traffic out of town and onto the ring road. Nouk winds down the window. The cold air feels good. Jonathan mimes a shiver, presses the button in his door handle and winds her window back up.

The homecoming lunch had been in their calendar for nearly a month. Nouk forgot about it until Wednesday when her mother phoned to remind her.

‘Alice is going to be woozy of course,’ she’d said, her voice lifting to overpower the noisy churn of a mixer. Nouk pictured her, phone squeezed between ear and her shoulder, cake batter whipping in the bowl. ‘It’s not lunchtime for her body. I’m just saying you’ll need to take care around her, that’s all.’

‘Jetlag isn’t a disease, Mum. She can suck it up,’ Nouk said back.

‘I hope you’re not going to be in one of your moods, Anoushka,’ her mother sighed. ‘Please don’t ruin it for everyone.’ Then she was silent. Then she hung up.

Nouk knows her sister won’t be woozy and won’t need anyone taking care around her. Instead she’ll be puffed up and proud, telling stories about her internship buddies at the gallery in Upper East Side. How one time after work they sat on bleachers in Sheep’s Meadow eating warm pretzels while they watched a rom-com being shot. How after that they hit a dive bar in Hell’s Kitchen where she got in on a fake ID and ordered a cocktail called the Lemon Drop that popped in her mouth as she drank. Nouk has heard the stories a hundred times already, pulling on her pyjamas and nodding and smiling while Alice slicked on mascara in the webcam, drooling over the prospect of eggs-over-easy and biscuits at Bubby’s – Tribeca not Highline – where she was meeting ‘the gang’ for a late brunch.

They pick up speed on the main road as it carries them into open countryside. Jonathan taps his fingers on the wheel, switches presets on the radio, bites the edge of his thumb. She couldn’t stop him coming. She tried. The more she protested that she was fine to go alone, the more he’d rubbed his hands on her arms as if warming her up after a cold swim, bending down in a squat-lunge so he could look under his eyebrows at her. ‘I’ll be there,’ he said in a hushed, low voice. ‘I’ll be there.’ And now he’s winding up her window and turning the radio from Four to Two because it’s hard to get into the afternoon plays and Steve Wright is pretty funny.

Nouk sits on her hands and clenches her thighs together. She concentrates on what’s happening outside the window, searching for the edge of town, where suburbia bleeds out into countryside and the world goes fully wild again. The last of the roofs rushes past the window. The lanes drop from three to two, to one, concrete giving way to granite, bracken. Occasionally they pass a ruined engine house, collapsing walls and chimneys stark against the sky. She winds the window down again and breathes deeply. Jonathan sighs.

‘What?’ Nouk asks, though she doesn’t want to know.

‘Nothing I suppose.’ He indicates, sighs again, turns the wheel, checks the mirror, sighs louder.

‘You didn’t have to come,’ she says.

‘It’s not that.’

‘Then what?’

He makes a croaking noise in the back of his throat, like the words can’t find the shape to take. ‘I don’t know why we’re even going,’ he mutters eventually.

‘They’re my family.’

‘All the more reason not to go. You don’t even like them – so why waste your weekend? Just tell them the truth, tell them you’d rather not spend your Sunday with them.’

‘Because that’s what you’d do?’

He clicks his tongue against his teeth. ‘My family is not your family.’ Jonathan reaches over and squeezes Nouk’s thigh. ‘Everyone deserves the truth, Nouk.’ He says it like he’s offering her the advice she’s been seeking, a soft lilt to his words.

She punches her consonants back at him, staccato. ‘Do you deserve the truth then?’

‘What do you mean?’

Across the bay, gulls crowd the back of a fishing trawler, white flecks against a skillet sky. In the distance, strands of darkness fall from the clouds to the sea, sweeping in fast. The boat doesn’t stand a chance. He’s waiting for Nouk to speak. She stares at the horizon. She knows that to make the lunch bearable she should take it back, but she can’t because she has nothing to give him to replace it.

A minute later hail attacks the windscreen. Golf ball sized chunks pummel the bonnet and roof, echoing through the hollow shell of the car.

‘Bloody brilliant,’ Jonathan shouts, as they pull up outside the house. He flips down the mirror and furiously tousles his hair. Nouk turns away from him, unclicks her seatbelt and leans her forehead against the window. She feels the vibrations of the downpour ripple through her as her breath covers then fades away from the glass.

‘It is brilliant,’ she says into the thundering hail, so only the storm can hear her.

Nouk’s father smiles as he strokes her mother’s arm. Long slow brushes back and forth. He’s listening to Alice talk, absorbing it all to retell at their next dinner party, how his youngest came good and found herself in New York. He joins in occasionally too, recollecting his own youth and the times they had, every now and then throwing a conspiratorial grin towards his wife.

‘–it’s so full of life, don’t you think?’ Alice says about a block sale she stumbled on in Caroll Gardens after visiting the soda fountain where they invented egg cream. She’s wearing a charm bracelet she picked up there for a dollar. It jangles as she talks.

‘You should have been there in the ‘90s, Ali’ Nouk’s father replies. ‘Now that was living on the wild side!’

In the past, Nouk and Jonathan might have joked about her father after a lunch like this. How he was a bit pathetic, trying to impress everyone. How the only time he went to New York was with the family and they all stayed with his brother near Larchmont and only drove into the city twice. They might have done impressions of him, making up increasingly ludicrous places and events he claimed to be a part of. Nouk might have ended up burying her face in the bedsheets to smother out the hilarity of it, noticing Jonathan’s touch getting more urgent as he massaged her side, his face suddenly serious and purposeful. She looks at Jonathan forking potatoes into his mouth, nodding and smiling at her father, at Alice. It’s like they’re in a different world now.

Alice is talking about the rom-com in Central Park again. Nouk’s father is still brushing her mother’s forearm, as if he’s charging a balloon up for a static shock. Nouk’s mother half smiles through tight lips, her eyes locked on the cutlery neatly pushed together on her plate. She doesn’t lift his hand away, or stroke his arm back, or cup her fingers over his in affection. There’s no indication she can feel it at all.

Nouk thinks back to the car and Jonathan’s broken face when she jabbed her question at him. Each little word daring him to respond, ready to bite back if he did, so they could get it all out in the open. Although she knew he wouldn’t. She trusted in it. A safety net, baggy and worn, but with just enough tension left in it to hold. He talks about telling the truth like it’s so simple to untangle, she thinks. Like anyone can. That’s when she feels it. In the middle of one of her father’s anecdotes about a kid spitting off the Empire State Building. Jonathan’s hand, on her arm. Stroke. Stroke. Stroke.

Nouk clocks off work at midnight. She weaves a path between the drunks outside the kebab shop. Someone shouts something leery at her, so she cuts down a snicket onto the waterfront, where it’s quieter. The sky is clear after another day of heavy rain and the quayside is slick with milk-white light. When she reaches the pier, she sits, taking a breather before climbing the steep high street home. Reflections on the water make the world dance. Moored boats sway, the wind spinning their masts into a song of wire against metal. With no trawlers to chase, the gulls wheel above the bins, swoop to yank out wrappers and hiss over whatever they find.

She pulls her coat tight around her, thinks about her shift. About the pint she pulled for the lecturer whose name she doesn’t know but whose face she recognises. He drinks there a lot. Often, he smiles at her. Tonight he said something funny and she laughed. He laughed too. It made her skin prickle. It’s prickling again now and she focuses on it, lets it warm her against the chill of the midnight air. She slouches down on the bench, closes her eyes and embraces the glimmer of possibility – how a look, a movement, could fill her so entirely for a moment, making everything else slide away. And it’s not about something happening. It’s not about him, or the way his hand brushed the edge of hers as she passed him his pint. The curiosity of what if and the excitement it carries would quickly die if it went any further, replaced by guilt and confusion and the crippling normality of it all. It’s just the potential she finds herself clinging to, more powerful than reality and more hopeful than truth. It pops like she imagines a Lemon Drop might. It makes her feel alive.

Her teeth chatter. There’s a pressure in her chest pushing the air from her body. Her temples throb. Her ears throb. Her heart throbs. Behind her closed eyelids she sees the moon blazing.

Nouk wakes up just before six, frozen. The sun is beginning to turn everything grey. She pulls her collar up and ducks her mouth inside her coat to warm her body with her breath. Two seagulls peck at a crisp packet in front of her. Across the estuary, more gulls murmur skyward as boats silently ghost their way out to sea.

Jonathan will want an explanation. To know where she was and why she didn’t call. She could pretend she was with someone. That all this time her distraction, her spikiness has been because she is cheating on him. He would nod, tight-lipped as he turned the last few weeks over, seeing how her behaviour slotted neatly into that reality. He would look hurt and sad and lost, but wouldn’t feel the need to say sorry, or that he’ll try harder. They wouldn’t have to hold hands or talk in circles and fail to find a way out. A simple lie, over a complicated truth. It would make things much easier, for both of them.

Swanpool Lake is in the opposite direction to home. By the time Nouk gets there the morning is bright and full. Her cheeks warm in the light. There’s no wind and where the road curves along the front she can see lazy waves licking the shore. She sits on the storm drain that joins the lake to the sea and watches the fresh water surge down the grill, through salty rocks then into the open ocean. She pictures the fish beneath the surface, swimming frantically against the suck and pull, attempting to stay where they are but up against forces far more powerful. Through the rusty grate, down the pipe, spat into the sea – what happens next? Do they celebrate the surprise of their new found freedom, a whole ocean to explore? Or do the drown in the salt water because it’s too much for their fresh water gills to take?

Either side of the drain, the displaced storm sand rears up in heaps, covering what used to be nettles, blackberry bushes, hawthorn and birch. She digs her fingers in deep, feels the wet, dense resistance of the sand under her nails. She keeps her hands there for a moment, in the cool, still smother, leans into it, lets it take her weight. Her eyes close and her head starts to drop as sleep threatens to take her again. She startles back upright with a jerk. Hears the water rushing. She begins to dig.

She works slowly at first then faster, harder, scooping great handfuls away and piling it at her feet. The deeper she burrows, the more difficult the sand is to move. Compacted, wet, resistant. She speeds up, gouges with her nails, leans over, reaches in. Something in her demands it, compels her to get to the bottom, to get rid. The hole she’s making gapes and yawns, a dark mouth swallowing her body with every pull and claw. Her breath thunders with the effort. Her shoulders ache. Sweat beads up along her hairline, cold kisses on the back of her neck.

Then it’s there. A survivor. The tiniest tip of a pencil-thin branch sticks out where she’s digging, then another, then another. She holds her breath, her fervour tempered by the tree’s delicacy, its dependence on what she does next. She teases her fingers under the branches to work them loose, cups her hands around each one like they are flame in a breeze, protecting them from the crumbling walls of the hole as she gently lifts and goads more of the tree free. As soon as they’re released, the branches spring up, bendy new green against the blue sky. Life, Nouk thinks. Even under the weight of all that. Even in the darkness and uncertainty, not knowing if it would ever break through. She smiles.

She falls back onto the sand and wipes the sweat from her forehead in a gritty sweep. The tree stands proud in the daylight. Above her, clouds drift. She hears shingle clack as the tide drags over the shore. The call of gulls. Birdsong. There’s the fast thump of a dog’s feet pounding across the beach after a ball. An early, eager family playing by the water. Nouk gets up, dusts the sand off her hands and turns towards the road that leads back home. On the very edge of her vision, the little tree dances in the breeze.

online fiction relationships short fiction

Editor's Pick Gibraltar\ online fiction short stories

Someday We’ll Dance Again

by Jonathan Pizarro • March 31, 2021March 31, 2021

When the ship is halfway across the Atlantic, he changes his name. Lying in his bunk, he pulls out a scrap of paper and writes it out again and again until the pencil wears out. It’s a small change, he thinks, swapping out an o for a y and squeezing in an h. He says it out loud, holding his tongue between his teeth and emphasising. An…fonee. Fff. Fffon. Eee. No longer the tap against the roof of his mouth like the floorboards of a tablao.

He leaves his surname intact. The man in the bottom bunk lives in New York City. He’s done this trip before. You can change it when you get there, the man says. Your English is pretty good, and it sounds kinda Italian. What you don’t want is for them to think you’re some kinda Dago. They don’t know where Gibraltar is anyway. Listen Anthony, the man smiles at him, you can do whatever you want once you get there.

They get to know each other in the days onboard on their way to New York. Hey James, Anthony asks, what was your name before then? James laughs. Who cares? he answers, nobody cares. It’s James now, call me James. Anthony watches James in the low light taking off his shirt and hanging it up on a peg. His muscles folding between his shoulders. The blonde curls of his hair visible in a muted shade. He closes his eyes when James turns around and he pretends to be asleep.

The night before they arrive, Anthony asks James what New York is like. You ever been to London?, James asks. Anthony says no, I’ve never left Gibraltar. Only to Spain you know, because you walk a bit and you’re there. James says, I saw Spain from the port in Gibraltar when we left. It’s nothing like that, nothing at all. Buildings taller than that Rock of yours. How much taller?, Anthony asks. James whistles.

They sneak up to the top deck and it’s dark and empty, with nobody to stop them. Only the water ahead illuminated by the lights of the ship. Anthony leans over the railing and he makes out the letters in white on the side of the ship, reading them upside down. RMS CARPATHIA. The outlines of waves spread out as the ship slices through them in the night. Beyond that, an emptiness stretches out to the horizon so intimidating that Anthony takes a step back. When he looked out to see in Gibraltar there was always land. Algeciras across the water so close you could swim to it, and on a day without levante you could see the mountains of Morocco. All behind him now, moving faster away.

A hand reaches out under his jacket, tracing over his ribs in a way that makes him hold his breath. James pulls out a tin from Anthony’s pocket and taps out two cigarettes. When Anthony turns around, James places one softly between Anthony’s lips and lights it. He feels the moisture of James’ saliva imprinted on the paper, mixing with his own. Where are you from, James? Anthony asks. James says, what does it matter? Leave all that ‘from’ behind now, none of it matters. This is the future you’re going to my friend, everything else is the past. Anthony inhales deep and looks West, away from James. He thinks that in the distance he can see the smallest orange glow. Didn’t the statue in the harbour of New York have a torch? A giant woman of bronze holding it up, inviting him in.

In the morning, James shakes him awake and tells him to grab his bag. They walk out of the dormitory, where everywhere is crammed full of people with their belongings, wanting to be the first ones off the ship. James grabs Anthony’s hand, and they push their way through, ducking under elbows and boxes, squeezing between bodies ripe with the sea voyage. James points out through a grubby porthole and tells Anthony to look through. He sees her then, arm extended pointing to heaven, a crown like La Virgen. Taller than he could have imagined. You made it my amigo, James says. Crushed by people moving closer in the hum of anticipation, James’ hand tightens on Anthony’s, their bodies pushed together with the sway. James’ cheek against Anthony’s. He turns his face and brushes his lips against Anthony, a deliberate imprint. Anthony jerks his head back and scowls. The ship halts sharply and in the lurch, in the circus of people pushing and shouting, each in their language impatient for this new ground to set their feet on, James lets go of Anthony’s hand and disappears.

At the inspection station, Anthony looks up at the flag waving above him while they check his papers. The inspector talks loudly, one question after another in single words like bullets. Name. Age. Occupation. Race or people. Stamps pounded hard onto paper and he’s told to sign his name. Then he’s out somewhere, inching slower and slower in a single mass towards the ferries.

He tries to look at the city, but the crowd swallows him whole as he clutches his papers. Before he tucks them into his jacket, he looks down at what the inspector wrote. The date in delicate cursive, 24^th July, 1906. His family name spelled wrong, an extra Z. Under nationality, Gibraltar. Race, Italian. The assumptions James told him about already becoming official.

Maybe at the harbour he’ll see James again, but everything is a blur of bodies and sound in this new place. Women with parasols everywhere, obscuring the view. Hats that look like cakes. Horses pulling carts. Horns blowing. The heat. The smell. The buildings taller, taller than the Rock of Gibraltar so tall he can barely stretch his neck upwards to see without getting dizzy. Piled on top of each other, this moving, squelching, blaring mess of people and machines and concrete going everywhere so desperately. He sees his tía and tío, looking just like the photos they sent. His protests are feeble. My friend, he says, I lost my friend he was on the ship somewhere. You’ll see him again then, his tío says. Everyone rushing everywhere with a sense of purpose and a movement that feels at double speed. He lets them take him away, navigating this city where suddenly the world feels larger and smaller at the same time and he is completely drunk on the it. The ferry. The train. The tram. Pulled along like his spirit is still somewhere across the Atlantic.

And suddenly peace. Suddenly space. A row of neat houses in Brooklyn stretching out forever all looking the same. Cousins, cousins and more cousins he has never met greeting him warmly in strange accents, fast and clipped and pitched so high against his lazy open drawl of basic English. He shares a bed with a newly met relative. Back against back the curves of each other, the warmth of each other in a small comfort against the idea dawning on him in half-sleep that he is thousands of miles away from everything he has known.

Eight weeks in, and the streets seem more familiar. He learns the way to work and home, and gradually his discoveries expand. On his lunch hour at the foundry he can walk to the river and look out at the skyline of Manhattan. It looks like a city of impermanence. He grew up under the Rock of Gibraltar, that looks the same in every old painting he’s seen, and he knows will look the same if he ever crosses that ocean again. He thinks of James on the boat and the past like the wake on the sea. He writes letters home to his padres, balancing his wellness with his longing to embrace them.

On his free days he takes what feels like an interminable journey into Manhattan. In Gibraltar you can walk and reach everywhere. A town with two streets that could fit on an olive stone. Here it feels like trains and ferries and trams and carts and still he doesn’t run out of city. When he’s not on them he’s avoiding them, standing at the centre of everything looking up at the buildings with their strange angles. He looks away from the men building skyscrapers, balancing from steel beams from such a great height he thinks if they fell, they would disappear into dust before their bodies hit the ground.

He buys a newspaper from a man with one leg, hopping around shouting about murders and fires and robberies and wars. He walks the grid of each street and avenue, always delighted in the feeling of being unknown and almost lost. Stumbling into neighbourhoods, each with their own language shouted across the street. It reminds him of the port in Gibraltar, the people arriving and leaving with their own tongues, calling out snatches of Spanish and English and Italian and Arabic and ones he doesn’t know. Here too, each street with food piled high in stalls like the markets in Gibraltar. Meat sizzling on grills and the plump yellow flesh of fruit split open and sold by the pound, not the kilo. But nobody here stops to ask him how his father is. No neighbour feels compelled to report what they’ve seen. No scandal to die down, no prying eyes, no loose tongues.

He turns and walks and turns again, crossing the gates of the park. Past the men in a line under sun umbrellas getting their shoes shined. Past the women pushing strollers and children with sticky pink fingers reaching into boxes of candy floss. Past the elephants and the boys playing baseball, and the lovers on the bridge chastely holding on, finger to finger. If he walks far enough into this piece of solace in the middle of this city that doesn’t seem to stop, he knows he can find stillness. He sits in a spot by the lake under the shade of a tree and watches the boats rowing across the water. He spots two young men without straw hats on, throwing caution to the heat of midday. One of them holding the oars with large, powerful hands. Sleeves rolled up to his biceps, flexing and relaxing as the wooden craft glides along. The other boy smaller, paler, thinner holding onto a book and reading out loud, lips moving inaudibly in the distance.

It’s too much sometimes in this city, despite the wonder. Too many large signs screaming out to buy and buy and buy potato chips and shaving cream and bonds. Everything making noise. Except here, under trees taller than any he’s seen in Alameda Gardens. The summer heat the same as in Gibraltar. He can feel the warmth from the sun and pretend for a moment he is back there. Sitting somewhere in the South District, high up enough to see across the Straits. The deep green of the Mediterranean. No sound but a passing seagull and the muted echo of a ship’s horn.

And his eyes close to see himself back there months ago, with the sailor he met by Europa Bay. The same age as him, nineteen, and already around the world twice over. The heat that day was singular and unexpected. He knew a place, he told the fleeting visitor. They climbed down rocks and left their clothes in the cove. The water looked too good. The sailor closer to him in the sea. Closer still, and a mouth on his cheek, then his lips. Hands underneath reaching for each other. Up the slick, wet, strong arch of his back and on his shoulders. Then a shout in the distance and a figure looking down on them from the rocks. A promise, a desperate call out that they were just playing around but none of it any use. The gossip made its way down Main Street in a matter of days. The sailor long gone for another port. America then, his papá said. Wrapped up in the promise of a new start. When they put him on the ship it felt like they were throwing him away to save themselves the shame.

He opens his eyes and thinks of himself, here. Central Park. New York City. Where things are bigger and taller and grander and impossible but real. Right in the middle of life and the future. With whatever is to come. The two boys still rowing on the boat. People passing in flashes and disappearing forever. He’s seen so many faces.

A boy passes in a white linen suit, a glimpse of the angle of his nose and then from behind, soft blonde curls trailing out of his hat down the nape of his neck. A view he kept and memorised from nights onboard while he pretended to sleep. James! he calls out, James! The boy never turns. Anthony stands up the boy is gone, into the background of the park. And now he’s not so certain it was James. But he stands there, feeling the lips against his cheek that he should have turned to welcome.

A family pass by. A boy about his age trailing behind them. He looks at Anthony and smiles, who smiles back. He sits on the bench again and watches the boy walk away. The boy turns and smiles again before turning out of view. This changing, growing city so full of promise. Someday a chance to be brave enough to reach for it. He opens the newspaper and reads about distant wars.

AIDS Editor's Pick online fiction short fiction

Someone to Love Me

by Ron-Tyler Budhram • March 28, 2021March 28, 2021

I’m sure it started when I met Andrew Friday night downtown, on the way to a place I discovered following some older men. They paraded to the Eagle’s Nest bar like Toms of Finland in black leather, five or so of them. Curls of body hair poked from around the edges of their vests and suggested a general unruliness. That’s not right, forgive me. It was more like they exuded a kind of assurance and, for cowardly young men like me, a little of their bravery was infectious.

I followed in their smoke trails, along the waves of their laughter, their bickering and chatting. One of them turned over his shoulder to look me up and down. I glanced at the sharp angle of his jaw.

“You okay?” Andrew affected a Texan twang. “It’s dangerous in these parts, so you follow us.”

I looked down.

“That there’s a million-watt smile, son!” he said, and when he caught my eyes he was triumphant. “Almost there.”

“I’m Mahan,” I said, but I got no answers back and felt stupid, and dug my fingernails into my palms for feeling this way.

Andrew said he would buy me a drink.

There was an old woman at the entrance in sweats, collecting two-dollar covers. She didn’t even look at me with them. She was unconcerned. She became a part of this living fantasy of true liberty, calling us things like sweetie and honey. Andrew and I eased into corner seats at the black bar, which matched the black walls. His friends disappeared into a metal hole downstairs, but he stayed. He allowed me to request a whiskey sour. He asked, what’s a young man like me doing walking around alone. “Place like this. Night like this,” he said.

My answers were typical things. I had just gotten my degree in architecture at the University of Kansas. My parents knew only of my grades and were shocked when I told them, rather than asked, about moving to the city. What will you do there, how will you live, my mother pleaded. I need you here with me because I worry, she’d cried. I told her I had been directionless. I whimpered to her that this direction was the first one I cared for. She waved me goodbye on the driveway as I backed out. I made the 40-hour trip to New York City from Kansas City in my car, an old green Dodge—in which I was currently staying. I never came out to my mom.

I reported all of this to Andrew in rambling words and cut-up phrases because he didn’t stop me. Attentively, he watched me drink from the straw. Wrinkles around his eyes and on his forehead convinced me he knew everything there was for me to know—not such a farfetched fantasy to buy into. The men he came in with, nowhere to be seen, were all the same. They’d all looked to be in their 40s.

“You’re not out to your family? Is it your culture?” he asked. “Do you have a boyfriend?”

A muscular man behind the bar slid me a second drink, and because I looked him in the eyes, he murmured the word “sugar” at me.

“I don’t have a boyfriend, I never have,” I said, avoiding the topic of my ethnic identity. “And my mom is a Christian. Once, she told me, ‘Gay people go to hell.’ I never got to tell her about me, but I wanted to.”

“Wow. I’m sorry.” He tapped his glass with two fingers. His eyes fixated on the bar’s black surface, directly in front of my body, and he settled into a momentary daze. I ventured to ask what he did for a living. He said he was a fashion designer. But he lived off his investments.

“I have an art collection.” He leant towards me and said confidentially, “An art collection is the best investment you can have. No depreciation. Astronomical increase in value.” His hand was hot over mine. “I’d like to show it to you, if you want to see it.”

“I want to see it.”

Andrew led me deep into The Eagle’s Nest, through roiling clusters of men seemingly stuck together in black corners. He grabbed one of his friends by the elbow, and that Blondie song, “Call Me,” drowned out their shouts. I followed him back to the entrance, where the same song blasted from a Firebird cruising past us down the street. He got us a taxi, and we sang it all the way to Central Park South, “Cover me with kisses, cover me with love, roll me in designer sheets, I’ll never get enough…”

I never thought I was attractive, but Andrew said I was beautiful. Over and over he said this to me, and his flattery worked on me. In my experience, older men were infinitely better in bed than any of the men I’d seen my own age. They knew my body in ways even I didn’t, and they knew their own bodies and their own limitations in ways I found humbling for them. He breathed me in and closed his eyes, and he had a faint musk that brought to mind the way my father smelled when I buried my face into him as a child. Aftershave, alcohol, smoke. His mouth seemed to take the slightest direction from mine. His chest and stomach hair grazed against my face as I went down. He held my head. He threw me on the bed.

The door creaked open. I glanced behind me at two of Andrew’s friends stripping away their leather, which fell to the floor with soft flops. I felt chest hair on my back and lips on my shoulders. I felt the waves of drunkenness slide along my ears, the lapping of hot tongues, and I lost myself in pleasure. Over the course of the night, the action and the rest, all three of the strange men, shot up something up into their arms in the spare rooms, and I only glanced at the needles before Andrew steered me away. Farther down the hallway back to his room he said, “You don’t need to see any of that.” Unquestioningly filled the role of protector, of daddy.

In fact, I realize now that I was wrong about him and his friends before. What I meant was—if they were in this room with us, moving with us—if I moved from one to the other of them and took them all in, then there was no limit to what I could accomplish with other people in this moment here and now. Right now we were harmonious; we were drugged by the inherent power imbalance of our dynamic, by expertise as leverage.

Outside of that moment, though, I was glad to never see these men again because I know they must return to their lives. I know that, for them, I was reduced to my figure, to what I was: a slim boy of brown skin; soft South Asian hips and skinny calves; a suppleness; a passing flavor generally irrelevant when they have only the limbs of a toy doll in their bored and lonely hands.

Bravely, I never left the next morning. And, still naked together after his friends had gone, the fault was solely mine. We hadn’t used condoms; none of them could get it up while wearing one. I couldn’t do anything about it now, it was done. A potentially dire mistake; but at least there wasn’t anything that wasn’t treatable. Andrew asked me if I’d like to come back. He said we could all have fun again. He said I’d have a friend in him, even if I wasn’t willing.

“You want to be my friend?” I asked him.

“Yes. You are that good.”

He said I had potential and would do great things, but I rolled my eyes.

Andrew didn’t tell me to go. He let me use his bathroom. He let me see that everything in his kitchen was copper: the faucets and fastenings, the fridge, and about a hundred hanging pots and pans over an island with a built-in wine cooler. He was frying me eggs in a lush, blue-velvet robe, passing me a tray with lines of white dust. I refused both but took a fat blunt from the rim of an ashtray and lit it.

One of his gallery walls boasted unabashed value; his acquisitions were jaw-dropping. Not on this wall, but on others, there was a literally curvy lady in a 1926 Picasso, and the very striking blocks and lines and color in a work by Dubuffet. And then there were a few works by Monet. I walked among them and Andrew talked to me about the World Wars and the decadence following each one. How some of these artists worked and thrived during times of excess, how they worked harder and faster in the economic decay of depression, the ‘30s and ‘70s. He said it was like time repeated itself on a loop.

I said it was more like a spiral, since people just seem to get more and more fucked up.

We stopped near a self portrait of Basquiat, who Andrew called a modern genius, “Someone who expressed an “acute collective trauma, or an ingrained trauma that keeps us suffering.” He said the man in the artist’s self portrait assumed a “caveman warrior stance,” holding an arrow among the skyscrapers of a city. The man seemed to extend his fury beyond the border of the frame where, on the ceiling, spots of water damage bloomed like shadows, death for this art collection. Left untended, the damage would spread and then rot. Some was already creeping onto the wall. I heard a drop of water in a bucket.

I mentioned the water damage, and he moaned he didn’t know what the world was coming to. “I’m going to have to store all of this. Soon,” he said, eyes blazing. He waved a hand at the man with an arrow. “You know, there are some really dirty men who want to just piss all over everything? Those maintenance people keep putting me off, and you know why? There’s homeless people in the apartments above me, know why? New management. New property owners. They want us out, and they want to demolish. Well, I already talked to the neighbors about the best real estate lawyers in the area, and we’re dealing with this.” He breathed deeply as if to calm himself.

“Why don’t you just move?”

“Move?” he said. “No one’s moving, I know all their lawyers are already involved, and mine too. It’s the principle, the principle.”

Andrew had a view of the foliage that had me transfixed in the corner, at the French window, staring out at the design of Central Park. I admired the deliberate placement of everything, the demand that nature adapt around the paths, its graffitied fountains, its castle. I traced the swift progress of runners in ear-warming bandannas. I watched dogs fixate on one out of millions of scents, stopping their owners for important messages. The park was radiant from greens to reds now that the weather had taken a turn. Everyone was out in New York City at its best.

“Who am I kidding? They’re gonna tear it all down. Demolish it, and then up will go the luxury condos.” He opened a drawer underneath the record player and pulled out a gold-and-silver watch, a Rolex. He turned to me with an affectionate smile, as, deep down, the coke inspired an idea brilliant and pure. “You could stay here. I know you’re looking for a place. You could live here with me in your room. I’m only here for a short while. Obviously.”

“I don’t know, Andrew. You’re so fabulous.” Life would be too fabulous, I told him.

“But I find you to be a peaceful presence,” he said. He passed me the Rolex. It shone a soft, silken gold. “Take it. Sell it. It’ll be your deposit.”

I was dumbfounded. “Please. I don’t know what you mean by this. It’s too generous.”

“Nothing. I don’t care about it. What I do care about, is you.”

I laughed in his fervent face. “What the fuck?”

He sighed. “You have enormous potential. You can do anything you want as a young, educated, and cultivated person. I see someone I could love one day.” He moved his hand from my ass to my shoulder and locked eyes with me. “Someone I could trust. It’s true.”

“Oh. God.”

“It’s true.”

I sprawled myself on the lush throw pillows of his purple-velvet fainting couch. His watch dangled from my finger.

“You love this,” said Andrew, smiling and looking back at me. “Don’t lie.”

“Oh yeah. It’s been a lot of fun. You didn’t say anything at all about your friends joining us after The Eagle’s Nest. I thought, oh. This is how it must be in New York.”

“I’m so sorry. I should have.”

“Yeah. You should have.”

“Sorry. Really. I thought we could all have fun.”

“It’s only my self-esteem.”

He walked over and closed my hand around the watch. “Take it.” He watched me looking at it.

I said I’d seen an ad for a new job at the Central Park Conservancy. Landscaping, renovation, some volunteering. They’d been working on Belvedere Castle. I could do that, I wanted to do that. If I could manage to get something like that, it wouldn’t pay much, but it would be what I studied. Right now, I only had my dwindling savings: almost $2,000 in the bank, near $300 stashed in the cushion of my car’s passenger seat, and $35.50 in my pockets, on his floor. It was everything I had to show from being a produce boy at the JL’s in Lawrence through college, and a cashier before that. And I had this watch. My mom would have hated someone so wasteful, so out of touch.

I thanked him for being willing to help so generously. I thought that, maybe, experiencing someone else’s generosity could be the greatest pleasure there was—for both of us.

“So you want to make a mark on this city,” he mused, standing over me. His eyes focused on mine as if he could infuse me with the importance of such a thing. “Manhattan is changing, you know. They are cleaning it up. It’ll be beautiful. Safer. And you’ll be a part of that.”

It sounded like as good a direction as any for me to take. Something to be ambitious about. As long as there was a direction, and a place I could call my own, I thought I would be happy. I felt like I never used to know where I was going, unless it was to school.

Andrew was exceedingly kind to me, and he was over generous. He let me stay in one of the spare rooms, which are all empty except for beds. He liked that I could converse with him freely and deeply, and he talked to me about topics in art and culture, treating me as a mentor would, his protégé in all things including sex. He had me under his constant supervision, so he didn’t really have to trust me. But this freedom still felt unadulterated, somehow pristine and effortless. It was more prideful and lustful than I’d ever let myself feel before arriving in the city. We went back to the Eagle’s Nest a few times. I read his fashion books aimlessly and looked at his art collection until he ordered it all to be stored away. Eventually, the place was completely empty, except for my bed, and I’d been high on his weed for a while now.

But now it must have been the third week, and I was in my bed. I was conscious only of my movements and my sounds, which slipped out from me in low moans across the room. The moans couldn’t be seen, bouncing off the wall, but they turned the room into an eternal block of space. In dreams my body writhed with men, shifting floppily onto each sweaty mount and, all at once, I gasped for air as Andrew’s face smashed into mine. It grazed into my skin, pushing in my eyes and contorting my nose, suffocating me with a tongue too thick, with rough buds like fine gravel combing throughout my mouth. Deeper and too deep and too big. Andrew demolished my body with an avid strangeness shocking and mechanical in its rhythm.

I flinched away from the corner wall after making skin-to-skin contact with it. The daylight burned my eyes but illuminated some dead tulips on the windowsill. It cast a shadow on the water-damaged wall, creating a patch of deep darkness where I dreamed the room would begin a slow, moldy implosion of priceless art and the whole building finally came down. I realized my body was run down. I was horribly sick. Dreams came and went like the rotation of a carousel.

In moments when my body was defenseless, that was when I got taken advantage of. I sat in bed alone, remembering when I was nine, and in the pediatrician’s office I saw an x-ray of my lungs. Three-quarters of my lungs are contaminated by pneumonia. I heard the words “this can kill,” and I dreamt those words. My frame was slight, like the stem of a dandelion. I walked hand-in-hand with my mother and she shot me murderous glances even though I hadn’t done anything wrong. This time it was her fault, and I knew so the minute she looked away from my eyes. Had she been judging herself? Blaming herself for letting my health get away from her?

She was attentive before and after this, always an aggressive caregiver. When she looked at me in the parking lot I imagined she saw her own failing. My body was beholden to her. My frailty, then, was both our fault.

Images came ghostly and grotesque, images of men who’d entered into my life only to disappear from it—and when I died, there would be nothing, no more memory for me. Sometimes I was like that: I had nothing but feelings left in Andrew’s room. I felt the helplessness of standing by, of lying down, looking at the water damage infecting a building set for total destruction. I felt sickness picking me off.

I felt the cold in my bones. Tonight, the heat was out. I dreamt I was at a party gone terribly wrong. First the little things went bad. The party had run out of ice. And yet Andrew and the tenants of the building and their lawyers got along drunkenly-joyously, as if they were joking in court over grievances and emotional distress. And the owners of the new luxury condos, those old white goons in orange toupées, they spread gasoline in long, piss-yellow arcs. The pockmarked ringleader dropped a very expensive lighter, and flames engulfed 100 Central Park South. Flames propelled out the windows. Bodies flared up and burned away into the city’s atmosphere. I felt the fire slicking along the sinews of my muscles.

I was six and still sleeping with my parents. The ceiling fan twirled high from steepled beams, and I watched the spinning blades from a state of paralysis. I heard my mother’s giggles fluttering over the large body of my father, and together they hid their secrets under the sheets. They hid everything until randomly there was a rapid stomping around the bed. In the middle of the night my father was drunk and dazed, half-asleep, and, with a sharp punch and a pop to the face, he released her from a fitful sleep. She sobbed. I was powerless to move for a decent breath. I felt suffocation, and I burned with the agony inflaming my muscle tissue.

I dreamt I was in Central Park with Andrew and it looked as though a dust bowl had settled over the Great Lawn. Only small patches of green could be seen across the expanse. Nearby, there was a group of boys, probably done with school for the day, massed and cheering around something going on—I couldn’t see past them until one boy shifted to reveal a couple of humping dogs.

A din of low chirping came from the bush by the phone booth. The glass door opened.

“Excuse you,” said a woman with an Afro and hoop earrings. I stepped out of her way and then entered. My coins clattered in the machine, and I dialed, and when the line stopped ringing I gasped a little too involuntarily.

“Hi, son.”

“Hi mom. I miss you.”

“You need to call more. Gone for all this time, and I know nothing. What have you been doing? Are you eating enough?”

“I’ve been eating fine. Everything is fine.”

“Do you know how much I worry?”

I recoiled from the accusation in her voice. “I’m sorry. I’ll call more often.”

“Don’t just call when you have something to tell me. I need you to call even when you don’t have nothing to say.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Do you know that I don’t sleep at night? Thinking of you in that city. Why do you want to be by yourself? I don’t know why you want to pay rent.”

“But how are you doing?” I ask her. “Are you ok there?”

“Same old thing. Your father is a drunk.”

She needed me. “Do you want me to come home?” My nails dug into the grooves of the receiver’s metal cord.

She doesn’t respond for a few seconds, but only breathes. “You would really come home?” she said.

“Yes.”

Again, she doesn’t respond for a bit. “No. You live your life, son. I’ll be fine here.”

“Really?”

“I won’t allow it.”

I want to reach through the phone and wrap my arms around her shrinking frame. I take a breath and feel a thrill.

“I’ve been spending a lot of time with a new friend,” I said, wiping my nose with my sleeve. “A best friend. He helped me move in. His name is Andrew…he and I… He’s more than my friend.”

I heard more of her breathing, and a slight crackle on the line.

“I think I could love him,” I said. “That’s all.”

“Does he treat you well?”

“He treats me very well. We take care of each other. He’s good. Are you, I mean, are you okay? Do you have any questions?”

“Are you taking care of yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Does he have a job?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s the only thing that matters. That’s all I ever cared about.” She paused on the phone. Now she was the one crying, a quiet and distant shudder. “You always did what I told you. You’re a good boy. Do you need anything from me?” She wanted off the line.

“Well, alright, mom. I better get going.” I told her I loved her, and replaced the receiver.

Stepping out of the booth I tripped on my own foot and fell into the chirping bush. Its sparrows clamored around me and flew away into the sky. Andrew lifted me, cradling my upper back with his hand.

We started walking deeper into the Park. The cherry trees were in blossom, shedding petals on the path.

“I just told my mom.”

“You did?”

“I thought it was going to go all wrong…but it didn’t.”

He said it was good for me. My chest still seemed warm from the whole interaction, but I didn’t know what to say to him. He seemed content, happy in the silence with me. He took in the beautiful day. We walked past the weeping willows of Turtle Pond and its gliding swans.

“How is your mom? How did she react when you told her…?” he said. We walked up to the turrets of an improved, graffiti-free Belvedere Castle, my very own mark on the city. It was a project I had overseen to completion, a new crown jewel. I broke a sweat climbing its winding steps to the top, and we looked down at half the rectangle of Central Park: Shakespeare’s Garden; the theatre; and the woods of the Ramble.

Andrew looked so openly at me. “When I came out, my mom screamed, ‘But you’re my son!’ We never talk about it.”

I was effusive. “My mom cried. She said she wanted me to be happy. It’s been such a fantasy.”

“Like a dream.”

“Am I going to wake up?”

#FlashFriday flash fiction micro fiction short fiction

LONGING

by Litro • March 26, 2021May 22, 2021

Photo by Alexander C. Kafka (copied from Flickr)

How strange to think of life in your bedroom, staring at the wall, or at the kitchen window, waiting for the kettle to boil; to remember dark days after work, pinned between familiar, leering houses, listening to your shoes cluck against the pavement; to feel, like a child tugging at your trousers, the pull of washed-out streets on old postcards, or see an object from another place and not know what it is made from or what it is used for and get a burning in your temple; and to think, because you never stop thinking – in unmoored sensation, in mad scenes of excess and relaxation and tangerine sunlight – to think one day a stranger would grip you by the wrist in a bar in St Petersburg, the most romantic city in the world, and make it clear with serious, marble eyes they sat in yellow rooms on rainy days and dreamed about your life.

I can’t sleep: in my head I drive across America, wearing Francoise Hardy sunglasses, adjusting the hem of my sleeveless dress in over-air-conditioned petrol stations, buying bad coffee in tall cardboard cups and moreish doughnuts I unstick one by one from the dashboard, stopping in crossroad towns and causing a sensation, scandalising the chubby mothers driving their children to Little League; I lean on bars and lie about my heritage, my name, everything, pretend I play the sax, until I am drinking homebrew on monstrous farm machinery late into the evening and watching fireflies spasm like schools of fish across the humming fields, glancing from face to face, deciding which of the factory men, the fat-strong sweaty men that live in these towns, deserves me, the most glamorous woman they have ever seen.

I sit at home, at the dinner table, in the other room, laughing with my husband, doing funny voices, talking about the news; I offer myself nightly, taking him with my hand and putting him inside of me, trapping him there, talking constantly of the children we will have and the names we will give them, showing pictures of houses in the areas of town with the best schools and most pleasant parks; I suspect him of taking hot baths in order to make himself infertile, and worry he may leave out of an unbidden longing of his own.

by Dorothy Cornish.

online fiction short fiction

The Provision of Benches

by greg forshaw • March 21, 2021March 21, 2021

Manhattan that white winter. The pavement froze over, the citizenry died of the cold upstate, the moon was a skull. Or so Robbie saw it, saw it, rather than scanning for randoms on the scrunch to East River Park. Too late he noticed the woman on his adopted bench. She’d swept clear the slats and was settled on a quilt. Robbie sat anyway.

‘Thought you’d have it for your own self,’ the woman said.

The seat was his eye of the snowstorm. Even if Robbie found a cross-street empty of New Yorkers, it’d be littered with their footprints. ‘My mistake,’ he said, looking to Williamsburg over the water.

‘He ought to have been at his pop’s funeral.’

‘Who?’ Robbie heard himself saying.

‘My pop. This bench is dedicated to my gramps, Cas. It’s tough when family lose touch.’

‘You reckon?’ Now she said so, Robbie saw the plaque but didn’t turn to it, to her.

‘You’re wondering, it’s Casimir Herbert, 1927-2014. The lost are borne on seas of shipwreck home at last. You can damn near see his house from here!’

‘Casimir’s?’

‘Auden’s! Way over on Montague Street,’ she said. ‘You don’t recognise me, do you?’

Now he turned. Lean, clean-featured, almond skin. It wasn’t a face you should forget. ‘I’m not long off the lander,’ he apologised, ‘bouncing round like Neil Armstrong, knowing I’ve never before stood on this spot, or this-’

‘Or at the 11^th Street Bar?’

‘Yes! How-’

‘Waitress to the one customer with the accent. It’s Jen, fyi.’

Only an ocean between the Mersey and the East River. ‘Do you want to get married, Jen?’

‘Haven’t been there either?’

‘Yes and no,’ he said.

‘You’re wondering anything else, just ask.’

‘Does it ever stop snowing?’

The joys of sitting weren’t lost on someone who stood for a living. Robbie worked at the Vanderlay on the Upper East Side. His green card – if he’d had one – would state his ‘extraordinary ability’ to stand and to speak. That accent of his, opening doors, closing them again. But the snow helped, its brilliant reversal, making all bright things quiet and all quiet things bright – making the reek of frankfurters and fried onions seem Michelin-starred, say. Central Park! Robbie was sure he could smell its Sabrett hot-dogs, could hear its wildlife centre. And there he stood all the day long in Manhattan’s hungering roar.

Jen needed no such help.

‘I’ll see you at the ballgame Wednesday,’ she’d said, by way of goodbye. Meaning the footy, Liverpool v Real. All Robbie did was see her, bossing the bar, taking orders without taking notes, and feeding her heedless tips into the jukebox after the defeat. Early Dylan, later Thompson, only Drake.

He had to ask.

‘Fingerpickers!’

Robbie said he’d see her at the bench.

Her breath visible, Jen said, ‘You got to sit, right?’

‘I’m just trying to turn my back on Manhattan,’ he said. ‘When I can, when the rock fist isn’t offering a glass bouquet, when the Chrysler’s beak isn’t drinking the sky – then I can leave again.’

‘It’s a bird or it’s a flower, the Chrysler?’

‘Both!’

‘So, when there’s no new spots for you in this city?’

‘Yes.’

‘Could might be some while. Homeblind, my folks would call it. Or my Grammy Dreda would’ve.’

‘Is that Casimir’s wife? You didn’t say why your dad missed the funeral.’

‘Lookit,’ Jen said, baring a shell-shaped locket.

She smelt of salt water when he leant in to crack the case. One pearly half was empty, the other framed not a face but the rear of a couple who were arm-in-arm on a street of shops. ‘Is that their best side?’

‘Yes and no!’

Her voice in his ear, her body counterweight to the locket. The photo was striking, actually, all verticals and horizontals, the lowered awnings under a lowering sky countered by the upright couple, Dreda hour-glassed and accessorised, Casimir shot-cuffed and Brylcreemed.

‘Like it’s from the fifties,’ Jen said, ‘here on the Lower East Side. Summer if you can imagine. The original was in Look and we’ve about decided Kubrick took it. Before he staged the moon landings! I picture Dreda and Cas walking out the photo to his family’s place, a tenement not five blocks distant.’

Robbie released the case – and Jen. ‘One of the world’s great cities but everyone’s living in a bloody village.’

‘Got un-great ambitions too. Cas’s was seeing Dreda in her stockinged feet and slip, better than bare somehow because you could really look,’ she smiled. ‘They made it way before this quilt was finished! In lust and in a rush. Though when their boy Bryan – my pop – was likewise, up with some shopgirl from Poughkeepsie, he wasn’t getting no wedding quilt.’

‘So Bryan dumped her?’

‘Dumped them, more like,’ Jen said. ‘He had some half-assed seventies wedding. Them and Elvis without Elvis. Didn’t take. Couple years later came my mom, then me, then another divorce, then nothing. When Dreda fell ill Bryan confirmed the worst for Cas by refusing his mom’s bedside.’

‘Bryan must regret that.’

‘Cas for damn sure regretted lying to Dreda. Their boy was coming, hold on now, hold on. Her service, like his, was blocks away, worlds away. Latin mass, sermon in Polish. So why’d their story matter to me? I wandered off and found this here spot in answer.’

‘You paid for the plaque?’

‘Sure! Like there’s byelaws on benches. One in Central Park’ll set you back seven thousand and change. It’s not even about that there – it’s the opposite of broken windows, you know? Unbroken benches.’

‘Because I noticed, in work, you don’t need to write anything down to remember it.’

‘Natural-born waitress!’ she said. ‘You noticed.’

‘No. I mean. At home, when someone dies tragically, early or off a bridge or on a verge, mourners leave photos and flowers. Whereas a bench will outlive us both. Or will me, anyway.’

‘I want to remember, and I don’t want to be the only one to.’

Lost to Newcastle. Lost to Chelsea. The sunlight was almost celebratory on the river, and on the snow beside it, yet they were scrunching away from the bench, past her bar, to a playground farther up 11^th Street. Through a chain-link fence pixelated ballers sported in the half-cleared court. Robbie was showing Jen why Manhattan. Graffitied on the adjacent school was a rhino as seen by a fly, huge fizzing jewelled reds and blues.

‘We came here on a city-break, Carly and I,’ he said. ‘Fifth Avenue, a Broadway show, the new masters at MOMA. All shopping really. Money in and experience out. Next! Carly was eyeing Dubai, her start-up, a family. But nothing was next.’

‘Did you know anyone, have contacts or folks here?’

‘I knew where the airports were.’

She looked at him levelly. ‘Safe in your spacesuit?’

‘I’m reminded of Durer’s rhino.’

‘It’s got six horns, lookit!’

‘Not accurate but right,’ Robbie said. ‘Who’s responsible, one of that lot? If I’d done this I’d own it. Except I couldn’t have done it. That’s this city. Can be owned, can’t be bought on a city-break. The yes and then the no. Do something!’

‘You know those prehistoric French caves?’ Jen said. ‘Full of finger paintings, like little kids make. Idn’t hard to leave a mark.’

‘I had a bench where the Mersey meets the Irish Sea. But the sands were on the move. Beneath were ancient clay beds bearing footprints. 5,000 years old and undone by the next tide.’

‘You must miss home this time of year.’

‘November?’

‘Thanksgiving!’

‘I’m not a family man,’ Robbie said. ‘We should do something. Like find your dad.’

‘Or your green card?’

He only smiled.

‘No one’s lost, Robbie. Pop wasn’t never. Aunt Hannie eventually gave up where his cold-water place was, in Greenpoint. Damnedest thing was pop’s tv room. No tv. No nothing. Four walls, a shuttered window, all painted this thick lacquered black, into which was scratched the same phrase over and over.’

‘Saying what?’

‘We don’t know,’ Jen said. ‘Like it’s a spell in Arabic or Syriac, from where we were at way back, the desert or something.’

‘What was Bryan trying to keep out, the city?’

‘We’ve about decided he was trying to keep something in. That’s the trick, idn’t it? The sands are always on the move. Families are. Though Bryan’s not choosing that. He was in Bellevue before Hannie set him up in her basement.’

‘So he’s recovering?’

‘Pop’s on meds. A music-therapy program also. Breaking your hands, they call it. Finding new patterns. He’d grown his right thumbnail real long, for scratching out the spell. I mean I never saw it, the admitting nurse cut it, but the nail’s not gone for me. So hard it was like horn,’ she said, tapping the rhino’s head again and again.

Jen received him at her third-floor Williamsburg walk-up, small, shared, though she was alone this evening. Her mocha-brown hair was down, and under an apron she wore khakis and a cream blouse. The prickle of grilled meat and fried onions reminded Robbie of Central Park. ‘Smells good.’

‘Come on through. Shit!’ She bent to peer; the grill’s electrics had died.

‘I like it bloody.’

‘You truly don’t, fyi. It’s myoglobin and water. I’ll let the steaks rest. Sit, sit. Or put on some music. Stereo’s in back.’

Instead of selecting a cd, Robbie just switched on the machine. Piano sounded. The view from her window was of other windows, lit butter-yellow against the breath-held blue of the sky. Both seemed cheerier than the whited ground.

‘Crack it open, why don’t you,’ Jen said as she served up the garnished sirloin and crisp roast veg.

He freed the window. ‘I can’t remember when someone last cooked for me. Someone I know, you know.’

‘Have at it.’

He finished first and watched her eat. Jen let him. She was trembling, though Robbie thought it was warmer. There hadn’t been heavy snow for weeks. ‘Shall I close the window?’

‘I’m not cold, I’m pregnant.’

‘It’s not mine,’ he heard himself say.

‘What?’ Jen pushed back her chair; she wasn’t showing. ‘No, forget I said.’

‘Me too.’

The sonatas, at least, were careful.

‘He recorded these over on 30^th Street,’ Jen said.

‘Who?’

‘Glen Gould. It was all guitar when I was a girl but the piano, his anyways, it feels evolved. You know another thing that separates us from the apes?’ She cupped the air above her groin. ‘A bowl-shaped pelvis.’

‘There’s that photo from the moon of Earth where it resembles an upended blue bowl.’

‘This here one helps our gait but hinders our birth,’ she said. ‘And me a natural-born waitress, knocked up by a barfly, shit. In lust and in a rush.’

‘Breaking your hands is hard.’

‘Idn’t it? Forget I said, I’ll be easy again come next week. You got kids, Robbie?’

‘I can’t.’

‘Oh, I’m-’

‘I’m sorrier about the partner I used to have than the kids I never will.’

‘But you did something, adopted?’

‘Did my nut. All the nexting – the bedroom rotas, the ICSI, the social workers. Then the accident. Before Carly went before the panel.’

‘Sorry.’

Funny, Robbie thought. You lived to hear that once. Twice and you were sick of it, though all you made was mistakes, and all you could do was apologise. ‘I should’ve been in the car and the whole village knows I wasn’t. I should’ve been with her anywhere. I shouldn’t be here.’

‘New York City?’

‘Your apartment,’ he said. ‘See you Sunday.’

Liverpool lost again, to Man U, but unjustly. He didn’t see Jen. Perhaps there’d been a problem with the abortion. Which was the upshot of what she’d asked, of how he’d answered.

Robbie tried the bench. She wasn’t there either. Nor was it. He scrunched around until his brain adjusted. Where their seat had been was a crater of snowmelt and blackened prom. Robbie thought irrationally of Bryan, undoing his pop. Yes and no.

Another of the Vanderlay’s doorman had a carpenter nephew with a narrow shop off Bleecker. When idle, Gio would sit outside all weathers in a chair he’d made from white oak, ‘like they built the ships with’. Robbie went the Monday after the Sunday.

‘You sure, Robbie?’

‘I can afford it, if your uncle takes that holiday in the islands he’s promising your auntie.’

‘No, you ready? Because in this town they ain’t sitting on no bench. They gonna trick on it, tag it and cut it. They gonna ain’t give a fuck who it’s for. Pigeons gonna shit on it, dogs gonna piss on it. You ready for all a that? Because I ain’t no LL Bean.’

‘I think so, Gio.’

‘Take at least a week, you change your mind.’

‘A week!’

‘Ain’t no Ikea neither.’

The Nets were on, and Robbie had brought craft Brooklyn beer round to Gio’s shop.

‘Them Raptors gonna clean our clock. We Liverpool!’ Gio couldn’t watch, and was planing slats instead. The sheltering smell of cut worked wood was everywhere.

‘I didn’t tell you the best part, Gio. You’re helping me put the bench where it belongs.’

‘Say what?’

‘We’ll go after closing, when it’s good and dark.’

‘The fuck we will!’ Gio said. ‘You trying to get us arrested? We do it in daylight like Christians.’

Lunchtime the following Monday, they secured the bench onto a borrowed flatbed, and donned high-vis tabards and hard hats. Gio double-parked on the loop off Avenue D.

‘Watch your step, Robbie.’

Forget his feet, Robbie’s hands weren’t right for this. He’d been a glorified clerk in Liverpool. The bench was sly as a giant slinky between them, light and heavy, easy and awkward. The distance stretched. Nobody noticed them, not the dog-walkers, not the Santa-hatted jogger who crunched past. As with Robbie’s green card, everyone assumed you were legit or didn’t care that you weren’t.

‘Where at?’ Gio said.

‘That clear area there.’

The bench was a lazy J of oak, the slats quarter-sawn and honey-coloured in the weak December sun. Gio got a grease-papered deli sandwich from his pocket and sat. He cocked his head up at his colleague.

Robbie returned to the bench whenever possible, ready to apologise or tell her what J stood for, was a spell for, but Jen never came. Why would she? That skull was back in the sky and he thought of the footprints on it forever.

He tried the bar, then her apartment. No answer. When Jen returned home, bundled up, he couldn’t tell if she was any bigger.

‘What,’ Jen didn’t ask.

‘I made a mistake.’

‘You think? You were right.’

‘I’m never right,’ Robbie said. ‘Our bench, you did that?’

‘It’s all about you!’ she laughed. The laugh became grief.

‘Jen?’ He wiped her tears but more came.

‘Pop was progressing some, growing out his nails to pick guitar with, getting off of his meds. He took that horn thumbnail to his own throat. Happy Holidays!’

‘I’m-’

‘Didn’t want to be no gramps. There’s nothing new here, Robbie. Go home.’

But sit yourself in someone’s life and let them come to you. Ask them to.

‘Gio, can you get the truck again?’

‘I doan wanna know.’

‘Gio-’

‘I’m a do it, Robbie. I doan wanna know why.’

They retrieved the unbroken bench, dropped it outside Jen’s. Where it didn’t belong and then did.

‘You leaving, Gio?’

He’d already started the truck, having got a ticket last time. ‘You ain’t?’

Robbie was drinking from the bowl when they came for him.

‘See some ID, sir?’

He hadn’t heard them roll up. Unmarked van, uniformed men. ICE. Appropriate, though the officer had bare-arms, blue-ink veins, skin that seemed to steam.

‘Sir, driver’s licence, green card?’

‘I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,’ Robbie smiled.

‘You aware what we’re about here, sir?’

‘You’re checking I’m a citizen. I’m not.’

‘We know it.’

Ah, Jen, Jen. Snow spilled from the sky like ticker tape.

#FlashFriday flash fiction micro fiction short fiction

STOP MAKING SENSE

by Nick Olson • March 19, 2021March 19, 2021

Photo by Ian Burt (copied and adapted from Flickr)

I took the last picture I still have of you with a cracked old Polaroid we found at a yard sale in Andersonville. I think I copped it for like five bucks, but I don’t remember exactly. I do remember that I got that and a VHS copy of Stop Making Sense, and you dug your old VCR out of storage, and we decided while watching it that the Talking Heads were the coolest fucking thing to ever happen to music, and we stayed up way past five a.m., and the sex was still new. We were figuring it all out.

I drank with you even though before you I was sober for a couple years. I never told you that, never told you any of it. I think the self-hatred lent something unique to the dynamic. So we drank.

Back then, my gender identity wasn’t something I consciously gave much thought to. I tried not to, anyway. But you’d see the way I watched you put on that deep red, that ashen gray, and there I sat, soon enough, in front of your light-switch, ultra-magnify makeup mirror, and you put foundation on past my stubble, shadowed my eyes into something more striking than I thought possible on my face, and later that night, long after you’d shown me how to use makeup wipes to get it all off, I cried for how beautiful you’d made me, what that meant to the image I had of who I could be. And when I came back out and you asked about my red eyes, I said I must’ve gotten too close with the wipe. I’d get it right with practice. You agreed.

Your roommate took me to my first gay bar. I wasn’t sure of the etiquette, proper decorum. I didn’t really know who I was, and you didn’t come with us. I think you had to work or something. You’d told him about my experimentation, so he brought along a mini kit and applied what he could to my face on the Uber over, passing streetlights as guide. He paused on my lips. Had to consider. Gave them ruby, showed this in compact mirror. I was perfect. I wish you could’ve seen it.

I don’t remember what music was playing that night. It didn’t really matter. I just saw David Byrne, hot sweat, VHS damage past tracking, and I drank too much, slithering smoke, too much light, and the feel of the hot metal mouth of your roommate. The pause after, excuse to go to the bathroom, and wondering if that really just happened or if I imagined it. If I hoped for it.

I remember taking out my phone, pulling up your number. I told myself that it was too loud for a call, and a text was pointless. I put my phone away and tried to continue the rest of my night.

There was something with bass, and dancers up on mini stages in all the corners, and people who wanted to dance with me, on me. Your roommate took me aside when he could tell I was getting overwhelmed. It was actually very considerate. But then he kept buying me drinks after that, and I kept drinking them. I had a distinct image, in the middle of it all, of the time years back when I’d decided on sobriety. Of pouring bottles down the sink, one after the other. Dropping them into the garbage, first one landing hard but staying intact, the rest breaking against their brothers.

I waved your roommate off and went to the bathroom to let it all out of me.

I don’t remember much else. I know I stopped drinking after that. Got my own Uber back home, thanked your roommate but declined when he offered to ride with me. When I got home, I made myself a sandwich to blot out the burning that was left inside. I smeared the ruby, the gray, all of it all over. I didn’t have any makeup wipes.

From then on, we were loving on borrowed time. We both knew. And we played that old VHS out, do you remember? Watched David Byrne sweat through his shirt and keep going, through the cheers and applause, through it all, and the last sounds were Lynn Mabry and Ednah Holt closing out “Crosseyed and Painless,” and the way we sang along with them, “I’m still waiting . . . I’m still waiting . . . I’m still waiting . . .” And it was that night that I took the last picture I still have of you, sure enough, with a cracked old Polaroid we found at a yard sale over in Andersonville.

Central Park New York City

FROM SOMEWHERE

by Alisa Golden • March 13, 2021June 16, 2021

The calendar says, Spring, but the weather says, Nope. On the Upper East Side, the sky is grey. Central Park’s trees are stately but they still present as winter-dormant silhouettes. A low wall separates me on the city sidewalk from the green of the Park, but the starlings don’t care about boundaries, and they sit on the wall, swoop down to pavement on one side, grass another. They know on which side their bread is buttered, and they are happy to eat it, wherever it is.

I hold my camera steady and wait for them to pose. I know the starlings are commonplace here, but they are still birds, and I like flying dinosaurs, whatever kind they may be. I wished I could have seen the fancy Mandarin Duck, the “hot duck” that appeared from somewhere one year on the crescent-shaped lake, and I still yearn to, but I know he is gone. I am happy enough with the usual residents. On New York City’s streets I’ve only seen rock pigeons in a variety of color forms; although when I tilt my head back and look carefully I can pick out little sparrows, flying in and out of open traffic light poles to get to their nests. So a starling or two in the Park is welcome.

Although my map shows a solid line, it is an invisible border between the little rolling hills and lake, playing fields and tunnels, and the river of pedestrians, sea of yellow taxis, fog of street vendors with flags and bagels, and heat of buildings pressed close. Paths into and out of the Park take me to different worlds in an instant. They are the hidden swinging doors: with them, the past tags along.

Like scattered tattoos, statues mark a perceived important person, historical moment, or celebrated event. I’m both baffled and awed by the Obelisk: dubbed Cleopatra’s Needle, whose twin stands on the bank of the Thames in London, their sister in Paris. A four-way world connection, since you must include Egypt, their original home. The Obelisk, carved of red granite with now worn hieroglyphics, a kind of poetry, weighs as much as forty-five elephants, so there’s a five-way connection, if you count the elephants. A time capsule is buried beneath it containing the 1870s census, the Bible, Webster’s dictionary, a guide to Egypt, a copy of the Declaration of Independence, and the complete works of William Shakespeare. Time is fluid as the past becomes the present. What could we possibly agree to bury today?

One community agreed that the Park needs more monuments to women, adding to the already-placed fictional characters of Shakespeare’s Juliet, Alice in Wonderland, and Mother Goose. I will miss seeing the Women’s Rights Pioneers, the statue of Suffragists Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, since it has not yet been installed, and I will have to search out the Poet’s Corner another time. Within the nooks and crannies of 840 acres, the bronze head and shoulders of Irish poet, Thomas Moore is made to look taller than the short man he was, a peculiar advantage of statuary: revision. The statue is twelve feet high.

Across the Park on the West Side, much better than gazing at monuments, I encounter a living poet. The man on a bench explains that he is not a bad man; he is the Central Park Poet: a dollar a poem, or three poems for three dollars, five if you want to help out. He jokes that they let him out on Tuesdays, but I am sure he resides daily in the Park, a fixture as any statue, bench, or bird I’ve come to see. “Where you from? California? Everybody’s got to come from somewhere,” the Poet says. This is his home. I am the stranger here.

My black boots spring a hole in the heel from walking eight miles a day, joining the resident ranks on foot as much as possible, hoping to become an honorary New Yorker. Remade with every limping step and every visit, my mind map gratefully expands. I ease back into the City for a sandwich, the pigeons resolved and working around my feet.

by Alisa Golden

#FlashFriday Editor's Pick flash fiction micro fiction short fiction

NO MAN’S LAND

by Litro • March 12, 2021March 12, 2021

Photo by **Christal Yuen** (copied from unsplash)

His bottle’s gone. His power.

He turns towards The Lovely Adrienne to tell her: stall them, feed them a line. Too late, she’s already in the ring, her feathers sweeping the sawdust.

Adrienne, Bird of Paradise; her intimate fingers conjuring, beckoning him forward; fluttering their hearts, his heart, just for a moment again — even here.

“The Great Brusilov will now perform his final feat of magic, bravery and daring.”

A delighted coo. She has them in her palm.

“A feat worthy of kings and emperors.”

A butterfly hush settling. Rows of wide, expectant eyes.

A beam of light on him; he stands snared in its moon — unable to move, to perform. To replace the hollows behind those dark, staring eyes with the wonder of something which suspends belief — if only for a moment.

“Come on,” she mouths.

He remembers, three years ago — a different world — her fingers leading him along the gloomy corridor. Her featherbed eyes; her hair cascading gold.

“Mon brave,” she whispers.

He remembers: the army chaplain raising the chalice through the smoke. Always smoke.

“Drink this in remembrance of Me. Take, eat — for this is my body.”

The sun breaking through and God is with them — if only for a moment — even in this place. For Him, King and Country, we must all do our duty.

“Our duty,” she mumbles; strokes him.

The world outside; the sanctuary of her brown eyes. Her fingers touching his tongue, hair cascading gold. The scent of violets. Mumbling, reaching for him. Pouring the harsh, red wine. The ecstasy of forgetting. But now, “Don’t worry sweetheart, it happens.”

No choice now but wait for the whistle. Strings of sweat — beads of lust — congeal, grow cold.

The whistle blows. A hand on his back.

“Get out there, son; you’ve got a job to do.”

Stumbling forward, trying to conjure it back: his power, his manhood. Christ’s gold. If you believe in it all, magic can happen.

Coins of sunlight stippling the sawdust — floating across his palms.

An elephant, lumbering into the ring, lifting its head and bellowing. The audience stills.

Those tiny, pitiful eyes — as terrified as he is.

The creature heaves forward and he scrambles, searches for the power he once had to make it all disappear. For his comrades too — just for a moment. To vanish like the coins behind their ears and the rabbit hopping through the quagmire to the safety of its hole.

Along the dark corridor, closing the door. The ecstasy of forgetting.

The Lovely Adrienne (she knows, but the show must go on) still beckoning him forward.

One step — his duty. Another step — and out, out into the smoke. Great clots of earth falling around him; sky burning, a deluge of screams.

He raises his arms and it’s gone. Vanished.

An inhalation of breath — held before the final exhalation. The explosion of applause.

But the girl, the girl with gold hair, drowned in the mud of his dreams.

by Julie Oldham.

Editor's Pick online fiction relationships short stories

Roman Numeral Relationships

by Rajiv Ramkhalawan • March 7, 2021March 7, 2021

“You’ll fondly remember this particular relationship when you’re married to a solid eight with two photogenic kids (a boy and a girl), but still not complete.”

You pick up a Sally Rooney from a stack of other books and pretend to read the blurb. You finger its contours and press your thumb hard into the sharpish edges as you eye him.

He’s in front of you, in another duty-free store—but with the same loud lights and peppermint breath—perusing quirky-shaped bottles of rum and sniffing rugged scents.

Memories sift through your brain. Good and bad. But mostly memories of him planting sweeps of kisses along your clavicle; a salvo of bergamot, pink pepper, and vetiver infiltrating your patient, girlish defenses. You wonder if he still eats Milano cookies and drinks iced tea.

You consider pulling the book up to your nose each time he threatens to turn your way. But you decide that you are safe: he was never much of a reader anyway. A bookstore to him must be what a cigar shop is to you, dated and unnecessary.

He disappears and reappears between zipping travelers lugging their possessions along the reticulated patterns of cold terrazzo. The airport is frenetic even for early morning. Tired parents search for elusive departure gates. Shops overflow with customers, anxious to purchase cheap, last minute gifts. The bitter roast of coffee and the saltiness of cheese being pressed into panini sandwiches waft through the corridors of Terminal D.

He has aged as have you. His munificent locks—the ones which used to leap off his forehead with unashamed desire and tickle the coarse inclines of your eyebrows—are no more. Instead, they are replaced by a withdrawing line of thinning hair and naked patches of creamy skull. But his looks have been spared, you think; he is still attractive, still captivating enough.

What has it been, twelve years? Fourteen? You agree on thirteen and let out a chesty, counterfeit sigh. You’d always known that you’d get one of these: a glimpse, a snapshot. To return—in whatever superficial way possible—the fragments of splintered hearts which have been taped to your soul. A “moment” to rectify, to fix whatever it is that you are. But you know it does not work that way. You have always known this. For thirteen years, you remind yourself.

You play a game: Guess the girlfriend or wife.

There is a leggy, tanned blonde to his right. On her arm is a tattoo of a man who resembles a young Clint Eastwood. The tattoo artist has done justice to Clint’s popping jawline. She has too much spunk for him. You consider an Asian woman at the register—with perfectly pressed hair—but a couple of jumbo-sized boxes of Marlboro in her cart takes her out of the running. You recall that his father dropped dead from emphysema when he was nine.

Then, out of nowhere, she emerges from behind an M&M’s stall and you know it is her without the need for confirmation. Long, healthy hair, pulled into an unspectacular ponytail. Rimmed, cat-eyed sunglasses and a turtleneck—a size and a half too big for her—draped over a pair of jeans. No hint of makeup, because you reject nude lipstick as actual makeup.

He is with the person you have grown into.

She elbows him. He grins and mutters something you wish you could hear: Is this cologne too much? Think we’re gonna miss our flight if we don’t leave now? Do you know that I am broken?

You ponder whether failed relationships are really just a series of preset factory beats moving along a conveyor belt: the promising meet cute, the hurried, awkward merging of eager bodies, the petulant fights, the inevitable break up, the damaged end product.

Words like “strong” and “empowered” get bounced around in conversations with your mom and girlfriends for months, years. Whatever tales of inner peace these syrupy pow wows seemed to have nourished your brain with becomes embarrassingly undone in this moment. Thirteen years feels like thirteen minutes, and suddenly, you can smell heated mozzarella rising on a pizza in his oven that will never be eaten by the two of you. Layers of pseudo-fortitude built up by all that yoga, and reiki, and Eat Pray Love bullshit peel away, leaving you feeling bare and defenseless, like a buttery hog in the wild.

How does one truthfully reconstruct a heart to be “strong” and “empowered” when it has been stuffed to capacity long before you are even twenty-two?

You dig into Sally Rooney with your manicured fingernails and a rush of regret and anger gobble your insides. With a last look, you leave your soulmate at the airport, not wanting to, but having to.

It’s not the spewing of more fuck yous than a Scorsese flick that convinces you it’s the end, for real, this time. It’s the word anymore, tacked unassumingly onto those fucks that seems to underscore the finality of the relationship.

This is indeed the swan song: I can’t fucking do this, anymore. This isn’t fucking working, anymore. I got nothing left for you, fucking nothing, anymore.

You love her and hate her at the same time; you figure she must feel the same way about you. You’ll fondly remember this particular relationship when you’re married to a solid eight with two photogenic kids (a boy and a girl), but still not complete. Not loved in the way that you feel loved now: to the bone and blood and guts. Yet, in your arrogance and childish spite, you gamble consciously with love like this and decide that better will come along without ever considering the terrible consequences if it does not.

Baby and Shug sour into dimwit and dumbshit. Cookie rots into asshole and jackass.

You’re tired but not because it’s 3:17 in the morning. The toxic effects of marathon rants and debasing soliloquies have seeped into you and you feel dirty thinking about all the “bitches” and “fucks” and “losers” that have stained the white walls of your tiny apartment.

Finally, she rips off her engagement ring and flings it onto the table. It careens off the hardwood and makes several metallic chinking sounds before landing at the feet of your new pair of Nikes. The ones she got you for your birthday. She leaves and you pick up the ring you saved up the last seven months to get.

3:17 turns to 5:34 and she has not come back.

III

You are at a bachelorette party of a friend of a friend. In five years, you’ll ask your friend, how’s whatshername doing? The response will likely be something along the lines of: beautiful kids, city life, Fiji holidays, and a Border Collie named Luscious Purple.

The party is really a dinner at a charming restaurant in the city. All the girls drip in Gucci and Prada, except you. They sport salon styled hairdos and orthodontically corrected teeth. You don’t assume this; they speak with a cool sense of pageantry about these sterile facts in the same vein you’d expect someone to talk about a recent job promotion or the arrival of a new puppy. You notice narrow trenches of wrinkles beginning to conquer their Mediterranean kissed faces, and you worry what will become of them. You decide that you are only “worried” about these pristine creatures because you’re bored.

You almost didn’t make it tonight. The weather has been horrible all week. The kind where fat streams of water, long as snakes, gush down the edges of sidewalks and give gutters a real thrashing. You are overdue on rent and figure free food and drink is worth the downpour.

You catch whatshername smiling for no apparent reason while the other girls break off into pockets of conversations about celebrities you have only vaguely heard of. Is this how you’ll be when it’s your turn to get married? Crated in an innocuous bubble of obliviousness; a comatose state of bliss? You think and think but decide against it.

You pleasure your brain with warm thoughts of Cookie on one knee. You wonder if you’ll cry. You decide against this, too. Knowing him and his careless nature, you’ll probably discover a crumpled receipt or two, days before the day. You scold yourself: he has surprised you before. And not just once.

You are not over the moon about many things in life, but you are about him. You wonder—at the same time you catch whatshername examining her gleaming rock—whether she is over the moon about her fiancé, whom you assume to be a slippery, armpits-shaven, prick.

In the moment you realize that Cookie is the rock. He is the weight in your life. But the good kind, if there is such a thing.

The sommelier arrives with champagne: two bottles, dark juniper with silvery tops. He states in a snotty tone: Champagne Krug Clos du Mesnil Blanc de Blancs 1995, before he unwinds the muselet and impregnates the otherwise empty restaurant with boisterous pops. He says something about the champagne’s rich nutty and honey undernotes as he pours the effervescent liquid into glitzy, crystal glasses.

The girls ooh and ahh.

You recall reading that the average person can’t tell the difference between the quality of a ten-dollar bottle of champagne picked up at a supermarket from a thousand-dollar bottle bought, from, well, a restaurant like this.

You chug the bubbly and conclude that the author was right.

You are in the park, holding hands, observing color explode in the blackness above you. Red. Green. Silver. Blue. You feel the pulse in her wrist quicken—each time the flare of a brocade firework tears through the night and stretches into a wheel of dazzle—sparking up your heart.

You fall in love with her amongst choking sulphur and glittery particles. The thing you love most about loving her is the feeling of oneness, of belonging, that perhaps only an all-consuming relationship can offer. You dismiss your mother’s words of never giving your entire heart to someone, to keep a piece for yourself, for that rainy day. You question the sense in that. Especially the part where your mother says that the day does come, whether we wish to admit it or not.

There is nothing and no one like Shug. The trajectory of your life’s likes and dislikes will be shaped by her and this experience, and you submit to this truth, for better or worse. You pull Shug into you and think this moment should never end. And in some ways it never does.

It’s 7:15. He is late. You saunter around the convenience store and run your hand along a row of chips in shiny aluminum bags. One with intense neon writing steals your eyes. It says: BONKERS CHIPS. Underneath those words, in small, cursive letters it says: guaranteed to make you bonkers about something.

Even someone? you whisper.

You decide to get a slushie, but the machine is out of order. Things like this always seem to happen to you. You almost never particularly itch for something, like a Vanilla Coke or a slushie, but when you finally decide that you want one, it’s never available. Apathy morphs into necessity and you forget that you started off not really wanting the Vanilla Coke or slushie. This is how marketing must work.

The doorbell chimes and you know that he has come in. You wonder why he is late. You wonder if he has a girlfriend. He must have, you decide. How can he not? You wonder if she is waiting for him in the dim carpark. You wonder if she is pretty.

Before you realize it, he’s standing next to you and you feel giddy. This is the closest you have ever been to him. You seize the BONKERS CHIPS and start reading the ingredients: White habanero. Red Savina. Ghost Pepper. Your eyes drop lower. His sneakers are muddied and frayed. You decide that he does not have a girlfriend after all.

You know that he will grab a small pack of Milano cookies, make his way over to the fridge for an iced tea and vanish into the aisles. If you do not go in now you will have lost your chance for another week. Another week of welling agony; of constant indecision about ever returning to this store.

Before you can commit to the idea of turning to him, he turns to you and says: Are those any good…the chips?

You get lost forever in his light, brown eyes. He is even lovelier up close.

Never had them. I think you should stick to your cookies.

You realize your mistake and turn red like the party cups next to the BONKERS CHIPS. He has not reached for the cookies yet.

A CALIFORNIAN LIVING IN NEW YORK DURING COVID-19

by Michael Mohr • March 6, 2021June 16, 2021

During the coronavirus pandemic, the everyday becomes the absurd.

I was born and raised in Southern California, and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2008. Last year—after a tough breakup—I moved to New York City (a long-held dream) in late March, 2019. A writer (stories, novels) from a writing family—my mom is an author, and my uncle a novelist—I came like so many relatively “young” writers from the West (I’m thirty-seven) to The Holy Land, the universe of major publishing, literary agents, and connections.

Once here I stayed in two different Air BnBs for about five months before snagging a small two-bedroom apartment in a third-floor walkup in Harlem. The price was right. I use one bedroom for my writing/editing office—I make a living as a book editor—and the other for my bed. I moved into the apartment in early August.

I have conflicted feelings about Harlem, and about New York City as a whole. It seems common to feel this way about The Big Apple. On one hand there are so many things to do: Opera; theatre; film; literary readings; museums; art galleries; etc. You can walk around Central Park or any of the other parks all over the city. If you get bored of Manhattan—hard to do—you can just swing over to Brooklyn or Queens on the subway. There is always something.

On the flipside, and this is something I noticed immediately: People here rarely smile. I quickly learned—especially in Harlem—to lower my gaze when I walked past. Most seem to be constantly irritated and in a rush to get from A to B. There appears to be severe Tunnel Vision. I understand it to be a logical survival mechanism living in a frenzied, anarchic city.

Fast-forward to late March, 2020. I have now lived in Manhattan for over a year. I like it. I detest it. I have grown to respect it. I plan to be here at least a few more years. I joined a writing group. I have pumped out an incredible amount of prose in the past year. I understand the zombie-like gazes of people on the subway. I can even read on the subway, with all its rocking and metallic screeching.

The virus has hit us all globally, of course. But New York City has become the national epicenter. Cuomo has been telling us for weeks that we don’t have enough hospitals, enough healthcare workers, enough supplies. He’s been telling us to self-quarantine, to stay inside as much as possible, even if you are young and healthy.

In Harlem, many seem to be ignoring this. I live on West 130^th Street, at the corner of 5^th Avenue. Until about two weeks ago there were still teen and early-twenties people gathered together playing basketball. Each time they did I squirmed, sitting at my desk writing, watching them out my window. I thought about that orange ball, all the potential for contracting the virus. Finally, the city sent people to take down the hoops and lock the black iron gate putting up red COVID-19 WARNING signs.

One night when I was in bed—reading the 700-page behemoth, East of Eden, by John Steinbeck—I heard young voices in big groups, and loud noises; shouts, screams, laughs. I ignored it for a while and then gazed out my window: Groups of teens walked around in gaggles of 8-12, talking, laughing, not social-distancing, arms round each other’s shoulders, no masks, no gloves, as if it were just another Wednesday. Different groups shouted at each other. They carried bottles. It seemed like a Harlem-version’s scene from Westside Story, only this wasn’t a performance; this was, most certainly, real life. I thought of how Cuomo was being cautious with his choices and his language; he wasn’t going to force New Yorkers to stay inside. Clearly he was worried about social unrest. All those kids out of school. All those young people unemployed. The dissipating economy. It’s a bad mix.

The next morning I walked down 5^th Avenue in the late March sunlight. It was a seemingly perfect spring day, ironic given the global pandemic ravaging our nation, killing people in the tens of thousands. I’d been avoiding the news but it didn’t matter: Everyone I knew told me all about it. And I saw my New Yorker news headings which were emailed each day.

My routine was becoming regular during the pandemic: Wake up, drink Irish Breakfast tea (with milk), read whatever book I happened to be plowing through, text a few close friends, avoid the news and social media, write—I’d started writing Book 2 in my autobiographical literary trilogy—and then go for a mid-afternoon walk. I’d go down 5^th Ave to 125^th Street, and then cross over to Marcus Garvey Park. I’d then walk either around the park to the west and trudge down Mount Morris Park Ave, to 120^th, or else I’d zigzag through the park. Often as I walked down 5^th I’d hear sirens going off; but I’d noticed, recently, that the sirens were becoming more and more frequent. The sirens also varied; there were different speeds and beats to the sirens, and they were significantly louder.

That morning at Marcus Garvey Park I saw a massive circle of maybe forty kids—pre-teens and teens—surrounding two kids engaged in a wild, rugged fist fight. I stopped, and, from across the street, I watched. No masks. No gloves. And besides…they were all standing side by side, touching each other…and two kids were fighting physically. An African American man next to me filmed it on his iPhone. He glanced at me and we shook our heads. It made me realize that, no matter what might be happening in the world, when you’re that age, and you’re male, it doesn’t really matter…because it’s not directly happening to you.

I thought back to my own youth. I am now sober from alcoholism almost a decade. My drinking years were 17-27. I got into all kinds of reckless situations back then. I was an irresponsible, immature, angry rebel who didn’t give a damn about anything or anyone except himself. I was lost, scared, and confused, and I wore a mask to conceal the wealth I came from, the intelligence and sensitivity I possessed, and the fear I carried. If it’d been the year 2000 when coronavirus hit, when I was 17, would I have acted differently than these kids? Probably not. I might have acted worse.

And yet, having some distance between then and now, I felt shocked and angry, seeing them casually battle each other like the apes that all boys at one time are.

Another day—in early April—I walked down to the northernmost part of Central Park, at 110^th Street. Often I’d walk the Harlem Meer, a small man-made lake. For a moment I’d feel sane and normal, like we weren’t under attack by a virus. In the hot, gorgeous spring weather—blue skies, sunshine, 70 degrees—there were joggers and walkers, people circling the Meer, sitting on rocks near the water, dancing solo on the grass with headphones, sitting on green benches, chatting on cell phones, hula-hooping. I’d call a friend and circle the Meer. Or put my headphones in and listen to Johnny Cash sing his elegiac version of the song Hurt.

One day, after walking the Meer, and passing dozens of others on their own journeys, I tromped back towards my apartment at a little before 7pm, on Lenox Ave. After passing a grocery store—people standing six feet apart with masks on waiting in line outside—around 113^th, I suddenly heard the hundreds of clanging pots and pans and yells, signaling the national routine now of making noise each night in support of the healthcare and essential workers, all the people who are making our country run as smoothly as possible given what we’re going through. I smiled, hands in pockets, hearing it.

At 123^rd Street I passed the Atlah World Ministries church, which has been classified as a “hate group” and routinely posts signs bashing gay people, LGBTQ, non-believers, and many others. This time the sign said that the “enemies of Harlem would die of the coronavirus.” It added, “Repent now.” I was, again, shocked.

I walked east, back into Marcus Garvey Park. Wandering a ways through the park, I arrived at the entrance/exit close to Madison Ave. I saw a group of seven little white girls standing in a circle and throwing a Frisbee; they wore no masks, no gloves. Their parents stood nearby, talking to each other, smiling and laughing. Across the park on the green grass was a crew of four white college kids; they hurled a volleyball around to each other, also smiling and laughing. When people ignore mortality, when they display a blatant disregard for others’ safety: What can you do but accept it?

When I walked out of the exit of the park onto 124^th, I started moving towards 5^th Ave, to head home. Just before I reached 5^th, I saw a woman, red shirt tugged up exposing her belly, her pants down, defecating on the sidewalk. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen this in New York City. (You see everything here: It is very common to see grown men peeing in the street at all hours of the day and night.) But the act struck me in that moment as a metaphor of our nation and of the virus.

I think the metaphor works on two levels. On one level, this woman is probably a victim of poverty; of, to some extent, a racist-capitalist system wherein the people at the top—rich white men—run the nation. She is a symbol, then, of oppression. On the other hand, I felt like she—or her act of shitting on the street—represented all of us right now: Here we are—America—caught with our pants down, crouched embarrassingly, unprepared, doing what we should have been doing in private. What I mean by that is: We weren’t prepared for this virus and the implications of it. How could we be when we have a president who has cut the CDC in half, who has not even fully recognized that this is real? But, deeper than Trump, I think there is a distinctly American phenomenon happening wherein we didn’t believe, on some delusional level, that it could “happen to us.” We’re the United States. We stay safe. It always happens to “them,” to those “over there.”

When you hear about college kids being unwilling to part with their Spring Break partying—perhaps at the lethal cost of their own more-vulnerable parents—you know we’ve reached an all-time cultural low. Social Media, the internet, Fake News, Trump, divisive politics on both sides; the gargantuan chasm between the wealthy and political establishment and ordinary people: all these and more play a role. Donald Trump is our president. “We” elected him. He won. That in itself should be metaphor enough for where we’re at. He is all of us; he is a perfect mirror for our current cultural values. Don’t pretend that you’re exempt just because you didn’t vote for him. You aren’t. Trump represents much more than politics. In fact, he might not represent politics at all. (Rather, a cultural rage, narcissism, nihilism.)

Each day I talk to friends back in California who are worried about me. “New York is the epicenter,” my mom said several times, sounding concerned. All I can say is, I know. I read books. I write. I finished a whole novel draft of Book 2 of my trilogy in—believe it or not—just under a month. (It’ll take me a year to revise.) That’s the joy of having a calling, a passion, during Covid-19: It gives you soul-fire to be warmed by. I get to write fulltime (book editing work is stalled right now), which is my dream. I get to read as much as possible. I get to observe the fanaticism and lethargy and nonverbal rage that has infected a whole city.

A few evenings ago I took a late-night walk. Several blocks east and south of my apartment, I approached a hospital. No one was out; the streets were deserted. It was extra bizarre because it was around 10:30 at night on a Saturday. Usually these streets would be exploding with activity. I was deep in my head, thinking about my developing trilogy, about my writing career, and about a woman I had—pre-virus—been trying to date. As I was about to pass the entrance to the hospital, four hospital employees wearing bulging white uniforms and serious face masks—they looked like NASA astronauts—shoved the black double-doors open and walked out holding a zipped-up body bag with a body inside of it.

I stopped, watching them. My heart pounded. One of the men in white looked up and saw me; he didn’t speak, but he nodded very briefly up and down. I understood the signal: Yes, this is a Covid-death.

I waited until they passed and loaded the body into the back of a van.

Once I arrived at my street, I strolled slowly in the dark night and tree-shadows towards 5^th, way at the other end from Lenox. I was the only one around. I passed dozens of brownstones, the stairs rising up to black doors. I thought of the clusters of loud teens that night. The fist fight, the kids circled. The little girls playing Frisbee, and the college kids throwing the volleyball. I thought of the woman shitting in the street. The dead body.

Who are we? I asked myself. Or, perhaps more importantly: What have we become?

I came to New York City to learn, to chase my writing dreams. And I have certainly learned a lot, and made important connections. But, during Covid, I am seeing the fraying thread of humanity, of society, of civilization. We seem to have lost the ability to love one another, to care. We have lost sight of empathy. We don’t view each other anymore as fellow humans, but as dots being erased on a piece of global white paper.

Still in Manhattan few smile. You learn to thicken your skin here, to become hardened. It’s not all bad. There is beauty in this city; there is forgiveness. The clanging pots and pans rising out of solidarity. The essential workers, doing their tough duty. The delis and liquor stores and markets remaining open. The parks. Online Broadway and opera productions. The Zoom gatherings to support one another. The constant phone calls. Family and close friends. In an ironic twist we’ve all been cleaved apart like never before…and simultaneously brought together in new ways. Bizarre how things happen.

Sometimes it’s a struggle to find the good, but if you look long enough, and carefully, you will find it. I have found it only in small spits and spurts. But it’s there.

#FlashFriday Editor's Pick flash fiction micro fiction short fiction

JFK

by Rabia Saeed • March 5, 2021March 5, 2021

Photo by Michael Cover (copied from Flickr)

So the plane is landing and I’m sitting next to my friend Sara who is going to NYU — in business class, mind you — we got upgraded — and she is whispering to herself so I realize that, hello, she is saying a prayer. Like reciting ayat-ul-kursi, okay. And I’m like I want to remember this moment, I want to immortalize it, I want to always remember what it felt like when I landed at JFK for the first time in my life.

And all of my life’s moments, the defining ones, are associated with one prayer or another: bismillah, ayat-ul-kursi, surah-fatiha. And so I kept listening to Norah Jones’s “Carry On” over and over and over. Norah in my ears as the green patches became trees, Norah in my ears as the ground hit the wheels. Carry On, Carry On. I felt bad too because I always feel like God is waiting for me, specifically for me, to fuck up. And like if everything in America turns out to be a bad experience, God will be like, honey, go complain to Norah Jones.

Christopher Columbus Editor's Pick online fiction short stories

The Compass Turns Thrice

by Rekha Valliappan • February 28, 2021February 28, 2021

“. . . down to the sunless sea . . .” –S.T. Coleridge

124 was spiteful he says. It is one of those cold mornings in May. Time is wobbling the way compass points hover or spin for no rhyme or reason on a nautical chart.

“What in the world does that mean?”

“It gets swampier and swampier,” he says nudging me with a sly lazy wink.

About a year after the Xanadu incident I first met Christopher Columbus and his mountain of ‘maps.’ Big guy. He carried purpose in his stride and the wild look of a man with mean intentions. 124 was one root cause.

Mathematical impossibility I reckoned at the time, given that this muscular man with barbells for arms had to be at least six hundred years old give or take a few decades, till he showed me his squished and water stained non-laminated ID peeled from out of the thick folds of his dun doublet. True enough it bore an address on Maple Street two blocks down from where I lived or formerly lived on the edges of a New England woods. He wore auburn locks, a mangled red beard, a walrus moustache, a pleated overcoat and black galoshes and his face was as round and ruddy as a grapefruit.

At last, after what seems hours, but may, I now realize, have been minutes, listening to music on my cell phone on blast, so, technically, I may have been deaf and blind “Sirius has just risen,” he says, nautically incensed, “I must return.”

Then, since this is our first encounter he tells me somewhat conspiratorially that his name in full is Christopher Corleonus Columbus and that he has a ghost of the seas in mortal danger at 124 to whom he must hasten. I smile awkwardly trying to connect. I am forced to admit mine is an equally exotic sounding Mara Amarillo Marle.

“I have searched all these islands and places,” he says taking firm jabs at a cartographer’s maps, clutched by the armloads against his heavy chest, loads of faded manuscripts with lines and compass markings. Peering into them it is as if I am back in Xanadu, the day I fell through the ice.

I want to know more of the catamarans he has sailed, the outriggers, the Cyclades Map of Elysium, King Arthur’s wonder sword Excalibor forged in the island of Avalon, map of the island of Los Jardines, the barges he has commandeered, how he has managed mast and mizzen in storms, crossed the daguna-infested mountains of madness.

“Like walking a dog,” Christopher says with another wink and a cocky sneer, “except 124. It’s haunted mad.”

I figure I should keep hanging out with him, pretending I’m interested. Ghostly visitations have been a history in my family for generations. I have been playing pretend long before Xanadu. What’s another year of another round for what lies beneath the ice?

As if reading my thoughts, he says the haunting comes from 124. Many of the islands and some continents turned ghosts, disappearing without a trace. They will never be found, he says. Some atolls do not want to be found either, he says, the barrier ones. When they do not want to be found it’s open season. They turn spiteful. They shift, they move, they sink, then they vanish. 124 was different he says, till it came alive.

If they don’t exist, they don’t exist, I counter, the same like Xanadu, the same like its original Atlantis, the same like the Taino’s Guanahani, floating beneath. He shakes his head vehemently, his flaming locks flip-flopping between his cauliflower ears. It is my wish to know how he can tell they’re there, these places, if they are no longer there.

He gives a snort. He thrusts the maps in my direction, arms extended. I hesitate momentarily. He has a glint in his eye to match his snarl. I am reluctant to touch his nautical charts. We discuss 124, ship wrecks, many more voyages of discovery. He etches intricate tunnels of routes with one calloused finger. His frustration is 124. He sits back lost in his own handiwork. Then he starts over.

If only Christopher can show me a map of the Island of Thule. Or a map of the Island of Javasu. Or the Isles of Auroras. He grows impatient. He wants to know why the rigged xebecs that sail to the moon are not available free for explorers like him. There are none available even affordably priced, he says, revealing his ability to adapt to our ways.

One reason why I picked my small dhow in a Thrift Store, to sail to Xanadu, I say.

“This is how you chart a course to the moon,” he says, holding up another map, referring at intervals to his ship’s log, his leather-bound dairio and his palm-sized compass rose which never leaves the insides of his pantaloons. He is not ready to share with me his compass, not even touch it, his beloved rose of the winds which will lead him to 124.

The moon is a whole lot further away I say with an innocent look on my face. I wish he will tell me of Vega, how brightly she shines in the starry heavens, or the sound of the whales, or the cries of the dolphins. I want to find a way to the golden gates of Atlantis. I want to hear the siren’s songs.

Instead he talks to me of the thousands of shifting islands, the movement of ghost ships, the hauntings, the chickadees in the foothills going chee-chee-chee, earth vanishings in lumps and bits like disappearing water-spouts, the allure of the moon and counting the stars in the night sky, because, he says, they too vanish. The day is set when the moon will vanish, he says. He has been a moon voyeur the greater part of his life he says. More than ever I wish to go to the moon.

But first he says he has to lift the curse at 124 before vanishing himself. He fumbles underneath his overcoat like Moxie, my sister’s Bernese mountain dog relieving a great itch. I believe he must have on his inner sleeve or somewhere well concealed upon his broad six-foot person a wizard’s wand such as only Merlin would use when necessary, which makes one invisible in an instant. Instead he says by some strange alchemy of the philosopher’s stone he has stumbled upon a similar wonder ring of invisibility far superior than the one found at Gyges, which he has every intention of using at the right time. The ring is concealed in his compass!

***

The second time I run into Christopher Columbus he has grown swarthier and more unkempt. His size has tripled. His orange hair is tucked into an orange stretch beanie. The glint in his eye is more pronounced. So is his snarl.

“124’S NOT A FAKE! NEVER!” he yells distractedly. It turns my world upside down.

I have been building my small universe around movies and internet games and the hidden door, aspiring for my return to Xanadu. My universe crumbles when he appears, spider-webbing like the ice when it cracked under my weight the first time.

“Are you lost, Christopher?” I ask, a fraction timorously.

“1-2-4!” he yells over and over. He is not willing to stargaze the maps as he had at our first meeting, or search his multi-point windrose compass for 124, or point me the way to Erdapfel–the ball of our globe in two parts. It perplexes me.

Rummaging, grasping his stockpile of maps and charts he wants to know where he can find a sea-worthy carrack with masts and a sail and a sea-faring crew in these tough times. A smaller caravel with lateens would do. Matter of life and death he says. He does not mean to scare me he says but he cannot find 124. Nor can he find Mirabelle the mystical oracle board of numbers past present and future, to remove the curse.

I can feel the prickles inch down my neck into my ribcage. I try to focus on his deep green eyes the color of the seas. I like his fuzzy brown liquor look. But I want to know about the dodos and mammoths. I want to know of his early encounters with the strong and fierce Amazonian women. I know just the oracle board he speaks of with such vehemence and focus. I know where it can be found.

What he means is the ouija board and I know just the one. Mine! One that talks in real oracle speech. It belonged to my great grand-aunt. It has been in our family for ages.

It makes new memories. The ouija-inspired murder of her culinary cook favorite haunts me to this day. Ouija spirits whom she had invoked from beyond the veil haunt limited family groups to this day. They found ways to play risky games. They found ways to communicate to her the tools of the devil himself. What Christopher requires is my great grand-aunt’s ouija board. The alphabets and numbers will self-navigate, settle 1-2-4 squarely somehow and the hauntings.

If only we can reach a mutual settlement. If only we can exchange tools with all possible speed just might work. Planchette for compass. It’s frustrating how they’re interlocked. If only he would trust me enough to hand me his windrose, I would happily give him my beautiful hand-carved planchette, the one that has invoked several bodiless spirits for my great grand-aunt. More importantly if only he will show me the map of the Greek islands of Abacus or the map of Ariadne in the Aegean Sea, or the island of Babeque, or the lost continent of Kumari Kandam.

Instead he says the earth is the center of the universe, that the maps are not really real, nor are the cartographer’s charts, despite how closely he clings, that in many ways 124 is so like the extreme Cthulhu mountains, higher than the Himalayas, remoter than the Ural, so terrifying, yet so profound, so ghostly, so dogged in its persistence, he must find it for eternal peace.

I follow him to the local diner, my short legs trying to keep stride. I believe he wishes to speak of Gods and deities and malevolent entities and scantily clad women warriors. By the time we make it across the parking lot I’m finding it hard to remember this attractive green-eyed behemoth of a man smelling of guava and sweet ginger, whispering “1-2-4” lovingly in my ear.

At close proximity the markings on his face stand out like hardened frost. I ask him about the sickly pink scar standing out like wood rot on his forehead.

He says he has to clean up. He got kicked by a horse he says.

He sets his maps down. I do not touch any. Furrowing at his cartography exchange I want to know the trajectory of Lumpler’s Comet which had streaked in the night sky of 1493 in the Cantino world map, but I guess I’ll have to wait till he’s out of the bathroom.

***

Anywayz, the voices I’m hearing are the same which led me to Xanadu below the ice. Marooned Moon now needs tree incense . . . a cantata sung backwards, over and over. I’ve memorized the words.

The same bird, 124, I’ve counted, through the same windowsill, standing in the middle of the same overripe cornfield row, blood dripping talons, long dagger beaks the color of the overripe corn, hooded eyes spearing skyward. The whole situation of 124 has taken an incessant front seat pattern in my brain. I can see my great grand-aunt’s wooden ouija board of alphabets and numbers 0 to 9, her planchette tremble and move across 1-2-4, spinning thrice, even if I were blindfolded. It doesn’t stop.

I sometimes wonder if Christopher Columbus will show up again. Dark and swarthy, rakish in his own handsome way, with his quaint Lilliputian accent, weighted down by his maps. I could follow him to the moon, to the ends of the earth, to Xanadu. My last encounter did not end well. I would rather not meet him in a local diner, not after the magnitude of the water main break when he snapped the automatic faucet in two in the bathroom, ten years ago.

I did get a call once on my cell. The voice sounded a recording. It could have been Christopher. It kept repeating ‘1-2-4! 1-2-4!’ The voice wondered if I were dead. A ghost voice. We are connected that I have no control over.

My sister the cautious one tells me to return our great grand-aunt’s ouija board to where I found it in the crawl space under our house. It’s up to no good she says. She doesn’t know of Christopher Columbus. I have my planchette. Works just as good as a mariner’s compass. Spun thrice. Lots of logistics here. Lots of perils. But you gotta do what you gotta do. Wait up, 124! I’m on my way!

I want to tell him it’s all coming back, the realm of possibility, the lifting of the curse of a terrifying demon of the ouija board / oracle board, does it matter, at numbers 1-2-4, the point of exit on his compass when he ran into foul weather, regained the sea, and confused at best could never return despite a wide sweep of a large area of ocean. It is as if 124 never was. Thereon rising winds put him on doubtful courses. He is swamped, reframing the narrative of the islands that are his life, that are his home. I blame 124. He wants 124. I’ve found the point of compensation, the cure right before the ice closes over my head and I hear the voices sing Moon Marooned – the song that should be sung backwards to lift the curse, to rid 124 once and for all of the ghostly hauntings.

I will trace the route to Atlantis. An explorer never quits. This time it is I who will find Christopher Columbus again. And it won’t be over hard to obtain xebecs, or ghost islands, or mariner’s compass, or 124, his long lost spiteful at best dearly beloved.

#FlashFriday Editor's Pick flash fiction micro fiction short fiction short stories

ROSIE GOLDSTEIN WAS A DOG

by Alle C. Hall • February 26, 2021February 26, 2021

Photo by Bring Back Words (copied from Flickr and slightly altered)

In the fourth grade, boys in the town of Huntington Harbor started to notice which girls were getting tits and who looked like Farrah Fawcett. They divided the girls into two categories: “peach” for the burgeoning hot ones, or “dog.” Such was the case with Rosie Goldstein.

It hurt Rosie that most of her friends were peaches, the Christies and Kristys she’d hung out with since the second grade because they lived in the same gated community. Christies and Kristys had long, straight, blonde hair. Rosie’s was auburn and curly — Jew hair, a fact noted but not given importance, so Rosie thought — in the second grade. By the ninth grade, Christies and Kristys had perfect boobs to go with the blonde hair. Rosie did not yet have a waist. Not in the fifth grade, when they took their measurements for home ec, and Rosie’s chest assessment came in two inches smaller than her waist; and not by the ninth, when Trey Godford pushed her from behind in the hallway between geometry and French II and said, “Goldstein, you dog.”

Rosie lived for stories where the fat girl went away for the summer and came back slinky. But Rosie wasn’t fat. Rosie Goldstein was a dog.

Rosie felt a rough rumble in her throat. At the same time, she heard a deep growl, but didn’t put the two together until she saw fear leaking from the corners of Trey’s blue eyes. She lunged. The bones of Trey’s skull crunched wonderfully in her mouth. His blood tasted like currants. She watched him stagger in the hall like a decapitated chicken and wanted more. She leapt, sank her teeth, shook him like a slipper.

Christies screamed. Kristys fled, splotches of red clashing with the delicate pastels of their Gloria Vanderbilt tops. “Oh my Go-od!”

Rosie loped playfully after them, dropping what was left of Trey to nip at their neat butts and pretty ankles. She chased them past Mr. Enrique’s English class, down the main staircase, toward the front entrance. At the door to Mr. Hurdy’s Social Studies, Rosie paused, arrested by the scent of saltwater clinging to a boy’s skin.

Tommy Ray sat alone in the classroom, a buoy in a sea of desks. He looked up from his Surfer Magazine to take in the huge, russet hound panting in the hallway. “Whoa.”

Rosie Goldstein padded on all fours to Tommy Ray, rested her triangular head in his confused lap, and whimpered slightly when he scratched behind her ears. The Star of David hanging from her collar banged against his knee.

Editor's Pick mothers online fiction short stories

The Mothers

by SCOTT KARAMBIS • February 21, 2021February 21, 2021

“But what’s the difference?” I quietly asked Christine, who was sitting beside me in the first row of the back room, smelling slightly of persimmon. “As long as they buy it?”

I learned there are three ways to make money. Get more people to buy, get people to buy more often, or get people to buy something more expensive. Upgrade. By people, I mean mothers. It doesn’t matter what you’re selling–burritos, pajamas, lawn furniture–mothers are the main vein. 80% of everything. We ordered them to our specifications. Household income, family constitution, passions and interests were all screened. First-time mothers were ideal for expensive and unnecessary innovations. When the first Bugaboo, “the Frog” appeared in 2002, tripling the price of the previous luxury model–the suddenly dingy McClaren—my colleagues nodded in respect. Then there were the mothers who occupied the broad arc of the bell curve, 45-75k, 1+ children, a passion for care, cleaning, order. Dee, Maria, the Carols, Sara, Sangeeta, Tola, Patti. You’ll meet them soon. They held our fates in their 80 million hands. We recruited them from three different media markets to explore any regional differences in dishwashing attitudes, beliefs and behaviors.

I learned that the markets were rarely in the glamorous urban centers I hoped might be the destinations of my business travel, but rather isolated mid-sized cities because they were a better representation of American values than coastal cities with their elite ways and means. The cities for this–my first research trip ever—were Nashville, TN, Columbus, OH, and Fort Collins, CO, which we were going to visit West to East for logistical reasons I didn’t understand. Telling you the name of the dishwasher brand that is the occasion of this research is more trouble with a global corporation’s fearsome team of lawyers than it’s worth, not least because you assuredly know it. As of this writing, July 2020, there is a 47% chance that you or someone dear to you pour its crystals or squirt its translucent gel or as of 2001 place its multicolored pod into your dishwasher’s designated compartment as part of your daily chores.

The first learning worthy of inclusion in my report was that serious dishwashers (the people not the machines) were deeply invested in the way they load their appliances. Every mother claimed to have cracked the code on their dishwasher’s load capacity and cleaning efficacy. As the moderator, Claire M, pointed out in our first debrief in the Denver, CO airport Cantina Grill, half of each 90-minute session was taken up with detailed descriptions of how respondents layered plates and saucers in parallel rows, distinct from bowls which needed to be “nested” so they didn’t redirect spray away from its intended course. Failure to perform this task would leave crusted food on plates which you could never get off without borrowing your fancy sister-in-law’s power washer. In fact, Claire M– suggested we didn’t call them dishwashers (the people not the machine), but rather dishloaders, to acknowledge the behavior’s importance and avoid the noted lexical confusion. This seemed a minor observation but judging by the way Sanjay, the brand manager, made a careful note I could tell Claire had hit the mark. Chiefly, and another pivotal learning for me, the obsession with dish-loading was considered a problem by my clients in the sense that these homemakers gave their precise loading routines credit for their clean dishes.

“It’s not the detergent,” Claire said between loud announcements on the Denver Airport PA. “We didn’t hear many brand names today, did we?”

The assembled group all made eye contact but didn’t answer.

“The loader is the hero,” Claire continued.

“And un-loader” added Dennis Lim. Dennis worked for Sanjay as the assistant brand manager and was a very serious young man indeed.

Claire rested the eraser end of her pencil against her lips and quibbled: “Didn’t we hear that unloading is a relegated chore?”

I started to speak but I wasn’t fast enough for Dennis. “It’s the reveal,” he said, eyeing the rest of us along the cramped booth in the Cantina Grill.

Randall made a face. He led the R & D team and wanted to hear more about spotting which his new innovation was designed to address.

“Maybe we should focus on favorite foods,” Christine offered. “We need a torture test.”

A torture test, I learned, was a homemaking problem that had resisted all remedies, a stain that wouldn’t go away. If a brand could crack that nut, then, it was surmised, consumers would believe it could serve all their wants and needs, known and unknown. Torture tests occupied my mind over the two-hour flight to Columbus and the almost equally long drive to the focus group facility, located as always on exurban fringes of the city, so closely resembling the others, that it seemed we were repeatedly returning to where we began.

“I want you to imagine,” said Claire on the other side of the glass to the Ohio mothers, “that this is a magical room.”

“Oooh,” the mothers said.

“In this room, you will discover things you didn’t know you knew.”

This being my first work in the field, it was suggested by Christine that I occupy a “listening mode” but my long training finally caught up with me and as the respondents turned again to their loading skills–with one Elizabeth Trout suggesting a competition, if only so she could crush all challengers, creating a tension in the room that manifested as a staticky silence on our side of the glass—I had a question I needed answered. “But what’s the difference?” I quietly asked Christine, who was sitting beside me in the first row of the back room, smelling slightly of persimmon. “As long as they buy it?” Quiet turned out to be the right register to ask this question because as my whisper entered Christine’s smooth, translucently pink ear, she brushed back the hair from her face and with a perplexed expression whispered back: “Can. You. Step. Out. With. Me. Please.”

The focus group was invented by Robert Merton in the 1940’s at Columbia to study the impact of wartime propaganda, including ways to motivate Americans to purchase war bonds. His first study was based on an 18-hour radio marathon which raised a record-breaking sum of $39 million. It was assumed that patriotism drove the contributions, but in what he called focused interviews, the first of their kind, Merton learned a deeper motivation was at work. The audience was compelled by the host, a popular singer named Kate Smith, also known as The First Lady of Radio. They were drawn by what we might today call her authenticity. “She’s just fat, plain Kate Smith,” said one respondent.

“Take some of these actresses, do they care about anything but themselves? Many of these actresses are beautiful, lovely figures, but Kate Smith hasn’t any of this…I look on this as a mother: I don’t want beauty. Perhaps at sixteen I wanted it, or at nineteen, but now I don’t want it anymore. [In agitated tones] I’m thinking of my children, I’m not thinking of glamour [this said with withering contempt]. (Merton’s Brackets)

Does it need to be mentioned that all these mothers were facing a long stretch of solitary domestic labor as their husbands were deployed? Born Meyer Robert Schkolnick to Yiddish-Speaking Russian Jews, Merton invented his new identity as a stage name for his magic shows which he performed for neighborhood parties in South Philadelphia. He chose his first name in honor of his hero, the legendary Robert Houdini. One of Merton’s favorite tricks was guessing what cars his audience owned based on their middle names. It’s reported that Schklonick/Merton was surprised by the way focus groups were adapted by marketers to study consumer behavior, though it seems the inventor of the concept of “unintended consequences” might have predicted this outcome.

Now Christine led me into the back room of the back room, filled with supplies and samples but still had enough space for a quick consult. Christine didn’t chastise me for my ignorance but did feel it was time for a teaching moment. As I’ve tried to suggest, Christine was a hyper-competent, no-nonsense professional on the fast track, a woman I was thrilled to have as my supervisor. It’s also true that Christine possessed the kind of ethereal physical beauty that sometimes made it hard to understand what she was saying when she was saying it. Perhaps accustomed to this problem, Christine now began an off-the-cuff presentation, writing in alternating black and red EXPO dry erase markers on a spare whiteboard she found in the storage room.

1) BRAND’S ARE BUILT ON TRUST

Sensing correctly that I was about to ask her to clarify what she meant by trust, Christine met my eyes with a piercing gaze that communicated she knew about my fancy background and if I was going to start parsing terms, I should reevaluate my career choice right now. She knew I knew perfectly well what she meant.

2) BRANDS WHICH DELIVER A FUNCTIONAL BENEFIT (I.E. CLEAN DISHES) BUILD TRUST WITH PROVEN RESULTS

Here I did succeed in interrupting briefly to mention our client’s well-known commitment to product superiority in every category they entered. Superiority was a pillar of company strategy and required an investment in R&D that, no joke, exceeded the GNP of many developing nations. “Aren’t we always the best?”

Christine nodded, holding my gaze with eyes that seemed to oscillate between teal and lapis lazuli depending on the light. Then, she turned back to the whiteboard, writing quickly and speaking slowly so the writing and speaking were synchronized:

3) SUPERIORITY IS PROVEN IN THE LAB BY MEASURES THAT EXCEED THE ABILITY OF THE NAKED EYE

Christine stood like someone who had trained as a ballerina in her youth, her pelvis pushed slightly forward and shoulders thrown back, especially when she was pausing to think which gave me another opening:

“So,” I said, ‘this ‘superiority’ while defensible in a court of law, is really an epi-phenomenon. It’s the perception of superiority we’re talking about, isn’t it?”

Christine nodded again, acknowledging my point so far as it went. My problem was my distinction between real and perceived benefits. They were one and the same from a marketing POV. But this answer raised another question. Why pour all that money into R & D if belief is the endgame? Christine smiled in a mysterious way. Perhaps she thought this was a cynical observation. A pause hung in the air as she lifted a box of the prototype from the floor The box was the same metallic green of the dishwasher brand we stored under the sink in my childhood kitchen but from it Christine pulled out Randall’s latest breakthrough, a small compact disk, almost organic in its translucent skin containing three different-colored gels. She held it in her open palm. “Do you believe?” I must have nodded because she arched her eyebrows high on her forehead and asked me why.

That was a good question, but before I could answer, the door opened on the storage room and through a narrow gap, the head of Sanjay emerged. From the expression on his face, it was instantly clear that we had a problem–a problem more immediate than the topological expertise of dishwasher-loaders across America.

“Sanjay?” Christine asked as she erased the white board. “Everything, OK?”

“’Fraid, not, Chris,” Sanjay said. “Can I speak frankly?”

Christine nodded, her head tilted slightly in my direction to indicate I was all NDA’d despite my obvious greenness.

“We’ve got a mess on our hands.”

I could see Christine was perplexed. She stepped forward so that Sanjay could relate the situation. In her general resting face, the corners of Christine’s mouth curled slightly upwards, a feature that might look clownish on other faces but on Christine’s created the suggestion that she possessed a secret that anyone would very much like to know. At this moment, however, Christine’s curved lips first flattened out and then continued their downward descent into a face expressing shock and disgust. It appeared that Christine might be sick so fully did her normally tawny hues turn the color of wet concrete.

Christine tilted her head to peer around Sanjay to look into the backroom of the focus group room that looked onto the room itself. I heard Sanjay say that they’d cleared everyone out.

“Where are the respondents?”

“In the lounge,” Sanjay said, “awaiting instructions. Looking ‘bout as anxious as long-tail cats in a room full of rocking chairs.”

“Do they want to leave?”

Sanjay paused and looked down. “We’re in uncharted territory here.”

“And Claire?”

Sanjay looked down and shook his head. “That dog won’t hunt,” he said.

The consequence of Claire M’s indisposition meant a waste of the day’s groups, if not the research as a whole, which I assumed was the reason for the brooding silence that hung over the room. The air darkened, as it does when a lot of money is going to down the drain. Christine’s brow actually furrowed. “I don’t think I need to remind everyone how important this is,” Sanjay added. This was a shift in tone but one that didn’t lighten the burdensome silence which was when I said, “I could do it, I think, in an emergency.”

Both Sanjay and Christine looked at me with different but equally hard-to-read gazes.

“Are you trained?” Sanjay asked

Christine spoke for me, and the answer was quick and clipped and negative.

There was another long pause, during which I and everyone else heard a noise that sounded like retching. All our eyes traveled to the crack in the door, in which Sanjay was still stuck out at a lawn-dartish angle. I wondered if he was having a panic attack.

“You’ve done some teaching? Did I hear that correctly?”

I nodded, but aware of the pressure of Christine’s critical gaze without looking at her, I added, “It’s probably a bad idea.”

All focus group rooms are alike, both to one another and to the endless drop-ceilinged meeting rooms we all spend so many listless hours. My room was one of five in the consumer research center in Columbus, OH . It contained a standard particle-board meeting room table and nine cushioned office chairs. The western wall of the room was devoted to a white board. The northern wall was made up of the large two-way mirror that had been the center of my attention. There was also a ceiling mounted video camera and four microphones set in the table both to record and transmit the proceedings. Everything beyond these basics was imported into the room—including a grab bag of supplies familiar to anyone who has thrown a birthday party for a child: colored markers, scissors, glue sticks, glitter and pipe cleaners and sometimes balloons and Nerf guns all designed to simulate our imaginations and bring the reasons for consumer habits blurred into obscurity by our routines into the full light of day.

I watched six out of the original eight mothers return to the focus group room with determined hunker down expressions. They settled behind their own nameplates (Dee, Maria, Carol T, Sangeeta, Carol Z, Patti) and over the speakers in the back room, we heard them expressing concern about Claire M, whose own nameplate had been removed. Carol Z said she hoped that she had someone to take care of her because was there anything worse than getting sick on the road? Everyone in the room nodded and murmured assents that there was indeed nothing worse.

“Did she say she was from Washington?” asked Dee.

“The state?” asked Carol Z.

“D.C.,” said Carol T.

“That’s. A. Blessing,” said Maria, each word coming out between slow, open-mouthed breaths. Along with the other mothers, Maria had wrapped her scarf around the lower half of her face. Whether they were shielding themselves from the lingering smell of Claire’s sickness that had been spread far and wide or the industrial cleaners that were applied afterwards, I couldn’t tell from this side of the glass. Dennis Lim’s large head and sharply parted hair jerked back and forth from the watch on his hand to Sanjay to me, suggesting that every minute I stood there was a minute replete with wasted dollars. I took my nameplate from Christine’s hand and headed for the door.

When I entered the room, the mothers looked up at me, their eyes both expectant and anxious above their scarves. I repeated the instructions at the beginning of the session that Merton recommends to build the rapport necessary for an open conversation. There were no right or wrong answers. They would likely disagree. You don’t have to have a rational reason for your opinions. Who among us knows the truth of our own hearts? The mothers looked back at me, smiling politely with their eyes.

The next activity on the list was called STAGES and involved asking the mothers to describe or dramatize their daily routine to bring out the surprising details that hadn’t yet been brought to consciousness. Dee, who had described herself as a “firecracker” in the introductions, volunteered first. Dee wore an Ohio State jersey over a white long-sleeve shirt that went down over her hips. She raised her arm and got right into character: “Thomas, McKensy, Lauren, please get those dishes in the sink right now!”

Dee’s enthusiasm really lifted the energy in the room. Carol T jumped up next and started showing us how she washed the dishes before she put them in the dishwasher which come to think of it, was double washing. What were they washing that couldn’t be washed by the machine? Maria admitted she wasn’t sure. Maria was a big woman with copper color hair. She had the look of a someone who had been through some hard times but wasn’t inclined to complain. Her eyes now took on a reflective gaze. They weren’t really washing because they had to wash.

“It’s more…” Maria began. We all turned to her.

“A habit?” I probed.

“I just love to clean.”

Sangeeta had the brightest scarf of all, saffron-colored and filled with images of blue-skinned gods. She now pulled it from her mouth to say, “Yes,” she said, “This is correct.”

This wasn’t what Randall wanted to hear. His innovation included special enzymes and proteins that would remove this arduous extra step, the unmet need that apparently wasn’t needed. I needed to find a problem, the elusive torture test, a problem that lived on, stubborn, enduring, unresolved. I placed the new prototyped pod in the center the table and we all stared at it for a moment. What did they think it was? What did the colors mean? My questions didn’t seem to register. They dissipated into a new stillness that filled the room.

In his training manual, Merton draws a distinction between two kinds of silences, what he calls “dead silence” and “pregnant silence.” Dead silences are a failure of the moderator. Pregnant silences, however, are full of potential gifts, a sign that hidden impulses were stirring in the silt of our deep coastal shelves. I felt a growing warmth in my face and looked down at the spread sheet where we summarized the mothers’ lives. Children, income, work, attitudes, beliefs, behaviors. Maria’s household income was between 65 and 75k; she worked part time in a flower shop and described herself as “a cleaning freak.” I saw she had three children in the house but in the next question she listed four ages 16, 14, 6, 11. It was then I knew that her third child would be six forever. I didn’t know it in some magical, clairvoyant way but because she told us. I watched as she moved her hand slowly, touching her shoulder then her face fingers in the air. She looked out at me and through the suddenly chill air. I looked around the room. Dee’s eyes opened wide, hands pressed flat to the table. Sangeeta and Carol T both pulled sweaters on. I waved my own hand through the air, fingers spread, as if I was pulling open a curtain. “Thank you,” she said. She wasn’t talking to us. The other mothers in the room nodded, their scarves falling from their mouths. They didn’t seem concerned by whatever was happening, even as Maria’s words slipped into another language, which I thought at first it was Spanish or maybe Portuguese. It didn’t matter to the mothers. They knew sound matters more than sense. As she spoke, she held her hands to the room. The other mothers raised their hands too, as if mesmerized. I can’t claim to have seen or felt anything in the room, except the mothers themselves, now immersed in their own experiences, their lifetimes spent caring for their children.

I heard a thud behind me as if someone had fallen out of a chair and when I looked back, I saw my own face staring back at me, the mirror reflecting and enhancing my dismay. In front and behind me, I saw the room as through a glass darkly, watching as the mothers now join hands in a communion. There was a gathering vibration in the room, the kind that starts when people who know how to pray start to pray together. In the mirrored glass, the light seemed to bend, as if a force was pushing on it from the far side, and in the reflection, I watched the pod in the middle of the table quiver and the gel leak out in a small multi-colored stream, forming bright ectoplasmic pool.

“Oh dear,” Carol T jumped up and reached into the cabinet under the TV where she instinctively knew where the cleaning supplies were stored. The other mothers stood up to help. The sudden activity broke the tension. Maria was still now, leaning back in her chair. Sangeeta removed her scarf and leaned over to wipe away Maria’s tears. “Take your time,” she said. You might think I’ve made this up, but I assure you it’s true. Nor would this be my last visitation. My research would be full of uninvited guests, children seeking comfort, lovers with torn hearts, abandoned husbands, angry fathers, all demanding to be heard, addressed, tended to. Six months later, in a new job, it was a gathering of stepmothers. I was collecting information to help my client portray nontraditional families. The mothers erupted into in a torrent of rage against the fairy tales and films that marked them as invaders, cruel masters, witches. The stepdaughters arrived to demand expatiation, a pound of flesh. Their battles were locked in an iron cage. The next year, it was new mothers. I was exploring changing attitudes about sun tanning. I was working on behalf of a flailing skincare brand, the one with a French name. In the late 70’s, their advertisements contained a lithe bohemian model strolling along beaches on the French Riviera. Over-exposed in grainy shots, the model’s arched brown back blurred into a sensual dream. In the room, the conversation turned to graphic descriptions of sex, passionate assignations on midnight beaches, the taste of salt on skin, hidden hotels filled with lovers’ cries. “I can’t believe I’m telling you this,” they said to me and one another and the camera. In between groups, I splashed cold water on my face, dizzy with lust. Oh, the mothers! They’d be the making of me. Ned, my therapist, agreed. “What would we do without them?” he said, spreading his arms. His office shelves were stacked with the games I played as children. “Tell me about yours,” he said. “My what?” I asked. “Everyone has a mother,” he said.

When I finally went into the back room, the clients had all risen from their seats, the computers glowing idly on the tables arranged around the mirror. Christine was speaking to them in a hushed voice, the kind used by witnesses to a sudden and unpredicted disaster.

“Do I go back in?”

“You can release them,” Christine said, turning to me. “Please thank everyone on behalf of the brand.” I felt the indictment in Christine’s cool stare. I knew I’d made a discovery that day, how brands really work, seeping inexorably into our beings, a source of meaning as enduring as any other—a cross, a flag, a ring. The truth, I learned, was that the actual product didn’t matter. Anything would do. But Christine, Sanjay, Randall didn’t want to hear that. They heard a mockery of their whole enterprise, a global company’s billion-dollar investment turned into a parlor trick. Christine shook her head in dismay. “Think you can handle that?”

The mothers lingered for a long time after the session ended. I had to remind them to gather their checks. I waited in the hall where I saw the manager of the facility trying to catch my eye. He wanted me to check the invoice, worried we might blame him for the earlier mishap. While I ticked off the line items with sounds of satisfaction, he apologized for Claire. She could be sensitive but that was why she was in demand. He asked me if I wanted the videotape now? When I returned to my hotel, I watched it for hours into the night, looking for a shade or shadow, some perturbation in the air. Here’s what I saw: I watched Claire grow silent, her eyes downcast, turned inward, her jaw set. Then her mouth shaped some unvoiced word, her eyes suddenly bulged, and her body convulsed, neck strained, hands clenched to the table before she collapsed. The women all jumped from their seats and rushed to her assistance, mothers to the core. Maria took Claire’s head in her arms, wiping the mess from her face. Sangeeta waved her scarf over Claire’s face. Carol Z grabbed a water bottle while Carol T ran for help. This what mothers were or what we needed them to be, how we made them and were continuing to make them. Now, I watched Maria emerge from the room, arranging her scarf around her neck. I thanked her for her participation. The tears had streaked her mascara and her hair was mottled and lopsided but in her eyes was a serene gaze. She apologized for disturbing the group. I told her not to apologize and offered my condolences for her loss. “You have a gift,” she said, hugging me good-bye.

Christine had another opinion which she expressed at my exit interview two weeks later. I handed her the report which she had requested with a terse email. It was then I noticed another woman sitting quietly in the room, hands folded on her lap. Christine paged through my report as I took a seat.

“What happened in there?”

“Did you watch the tape?” I asked.

“I didn’t have to,” she said.

“We went deep,” I acknowledged.

“Too fucking deep.”

I’d never heard her swear before and felt a little rush of dark energy. “I thought,” I began but Christine spoke over me. She was frustrated they’d invested in my training only to watch me go off the rails. Perhaps they had pushed me too fast. Her mistake, she said, resting a hand over her heart. She took a deep breath and looked out the window. When she turned back, she explained she was sorry, but they could no longer support my role. She let me take this in and then asked if she could give me some advice. I needed to work on what she called professionalism. We worked in service of the brand. We were here to touch lives, she said, quoting our client’s mission statement. So many people depend on us. As I watched, a layer of crimson flushed over her rosy complexion, and her beauty reassembled into a shimmering vale between us. When she finished, she rose briskly and smoothed down her skirt. She wished me luck and left the room to me and the woman in the corner who introduced herself as Angela from HR. Angela was the opposite of Christine in manner and style. There was a weariness to her slow gestures. Perhaps she had troubles of her own or she had developed a convincing performance of empathy. Angela explained the terms of my separation agreement, the particulars of my non-compete and the meaning of a mutual non-disparagement clause. She asked me to sign and initial every page to confirm I had read and understood the terms.

“Any questions?’

“Well,” I admitted

“My advice,” she said. ”Jump right back in there.”

“You think?”

She nodded assertively, walking me to my my desk so I could pack up my things. My former colleagues looked on with uneasy glances. They knew bad news when they saw it.

When I arrived on the street, I called my wife. “Hi,” she said. “Everything ok?” There was a thread of apprehension in her voice. Our new patterns had been established and discontinuities were notable. I told her the news, which was met with ambivalent sympathy. “Oh no,” she said. Then she asked me about severance and whether I was looking for another job.

“This happened five minutes ago.”

“True,” my wife said.

“I’m not worried,” I lied. And in that moment I learned I was being made into something too, someone who needs to believe. It’s not what I hoped I would become but who among us gets to choose? Even Meyer Robert Schlonickoff fell into his profession by accident. He was raised in near poverty by Russian immigrants, a tailor who supported his family with a dairy-product store until it burned down. After high school, Merton won a scholarship to Temple, and then, against all odds, to Harvard to join the emerging field of Sociology. Considering his history, it’s probably no surprise Merton became an expert on the ways we are shaped by forces we neither recognize nor understand. Later in life, Merton admitted his love of magic was the key to his success, unlocking a new way of seeing. There was a paradox at the heart of magic. When we are delighted by a trick, we know we are being deceived, but we want to be deceived. Over time, great magicians do less and less. They know the need for illusion is already in us, universal, unmet, inexhaustible. That’s why we go to the show.

#FlashFriday Editor's Pick flash fiction micro fiction short fiction short stories

LOVE-YOU-LOTS

by Michael Burrows • February 19, 2021February 19, 2021

He’s got that new song by The Streets stuck in his head, the one with the music video filmed up the road in Chicken Village. Mike thrums his fingertips on the desk, in time with the beat. He’d throw his hood up over his head if the fat security guard hadn’t taken his coat. The guard went out to make tea ages ago.

Hi hat, hi hat, snare. Then a little base line walk, fingers up and down a fret board. Mike’s got a Love-You-Lots Teddy Bear in his jeans, in the pocket of space created by wearing them low on his hips. There’s a melted Twix shoved down the front of his boxers; the serrated edge cuts back and forth on the soft skin at the base of his dick every time he moves.

The guard reverses in, his fat arse pushing open the door, a mug in each hand. Mike grins his shit-eating grin, reserved for teachers and authority figures. The guard, badge says his name is Dale, places a mug in front of Mike and takes a seat. The plastic chair groans under his weight.

“Thanks, Dale,” Mike says, in a high-pitched nasal voice, drawing the name out so it sounds like “darl,” the way Mum says it. Dale grimaces – literally – he looks like Grimace, the McDonald’s purple blob, with his ridiculous mustache and his shirt buttons straining across his stomach.

“Righto, righto, righto,” mumbles Dale, playing the Hollywood bodyguard, the maverick cop, a fat fuck Bruce Willis, “Michael Hopkins. Ms. Hopkins’ boy huh? How is your mum?”

Mike can’t help himself, lets out a little half laugh. Tries to disguise it as a cough. Dale’s eyes get even wetter and more pathetic.

“You say hi to her from me, yeah? Tell her to keep fighting.”

Love-You-Lots Bear is holding a red heart in his arms, with a white frilly border made of some sort of lace. It’s tickling the inside of Mike’s leg something fierce. He’s got a nice old gob of spittle building up in the back of his throat. Turning his head, he spits straight onto the white laminate floor. Some of it dribbles down his chin. Fuck it, he doesn’t wipe. Dale’s looking at him like that dropkick boyfriend of Mum’s did for a couple of months.

“C’mon, Mike. It’ll be me has to clean that.” The little puddle on the floor has a green sheen from the fluorescents. “What’s all this about then?”

“Don’t know what you’re talking about, Dale.” Mike says with a sneer.

Dale sighs, like a whoopee cushion deflating. He takes a sip of tea and licks the drops from his mustache, leans across the desk and clicks play on the video up on the screen.

There’s Mike, all alone with his hood up, running his hands along the tops of all the flowers, until he gets to the last bouquet, where he pulls the head off a rose. He walks down the aisle of cards trailing rose petals with each step. At the end of the aisle he disappears from the top right screen but immediately reappears on the bottom left. There’s Mike eyeing up the teddy bears, the little teddy doctors and nurses, the Get-Well-Soon Bear with a bright red bowtie. There’s Mike pulling a Love-You-Lots Bear off the shelf and shoving it down his crotch. He wanders over to the counter, with its array of bars and sweets, Congratulations-On-The-Bouncing-Baby-Boy boxes and organic 80% cocoa. There’s Mike taking a Twix and making it disappear into the dark recesses of his boxer shorts.

“What’s your point, Dale? Could be anyone. You can’t even see their face.” Mike’s tapping on the desk again, his tea is going cold.

Dale’s mustache bristles, one of those walruses on a David Attenborough special ready to defend his stretch of beach. He reaches for the phone and picks up the receiver without taking his eyes off Mike.

“Hey, Trina, Dale in Security. Could you put me through to Palliative Care?” You can just tell he wants to whistle while he’s transferred, his fat lips pout together, but no sound comes out. “Hey, Denise, sorry to do this, but could you pop Ms. Hopkins on the line?”

Mike shifts in his seat.

Dale’s listening carefully. His eyes drop.

“Oh.”

The shit-eating grin returns. The card Mike slid down the back of his pants is in a protective plastic cover that has stuck to Mike’s arse as he’s sat, the embossed “I Love You, Mum” imprinted on his pimpled white cheek.

Editor's Pick online fiction short stories weather

A Tyranny of Wind

by Tyler Smith • February 14, 2021February 14, 2021

“Weather is immune to history, law, diplomacy, and sometimes even reason…”

Ed Falcón, chief meteorologist for El Paso’s biggest TV network, was appalled at how seldom people asked him about the nature of weather. His admirers and devotees were only interested in hearing about the immediate weather or the weather to come, never in discussing the weather that was. The public thinks that weather can be controlled but Dr. Falcón knew that weather is a mysterious tyrant, a chaos to death itself. People talk about weather because they can’t talk about death. That is why war makes for the most curious conversation and weather data: At Ypres, the rain fell in helixes and tasted like almonds; at Bastogne, curious dendritic formations in the snowflakes made for heavy snow; in the aftermath of Nagasaki, the wind blew from the ground up for a week.

Weather is immune to history, law, diplomacy, and sometimes even reason, so meteorologists and climate scientists like Dr. Falcón are often ridiculed. However, the Channel 4 viewers maintained their fidelity and holstered their complaints such that Dr. Falcón began to feel invincible, which got boring. El Paso enjoys 300 sunny days a year, and Dr. Falcón’s expertise at Channel 4 had, in his mind, gone too long unappreciated. He was tired of standing in front of a giant sun, and was looking for a meteorological challenge. New Year’s Eve was also fast approaching, a holiday during which Dr. Falcón felt he’d abased himself on live TV for far too long.

He knelt at his bedside and prayed to his saints for guidance and luck.

Dr. Falcón was, by El Paso standards, a minor celebrity. He appealed to viewers on both sides of the border. Weather is a great equalizer, and he was so fluent in both Spanish and English that nobody knew what he really was. He enjoyed watching people try to define him. They always stumbled:

It’s racist to call someone Mexican. What are you?
Si eres gringo, no me lo digas. Pero no eres. ¿Eres?

Dr. Falcón was savagely handsome. He was tall and broad-shouldered with grey-blue wolf eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses and a goatee surrounding thin, mandarin lips. A few years ago, he’d begun to sprout some grey hairs from his chin and used Grecian formula to mask it, but lately he’d let the grey show. With a forecast accuracy quotient of 98.71% over thirty years, Dr. Falcón allowed that he had a sliver of clairvoyance, but nobody had allowed him to produce the statistic. He was not afraid to be wrong in his forecasts, but by virtue of geography, he was rarely given the chance. What might that be like? he wondered. To forecast for high stakes? Whenever he was interviewed, the focus was usually on his clothes or hair.

“So…mousse?” asked the reporter from LatinXpose

“Clay.”

“Straight razor?”

“Electric.”

“Qué no.”

“Qué sí.”

A year ago, Dr. Falcón was the only meteorologist in Texas to predict the great gulf freeze of November 11^th. And it wasn’t as if the other meteorologists hadn’t done their homework. “Weather,” or the prediction of it, is essentially mechanical. Mathematical equations are derived from observations made by machines running on other mathematics. Raw weather data is put into a model and the model is run.

“But to be a seer,” said Dr. Falcón to the reporter from the weekly magazine, El Paso Style, “you have to understand the atmosphere in which you’re forecasting, understand how nature and geology normally affect the area, and compare it to what is in your heart. And you have to know a little about the mind of God.”

The reporter nodded and asked him who he was wearing.

“My shoes are Berluti.”

“I love how you wear them with no socks,” she’d said.

The genesis of Dr. Falcón’s New Year’s Eve angst was tied to the year 1503, when Catalonia saw a bumper crop of table grapes. The grape farmers needed new ways for people to eat grapes, so a shrewd vintner contacted his connections in the friary, who laid out the vintner’s plan in front of the canon lawyers, and the plan was finally approved: At the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, read the diocesan advisory, every good Catholic was recommended to eat twelve grapes for good luck against witchcraft. The vineyards flourished and the friaries gilded their bells.

500 years later, this sinister tradition spawned by the greed and paranoia of The Spanish Inquisition had landed in El Paso, Texas, where for the last thirteen years on New Year’s Eve, Dr. Falcón indulged his fan base and the network by eating a dozen grapes in twelve seconds on camera. Who had suggested this abomination in the first place? Dr. Falcón couldn’t remember how he’d come to accept the indignity, in part because he couldn’t remember that he himself was the one who suggested it.

Dr. Falcón was 55 now, and felt too sophisticated to perform the same tawdry routine he’d done for years. By now, the New Year’s Eve production had become as necessary and as predictable as a midnight kiss, and by the end, he usually had so many grapes in his mouth that he couldn’t count or talk anymore and that was good comedy. But with the comedy came a kind of existential melancholy. He wondered, is this what I am? I can’t be this. This year, he decided he would officially forego the New Year’s Eve indignity. He told everybody at the November staff meeting that he was done with silly rituals.

“I am a serious man,” he said. “And I take my role seriously. No more grapes.”

Dr. Falcón had been contacted the month before by the station manager at TV1 La Mejor out of Mexico City, and the two spoke for an hour. The station manager hinted they might be able to give him his own morning program. Dr. Falcón said he’d have to think about it. Mexico City had earthquakes and every extraction of meteorological anomaly.

“If I do it, they’ll be no gimmicks,” said Dr. Falcón. “I’m a seer and a scientist, not a boob.”

“I’ve seen your New Year’s broadcast, Dr. Falcón,” she said. “At La Mejor, I’ll personally guarantee that you’ll never have to eat another grape on TV ever again.”

“Let me feel it out,” said Dr. Falcón.

At the December staff meeting, nobody at Channel 4 seemed to appreciate that Dr. Falcón had stated clearly that he wouldn’t be doing the New Year’s Eve broadcast. After reading the episode mock-ups, he saw that he was slated to host the festivities on December 31^st.

“I’ve told you more than once that I’m not doing New Year’s this year,” said Dr. Falcón, and hissed out a stream of smoke from his cigarette that exploded and mushroomed off of the station manager’s forehead, hung between them for a few moments as a poltergeist, then dispersed.

“Dr. Falcón, forgive me,” said the manager, “but it’s called a news team because we work as a team.”

“I will do anything for this team,” said Dr. Falcón. “Except the New Year’s Eve broadcast.”

“Take this up with the syndicate,” said the manager. “I’m done arguing.”

“You are the New Year’s Eve broadcast,” said the syndicate head, after the station manager told him to take his complaint to the top. “Besides,” said the executive, “You’re the one who suggested it. I remember specifically. You read an article about exotic traditions on a plane. I told you it was a gimmick, and I was right, but it was a gimmick that worked. So bully for you, and now you’re dug in.”

“What plane?”

The executive snorted and asked Dr. Falcón if he’d made any progress in his bid to quit smoking.

“I’m always making progress,” said Dr. Falcón, smoking.

“It’s making you look old.”

“Getting old is making me look old.”

“You’ll do the New Year’s thing then?”

“No,” said Ed.

“We’ll see,” said the executive, and hung up.

That evening, Dr. Falcón went to Rincón de Cherrie and had too much to drink. Then he went home and watched Patton, and that made him depressed, and he had a little more to drink. He went to the bathroom to shit. He was bored and had an erection, so he masturbated. He cleaned up and felt stupider and fell asleep. Dr. Falcón woke up to a message from the station manager at TV1 in Mexico City saying that she needed an answer from him cuanto antes because they wanted to introduce him during the New Year’s Eve broadcast.

He rose from bed and paced around in his bathroom, smoking, thinking about hydrogen cyanide. A hydrogen cyanide concentration of 300 mg/m³ in the bathroom would kill him in eight minutes. There is hydrogen cyanide in cigarettes. That was supposed to scare him, but he felt no fear. He was smoking right there in the shower. He toweled off, walked to his balcony and looked at the sky.

Nobody, thought Dr. Falcón, looks at the sky like I do: They see storm clouds and I see a somber spring of reason. They see smoke from the pit, and I see ice cubes skipped over the Lake of Fire. It rains fish in Honduras sometimes. Some clouds are so high that they refract light at dusk, after the sun has already set. It looks like the sky has been lit without a match. Strange things can happen outside: Supercells, witching drifts, idiot winds. He was still a little drunk from the night before, and he reached for a razor and threatened his face with cutting off its goatee.

He held another Zoom meeting with the station chief at TV1 La Mejor in Mexico City.

The station manager assured him there would be no clowns or adults dressed up as babies to co-anchor El Show de Falcón, which she said would be an opportunity for Dr. Falcón to address meteorology and its nuance, as opposed to a garden-variety morning show.

“No diets, no animals in costumes, no children with special talents?” asked Dr. Falcón.

“None of that,” she assured him. “Join us.”

The radioactive equilibrium model of the Earth also applies to people. The left side of the equation is living in warm light, and the right side of the equation is all dark and dead. At the station in El Paso, Dr. Falcón made one more plea to be given a furlough from his yearly indignity.

“With great influence comes great responsibility,” replied the Channel 4 station manager. “Here are your grapes,” he said, and handed Dr. Falcón a bag of grapes across which read “2020”. The grapes came from Rey del Oller vineyards, the grape monopoly who had a deal with Channel 4.

“I quit,” said Dr. Falcón, although he gave the ten-day forecast at 7pm.

During his last broadcast in El Paso, Dr. Falcón wished the Channel 4 audience Happy Holidays and guaranteed clear cool skies for the next week and a half, even though he’d looked at satellite data indicating a thermal whip snapping toward the east from Baja. He felt a pinch in his throat. It was dangerous to forecast against data, and in doing so, he felt both liberated and Promethean, torn between data and divinity.

“Adios amigos,” he said, and removed his earpiece and the ON AIR light went dead. Dr. Falcón instantly felt sheared from the old current of life, drove home, and packed his bags hastily, both proud and ashamed at his lack of things.

Just after departing on the midnight train from El Paso to Mexico City, an epileptic hail smashed against the cabin windows. Dr. Falcón watched and listened to the escapade of ice and snow and grit tore by in a riot. He sighed, his forecast forbidden. He looked inside his travel bag, fingered the sealed bag of twelve green grapes given to him by the station manager.

Suddenly, a ball of ice smashed a hole in a window, and little glass daggers pierced the polymer seat cushion across from Dr. Falcón. Wind whistled into the cabin and with icy pincers the storm clawed away at the crackling glass. Winds came from faraway places—stars and glaciers; a storm woven from the great, incomprehensible loom. A whistle then a roar. Dr. Falcón was embarrassed he’d let emotion infect his forecast, but he was on to greater things. A scent of tea roses, of slaughter, of cosmic particulate in the train car.

He closed his eyes, and ate one grape after another as the storm became intimate, passionate. The whole cabin soon filled with the rumble of matter versus anti-matter. The grapes were bloated and juicy, great green pearls. Dr. Falcón began a prayer of annihilation. He devoured his past in a handful of grapes.

When the train pulled into the Estación Buenavista in Mexico City, an intern from TV 1 La Mejor waited and waited until everybody seemed to have left the train. When he inquired about passenger Dr. Eduardo Falcón in the first-class compartment, an usher said that there was a problem.

“A medical problem,” said the usher with great solemnity.

An American tourist with no one to kiss was the first to recognize that Dr. Falcón was choking on grapes. She’d tried to revive him with some maneuvers but with no success. An ambulance left with Dr. Falcón inside. There was no need to hit the siren or the lights. Snow continued to fall over the zocalo as the ambulance made its way gingerly toward the morgue.

At midnight on New Year’s Eve in El Paso, Ana Barrera, the new meteorologist at Channel 4, went viral after she ate two-dozen grapes while singing all the words to ‘Auld Lang Syne’. The next week, she made an appearance on ‘El Show de Chango,’ the new morning talk show on Mexico City’s TV1 La Mejor, in which a monkey puppet has guests solve riddles.

#FlashFriday Editor's Pick micro fiction short fiction short stories

SHAMU CAM

by Charlotte Turnbull • February 12, 2021February 12, 2021

Photo by Josh Hallett (copied from Flickr)

Shamu Cam came live from Shamu’s tank at Sea World, Orlando, on the other side of the world, where the sun is an orange. Orcas are the most widespread mammal in the animal kingdom, found in all oceans, occasionally even a freshwater river, but most especially the empty spare room on that 3,000-home-estate north of the railway line in Didcot. It wasn’t the original Shamu – the real Shamu had been dead for 33 years by 2004 – but if it looks like Shamu, acts like Shamu, and we call it Shamu, etc.

“Are you coming to bed?”

I could sit for hours in that Hideaway Home Office Computer Cabinet, the erect motherboard and processor buzzing at my calves, waiting for the huge, silent shadow to flash directly in front of the camera. Waiting for the room to pitch suddenly into throbbing dark. I ate supper in front of Shamu Cam. I undressed and brushed my teeth, flicking through the different views – some above the surface, some below. You couldn’t take the internet wherever you wanted back then.

“Just finishing a bit of work.” There was no home button or touch-sensitive pad for ease of hiding; you had to flick the cable and send the mouse on an odyssey to reduce the image.

I dabbled in polar bear cam, penguin cam, otter cam, even a red panda cam once; slowly desensitised to conservancy objectives and critical endangerment. I could never get close enough to the screen to interpret long marks made by sausage fingers in the dust as a gorilla swung listless in a Goodyear. The keyboard was greasy beneath my fingers, but they always slid home to the dark heft of Shamu. Shamu Cam ran in the background from the moment I got in from work. Until I left in the morning. Always waiting, waiting for a glimpse of that half-mast of a sail: saluting, or bereaved.

We split up. The desktop was his.

No more black island sinking in slow circles of misty water. No more giant fish teleporting whenever the connection buffered. No more chance of a trainer’s body floating slowly, dragged by the hair, or arm, or whatever, while the scrim of the water hid abrasions and contusions. The computer was gone. The Hideaway Home Office Computer Cabinet was empty.

You read a lot about the cruelty of captivity and performance, but never the other side. It is theoretically possible some of the Shamus might have preferred the familiar tank – the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to recognise everything you see.

And isn’t life, after all, one long performance?

But the sheer relief of not having to be a killer.

Of not accidentally diving so deep that light cannot follow.

– of never knowing if it will end.

The Mist

by James Roderick Burns • February 8, 2021February 8, 2021

“I can still taste the shock of it, hot like gulped coffee, and underneath feel my quick furtive smile.”

I’m very fond of the Whisky Society. It has all the trappings of an old-fashioned, fusty gentleman’s club – oak-panelled walls, a pair of magnificent fireplaces flanked by armchairs, rows of hardbacks bound in gold-stamped cloth – but remains singularly free of fusty gentlemen. Anybody can join, and for a paltry fee marinade themselves from eleven in the morning to midnight in the finest single malt scotch. I was waiting with a glass in my hand when my friend appeared from nowhere in the other armchair.

‘Fraser! Wasn’t sure you’d make it.’

He lifted an eyebrow, settling into the welcoming leather and snapping out his cuffs. Fraser had always been something of a dandy, and his elevation from our modest ranks to the intoxication of lower senior-middle management had only confirmed the trend.

‘I wasn’t sure I would come, you know, but I found myself in this part of town and something drew me in.’

‘Speyside?’

He nodded. As I went for the whisky and the water jug he flicked away a minuscule speck of lint from his sleeve. There were midnight blue stains on his fingers, ink I supposed, alongside smudges of what appeared to be brick-dust on his shoes, but he seemed not to have noticed those. ‘Here you are. To your health.’

‘And yours. I’m not so sure of things as I used to be, but this never changes.’

He dipped his nose into the bulb and sniffed, tasting the cask-strength liquor appreciatively, then adding a dash of water. Colour appeared on his cheeks like carnations in an undertaker’s window.

‘Well, I’ve had an absolute bastard of a day, and was going to be here whatever happened, to be brutally frank.’ I expected him to smile and show the usual interest, ask after his erstwhile colleagues or simply react to whatever had happened, but he just stared into the fire. The flames leapt strong and high against the drizzle outside. The light was almost gone. As I watched it seemed to creep away into that thick, unpleasant caramel shade that seems to haunt the end of Edinburgh days.

‘Are you interested in stories?’ he said.

‘I haven’t moved into private office, if that’s what you’re thinking,’ Fraser said. ‘I might be career-minded but I’m not insane. No, just a sideways move to an up-and-coming policy area, you know: social alienation, then another to – well, it isn’t that interesting, to be honest with you. But I’ve been so busy I haven’t had much time for anything else, at least nothing I’m conscious of. I still get out and about but after work the days seem to fold up like a concertina.

‘The last time I recall really enjoying anything was that night at the end of the festival. Last year’s a bit of a blur, particularly round the bloody promotion board, but that night I do remember. We were at the branch in town, remember? The whisky there’s just as good, the building better, if anything, but the inside looks too pristine, don’t you think, like someone’s stripped it down for a quick sale to some faceless corporation? They had that wonderful highland malt and we kept at it till I felt like I’d drunk half the ocean.

‘You left to get a cab but I wanted to walk so I set off on foot, wobbly as an unmoored ship drifting out of the dock. The night buildings were stark and shadowy. Buses passed by on Princes Street. A few revellers poked out of alleyways and peeled off, and I started to feel lonely. Perhaps I ought to head up to the station and catch a bus. As I passed the bright windows of the McDonald’s I heard someone retching in a ginnel.

‘The bus shelter was dark when I got there, its domed light smashed-in. I perched on that mean little bench they’ve installed to make the tramps slide off, and tried to stay upright. The good cheer was draining away more quickly than usual. I could still hear whoever it was back there, vomiting heartily, and there wasn’t a bus or even another person in sight. I patted my inside pocket for a book but realised I’d left it in my other coat and stood up to pass the time with the bus timetable. Then it happened. At the same moment the retcher passed my shelter – a woman, by the look of things, wiping her mouth on the sleeve of her spangled top – I noticed the advertisement. I can still taste the shock of it, hot like gulped coffee, and underneath feel my quick furtive smile.

‘A chesty model in her underwear was positively leaning out of the picture. The fabric was a light chocolate brown, stretched tight across her chest and abdomen till it shone like a layer of brass. She had her hands clasped behind her back (presumably for leverage, so she could thrust out even further from the picture in a look-at-these gesture) and presented a slim oval, dark as a post box slit, between her glossy pouting lips. Come and Get It, Boys read the caption. I wouldn’t have noticed – well, maybe I would – but for the wiry stickman leering over her shoulder, one spiky hand against her flank, the other thrust rudely, almost possessively, at the back of her head. He was two feet away from the woman but that didn’t stop his monstrous horse cock, thick as her wrist, snaking up and disappearing between the cleft of her buttocks. He had one eyebrow raised, and his head tilted at the audience. There was no caption but in the far bottom, just above the advertiser’s name, was a signature, The Mist, trailing away into tendrils of vapour.

‘I’d never seen anything like it. I stood and stared and chortled till my bus came. I was still thinking about it the next morning. I had a catch-up meeting planned with the head of the social alienation unit, and mentioned the picture over coffee.

‘Cartoon, eh?’ he said, pouring liquid creamer into his mug with abandon. It slopped out of the sides, pattered on the thin grey carpet.

‘No, Heath, not just any old cartoon. This was something different, something – profound, I suppose. It had something to say.’

‘What, the guy wants to play hide the salami with a lingerie model? Who doesn’t!’ He laughed with a sound like a blocked sink and disappeared into his office. But the image stuck with me and kept ringing up in my mind like a sale tab in one of those old-fashioned cash registers. What was the purpose of it? I wasn’t sure, but suspected the mind at play behind those bold slashing lines and devilish grin had something to impart. After all, it could just as easily have read Jambo Cunt or something equally stupid. This had more to it. After supper I prepared myself a large whisky and green ginger, and settled down to think about it.

‘Ridiculous, really, wasting so much time on a trifle like that, but the night was wild and damp, the long summer day had blown itself out in a puff of heat and dust. I wasn’t going anywhere. I watched fat raindrops sliding down the glass. The sheer cheek of it was what gripped me, I realised – that irresistible urge to seize on what offended you and lance its poison with vast, ridiculous mockery, out of all bounds and proportion. I imagined The Mist, whoever he was, strolling back and forth in front of the advert a few times like a curator with a new acquisition, sizing up the right pitch and moment for his attack, perhaps humming The Circle of Life between rapid breaths, then ambling away and returning like an avenging plague at midnight, Sharpie in hand. That stickman stood for all the perversion of the world, its cheapened sensuality, the bountiful harvest of flesh both proffered and retracted in the picture’s soulless gleam. I thought I had it figured it out when it occurred to me how brutally the little ghoul was treating the woman, where and why he was firing his dart, and I tumbled back to the beginning. I turned on the radio but it must have been missing a connection.

‘All that came out of the speakers was a rush of static.’

Fraser stopped. I was certainly interested in the story, and said so. A vague smile appeared on his lips and he gestured with the snifter, pulling his green membership card from an inside pocket and handing it across.

‘Put the next few rounds on there,’ he said. I raised my eyebrow then quickly thought better of it. Now he was nine thousand and change ahead of me in the salary stakes, if he wanted to pick up the tab that was fine with me. His face wore a look of absolute seriousness. ‘Just leave it at the bar.’

‘The next time I came across The Mist I was consoling myself with pastry,’ said Fraser. ‘Things had gone pear-shaped at the office, and not just the usual sour-faced sort of downturn you get after six months with new people and grim reality dawns. This was much worse. The whole unit was shaking in its boots, though most of them were doing so quietly enough to alert the others without rousing the boss. No one talked openly – actually no one talked much at all – but everything was bubbling away under the surface like lava.

‘You know that Sicilian bakery, just round the corner from the flat? Its tiny, a strange little oasis in a sea of anonymous commercial frontage. As the pressure built at work I would hide out in macaroni pies and fish suppers slathered with salt and sauce, but my latest stress-management tool was sweet pastry. I hooked a cannoli out of a grease-spotted bag and sucked on the sweet cheese as I turned down Easter Road. Some wag had scrawled Edinburgh City Council and Local Government Drink Piss on a brick wall. I dismissed it at first, more interested in that little nubbin of sweet powder where the two halves of the pastry met, but then I turned around with a half-smile. Whoever did the deed had sense enough to distinguish between elected members of the council and the local government staff who implemented their policies (though both seemed to have odd tastes in refreshment). Perhaps it was The Mist, but on an off-night.

‘At the junction by the weak railway bridge, which shook every time a train ran by, was a long billboard. I walked round the semi-permanent barrier they’d erected to protect pedestrians from the road works and noticed he had been in the area, after all. Stockings this time, plastered on a gigantic pair of legs, tall and brown and magnificent as the trunk of a redwood tree. In the picture, spotlights sparkled off sheer material, running up and down the model’s thighs in slow strokes till they rounded out into surprising dark at the top of the poster. Next to her left leg was a fully-clothed, spiky stickwoman. She wore a business suit hatched in bold strokes and had a sombre, reflective face. Her index finger pointed to the logo, then the company name slashed through and replaced with another in magnified, flourishing italics: Gross-ad. ‘I am not a sexual object’ was printed in an indignant speech bubble underneath.

‘I burst out laughing, spraying the lapels of my suit with crumbs. The world seemed a little bit brighter, more of a sane place for a moment or two. At the door of the tenement it occurred to me I’d seen two, possibly three of these masterpieces on my walks around town. Did he live round here? Perhaps I’d catch him at work. I could slip him my card, have him come along and lecture the unit on citizen empowerment and alternative channels for social expression. A pigeon gobbled somewhere overhead, and I slid my key into the lock.’

Fraser was staring into the fire, the dregs of his whisky sliding round the bottom of the glass. ‘Two or three masterpieces, yes – and then what?’

‘What do you mean, then what?’ Fraser looked up. Small tendrils of red were creeping in towards his pupils.

‘I mean, you asked if I liked stories, and I do. How does this one end?’

A breeze was gathering outside the window. Small drops of rain knocked like fingers on the glass. Across the other side of the room someone lurched into a chair and sent a water jug tumbling. Fraser shifted around in the leather chair, first crossing and then uncrossing his spindly legs. He placed his palms down on the leather.

‘I didn’t walk into the job with my eyes shut, you know. Far from it. It came with a banner headline. Troubled unit, lots of staff churn, bit of a mystery why it wasn’t firing on all cylinders. I was stupid enough to think I could change it, turn things around. But really, there’s no curing cancer. You just have to cut it out or it’ll carry on rotting outwards till everyone slides into their grave.’

‘Fraser?’

In the uncomfortable silence after the broken pottery had been cleared up, my voice sounded unnaturally loud. His gaze had drifted outside and I brought him up sharp. ‘Your glass appears to be empty.’ I settled back into my chair. For a moment he sat there uncomprehending, then light dawned and he went over to the bar. When he came back he was smiling.

‘Two of the saltiest, seaweediest island malts, my lad. Dose of the sea already in ’em. Drink up!’’ We upended our glasses.

‘Better,’ he said. ‘Better. Didn’t mean to go around the houses, but you needed to know. His last scheme, believe it or not, the one before I – ah, before we came to a mutual understanding that the best way forward was a strategic relocation – well, his last great idea was house sitters.’

‘House sitters?’

It sounded like an organised squad of seagulls.

‘House sitters – as in professional busybodies parked in the front rooms of the socially alienated, the ASBO crowd, you know, the common folk, to perk the buggers up.’ Fraser snorted. ‘He used to refer to people as schemies, in public, this is, as pond life. “Get some shock troops into the ghettos, keep an eye on the pond life.” This in the guy’s office, fifteen yards from my team. And he meant it. The fuckwit wanted to kit out a bunch of underemployed social workers in tweedy uniforms and get them out and about in the community. He thought it would send a rocket through the ranks, and he’d ride its tail to head of group. Fuck him.’

I’d never heard him talk like this, not the language or the bitterness. Somehow it didn’t sit with his five hundred pound suit, the platinum cufflinks and perfectly pointed handkerchief. I waited for more but that seemed to be the lot. From over my shoulder I heard the soft chimes of the bell, then the white haired gentleman beginning his rounds. I gathered up my briefcase and coat and we walked out into the night.

The world outside was dark and damp. From the long curved housing block opposite the Society came the sounds of television and radio, an occasional child calling, all muffled by a clinging mist. We walked across the cobbles and through iron gates out to the street. The city had installed electronic journey update screens for our route home; one stood next to the shelter on a long pole, its flat grey pupil pulsing against a black screen. We settled in under the glass and stretched our necks for any sign of a bus.

‘Don’t you feel as though you did some good, though, after all that?’ I asked.

‘Good how, exactly?’ Fraser’s voice was disappearing into the rolled up collar of his raincoat. His hands sought out the belt, winding it protectively round his middle.

‘Well, I don’t know – injecting a bit of realistic thinking into what was going on, helping, you know. Clarifying things.’

‘The only thing I helped was myself by getting out of there.’ He reached up to the screen and tapped it. Nothing. ‘I certainly didn’t help the situation. He’s still there, chortling about the lower orders behind closed doors, and I’m monitoring the shit they pump into the drinking water. On a good day I count the seals.’

‘Pardon?’

‘In the old dock, behind the office. We get seals every now and then, as well as seagulls. Always the bloody seagulls. I once saw a rat slip into the water. Like a little hairy crocodile, it was.’

I could see he wasn’t happy and gave up. Perhaps the bus would be along soon and we could get away home. I wasn’t sure how to handle the silence. He had turned away from me and was staring through the scratched glass towards the end wall of a pub across the road. Its lower half was yellow sandstone, the edges of the stones marked with mortar, its surface chipped here and there by stones thrown up from the road. But they had painted the top half in bold glittering white. An enormous bosomy question mark snaked up one side, a slim red and blue drinks can on the other. Between them was four or five feet of virgin white space, with some banal strap-line running along beneath.

‘Fraser?’

I noticed our bus nudge over the bridge at the far end of the street.

‘Something to do,’ he murmured, moving out towards the road. As the bus pulled up its brakes squealed, the rubber-lined doors flapping open like bat’s wings. I walked to the platform.

‘Fraser?’

But he’d disappeared in the direction of the pub. As I climbed aboard and scanned my card I thought I saw a fleeting shape pass in front of the whitewashed wall, but when we pulled away it turned out to be nothing. The mist turned into rain, and the bus bumped away over the cobbles.

#FlashFriday Editor's Pick flash fiction micro fiction short fiction

THE SNAKE

by Danton Remoto • January 29, 2021January 29, 2021

Photo by Robert Nunnally (copied from Flickr)

I once lived in a three-bedroom unit in an elegant condominium with white paint in Simei, in Singapore. My two flatmates were also Filipinos like myself: Antonio was an engineer, while Roberto was a chef. I was here to write a book about the rivers of Southeast Asia.

On our left lived a Chinese family, the Cheongs, who sometimes had relatives visiting them. They would play mah-jongg until the wee hours of the morning. But the clackety-clack of the ivory tiles did not bother me. In fact, they even reminded me of my aunts who also played this game.

On my right lived an Indian family, and the smell of their cooking – curried meats and the chicken makhana – also wafted into my bedroom. But I was also not bothered, for I devoured the Indian food in the restaurants near the station of the metro rail system.

In front of me lived a Malay couple, very quiet indeed. When I first saw the husband, he asked me if I was a Filipino. When I said yes, he said that they have Filipino carpenters in Sabah, Malaysia. “But in the Philippines,” he sniffed, “they claim to be engineers.” I just gave him my fake Filipino smile.

The one who talked to me often was Mrs. Cheong. I first met her the day after I moved in. I was leaving the flat at nine a.m. to go to the National University of Singapore to do research when I saw her entering their flat. I gave her my genuine Filipino smile and she smiled back. “Ah-yah, sorry-lah. We were noisy last night with the mah-jongg.” I told her why I was not bothered, and she just smiled back.

The next week I met her when I was going to the pool to swim. She had just finished swimming, her short, gray hair still wet. “Nice day for swimming,” she said.

I smiled back at her, “Yes, Ma’am.”

“Ah-yah. Just call me Auntie-lah. You remind me of my son in Boston. Tall and thin, with glasses,” she smiled sadly.

“How many children do you have, Auntie?”

“Only two. Alvin in Boston, Christine in Sydney. Both of them studying. I hope they come back.”

“I’m sure they would,” I said, thinking who wouldn’t want to come back to Singapore? It had clean and tree-lined streets, and its trains were cool and always on time. Everything is green here, I thought, everything is measured. The forests are gone, replaced with neat theme parks, and the dirty rivers had been cleaned of dirt and debris.

“Oh, you never know with the young ones. They think differently from me and your uncle.” Uncle I rarely saw, for he worked long hours at a bank near Clarke Quay.

One day, Auntie invited me to have lunch in their flat. She said she cooked a lot but their relatives could not come at the last minute, so we should eat up. Her flat had furniture from Ikea and we ate her soft Hainanese chicken.

We were having chamomile tea in delicate cups when she told me what happened in her former flat. They used to live in Sentosa Cove, an expensive enclave of the rich in Singapore. One of her neighbors – a tall Chinese woman whose husband also worked in the same bank as Mr. Cheong – turned up her nose at everyone. “Maybe because her husband is VP in a bank and mine is just a senior manager,” she said, eyes rolling.

“The Goh family lived in the penthouse, the most expensive one in the condo. She always snubbed me,” Auntie cackled. “But I just ignored her, too. Who cares? But one afternoon, I heard her screaming!”

“What happened?”

“She knocked on my door. She said she was about to use the loo when she found a snake – a thin, green snake, one foot long – in her toilet bowl.

I was incredulous. “How did it reach her penthouse?” thinking of the high-rise and expensive condominium in Sentosa Cove. There was no forest for many miles around the enclave of the rich.

Auntie just looked at me with her glazed eyes. “Ai-yooo!” she said. “How would I know, lah?”

Editor's Pick Love online fiction short stories

The Future of Love

by Michael Harper • January 24, 2021January 24, 2021

Alex walked around the hotel room inspecting it as if all hotel rooms were not the same. Each fell into the traps of their price range. This particular room was no different, paintings of floral arrangements hung over the bed, the curtains were thick like carpet and fell in a softly suspended pile which suffocated all natural light, the lamps were shiny and fixed to the tables, the air conditioner hummed aggressively like a toddler concentrating on a coloring book.

Everything was neat and clean and tucked away conveniently. It was the same as every hotel room Alex had ever been in, excluding small local accents (Pueblos in the Southwest, Botanicals in Florida). The one exception was a very lavish establishment she and her husband had won a free night at from a raffle and a flea ridden hotbox she had been forced to dream a few unsatisfactory hours in after starting to nod off on the highway outside Cleveland. The posh spot had been uncomfortable. Tom, her husband, had walked around with his hand in his wallet tipping everyone he saw in uniform. Even Alex had to admit she glowed a certain soft shade of crimson when paying with their free voucher. She couldn’t remember the cheap highway place, except the feeling of little, many footed animals moving about in the dark and the sound of sex through the wall. But those were other rooms in what Alex now realized was another life. A life she planned in all sincerity to return too. Tomorrow. Or the day after at the latest.

She opened the bedside drawer and fingered the remote before instead lifting out the Bible. She opened the book at random and stared at the words, but her thoughts were on the last hours.

At 5 o’clock her doctor had broken the news. The cancer was spreading. The chemo wasn’t working, just sapping her immune system. Killing her faster. They decided to stop treatment and instead focus on the symptoms. Forfeit. Concede defeat. Prepare for what they had always searched for the slimmest of chances to hope against.

She drove home in silence, cutting off the radio before its influences could take hold. At 6 o’clock she broke the news to her husband. She didn’t want to, but it just slipped out after he asked how her day had been. There was the expected crying. Alex was annoyed. She was the one dying, and he was the one crying. As she stood there contemplating her husband as he turned into a soggy sandcastle, she lost all the patience she had ever had in her life. She took a few deep breaths through her nose before turning and leaving.

She slammed the door shut behind her, enjoying the definitive silence it created. Tom had just began lamenting about poor Sarah, their daughter, when the resounding slam struck him mute. The effect upset his balance slightly and he rattled like an empty paper cup unsettled by a breeze. He even had to sit down for a moment. By the time he recovered his senses, the echo of howling tires was all that remained of Alex.

She drove. Fast. Without destination. Impulsively she turned into a lot with a brightly lit blue sign that flashed ROOMS AVAILABLE. It was a chain she had heard of and thus trusted more than just any old place. If a company is on television and pays someone to write a jingle, then it must have some standards.

From that moment until now things had happened. Impulses were chased. Events were put in motion. And now she waited patiently like a disciplined dog playing fetch. Alex mixed herself another gin and tonic, measuring the ingredients precisely to take as many minutes as possible. She realized the irony of wasting time since her life was now on a resounding timer.

She checked her watch and then the clock on the bedside table. Her phone was ringing. It was Tom, so she turned it off. She found her reflection in the mirror.

There was always just the one thing she could never bring herself to tell Tom. Most of their stories had spilt out in their first half year together. They spent nights together at her flat. He had roommates, who were boys when together and sweethearts individually, and would always be crashing about at his place. It was like he lived with lawn mowers. They were always turning on TVs, running the microwave, changing the music, wrestling.

It was fun once they were tired of talking about themselves. But in the beginning, they were always at her place. Always with a half-drunk second bottle of cheap red wine glowering between them. Always a foggy ashtray near her. With each story going deeper and deeper into their shadowy depths.

She hadn’t listened intently or at least didn’t remember listening intently. All Tom’s stories were about a certain ex he never called by name. Classic stuff concerning parents and siblings and friends who had changed or never changed to keep pace with him. His hands would shake when he spoke, as if what he said was an exorcism which fought to stay with its host. He would look over her shoulder or deep into the swirling red currents of his wine, as if it was a whirlpool he was considering diving into. His magnificent eyes swam behind half-lowered lids as if they were trapped under icy glass. She liked being with him when he spoke and when the baton was passed with a, What about you? Or, Tell me something from your past. She would start slow, measured, unsure of where she was going. She could see the secret from far away, even when the words began racing out of her. She recklessly drove toward it only to swerve away at the last moment. Some part of here wanted Tom to guess, only so she could deny it with a slight hesitation, which would send shivers down both of their backs and cause him to quickly finish his wine.

She told him worse things. Things which haunted him for months, for years. Things which stalked his imagination and visited his dreams vengefully. Being with two men at once. The professor who was twice her age. All that vanished eventually. Disappeared more and more the longer they were together like the remnants of a dream breaking apart like a fog. He had grown up conservative, or religious or something, which his parents didn’t like talking about. All the shock of Alex’s past scorched his unarmed heart, but he grew to see her as a person instead of some foreign totem, looming uncivilized and strange against his culture’s sky.

It was easy for them. As easy as things can be. Life. Love. Etc. He wanted to get married and she didn’t care so they did. Her baby blue dress made his mom squirm, but it was beautiful. They’d thrown worse parties for worse reasons than celebrating themselves. Then they were married, which is something you don’t realize will happen when you marry. They had jobs. They had debt. They had an ugly car the color of an 80s prom dress. He wanted kids. She didn’t know what she wanted. So, they kept going. Kept doing life by moving forward and even though she knew it wasn’t true, she seemed completely fine to keep going that way until they died. He never showed a crack which let out any darkness or light. His hands never shook, and eyes never grew glassy and far away. There was nothing to talk about and she almost forgot there was this secret she’d never shared. Not with him or anyone. And then she was sick. Alex, the one who had never used a sick day or carried around a cold. Alex, the one who planned trips they would never take. Not Israel or New Zealand or Japan. And suddenly, she felt impermanent and became petty. She bitched about things which had never bothered her. She cried, alone, in the car parked outside the Walmart. Or after dropping Sally off at school. Or on the way to work. She wanted the world to reflect her illness. To suffer with her.

But the secret she’d never told, suddenly became impossible to hold in. It clawed at the door, searching for crevices to squeeze through. Even though it didn’t matter. Besides it being hers. Even though it meant nothing as an act. But as a secret, as something which she had kept for herself, hidden from the world as it gained value like a pearl held a power. A power over what others believed she was. A power over who she believed herself to be. In the shadows it morphed and transformed into an unpredictable beast tugging at desires lubricated by nostalgia and suppression.

After trying on a red synthetic wig that itched, she tied her pink bandana around her scalp. Over the last months she’d grown attached to the piece of cloth. It was like a baby blanket and she felt more hidden with it on, like sleeping with blankets to keep out the dark.

She wanted to be alone, but she also wanted things from people without the burden of interaction. She couldn’t stomach the necessity to compromise or meeting people halfway. Today she didn’t want to forfeit anything to anyone, which she decided was more important than what anyone else wanted.

There were three firm knocks on the door. Alex checked herself in the mirror, flattened her skirt to cover a few more inches of skin and then answered. The man was tall and athletically built. He had short cropped hair and a well-proportioned smile; all things Alex liked. He was young though, very young, which was something she did not like.

“Hello. I’m Laurent,” he said with a clearly fake accent. “You must be Alex.”

“Laurent? Really?”

The man smiled and walked into the room. “Mademoiselle does not like my name”

Alex was annoyed that they were playing this game. Both knew this was fake. Just because she was paying him for sex didn’t mean he had to be a fantasy. He came in and took off his shoes, setting them neatly by the door. Alex found this endearing and softened toward him. Besides, when he wasn’t speaking, he had a pleasant air and a welcoming face. As he passed her to enter the room, she caught the scent of lavender.

They sat on the bed. She let him touch her leg as he spoke, “This is your first time? I’m going to take good care of you.” He removed his shirt which released a wave of lavender like a field of butterflies being startled. Alex’s midsection buzzed. She thought about how since the chemo she’d had trouble getting wet and wished she had bought some lubricant. She didn’t know what to do with her hands, so she kept them in tight fists and dug them deep into the bed.

“It’s not my first time. I actually lost my virginity to a prostitute.” She laughed curtly.

“What’s so funny?”

“I’ve never told anyone that before.”

“You’re a very beautiful woman.” He stroked her arm and she could feel each inch of skin tingle as his hand passed like a cold breeze.

“Can I make you a drink?” she offered.

“If the Mademoiselle takes one then I will join her.”

His voice was soft, slow and low like it came from somewhere deep in his chest. She turned her back on him and made the drinks in silence, again measuring the ingredients diligently. She twisted the lemon chunks to dry rinds and tossed them into the drink like a sailor pitching the inedible parts of his dinner into the sea. They looked like stripped shrimp shells bleached pale by the sun. She forced herself to turn around.

Laurent looked calmly back at her. His fingers nearly brushed hers as she handed him the glass, passing a jolt of static energy. He smiled at her, “It’s normal to be nervous, but you have nothing to worry about. This is something for you. Enjoy it.” He spoke slowly, as if he was thinking of his accent, tacking curvy purrs onto the end of his nouns. He drank in small sips that didn’t seem to dent his drink. Alex’s cocktail was half gone which she couldn’t remember drinking. “We take things very slow. Very gentle. Just what you’re comfortable with.” As he spoke his hand started moving along the natural curve of her back, turning her momentum slowly toward him, as if she was doing it on her own. She felt herself opening or falling through an opening. They kissed. Softly. And then in half gulps like she was greedily drinking. His breath was hot, followed by cool pockets of spearmint.

He pulled her close and she felt small and safe. This was what she wanted. Not until this moment had she fully realized it. He held her firmly, just how she wanted, without thinking of himself. Not getting it over with or getting to the fucking or needing anything in return. Her money bought his sympathy, his patience, his willingness to put her first, second, and third without needing anything in return but her dollars. This is the future of love, she thought. We will work and work and then have nothing else to give someone else. Then we will pay someone to fill the void and we will love them unconditionally without the jealousy and unfairness that wrecks life. When it is over, they will leave. And we will miss them, but never hate them.

They kissed.

Slowly his hands grew restless, moving onto the next prescribed step. He squeezed the strap of her bra together through her shirt, causing it to spring like a window being blown open.

She stopped, grabbing his hand more aggressively then she had planned. “Stop. Please. Just stop.” The words came out like barked orders. He obeyed and waited instructions just as she wanted. “Just hold me. That’s all I want right now.”

She turned and laid on the bed with her back to him. Laurent curved around her, waxing her crescent moon shape by a week. He ran his hand down her arm and they laid in silence. She looked blankly at the wall and thought nothing, followed by everything all at once. Her eyes flooded with tears which overflowed her lids and dripped onto the pillow without him noticing. She didn’t want to die. She didn’t want to know that she must die because realizing there is no life without death doesn’t make anything easier, it just makes it more beautiful. She wondered if life was about making beauty or about nothing and if that would be easier. In Laurent’s arms everything was quiet. Everything was easy.

The hour passed. Laurent kissed her arm. “It’s time, Mademoiselle. Satisfied?”

She wiped her eyes and smiled up at him, “Best I’ve ever had.”

He laughed and grabbed his shirt on the way to the bathroom. Alex rolled to her feet. She found her purse and laid money out in a neat pile shaped like a peacock tail, so Laurent wouldn’t have to count it in front of her. The shadow of his voice could be heard through the door and she crept close to listen.

He was on the phone. The accent was gone and his speech was quicker and more natural.

“Hey, it’s LeRoy. I’m finished here. Can I get a ride? Yeah. No, it was good. No problems. Yeah, see ya in a minute.” Water started running and Alex retreated to the bed.

He emerged fully clothed and smiling. His eyes paused momentarily as they passed over the money before settling back on her. “Here is my personal number. Call me anytime.”

“OK. I will LeRoy.” His face froze for a moment before he laughed and shook his head.

“Sorry.”

“It’s OK. You don’t need to fake it. I like LeRoy.” A flip switched and he seemed to become human. Ticks and traits in his posture and arms suddenly emerged. He breathed less evenly.

“Sorry,” he repeated. The accent did not return. He sounded like someone you wouldn’t notice at the mall.

“What’s wrong with LeRoy?”

“Never liked it. Makes me sound like a redneck. I tried Lee for a while and then Roy. Both seemed so….simple. My boss came up with the act. He thought it would make me more, I don’t know, memorable. Make me stand out.”

“Well, I’m sure some women like it, but maybe you can stick to yourself with me.”

He smiled at the floor. “Of course.”

It was amazing to Alex how quickly they had switched roles. Now she was the confident one making him feel comfortable. It was cute seeing him vulnerable, but a part of her wished she hadn’t discovered him.

“OK,” he started with enthusiasm. “I have to go. I really hope you call again. I liked meeting you.”

Alex thought he seemed like a polite boy. He kissed her on the cheek and then she brought his lips to her mouth to reassure him. The money was folded into his pocket and the room started exhaling as it sensed the end.

Suddenly, a pounding like the heartbeat of a trapped rabbit started shaking the door. Neither of them moved, each waiting for a clue as to how to react.

“Alex! Are you in there! I have the cops downstairs to let me in if you don’t open up. Please. You can’t ignore me forever. We need to talk about this.”

LeRoy looked at Alex, who rolled her eyes. Forever seemed a bit dramatic. LeRoy pointed to the closet and Alex nodded. “One second,” she yelled. Followed by, “Jesus Christ,” under her breath. She closed the door on LeRoy who failed to look inconspicuous in the empty closet.

Before opening the door, she scanned the room and checked her face in the mirror. Everything seemed in place. How it should be. How it was expected to be.

“What?”

“Alex! Are you OK?” Tom rushed forward and hugged her. “I was so worried. I didn’t know what to do. I was so scared.”

“Sorry. I needed to be alone. How did you find me?”

“I called the cops and explained what happened and how I was scared maybe you were going to hurt yourself. It was just so unlike you to charge out like that.”

“Well you only get the news you’re going to die once, so you couldn’t have known what my normal reaction would be. And besides, there isn’t much harm I can do to myself that my body isn’t already doing.”

“I’m doing my best to deal with this. I just want to make sure you’re OK.”

“Well, I’m fine.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“I don’t really care.”

“You just got the worst news of your life. I’m sorry for thinking maybe you’re not alright and need some help. Just…”

“Just go home. Please.”

“What is there for you here?” Tom asked. “I’m not leaving you here like this.”

Alex looked around the room and tried to imagine what he meant. As far as he was concerned, she was drinking alone in a hotel room. Not such a terrible thing. Something lonely people did all the time. What was not here was another question, however. There were no words here. Only empty space. There was no one crying or speaking, going on and on and on. It was quiet here. Nothing could come in without her letting it in.

She saw the two glasses on the bedside table and panicked when she noticed the clue. “OK. You’re right. I’m sorry. It was selfish. I just needed time to think. Let’s go.”

Tom looked at her suspiciously, but his expression slowly melted into sympathy after noticing the open Bible on the bedside table. He looked like a teacher who had just taught some pupil a valuable lesson.

“OK.”

She started to gather her things. Tom sat on the bed facing the closet. Alex put together what she had brought, little things she carried with her everywhere, mascara, lipstick, money, cards, fingernail clippers, chewing gum, identification, all the essentials. The symbols of her life. Everything was back to normal in a few moments.

“OK. Let’s go,” she said.

Tom sat there, “I just wish you wouldn’t have done that to me. I was so worried. I was really frightened of what you could do.” He shook his head and ran his hand through his hair before standing and moving toward the door.

“Wait.” Alex spoke like she had something more to say, but really she just needed time to think. Place things. Realize her decision.

“What?” asked Tom, looking around as if the answer was hiding somewhere in the room.

Alex didn’t respond. She wanted to spring the door open, expose the monster of her recent recklessness, show where she had turned for comfort in her time of need. Let the truth crash about violently in the ordered surroundings like steers are said to do in expensive porcelain shops.

Then she thought of poor LeRoy trapped in the claustrophobic space, controlling his breathing so as not to be found out. He would be the naïve accomplice. She felt for him, not wanting to put him through drama that wasn’t his doing.

Suddenly, she laughed, realizing her mistake. Her folly. The world’s folly. “Nothing. It’s nothing. I’m sorry. Let’s go home. I’m tired.” She gulped down the remainder of her and LeRoy’s drinks and the couple marched hand in hand from the room to the elevator and out to their car, thanking the police for waiting.

They drove home.

Alex thought how useless it all was. LeRoy was already, against all odds, something to her. Opening that door just led to the same room with a different view. A room she couldn’t escape because she didn’t truly want too. She wanted people, needed to love them and hate them and feel like scratching their eyes out for being stupid and her still loving them. She loved Tom and she loved Sarah and she would have felt, if not love than something equally as bothersome for LeRoy if she kept meeting him.

Dying would be hard, she thought, and squeezed Tom’s hand. He would be there. But she would not go quietly. She still loved the world, despite itself.

LeRoy waited 3 minutes after the door clicked shut before leaving the closet. He counted the money, took out $50 and put it in his wallet and then returned the rest to his pocket. He checked himself in the mirror and smelled under his armpits. He had an urge for a drink but couldn’t find the remainder of his gin and tonic, besides his ride was waiting. He left the room, letting the door click gently shut behind him. The room was quiet. It said nothing of what it had seen. Someone would come along shortly and change the sheets, scrub the toilet, erase what had happened before someone new arrived.

#FlashFriday Editor's Pick flash fiction micro fiction short fiction

TIME TRAVELING UNCLE

by Stephanie Yu • January 22, 2021January 22, 2021

Photo by Kevin Rheese (copied from Flickr)

He first disappears just before I am born. I have no memory of it, of course, but my mom still wears it years later like a lead vest, releasing a strangled sigh whenever she hears the garage door open. When he returns, I am six months old, and he just stares and stares. Absorbing the number of moles I have and the curve of my hairline.

He has already seen what I look like at puberty, middle age, in death. He has seen the acne that will spread across my face like he has seen the bed sores that will cover the backs of my withered legs when they wheel me out the door. He knows the address of the home my grandchildren will put me in, and he knows it is not very nice. He has mapped out all the things that will happen to me if I decide to roll over in my crib the wrong way, and it is by his mercy alone that he puts his hand up and says “stop.”

He’s always making absolutely sure it’s me. In case competing timelines intersect and I am a changeling. Or he has fallen through a time hole and has forgotten he is in a dimension where he can’t be so forthcoming. He has given me passwords and fail safes, solutions to riddles, punchlines to jokes only he can resolve. Trick answers to know when I am an imposter. He diagrams decision trees, quizzing me several times a day. Why did the turkey cross the road? What makes a Brontosaurus sneeze? When does a comedian laugh at his own jokes?

He says he has met versions of myself that I would not believe. Plutocrat, ballet dancer, homeless without a shoe to my name. Not clones he says. Just offspring of wayward, inconsequential decisions, resulting in what you could be, would be, have been. He has met so many variations, he says, he has begun to wonder what makes his current iteration all that great. How can you know if the self is the truest self of yourself? I watch him tinker in the dark of the garage, hunched over, with a glow leaping over his shoulders in an embrace.

My uncle disappears again the winter before I turn eleven. My mom asks me to help gather the empty beer cans in his garage. He comes back just in time for my birthday party, smiles. Haven’t seen him since, but I still can see that grin. Now I celebrate my birthdays at a home my grandkids have put me up in. It isn’t that great, but also isn’t necessarily the worst.

What I remember of that day is him telling me he really didn’t want to miss this one, knew it was a biggie. Suggested I go for the chocolate ice cream, definitely not vanilla. Asked me if I knew the one about the priest and the quantum physicist who walk into a bar.

Editor's Pick Homelessness online fiction short stories

Getting By, Going By

by Rosalind Goldsmith • January 17, 2021January 17, 2021

Seanna slumps, exhausted. Her tent is rat-shredded, pocked with holes, covered with an old tarp. Inside, her bed is a plastic mattress covered with dumpster blankets and a damp pillow. Two bags of clothes beside. A Coleman stove crouches in one corner – a kettle on it she hasn’t used in years.

She sits on the pavement outside her tent, squinting at the people as they walk by. Her old green pants torn up to the knee, denim shirt worn and faded white, shoes wrapped up in duct tape. A front tooth fell out yesterday, now the other one feels loose, could be out by tomorrow. One thieving loss after another.

Other tent dwellers are camped out beside her. “The damned derelicts of the damned old defeated world” she calls them. They are loud, they scream, convulse, cough up blood, pass out. Sometimes they are rescued, sometimes not. They leave her alone now – anything she ever had of value already filched years ago. She’s old and doesn’t ask for much. No one speaks to her. She speaks to no one.

At night she thinks: What is there now to sustain? And why on this earth should I be sustained? Everyone she once knew – her people, her family – gone – distant or dead. Sometimes she’s got money for Vodka, sometimes not. The head that wakes her every morning vice-gripped with pain, the bones fevered with the cold, her pulse fluttering like a humming bird trying to escape.

This morning she pushes a clump of matted hair away from her face as she watches the parade of the Haves marching by in lockstep on their way to work. God. They are so determined to live their lives as if it’s worth it. As if life has something to offer them, or they it. She feels sorry for them, never envies what they have. She knows what they have doesn’t add up to anything. It’s just they don’t know it yet.

If she can cop a few coins, she’ll eat. If not, she won’t. Today, she’s determined to match the enthusiasm of the paraders. She says “Good morning!” to each one. And smiles.

This smile – a masterpiece. This smile a life’s work. This smile costing her everything she ever was: it’s a childhood memory of a swing and a party dress, a moment of laughter shared with a man she loved who died twenty years back. This smile dredged out from the earthed ruins of her happiness. She dredges it out because she has to. It’s a question of survival, survival a question of habit, habit hard to shake.

A young man passes by – he catches that smile – it reminds him of his aunt he hasn’t seen in years, but he’s not aware of that – he just knows he must go back. He stops, retraces his steps, puts a five-dollar bill in her paper cup.

“You have a nice day,” he says.

“Thank-you, you too.” she says and pockets the bill.

He walks on.

She’ll eat tonight. An egg salad sandwich with a large cup of coffee, and cream and sugar in it.

She knows this, but doesn’t give it much credit – the fact of eating, the fact of living on. She thinks about the homicidal circumstances of her life. It’s like her life has been bullied down by the days, and willed forward beyond its end date, and she doesn’t know why. Why does she – why does it – bother? What’s left now to hold on to? Clear enough: nothing. But it’s a stupid, blind-eyed brute, the will to survive – and hard to wrestle it down.

At four o’clock it starts to rain, a driving, soul-flattening rain. She crawls into her tent and sits on the mattress. That tarp is supposed to protect her, but it’s no match. The rain soaks through and drenches her, soaks her blankets, her pillow, floods out the bottom of the tent. This is bad. As bad as it can get.

Seanna crawls out. No point in being in there any more. The street is filling up fast and flooding.

Her neighbour – a meth addict who pitched in beside her months ago – is sitting folded up and hugging his knees, his hoody and jeans soaked through. Like her, he’s staring at the rain. He’s disheveled and beaten down, drowning, like her, a creature almost obliterated by the rain, shivering and suffering and enduring and cold to the bone and to the marrow of the bone.

Debris floats by – coat hangers, a baby’s shoe, a plastic seat cover, a doll’s legs, wooden blocks – she watches it all go by. Hasn’t got the will to go anywhere to get out of the rain. She’s a part of it now, a part of this downpouring – feels absorbed and taken up by it – feels comfort. The last, no-hope kind of comfort. A release, a capitulation. All resistance gone.

At the curb just in front of her something floats by, sticking up out of the water. She reaches out for it – it’s a small green plastic vase. She grabs it. Turns it over in her hands. For a fleeting second it reminds her of –

A promise once given her, long ago, by the man who loved her. A promise he couldn’t keep, and with it: a white lily. How she put that flower in a vase, and the vase on her white windowsill. How he kissed her then. The black and white tiles on the kitchen floor. Her red wooden table. His eyes.

Out of kindness to her, this memory dissolves in an instant and washes away with the rain. But she keeps the plastic vase, tucks it into her pocket and watches as the waters rise, as the wide, rivering street flows by.

The meth boy beside her curls up into a ball, like an armadillo, as if making himself small will protect him somehow, as if, in his way, he is still capable of resistance.

#FlashFriday Editor's Pick micro fiction short fiction

THE CASHMERE CLOAK

by Jason Thornberry • January 15, 2021January 15, 2021 • 1 Comment

Photo by Henrik Sandklef (copied from Flickr)

Out on the front patio of the old coffee shop — they meet here every day, discussing their backs and their wives and the minutiae of their lives. One older man, Jim, has a poodle the color of wet cement. It sits on his lap. Another older man, the one who hates poodles, sits on the other side of the table. Just in case this superficially passive beast begins to foam at the mouth. There are stories. The man who hates poodles has heard them all. That lady in Tempe? The one whose dogs ate her when she died? Poodles. All of them. And he already knows the cement colored dog doesn’t like him. The man’s name is Edgar. He wears aviator sunglasses — to avoid eye contact with the poodle.

Seated next to Edgar is a man who always brings war into their conversations. His name is George. As far as George is concerned, a war parable is as good a lesson as he knows for life’s most important questions and predicaments. Your back hurts? George can tell you a great story about swimming to a deserted island after a torpedo strike in the Korean War. George pulled an unconscious captain ashore, gave him mouth-to-mouth. They gave George a medal. But his back never felt the same. He still takes torrid, steaming, blistering showers, as hot as he can stand, every morning. Which helps. He carries a tube of toothpaste-looking minty stuff, and he asks his friends to rub a bit on his back sometimes. Today, George’s bad back reminds him of a story his son-in-law told him about the infamous suicide showers in Vietnam. George also has a theory about bathing during the Civil War. Apparently, a preponderance of Northern body odor disoriented the Southern troops. It was due, George says, to diets heavy in garlic, for which Northern culinary fare—even the kind found in a Union mess kit—was already becoming well-known. More than anything else, George loves connecting things back to the Civil War. He says the Civil War’s the fulcrum of American consciousness. But Edgar and Jim, the man with the poodle, are sick of hearing about it.

Seated next to George is Garrett. Garrett never says very much. Until he does. Then, he never shuts up. Garrett interrupted Edgar, who was interrupting George. Garrett suddenly remembered something on the radio yesterday. Something about their brand-new President and the socialist police state falling into place around his slender shoulders, like a blood-red cashmere cloak. Apparently, the new President’s going to let his army occupy the houses of the people who didn’t vote for him. After he takes away everybody’s guns, of course. Jim doesn’t have a weapon. He doesn’t care. If Garrett told Jim the new President was going to take his poodle Jessi away, he might listen. Jim softly strokes the furry curls on Jessi’s head.

Remembering suddenly, Garrett puts his coffee cup down and he lowers his gravelly voice. He tells his friends this country is on a frighteningly precarious path. He says he just heard, not ten minutes ago, on AM talk radio, that the new President’s presently crafting regulations that will make it illegal to _______ your _______.

Jim is horrified by this news. Strangely enough, Edgar is too.

This reminds George of a great story and he’s just about to tell it, until Jessi bites his finger — the same finger he’s excitedly pointing at Jim.

Editor's Pick online fiction short stories Spitting

Outsider, Insider

by Gautam Sen • January 10, 2021January 10, 2021 • 1 Comment

I was in a freewheeling holiday mood when the train I was in touched a station that bore the intriguing name of Hwakthu. I disembarked and, after checking in at a hotel, washed up and stepped out for a walk. I was strolling down a footpath when I noticed a balding man walking ahead of me spit, and then, as if on cue, a man with a hooked nose who was crossing the road to my side of the footpath did the same – and that too right in the middle of the road. I was about to explain it away as pure coincidence when a suspicious sound behind me caught my attention. Turning around, I spotted a third spitter, who wore yellow trousers and was may be some ten metres away, spitting with focused intent. At once terms like “chain reaction” and “the domino effect” sprang to my mind and, resolving to get to the bottom of the matter, I quickened my pace and caught up with Spitter Number One, whom I discovered working his mouth in the strangest manner possible. Alarmed as to what this might signify, and wondering what his next step might be, I wasted no time in addressing him while, at the same time, taking care to keep a discreet distance from his person:

“Excuse me,” I began, wearing a smile I tried my best to make amiable rather than condescending, “I’m a newcomer here. I notice the people around here are very fond of spitting. What might the reason be?”

He stopped working his mouth for a moment and looked at me as if he had first thought that I had spoken, but had subsequently changed his mind. Then his mouth resumed its former motions and he kept walking as if I didn’t even exist. A little further down the way he jerked his head and let out a jet of spittle that landed bang on the drain at the footpath’s edge. Horrified as I was, I couldn’t but appreciate his dexterity. I hung on for Spitter Number Two – the road-crosser, who had almost caught up with me. When he finally did, I put on my most disarming smile and greeted him with a friendly “Hi!”

He threw me a questioning look.

“I’m new to these parts,” I began. “It would be nice to know … why do people here so love to spit? I mean, don’t they know of the possible consequences – of how unhygienic it is and all the diseases it might cause?”

I am of an introspective turn of mind, and when I think of it now, it is not impossible that my lips curled subtly in subconscious disdain when I asked this question. You see, I belong to the Big City, the Great City, the place where things happen, where culture is born and bred, and I have an instinctive aversion to the unmannerly and the crude.

Like his predecessor, this fellow chose not to answer. Darting me a look of utter disbelief, he side-stepped away, spat assertively, and began crossing the road again, as if he had decided to keep a safe distance from me.

It was demoralizing, to say the least. The only hope left for me now was Yellow Trousers (though by now I could spy a few other pedestrians here and there getting into the act), but no sooner was he very nearly where I was when he kind of stiffened (did he sniff what I was about?), hailed what I later learnt they called here a “cycle cab” – a cycle lugging a board on wheels on which passengers take their seats – and, determinedly plonking himself on it, made his getaway.

All this was very disconcerting. I needed time to put myself together, so I made my way to a roadside eatery, ordered Pepsi, and spent some ten minutes taking slow, meditative sips while listening to the occasional spitting of the shopkeeper on the other side of the counter. I had taken a chance in getting off at Hwakthu, and it seemed Luck hadn’t quite favoured me on this occasion.

Having had my Pepsi, I continued walking, sometimes stopping to look at things – insects, a park, beautiful spitting women who sacrificed their beauty just to enjoy the supposed pleasures of spitting, and what have you. I tried to observe if the insects there, too, were wont to spit, but though I sat on my haunches and bent low to take a close look at a pair of cockroaches, it was difficult for me to figure out if they were actually spitting or blowing each other kisses. Hardly had I gone another hundred metres than I spotted a group of five men moving urgently in my direction, spitting at random in a variety of styles – sideways, forward, with head bent, with head straightened, while remaining stationary, and on the move. Clearly, spitting in Hwakthu had an extra dimension to it — people there seemed to pursue it as a form of art. However, it was with some trepidation that I noticed that Spitters Number One, Two, and Yellow Trousers were all there, with two new faces to boot.

“Hey you!” called out one of the group I had not seen before (and whom I will refer to as New Face One), when they were quite near me. He was untidy-looking and, God knows why, reminded me of a smashed egg that had splattered all over the floor.

“Hey you!” repeated New Face Two, who was big-built and had ‘Ruffian’ stamped all over him – on his snarl, on his unkempt, unshaven mustachioed face, on the roughness of his voice. He jabbed his thumb in the direction of Spitters Number One, Two, and Yellow Trousers. “So you were asking them a question, right? Come, let’s have that question again.”

“That’s a million buck question,” I retorted. “Do you have the money?”

“Repeat the question,” he threatened.

“I’ll repeat no question,” I countered, “but this much I’ll say: spitting on the streets is a public health menace — it’s the stupidest habit on earth.”

New Face Two rolled up his sleeves and, with the war cry of “Watch your tongue, you nincompoop!” he pushed hard against my shoulders, making me reel. The others too lunged and swung out at me. As I fell to the ground, they swooped down on me like vultures on a fresh corpse.

“Give it to him real good – break the bastard’s limbs!” said one of my attackers.

“Why do they let these bloody outsiders in?” joined in another.

There were loud spits and kicks and curses coming from all over. I bunched myself up and tried to use my hands as shields. Once in a while I shouted out things like, “Let’s talk it over in a civilized way” and, somewhat later, “Don’t think I won’t report this to the police,” but such outbursts were only met by louder curses and louder kicks and louder threats and louder spitting, so, as a final resort, I took to silent prayer. I have never been a particularly devout person, but there are times I do give prayers their due.

When that part of the ordeal ended I don’t know. I opened my eyes to an elderly kindly-looking bespectacled gentleman smiling and nodding at me in an imbecile kind of way. I was comfortably tucked up in somebody else’s bed, moderately but skillfully bandaged, feeling like I had come out of a very deep sleep. Surely I had been administered pain-killers, for there was no pronounced consciousness of body-ache in me. It did take me some time, though, to recall what had happened.

“Allow me to introduce myself,” said the gentleman affably, bringing his face close to mine and widening his eyes appreciably. “I’m Professor S. Zuzubee, Head of the Department of Scientific Research at the Nitwit Foundation. I was returning from office in my car when I saw you being assaulted. They let me pick you up because I’m well-known here. Be that as it may, it took me all my powers of persuasion to convince them that that was not the proper way to deal with the situation.”

“Thank you very much indeed,” I responded, oozing with gratitude. It all came back to me – how I had spoken out for the public good and had been assaulted in consequence. I wiped my face with my hand and gave a passing thought to the fact that the professor would not need to spit separately – he spat generously in the very process of speaking.

The man stood back, straightened himself, and suddenly began to declaim in his thin, tremulous voice:

“God spat on the face of the earth, and from His spit was born the waters of the earth, and from the waters there rose every form of life that exists, including His supreme creation, man.”

“Therefore, it is said,” he continued, “Spit, and be thou God-like.”

I goggled, swallowed, and cleared my throat.

“Er.. This is…?”

“Straight from the Hwakthu scriptures. We have a very distinctive culture here, of which we are extremely proud, as indeed we have every cause to be. And for your kind information, we’ve carried out extensive research on spittle in our laboratories. We’ve come to some revolutionary conclusions on its nature and properties that confirm, without a shadow of doubt – though the outside world persists in being skeptical – that the deep-rooted tradition of spitting in Hwakthu, which goes back many generations, has a thoroughly scientific basis.”

I sat up and eyed the door.

“Besides, why do internal injuries of the mouth heal so speedily?” he went on. “It’s because the antiseptic qualities of saliva, according to path-breaking experiments carried out in our laboratories, is 2.8 recurring times more powerful than those of commercial iodine … and yes, you may also have heard how, in umpteen cultures around the world, people spit to stave off the evil eye.”

Well, if I was on pain-killers, I would put them to maximum use. I jumped out of bed, slipped my feet into my shoes like greased lightning, and made a dash for the exit. I heard the professor hurry up to the door after me and shout:

“Did you know Hwakthu is a global manufacturer of spittoons?”

Spittoons? So, that’s what they were – those peculiar ashtray-like objects at various points on the hotel floor that were not quite ashtrays. I’d asked the boy taking me to my room, and he had said, “That’s just to make the place look nice.”

When I eventually reached the police station, I unburdened myself unreservedly to the OC with the qualification – recent events having made me wiser – “I know spitting enjoys a high status in Hwakthu, yet … violence is violence, a crime is a crime, assault is assault, isn’t it?”

The OC was a beady-eyed fellow with a heavy jowl. Despite spitting at intervals of about five minutes into an intricately patterned silver spittoon (which he followed up by taking a gulp of water from a glass in front), he had listened to my tale with riveted attention, but what he now did caught me completely off-guard. He thumped peremptorily on his desk-bell and, when a constable popped in, ordered him to immediately lock me up.

By now the effect of the pain-killers had begun to wear off.

“But … but … but!” I faltered, somewhat at a loss for words.

“There are no ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ in my vocabulary,” he declared.

I felt around in my mouth to see if I could find my tongue. When I discovered it was there, fully intact, I threw out a quick “Why? What have I done? Why me and not those culprits?” even as the constable ominously closed in on me.

Again the OC thumped on the table.

“Violence is of two kinds – physical and non-physical,” he began. “Non-physical violence can sometimes be of a more serious nature than the physical kind. For instance, attacking a community’s sacred beliefs is a much more serious matter than attacking a person who has attacked your community’s sacred beliefs – you see what I mean? The second kind of attack can even be termed an act of patriotism. Do not our soldiers kill enemy soldiers on the battlefield? You’re an educated man – tell me. Are these soldiers who kill enemy soldiers considered culprits or heroes?—Tell me. Are they or are they not rewarded by the government? Who can say you’re not a part of an international conspiracy to create disorder in Hwakthu? And yet, because our culture is so tolerant and forgiving, the Professor did all in his powers to come to your help. In which other place of the world will you find such largeness of heart? … Constable, lock him up!”

The constable, who had turned to statue at his superior’s oratorical performance, came back to life again and, robot-like, resumed business.

The situation called for divine intervention. I signaled God a SOS. My right arm in the constable’s firm grip, I was being unceremoniously led towards the door when inspiration flooded my mind like equatorial sunlight after a week of polar snow. All my symptoms of physical and psychological agony vanished like birds at the sound of gunshot.

The door before me had swung open perhaps half a foot on its outward path when – I myself don’t know how it came about – I drew my mouth to a perfect little circle and directed a missile of spit through the slender opening, punctuating the act with a swashbuckling swoosh. From the corners of my eyes I watched the OC spring to his feet like a Jack in the box.

“Wait!” he thundered, but it was welcome thunder, thunder in a parched, blistered land waiting for the miracle of rain.

You have got to strike when the iron is hot. I turned and raked my throat so loudly that, torso upward, I vibrated like a turned-on car engine. Having gathered a satisfactory mixture of mucus and spittle in my mouth, I used my tongue to work it into a gelatinous, open-ended globule of sorts the size of a playing marble and released it – swoosh! – like a bullet into a broken, discarded tin dustbin some five feet away that was simply asking for it.

“Bravo!” exclaimed the OC. “Constable, release him!” He beamed at me like he had just won the world’s richest lottery:

“Take a seat, sir… Constable, coffee and samosas…on the trot!”

He turned around and beamed at me so hard his eyes almost disappeared from his face. “Sir, you didn’t once tell me you could do these things – not once!” he protested, wagging his forefinger and then coming around his desk to greet me with extended arms. We embraced like reunited bosom friends.

“Make I make a special request?” he asked.

“Sure.”

“Could you do it again,” he bubbled, “there – into my spittoon?”

Instinctively, I obliged. It was child’s play to me. I became witness to the fact that geniuses are born, not made.

“We could certainly do with people like you here, sir,” the OC gushed. “You could mentor the

younger generation. All the fame and respect you can ask for will be yours… By the way, sir,

where are you working at the moment?”

“There’s an observation I’d very much like to make,” I commented, in a duty-first kind of tone.

“People here don’t rake their throats enough before spitting. It would significantly enhance the

quality of their spit… give it more substance, if you know what I mean.”

“Indeed, sir, indeed,” he responded. He regarded me as if I was the latest wonder of the world.

Everything was very hunky-dory between us after that, very hunky dory indeed. Strange it was,

then, that some part of me wanted to scream and get drunk … or get drunk and scream, if that

would help me scream louder.

#FlashFriday Editor's Pick flash fiction micro fiction short fiction

VITA SACKVILLE-WEST, LOVER OF VIRGINIA WOOLF

by Natascha Graham • January 8, 2021January 8, 2021

Photo by Renaud Camus (copied from Flickr)

I drove a different way, the last time, taking a road that turned out not to be a road at all, wherein I mean it began as a road and then abruptly melted away so that there I was rolling over the South Downs where I thoroughly startled a young man who had a mustache like a walrus and a puppy with eyes like a seal, who buried itself down in the grass with the butterflies, and watched my giant blue ship of a car lurch by on the way to see you, Virginia, whom I could see picking mulberries from the tree at the end of your garden, appearing every now and then in the distance as I rose over the rise of each hill.

Seeing you, from a distance, gives a sensation of the same family as that which you experienced when you wrote to me last November, when everything was white and the hedges looked as if they had grown old in the night, and everything glistened and was still, like Sleeping Beauties park, and you had that knowing that I had been but five minutes earlier in your bed, intertwined and naked, with the night sky between the curtains, the stars getting bigger and bigger and odder and odder, and the firelight flickering on the ceiling.

Now, it has been snowing again. Snow means such special things to me. It means the fat plop plop as it is shovelled off the roofs and falls into the courtyard below whilst I watch how fitfully you sleep. It means the strange melancholic halloo by which the deer are called to be fed, and which brings them bounding from all corners of the park whilst you and I hide, luminous and remote and irresponsible, beneath the old oak trees. It means these things in an intimate way, like the ticking of the clock in one’s own room means something; and is part of one. Now, without Virginia, life without Virginia, Vita without Virginia. Now there is only slush.

And, after five months of solitude I am still no longer a person, but a rag-heap for other people to pick over, a straw whirling down a drain, and I find life altogether too intoxicating in its pain.

I must tell you, my darling Virginia, that I wrote to Harold suggesting that I might have saved you, if only I had been there and had known the state of mind you were getting into.

Harold says I am probably right.

Digital Subscriptions, Fiction, Litro #110: Street Fiction

Wolf Eyes

by Peng Shepherd • January 6, 2021January 11, 2022 • 29 Comments

I am fix broken cash register when gunman come inside. I don’t know he has gun first, because gun inside pants, under jacket, and I don’t see. He look at menu, at appetizer section, thinking which is better, fried dumplings or eggrolls. He just stand there read menu, like normal person, but I know something wrong. I don’t like his eyes. In China, we can say we know man is good or bad from eyes. If man has Wolf Eyes, he is bad. Always true. Never wrong. I am very good at looking people’s eyes. This man has Wolf Eyes.

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Guns Peng Shepherd print fiction short fiction street

#FlashFriday Editor's Pick flash fiction micro fiction short fiction

TOMORROW I SHALL BE FETTERLESS-BUT WHERE?

by Alex Sheal • January 4, 2021January 4, 2021

Photo by Philippe Put (copied from Flickr)

I would question the sanity of anyone who’s not questioning their own sanity nowadays, Doctor, but this patient of mine — Patient Z, let’s call him — put even me on edge with his talk.

Had I read Poe’s “Imp of the Perverse”? he wanted to know, in which Poe described a certain bent of mind leading otherwise sane people to contemplate insane acts. Like the impulse to leap you might feel when stuck on a high ledge. Or — my patient’s example — your itchy fingers in reach of that EXIT handle while the rest of the plane sleeps.

Yes, I’d read the story, I said. Why do you mention it?

Why do you think, Doctor? he replied. Because I have that imp whispering in my ear all the time.

Whispering what? I asked, readying my pen.

Well, I wouldn’t like to say exactly, said my patient, and surely the specifics are beside the point, surely the point is to stop the whispering, to shut the imp up.

Or we could try just hearing and accepting the destructive thoughts that come along sometimes through the conduit of this “imp,” I put to him. Having such thoughts doesn’t oblige us to act on them.

Oh, this imp’s no conduit, Doctor, my patient said, fixing my gaze (Clozapine, I was thinking). In fact, he’s squatting right there on your shoulder, whispering what to dose me with, probably.

What does it tell you to do? I asked. For example? I did feel a little weight on my shoulder now, a tail flicking down my back.

All sorts, Doctor, whatever I shouldn’t. The absolute opposite of what I should. What if that happened? he asks. What if you did this? Alone it wouldn’t bother me so much, but I have a family, just like you (he pointed at my wedding ring, which I instinctively covered with my other hand) and a respected position in society, at work, whatever that means today.

It still means something, I answered him, and heard the imp screech.

But when they told me what Patient Z did, even I was surprised, Doctor. No wonder he’d wanted to keep the imp’s suggestions to himself, to stay away from specifics.

Still, I would question the sanity of anyone who’s not questioning their own sanity these days.

And that includes you.

Sickle Claws: Hesperonychus Monstrous

by Alicia Hilton • January 4, 2021January 4, 2021

Mother looked nothing like me: no scar across her forehead, no feathers or scales, and she didn’t have wings, a tail, claws, or a beak with an insatiable craving for flesh. Her skin was pink and supple, her head topped with a crown of glossy black hair. All of the other humans called me Hesperonychus monstrous, or dinosaur, but Mother said I’m her baby.

Most of my surgical modifications were completed when I was a naïve hatchling, but the microcontroller in my brain didn’t prevent me from learning that Mother was more of a monster than me.

All of my mornings used to be the same. Ravenous, I would call for Mother when I smelled her sweet scent and heard her footsteps clacking in the hallway. By the time she approached my enclosure, I would be shrieking and racing back and forth, lunging at the glass wall and kicking up dirt. Even when I tried to be patient, my rapidly growing body willed me to feed, feed, feed.

She’d unbolt the door and roll in the metal box. When she opened the lid, my flanks would quiver, but I wouldn’t pounce. As I watched the prey wriggle and skitter away, my beak would fill with saliva. I wasn’t allowed to hunt until Mother said, “Kill.”

The goo beneath exoskeletons was almost as delicious as salty, coppery, pulsing muscles, but the exhilaration of the chase really made my heart race. After I’d crunched and swallowed all of the bones, Mother would give me a cuddle.

Sometimes a caress became a pinch, a pet became a slap, and if I’d been very naughty, the collar around my neck would give me a zap, but I didn’t understand the meaning of true agony until fangs tore through my own flesh.

By the time my feathers had grown over most of my scars, my wings were strong enough to lift me off the ground. Hearing Mother’s praise made me screech with joy.

“Follow the light,” she said, pointing her baton at a tree. The red beam shone upon the leaves. When I got close to the target, she swiveled the light, illuminating the top of another tree.

If I obeyed all of her commands, she rewarded me with treats and pets, but one day, while I was munching on a juicy mouse, she hooked a leash to my collar, and snapped a muzzle over my beak.

I shook my head, but couldn’t free my beak. Lifting my right forelimb, I tried to slash the muzzle, but my claws wouldn’t tear it.

“No, Baby!” she said.

A zap from my collar made my muscles spasm. Urine trickled down my leg.

She said, “Will you be good?”

I whined, more from shame than pain.

She said, “Get in the cage.” She pointed at a metal box on wheels. It was barely bigger than me.

After I hopped in, she shut the door, and pushed the box out of my enclosure. Usually, the carts that I rode in were made from wire, but this carrier was solid metal, except for one ventilation slit in the door, and slits at the top of the box.

Anxiety made me breathe faster. I pressed my face closer to the ventilation hole, and saw we were passing other glass-fronted enclosures. Something covered in grey and brown feathers flew past a tree. Was it a dinosaur like me?

Another set of footsteps joined Mother. Slap, drag, slap, drag. The human sounded heavier, and his gait was uneven. He must be injured. His scent was stronger than Mother’s, sour, like something inside him was rotting.

He said, “The park’s locked down.”

Mother said, “Dome secured?”

He said, “Of course. You think I’m an idiot?”

The man wasn’t shouting, but his angry tone made my chest constrict. I clawed at the box, wanting to protect Mother.

She said, “It’s okay, Baby. We’re almost there.”

Through the slit, I saw the man opening a door.

Mother pushed the cart through the door. Instead of entering another hallway, we seemed to be inside of a larger pen. The lights were off. I squinted, trying to see into the distance. My nostrils quivered. So many new scents!

Thunk. The cage that I was riding in unlatched. A warm breeze ruffled my feathers.

Mother tugged on my leash. She said, “Come out, Baby.”

The ground felt strange beneath my feet. The surface was hard and warm. It wasn’t dirt, like the inside of my pen, or slippery like the floor in the laboratory.

The man with the limp walked back towards the laboratory.

Mother pressed a button on my leash, unwinding it. She said, “Up, Baby.” She raised her hand, and pointed her baton. The red beam was brighter than usual, but it only cleaved a narrow path through the darkness.

Eager to please her, I flapped my wings, and took off. Higher and higher, I rose. The pen we were inside was huge! The ceiling so far away!

I heard the sound of splashing water, and saw hazy lights. As I got closer to the pool, I saw shapes wriggling in the water. I sniffed the air, sensing the presence of flesh. Eager to feed, I angled my wings, and descended.

Mother’s baton light jerked to the left and flashed, commanding that I return.

I shrieked, begging Mother to let me hunt.

All of a sudden, the water lights disappeared. A loud ringing noise made me yelp.

A surge of heat jolted my neck as the collar gave me a zap. I circled back, and flew towards Mother.

A meal of six rats wouldn’t fill my stomach, but Mother started withholding food. People walked past my enclosure, but they didn’t feed me, even when I shrieked.

My mouth watered when I smelled flesh burning. Not rodents. The creature must’ve been a lot bigger. I sniffed the air, savoring the scent of bubbling fat.

The man with the limp walked past my enclosure. He was speaking into a little box. “Three more to put down,” he said, pausing to scratch his head. “No, too risky. They don’t follow commands.”

I trotted closer, and scuffed my feet against the dirt, churning up dust.

The man backed away from the glass and said, “Two more days. That’s all I can give you!”

I lunged, slamming my body into the glass wall, but it didn’t crack.

The man stumbled backward, and stared at me.

My side ached, but when I stretched my wings, the pain didn’t get worse. I opened my beak and cried, begging to be fed, but the man limped away.

When you’re starving, even the most docile baby can become ferocious. I raised my foot, and scratched the glass, but my claws only left dirty marks.

I used my other foot, slashing, over and over, but the glass wouldn’t break. Panting from exertion, I stared at my surroundings. There must be something to eat!

I pecked at tree trunks, but couldn’t find bugs, and there weren’t worms or grubs underneath the shrubs. Desperate for food, I flapped my wings, propelling myself up to bite leaves from a tree. The dry texture and bitter taste made me snarl.

Scratching my claws against the dirt, I dug a hole, working off my fury. When the hole got as deep as the top of my feet, I struck something that was too hard to dig through.

I moved closer to the nearest tree, but the hard thing was under the dirt there, too.

Finally, Mother tapped on the glass. I stopped digging and cocked my head. The door didn’t open, but I heard Mother’s voice through the glass. She said, “Baby has to work if she wants to eat. Are you ready to hunt?”

“Hunt,” meant food. I exhaled a big breath and honked.

I climbed into the rolling cart, and Mother pushed it towards the other end of the laboratory, away from the smell of cooked flesh.

We passed shiny metal tables that had clear boxes on top filled with things that looked like the rocks inside my enclosure, except they were smoother.

The sound of humming machines got louder, and I smelled something terrible. Not bitter like the leaves I’d eaten. A stench that made me want to leap out of the box, but Mother had closed the door. I trembled, and my wings hit the side of the box.

Mother said, “We’re almost there.” She put one of her hands next to the door, so I could sniff it.

The ventilation hole was too narrow for me to lick her, but I inhaled a deep breath. Her sweet scent calmed me.

When the cart stopped rolling and the box sprang open, I stepped out. I tried to follow Mother, but she shut the enclosure’s door, locking me inside. There were no trees or rocks, no dirt under my feet. Sniffing my surroundings, I paced. My claws made a scritch scratch sound against the slippery floor.

Through the glass wall, I saw Mother remove her jacket and put on a white suit that covered her body, even her hands and feet. Then she put something over her face that looked like the metal bucket that she used to hold worms, except I could see her eyes.

Above my head, I heard a voice that said, “Are you ready to hunt?” It sounded like Mother, but she was still outside the enclosure. I sniffed the air again, but didn’t smell flesh, just the nasty smell.

The voice said, “Kill.”

I trotted towards the other end of the enclosure, but I didn’t hear squeaks or skittering feet.

All of a sudden, I heard a thunk behind me, and a roar. I spun around and saw a huge beast! It ran on four legs like the rats, but was much faster.

I’d never hunted prey that was bigger than me.

Mother pointed her baton at the creature, shining the red light on its fur.

Instead of attacking, I flapped my wings, soaring towards the ceiling, but my collar gave me such a strong shock, I lost control of my muscles. Spasming, I slammed into a wall and slid to the floor.

“Kill!” Mother said.

I stood, but my legs were wobbly. Holding my wings out to make myself look bigger, I screeched.

“Good Baby. Kill!”

As the furry creature bounded towards me, I smelled a foul stench. Black goo dripped from its fangs.

Before I could gather the courage to attack, the monster roared and leapt at me.

I raised my wings to shield my face and skittered backward, but I was too slow.

Fangs sank into my chest, penetrating my feathers and scales.

I jabbed at the furry head with my beak, but the skull was too tough to crack.

The monster’s snout burrowed deeper, its teeth tearing through muscle.

I shrieked and raised one of my feet, trying to gouge the belly, but I struck only air. I slashed my foot again, and my claws tore fur and shredded flesh. Cold fluid splashed on my feet and feathers. It stank worse than anything I’d ever smelled.

The beast snarled and released its grip, backing away from me with feathers protruding from its jaws.

Springing forward, I flapped my wings and leapt onto the beast’s back.

The creature thrashed and snapped its jaws, then flopped onto its side. Struggling, our bodies slammed against the floor. The beast was burrowing its snout into my haunch, and the pain was excruciating.

I jabbed my beak at the head. The fur was soft, but my beak bounced off bone. I struck again, piercing an eye.

“Kill!” Mother said.

I jabbed again, and again, until the beast had finally stopped moving.

“Good Baby!” Mother said.

My head feathers were so slick, black fluid was dripping into my eyes. I tried to run towards the glass, but my wounds made me stumble. Before I could stand, cold water sprayed from the ceiling and soaked my feathers. It tasted bitter, not like the water that Mother gave me.

Shivering, I looked for shelter, but there were no trees, only the cart. I crawled inside.

I rubbed my beak through my wings, trying to clean off the tacky liquid from the monster’s eye.

Mother kept watching me, but she didn’t open the enclosure.

When I was drenched, the water stopped spraying from the ceiling. I heard heavy footsteps approaching the glass wall, and I saw the man with the limp walking towards Mother.

Mother said, “You got the tranq? She’s going to need stitches.”

I heard a thunk coming from behind me. Expecting to see another monster, I jerked my head around, but it was just a rat.

Phhhhht. A new sound made me turn back towards Mother. I felt a sharp pain and screeched. A little stick was stuck in my shoulder. I tried to grasp it with my beak, but when I moved, I got so dizzy, that I collapsed.

Gasping, I struggled to stand, but my legs would only twitch. My eyes drifted shut. Straining to stay awake, I heard the door open, and footsteps walking towards me. I smelled Mother’s sweet scent, and other unfamiliar humans.

Something touched my neck. I opened my eyes and saw four humans wearing the white suits. One of them had a long metal stick that was pointy on the end. Fear made me lash out. With my remaining strength, I raised a foreleg and slashed through fabric and flesh.

Moonlight streamed through the skylight. I blinked, focusing on my surroundings. I was back in my usual enclosure. The trees near me seemed to be bending. I shut my eyes, and opened them again. The trees looked normal. Beyond the glass wall, the laboratory was dark. No sounds of people. Only humming machines.

I’d never been so thirsty. My chest and haunch were sore. Patches of feathers were missing where the monster had bitten me.

When I walked towards my water bowl, dizziness made me sway. I slurped until the bowl was empty. My stomach rumbled, but there was no food near the water bowl, not even a worm or a beetle grub.

Exhaustion made me collapse before I could crawl behind the bushes, so I slept out in the open, beside the water bowl.

I woke to the sound of footsteps. Mother was watching me!

Honking to greet her, I trotted towards the glass wall. When I got closer, I saw a woman with yellow hair, walking towards Mother.

I hid behind a tree.

The other woman said, “How does she look?”

Mother said, “Her mobility’s good, considering the wounds.”

“Any signs of infection?”

“No seepage from the incisions.”

“She’s immune?”

Mother said, “It’s too early to tell.”

Humans stared at me through the glass, but they’d stopped bringing me mice and rats.

When Mother walked past my enclosure, she acted like she didn’t notice me, even when I flew back and forth, swooped from the trees to the ground, pecked rat, tat, tat against the glass.

Bark from the trees didn’t taste any better than the leaves.

So cold, I shivered in a patch of light that streamed through the skylight, plucking feathers from my breast, sucking on the fluid from the base of the quills.

A clattering noise woke me. Peering from my hiding place behind a tree, I saw a metal box by the door of my enclosure. It was bigger than the cart I usually rode in. Maybe there was food inside!

The box was open at one end. I gobbled up a pile of worms. Chomping vigorously, I shrieked in gratitude.

The box slammed closed, trapping me.

Scooping the last of the worms into my beak, I swallowed them quickly.

The box was too small for me to pace. I scratched my claws against the sides.

Footsteps approached, the clacking of Mother’s feet. I squealed in relief.

“Are you ready to hunt?” Mother said. She wheeled the box towards the door, over the threshold, down the shiny hallway past the tables, and into the white enclosure.

The cage opened after Mother left, but I didn’t climb out.

I heard a thunk, and smelled the same stench that had come from the furry monster.

My collar gave me a shock.

I darted from the box.

A man lurched from a gap in the wall. When he saw me, he growled.

The wall behind him slammed shut.

He moved more like an animal than a human, twitching and jerking, sniffing the air as if he was hunting for prey.

I scuttled backward.

Mother said, “Kill.” She pointed her baton at his face. The red light made him pause, but then he charged at me. As he got closer, his teeth chattered. Black goo seeped from his mouth.

I swiveled my head, glanced at the glass wall, and counted three humans with Mother.

I heard another growl, but the noise came from my throat. Extending my sickle claws, I leapt on my prey.

His teeth chomped on feathers, but they couldn’t pierce my scales.

By the time the man had stopped twitching, my head crest was coated with slime.

Water sprayed from the ceiling, but I didn’t get into the box. I kept staring at the glass wall, watching Mother. She lifted a stick. A little hole in the glass opened. Phhhhhht.

After the tranq wore off, I knew what to do. Humans were easier to hunt than the furry monster.

The woman with the yellow hair shoved the man with the limp and sprinted into the hallway. She tasted sweet.

The tall man with the pointy stick ran faster than Mother, but I chased him and slashed his belly.

Mother tried to lock me in the white room, but I slammed my body against the door, and forced it open. The alarm was ringing, but it didn’t drown out the sound of her shrieks.

Down the hallway she sprinted, heading for the door that led to the big pool of water with the wriggling things. She skidded to a stop when she reached the door, and tugged the handle. It rattled, but didn’t open.

Her fear smell got stronger. I licked my beak and snorted.

She pressed her hand on a box on the wall beside the door. Beep. The door swung open.

I was close enough to slash her, but pawed the floor instead.

“No, Baby!” she shouted. She pushed a button on the controller hanging from her belt, and my collar gave me a jolt.

Pain fueled my rage. Leaping with my sickle claws outstretched, I pounced, knocking her to the ground. The door started to close, but thunked against her legs.

She screamed and tried to crawl away.

My beak grasped her neck. Crunch. Her throat made a gurgling sound as I lapped the coppery essence.

More fluid splashed me, but it was cold, not warm. I stopped feeding, and sniffed the air. Icy drops pelted my face and body, but they didn’t taste bitter like the water that sprayed from the ceiling in the white room.

The alarm had finally stopped ringing. It was dark in the big pen, like it was when Mother had me fly to the pool. I heard a whooshing sound in the distance that made me tremble.

Stepping over Mother’s body, I retreated into the laboratory. The sound of my claws, scratching against the slippery floor, echoed down the hallway.

The man with the limp was lying where he’d fallen, in a puddle of blood. My belly rumbled, urging me to feed, but I’d only swallowed one more bite of flesh before I began to retch.

The gory puddle that sprayed from my throat had an oily sheen and an acrid stench, like the furry monster and the first man that I’d killed, but not as foul smelling.

My gut kept heaving, though it was empty. Finally, breathing hard, I raised my head.

Something was shrieking, and it wasn’t a human. I cocked my head, listening. The cries were getting louder.

Roaring, I bounded towards the sound.

The first pen that I passed had trees inside it, like my habitat, but I didn’t see any animals. In the second pen, I glimpsed a flash of fur behind the shrubberies. The creature wasn’t as big as the furry monster that had attacked me, but panic made me skitter away from the glass. Sliding across the floor, I crashed into a table.

A flicker of movement caught my attention. The rocks in one of the clear boxes were cracked. Baby dinosaurs! Bald patches of grey skin showed where their pinfeathers hadn’t grown in, but their eyes were open. Tiny jaws clacked, begging to be fed. The hatchlings stood on their hind legs and had sickle claws like me, but they didn’t have beaks or wings. So many babies, trapped.

I was tall enough to reach the box without having to jump on the table. I jabbed it with my beak, but it didn’t open.

One of the raptors inside the box snapped at a smaller sibling, chomping on a forelimb. The other dinosaur hissed and wriggled, but couldn’t break free. A trickle of fluid streamed from the wound.

I roared and swatted the box. My claws made a grating sound as they scratched the surface, but the box didn’t move or break.

The dinosaur that’d attacked its sibling opened its jaws, and looked at me. For a moment, all of the babies were silent. Then the aggressive one led the shrieking chorus, and hopped up and down, scratching the side of the box with its sickle claws.

I slammed my forelimb into the box. Crack, a big fissure appeared. Swatting it again, I tore off the top. Shards flew through the air.

The wounded dinosaur screeched when I grasped its belly with my beak. It would’ve been easy to crush the delicate bones, but I set the baby on the floor, and reached for another.

I was raised to be a monster, but I wanted to be a mother. Mothers should protect their babies, even if they looked different.

Momma’s a Butcher

by Yanitta Iew • December 20, 2020December 20, 2020

Momma keeps her eyes on me instead of the road. We are going somewhere far. Somewhere not near home or the park or the three-story knife store. Somewhere I have never been to like a supermarket, her office where she cuts up patients and puts their flesh into Tupperware boxes or Doctor Monica’s house in Friends, New York.

“When are we going to arrive?” I saw her sharpening her knives before we came, pressing the jarred edge on a rock and scraping it through. Maybe she is going to cook. Maybe she is going to take us to a nice restaurant where the customers are the chefs. Maybe she is going to sharpen her knives some more on the big rocks near the lake. Maybe she is going to show me one of her patients, tummy cut open, intestines hanging out of the carved body, knotted into a bow. I’ve seen her do that. I’ve seen her in her bedroom, the walls painted the color of blood. The same color as the blood that sprouts out of my gums when Momma pulls out baby teeth.

“Almost,” Momma mutters. Her eyes are still focused on my arm, my back, the back of my neck, my full fleshy cheeks hanging loose on my head bones. She licks her lips and makes a seething sound, like sucking in saliva. Dark gaps between my teeth fill my smile. My cheeks stretch and pull taut on my head bones, and Momma turns away to look at the road. That’s where she’s supposed to be looking.

Momma tells me not to call them head bones. They are called “skulls”, she said as if she were some “skull” expert. Actually, I’ve seen her collecting them in her bedroom. Maybe they are from the patients who came too late. Maybe they are the ones Momma could not save. Maybe they paid her with “skulls” instead of precious money. I heard that money was hard to find. I heard that Momma had to scavenge the streets for wild animals, since she couldn’t afford to buy meat.

“You made the best dinner yesterday, Momma. Fresh ground meat with some kind of leaf?” I smile. My cheeks tug against the edges of my head bo— “skull.”

“It was basil. I’m glad you like the meat. It was from one of the biggest animals lurking around Fifth Avenue,” Momma says. She looks at me but not at my eyes. Her gaze sweeps my arms, my legs, my cheeks and looks back at the road. She makes a seething sound and waits for the silence to settle.

“Are we there yet?” I cannot wait for what Momma is going to show me. She could be making the best dinner. White and sturdy meat with pepper and a dark red, thick sauce. Salty and hot, served on a large plate with a side salad and some kind of chopped slimy stuff.

“No, baby. A few more minutes.”

“Where are we going?”

“My office. It’s very big, and it has so much stuff you’ll be interested in. You’ll never want to leave.” Momma licks her lips again. I thought Momma worked at a hospital. She told me she is a doctor. I guess doctors work in hospitals, right? Momma does her operations at home. The hospital’s always full, she says, and she’s one of the most skilled doctors who don’t need nurses. She’s a stay-home-doctor.

She showed me one of her operations a few months ago after I insisted I stay with her. The patient came to our home, sleeping in Momma’s arms, blood dripping from a long, nasty gash down her throat. Her blood messed up the floor, but I wanted to save the poor woman’s life so much that I didn’t bother cleaning up. Momma brought me to her bedroom. The maroon-painted one with dry specks of red-brown along the floor. She uses the other bedroom as an “asylum” for patients. She sharpened her knife, cut a long gash down the woman’s tummy – torso, Momma says. I don’t know what’s inside a woman’s tum— torso because I don’t know the words. I already learned some of them from Momma, but she says she’ll teach me more when I’m older. I learned the parts where the animals down Fifth Avenue liked to eat, how they tasted for the animals and how they would taste like for the insane patients who eat their own flesh.

I am never going to eat my own flesh, I said and Momma would lick her lips, ignore me and crack the woman’s ribs one by one. The snapping sound jolts through my ears. I scrunched up my nose because the stench was hideous (a new word I learned from Momma). It was hideous and made me want to puke – Momma says “puke” is impolite, so I am going to say “vomit.” It made me want to vomit. I almost did before Momma said that it was the smell of the woman’s soul being ripped from her body when she died. She said that I would never be able to smell my own soul, and that I should pay attention to this moment.

Does it hurt, Momma? When her soul is ripped away? I asked. Imagine that stench and noise coming from my body when I die. I shuddered beside Momma.

She is far from conscious, baby. She doesn’t feel anything, Momma would say.

Why did she die, Momma? Was it too late? I said. Momma only shook her head, cut out chunks of the woman’s body and put them into extra-large Tupperware boxes.

What are those for, Momma? I see you put them in the fridge. Are they for the hospital? I said. She nodded, and replied with her usual medical gibberish that I will learn when I’m older. I want to become a doctor, so I can be like Momma. Only, I’ll be better. I will save people’s lives and send them back home to be with their family. I will not have to inhale (a word I learned from science class with Momma) the stench of their soul being ripped from their body because I’ll be the best doctor ever.

Momma says it’s a difficult job, and that I should not be a doctor. She says it will only damage my innocence and beauty. I know she worries for me, but saving people’s lives cannot be that damaging, can it? I’ll get to hold big, long knives. I’ll be those heroes in books that hold big swords. Heroes can be beautiful and innocent, can’t they?

She has become more supportive since I stayed with her that day. Where she cracked the patient’s ribs as if they were Velcro, blood splattering in her bedroom. I talk to her a lot about her patients. Ask if she knew them well. Some she did, like Auntie Penny who lives in Queens. I visited her often, but I didn’t like her much. Momma did much more than she should’ve done to someone so mean. She said she knew the woman who just died. Her name was Phoebe, found lying on the street a few blocks away from home, nobody with her, family estranged. Momma did her best to carry her home, but it was too late.

We stop to pick berries on the way. I take our picnic basket, still smelling of the meat sandwiches we had for lunch.

Momma trails behind me. She holds a knife in her hand. I wonder if there are delicious wild animals here in the woods. Momma says meat is expensive, and that I should be thrifty when I eat them. Even a job as a doctor cannot bring her enough money to supply us with meat. That’s why she has to hunt them on her own. I wonder how much meat must cost in supermarkets.

We never go to supermarkets. Momma says the people there are too rich and haughty (a word she used). She says that the people there will only look down at us because we are not rich enough to shop there. Only the president shops there, Momma says.

I drop a dozen berries into the picnic basket. I turn back to look at Momma, but she doesn’t smile. Her finger-joints are the colors of bones, and her eyes are like feral animals on the street. Her teeth are clenched, her eyes enlarged in size.

“Momma?” My voice shakes. This must be what she looks like to the feral animals she hunts.

“Momma?”

She snaps back from her act. Her gaze shifts from a wild feral animal’s to a kind woman’s. Her grip on the knife loosens and almost drops to the ground. Her eyes shrink to their normal size, and her seething sound stops.

“Yes, baby?”

“Why are you looking like that?”

“So the animals can be scared, baby. They could attack you. I’m right here, and if anything comes to attack us, we’ll be eating it for dinner tomorrow.” Her voice flows smoothly yet prickly like running fingers down the maroon-colored silk she covers her patients with.

“Are there bears here, Momma?”

“It’s better to keep safe in case there are, baby.”

The berries we picked are as fresh as the flesh Momma stored in the fridge. We get into the car, and the sky turns into the color of Kool-aid. Momma doesn’t talk. She was never eloquent (my favorite word from English class), and doesn’t talk much. But she loves to stare at me. Her fingers graze my skin, brushing on the tiny hairs and sending chills down my spine (a word I learned from Momma when she examined her patients). She often helps me apply a thick layer of lotion, but she did not help me today. She often wraps her fingers around my arm and squeezes, so she can feel my flesh in her fingers. She often pinches my cheeks until the skin goes taut and tugs on my head bo— “skull.” I’ve got to say these words correctly, or I’ll never become a doctor. Once I become one, I can invent my own terminology (another smart word Momma taught me).

Momma says my skin is pretty, and that I should be grateful for my fleshy arms and calves. She says that I should apply a lot of lotion, so it’ll be soft and silky. She says my thick and loose cheeks are the thing people look for in a girl. She says they’re beautiful, and she likes to touch them and seethe, sucking in her saliva. I know that’s the sound she makes when she’s satisfied. She seethes when she’s happy and interested and excited and enthusiastic (she seethes when I use big words).

“We’re here.”

I don’t wait for her to turn down the engine. I sprint from the seat and run towards a worn-down cabin. Knee-high grass line the edges. A few berries the color of Froot Loops grow around the fence, and ivy seeps along the cracks in the dark-colored wood. The sun is the color of egg yolks on a sunny-side-up. It looms behind the cabin, and bright flecks of light reflect on the grass.

“Where are we, Momma? Is this your office?”

“Yes, baby. It’s a slaughterhouse.”

“I thought you worked at the hospital. I thought you were a doctor.” Momma likes to tell stories about people at work. Nurse Rachel, Doctor Ross, Doctor Monica, another Nurse Joey and some Chandler guy. I’ve heard those names many times as if I knew them myself. Momma knows them well. They are her best friends, but she never lets me meet them. She says they all live in Friends, New York and meet Momma at a coffee house near Central Park. I’ve lived in New York since I was born, but I’ve never heard of a city named Friends. I guess doctors are not so good in geography.

“I’m a special doctor, baby. Sometimes I work in the hospital, but Doctor Ross and Monica are such skilled people that they don’t need my help. I bring my patients here. The ones that came too late, and cannot be cured. This is a special place for them.” Momma gives a lackluster smile, digs her nails into my hands and walks me towards the wooden cabin.

“Are there patients here that are alive? A hospital should be clean. This doesn’t look so clean. How often do you come here?”

“Every weekend. They don’t need special help, baby. It’s a slaughterhouse. This is where the patients are slaughtered.” Momma’s grip on my hand tightens. She leads me closer into the cabin and the door creaks open.

“What does ‘slaughter’ mean, Momma?”

She smiles at my question. She always smiles when I use big words. She smiles every time I talk about spines, head bo— “skulls” and torsos. Even rib cages. I’ve seen them. They’re light yellow, my second favorite color after maroon. Our home is painted that color from the outside and maroon on the inside. I see those colors every day, especially in Momma’s bedroom. They’re the color of blood and bones. They’re every doctor’s favorite color, Momma says.

“‘Slaughter’, in medical terms, means ending their suffering. Taking the life and pain out of them, baby. This is what I brought you to witness. I know you want to be a doctor. You will get to experience this yourself. There’s a patient waiting to be slaughtered. She’s been asking so many questions and turning insane. She doesn’t know what she’s getting into, so we have to keep quiet. We’ll give her some sleeping pills, and we’ll slaughter her, so it won’t hurt. This is what a doctor does, baby. You will be a wonderful doctor once you witness this. Medical students don’t get to be a part of this because it’s very risky, but you’re with me. You’ll be safe.” Momma’s eyes shimmer the color of turquoise. Her nails grip harder onto my wrist, and her other hand grazes the sensitive skin on my neck. “Are you ready, baby?”

I nod. I am finally going to do the things good doctors like Momma do. I’ll slaughter a patient and release her from her pain. I’ll get to learn the names for all the body parts. Rib cages, spines, skulls, hearts. I’ll learn how to slaughter someone the right way, to make it not hurt. I’ll be a wonderful doctor.

Momma says the patient is upstairs and she’ll get her. She tells me to wait and look at the things on the walls. Rows and rows of jars, filled with a transparent liquid, a variety of different organs floating inside.

Livers, hearts, brains, eyes, intestines, whole babies, heads, severed hands.

This is what I’ll collect when I’m a doctor. I see lines and lines of skulls, yellowed through time, arranged in a neat pattern ranging from smallest to largest on another shelf. Groups and groups of hefty femurs, rib cages, pelvises, fibulas, humeruses and clavicles. I can name them because they’re labeled. Elliot’s rib cage. Gertrude’s humerus. Baby John’s femur. Rachel’s pelvis. I touch them with the tips of my fingers. They are hard, chalky and real. They feel very real. I tip-toe to touch the rest of them. More skulls, bones, intestines and hearts. Even a brain. I wonder why Momma kept these. They are incomplete. Some parts of the livers are lined with teeth marks. Bones lined with the half-moon of nails and teeth marks scraping along the edge. Intestines torn in half and cut up into pieces. Hands with the index finger bitten off. What were these patients doing before they died? Was biting off their own finger painful?

My eyes scan the rest of the jars, and they land on the one in front of me. Jane’s heart, old blood seeping out of the aorta. Dark red, the color of death. Momma showed this to me and labeled all the parts of a heart. But she did not tell me it was Jane’s. I remember my friend Jane. She came with Momma here. She told me she wanted to be a doctor like me, so I told her Momma was one. She came here, and she never came back. Momma said she moved to California, but she never called. She never contacted me when she visited New York. I never heard from her again, best friend Jane. She must be dead. A person cannot live without a heart. I never got to go to her funeral, best friend Jane.

I hear the stairs creak behind me. I don’t turn around. I know it’s Momma. I keep staring at Jane’s tiny heart, the size of my fist, soaked in a translucent fluid. It stirs as if it were still beating.

“What happened to my friend Jane, Momma? Was she one of your patients? Did she get the disease from the other patients here? She came here with you, remember?” I miss best friend Jane. She must’ve caught the disease from the other patients here. I never should have let her come with Momma. Momma says I’ll be safe here, but best friend Jane should have been safe too.

“Best friend Jane? That’s her heart isn’t it? Oh, I remember her. Such a dear, but she couldn’t stop talking during the drive here. She kept saying that hospitals should be in the middle of town. She said that nobody lives here, so there won’t be any hospitals here. I told her that she was wrong, but she kept talking and talking. I had to make her stop. Her parents contracted her disease and died a few days later.” Momma says as if she were singing a rap song. Her words blend together like they are one long sentence: supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

“Why are you talking so fast, Momma? I read a book that said someone who’s talking so fast is lying. Are you lying Momma?” She should be lying. Best friend Jane did ask many questions, but she was curious. That’s what I liked about her.

Momma does not look at me. Her eyes glance at my fleshy calves, bruised like a pink peach. Her seething sound comes again, and her fingers twitch as if she were playing a piano. One of her hands is behind her back. I think I know what she’s holding.

“Momma?”

“I’ve been lying to you, baby. I am a butcher. I was never a doctor. Doctors don’t slaughter their patients.” Momma’s voice sounds as if she were speaking in water. I don’t hear it clearly. I hear echoes, overlapping voices, chanting “butcher, butcher, butcher.”

Why did you lie, Momma?

Butchers cut up all the edible meat. Momma says she hunts her own meat, butchers them up, puts them in jars and eats them raw. She tells me she keeps human hearts, livers, skulls and brains. She collects them. She butchers them. Momma says she slaughters innocent people walking down quiet alleys near Fifth Avenue. She bites their intestines raw, stench still acrid, dripping with bile.

But why, Momma?

Momma keeps talking. Momma says doctors don’t work at slaughterhouses. Butchers don’t work in hospitals. Butchers slice up animals, doctors slice up people. But Momma is a special type of butcher. She slaughters people and eats them, Momma says. She keeps talking. There is no Nurse Rachel, Doctor Ross or anybody. There is no Friends, New York. There is no insane girl patient waiting to be slaughtered.

I don’t want to die, Momma.

Momma.

Blood splatters on the berries.

MAGPIE

by Lisa Murphy • December 18, 2020December 18, 2020

Photo by Steve Bittinger (copied from Flickr)

I could hear them every day. Sometimes they sounded like little horses cantering around on the warehouse’s rooftop. Hooves reverberating on metal sheets. Their calls weren’t what I expected, a strange staccato, harsh and guttural. Kak kak kak.

That day I got to work early, as I often did, to make my breakfast in the staff kitchen while it was quiet. Sometimes, if I was lucky, I could go a whole day without speaking to another person.

Suddenly, something hit the kitchen window with force. I looked out and saw a magpie stunned on the ground. I wondered if I should tell someone.

Two more magpies flew down. One went to the stunned magpie and nuzzled him with his beak, trying to stir him awake. The other stood sentry, beady eyes darting from the roof to the resuscitation operation on the ground. I watched a while longer, mesmerised by their petrol-black feathers and clean white bellies, by their clear emotional distress. It was something like humanity.

I carried on making my breakfast and went upstairs. I didn’t tell anyone what had happened.

From my desk, I could hear the sentry bird screeching every so often, like an update for the others. Looking outside I saw the paramedic bird’s attempts had grown more frantic; he was desperately pushing the unresponsive bird now.

As the day wore on, the cries from the rooftop grew louder, wilder, as they accepted the fallen bird’s fate. It was intense, funereal. A palpable grief. So many had gathered, galloping, braying. Mourning.

Colleagues wondered what had happened. Soon after I heard the scraping of a shovel.

Later that night, as I lay in bed, the landlords’ voices rising through the floorboards, I wondered who might try to revive me. Who would scrape me up when I fell?

A Very Open Letter from Donald Hump

by Ash Kaul • November 30, 2020November 30, 2020

Dear Pussies and Studs!

Before fake news fakes its orgasm at my fake defeat, I want to cum once again.

This very open letter is not only for fake democrats but also proud republicans who have contributed to this great nation by buying more guns than even Al Qaeda to counter fake election results, and for rioting and violence, all because they love me, their beloved and perpetual President even if they hate everyone else! But since I am a team player, this letter is also for all those who have ever been in my team. See, I have only fired those in my team who would have in any case resigned under my breedership (Typo! Leadership). Some of them have had the shortest tenures – people like National Insecurity Advisor Michael Flynn, a former Army general who was involved in counter terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq against terrorists who our beloved American terrorists, i.e. the United States Army, was fighting. He was also the Director of the Defence Intelligence Agency under Obama. He was forced out by Obama because he was abusive, stubborn and Islamophobic, and publicly criticized the Obama administration. After being thrown out, he started a private intelligence firm for governments and businesses! How cool is that! And he struck cool deals in Russia (my favorite country!) and Turkey! This guy is so fucking corrupt I laughed and immediately used him in my campaign (the first election, the one that was not fake) and I even considered him to be my running mate. And he was so damn keen but he was a registered democrat so I felt it might be too much too soon, and chose this idiot Pence instead (Hey Mike! Just kidding! Ha! Ha!). But when I became King of the Ring, President of the United States, I appointed Flynn as my National Security Advisor. Obama advised me against appointing him, and so I was now completely convinced he was the right choice! But the turncoat (Flynn, not Obama, this time) only lasted a privileged 22 days under my ass because he was too clever for his own good.

Then there was White House Cheap of Staff Reince Priebus. Funny thing is that Priebus actually criticized me in the primaries and then smartly negotiated with me and then called for Republican unity! That was a great sign of being a talented sonofabitch! And so when I became King of the Ring, I appointed him Cheap of Staff, where part of the role is to be security guard of the Oval Office. But he took this part too seriously and wouldn’t let even those who I wanted to meet, meet me without him knowing. Soon, he was leaking out the correct news about my association with Russia (the one that turns into fake news after it is reported) and so I flushed him out and replaced him with John Kelly, a former Marine Corps General who would implement immigration laws like Hitler. So I loved him. But I had to remove him because he was a direct competitor to me in terms of the number of people he started firing. And when the New York Times, Washington Post and FiveThirtyEight praised him and said he would improve the White House and bring moderation, I knew we had the wrong guy here! The last straw was when he spoke the truth about the White House and called it a miserable place to work. This fake news was just too much to take, so I threw him out. You see, the Cheap of Staff position has many takers and is really meant for numbskulls and we have enough registered republicans who qualify.

But moving on, there was White House Miscommunication Director Anthony Scaramucci, an ex-investment banker. This guy was a shocker. He launched a full blown attack on my administration. I don’t mind that. But what I dislike is stupidity. This guy actually criticized us to the media ‘off the record”! How dumb is that! Nothing is ‘off the record’ with media. And criticizing my administration is so stupid because it is so obviously deserving of criticism anyway! Get a life man! Do something new! So I fired him. And now in the elections, the ones that have just happened but not been completed – these fake ones – he actually supported Biden! Biden, for God sake! The loser! Anyway.

Then there was Secretary of Illhealth and Inhuman Services Tom Price. This guy used private charters and military aircraft for travel. Can you believe it! He bloody made us look like India! Only Indian politicians are such parasites. We may be a fake democracy but we can’t be as filthy as India. I know we are headed there but we don’t want to collapse so fast. You know I heard, after seeing Air Force One, Modi has bought a plane for himself at a time when no one is flying anywhere and it cost more than the GDP of many miserable Indian states. I have a feeling Modi has a thing for long things. His funds come from a guy who lives in an expensive building shaped like a phallus. He loves long things – bullet trains, long aero planes and so on. Maybe that guy Freud can explain why. Ha! Ha!

But anyway.

So these guys were the ones I fired almost immediately. But there were many others (the list doesn’t fit into even 5 single spaced A4 sheets) I fired: Misdirector of the Office of Management and Budget Mick Mulvaney and his underling, the Deputy Misdirector Russ Vought, White House Deputy Cheap of Staff Katie Walsh, White House Principal Deputy Cheap of Staff Kirstjen Nielsen and James Carroll and Zachary Fuentes and White House Deputy Cheap of Staff Operations (I don’t even know what the fuck this position is for) Joe Hagin, Director of the Black House (typo! White House) Military Office Daniel Walsh, White House Deputy Cheap of Policy Rick Dearbon . . .

But now I am tired!

So I will simply name the rest without giving reasons for each especially when most Americans are undeserving of any position of any kind anyway. So they were: Carrie Bock, Michael Ambrosini, Emily Mallon, Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway (whose awful husband also left the awful Lincoln Project) . . .

But now this list is too long! It will consume this full letter.

So please look for ‘List of Trump administration dismissals and resignations’ in Wikipedia. The Wiki list is correct but details given in the links to why these people were flushed out is all fake!! As of November 9, 2020, I am proud to say my ‘A’ team (members of executive office of the president not including cabinet secretaries) turnover was 91%. There are two reasons why I am proud of this attrition rate. One, because it is below 92% and two, because it is above 90%. And I believe in churn. It cleans the crap. That is what the President’s role should largely about. Hiring and firing of people. When you throw out one guy, you end up getting another guy. And so you become an equal opportunity employer.

Also, just think of the money I saved for America when I fired all these expensive non-performers. It must be greater than the GDP of India, if not the richer Bangladesh. By the way, when you look at that list, you will wonder why so many people are at all needed to screw up a nation. More people are needed only when you build a nation. But what I am doing is, I am screwing the nation. Because only after you screw America, can you make it great AGAIN. And this again is the key word here. To make America great again, you have to get Donald Hump back again. First term he screws America. Second term he makes it great again. Not many will understand this logic, but I know I can trust republicans to understand it completely.

But anyway.

Now this very open letter is also to all those team members who managed to survive right up to these fake elections. People like Mike Pence have proven that even with a bull inside their ass, they would be smiling as long as that is a precondition for staying in office. People like Mike Pompeo, who I am sure, has Indian genes. He does personal political work in the guise of official work. Like Indian army officers he uses state officials for household tasks where even his wife gives instructions. Such harmless things are called scandals in only in over-righteous America! But I like that Pompeo (and his wi . .) are such assholes. I simply pretend we are in India and that it is our birthright to misuse our official position, and let him continue. I know he knows fuck-all about foreign policy but he does know how to further my business interests abroad. Just think: only if your President is financially healthy, will you be healthy!

So most of my cabinet is new, newer than me. That is because they are like toilet paper which looks nice and fresh but has to be thrown away fast after use, before it starts looking like Boris Johnson’s hair style or smelling like Modi. And as a matter of policy, I only appoint the toilet paper types. For two reasons. One: that is all we have in the republican pool, what to do. And two: what else will you use when the role is purely about cleaning my ass. And whenever I make the mistake of not appointing toilet paper in my team then we get people like Anthony Fauci for whom the kindest thing I can say is: @#$%^&&***%$#@@#$%!!!!!!!

So this very open letter, which is very brief, is to all the people above and also to those I have addressed it to. That’s right, to all the pussies and studs of our grate nation which is making grating sounds in this gentle world right now. And now to all of you, I want to say a few things.

God willing and Courts willing (though the two are usually on opposite sides in most democracies) I may well remain your King of the Ring and President! It is unfortunate that I am forced to declare myself President so many times. That is because American democracy has been compromised by all the parties who were not in power although, therefore, they were not in a position to compromise American democracy. The sad part is that if America has to be great again, it will have to compromise the fake results in the event Biden is about to become President. Let us learn from great nations like India, Turkey, Brazil, and the great statesmen like Modi, Erdogan and Bolsonaro. To prevent Indian elections from being compromised by the opposition (which is not in power), Modi has taken full control of the Electronic Voting Machines. We are way behind India, and are using primitive ways of voting that compromise elections in favor of opposition. Modi also appoints the Chief Election Commissioner and members of the Election Commission and that prevents the opposition from compromising democracy. Unlike us where every state works to ensure democracy but compromises it so that I, Trump, lose! Modi also does not interfere in the justice system at all. He only writes the verdict for the courts and tells them when to deliver it and leaves the process to them. Unlike us, who wait to get a useless majority in the collegium! All these great statesmen of the world are with me. While Modi congratulated Biden, I think it was not because he thought Biden won but because he, Modi is a living greeting card. Just see his twitter feed. That is all he does all day. Bolsonaro however, refused to congratulate Biden. Also because, I think he knows that people like he (Bolsonaro) and I can do anything to win and because he gets away using Electronic Voting Machine in his own country, he thinks I too must have a trick or two up my sleeve in my attempt to prevent democracy being compromised when I lose the election. As regards Erdogan, my chest swelled with pride when he went to such great lengths to prevent opposition from compromising the presidential elections of 2014 and the Turkish general election of June 2015. Obviously, fake news reported this as widespread electoral fraud and violence!

And this brings me to my disappointment with Americans who should have done what Erdogan’s people did for him and what Modi’s monkeys do for him. My dear pussies and studs, if you want to know what I, your beloved leader, expects from you, then please search ‘Electoral fraud and violence during the June 2015 Turkish general election’. Don’t go by the headline. It is fake. The ideas inside are real and can be used to save democracy. So take those ideas. Do this much for me, and from my side I promise that when I return to power, I will do the following:

Constitutional amendment to the twenty-second amendment which caps presidential term at two terms only. But you all must not demand this if Biden comes to power! Just keep this to yourself for now, stupid republicans! (Just kidding! Ha! Ha!).
Changes in the Gun laws to include missiles, rockets and chemical weapons, and allowing their free and fair use during elections.
Introduction of electronic voting machines where the server will be inside the President’s bedroom in the White House and also a spare server in a private epidemic ward of the hospital the president goes to.
Constitutional amendment to appoint third party election managers from Russia for free and fair polls.
Express migration of Islamophobic Hindu members of India’s RSS (Modi’s finishing school) so that Christ and Lord Ram can strike a deal.
Express visas to supporters of Modi (breath analyzer test to confirm regular cow piss consumption in addition to confirmation of low IQ through IQ test), ex-army duds from Erdogan and Bolsonaro’s countries.
Increase the number of Vice Presidents from one to four and reserve each slot. One for a black woman, second for a brown woman, third for a yellow woman, and fourth for a woman of unknown color. Sorry Pence, I can’t fucking afford you! I have to win the third election as well and counter that damn Kamala Harris.
Deal with Modi as per which he gives us his election fraud-in-charge and fake encounter specialist Amit Shah. And in return we will give (1) India a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council, but will exit it ourselves. Ha! Ha! Frankly, the United Nations is as useless as WHO. But Modi wants the seat because he is looking for a new audience to bore and a new venue to abuse Pakistan. (2) Free access to Indian products into America. No danger here because even after seven decades they only make oily food and ill-fitting underwear. (3) Intelligence information on their old enemy Pakistan, current enemies China, Bangladesh, Nepal and future enemy Sri Lanka. No risk, because we will give the same information to all their enemies also like we do with defence equipment. Ha! Ha! (4) A stadium in America for Modi to yell in his obnoxious voice at his vulgar audience, (5) 2 tons of mushrooms every month for Modi to whiten his facial skin, 2 tons of almond oil for Modi to prime his d _ _ k every month, (6) a role of Modi in a Hollywood film funded by CIA and produced by Harvey Weinstein and directed by Bear Grylls, (7) Threaten Facebook and Twitter if they do not stop removing Modi’s fake followers, and instead multiply his follower base by a hundred whether or not there is a real or fake profile behind the follower count.
Reserve all jobs, even in NASA for low IQ people so that the republicans finally get their due in these difficult times.
Launch a nationwide movement of #WhiteLivesMatter at the first available opportunity when some white billionaire dies of old age.
Buy Iceland for the LGBT community to leave for and make sure that the postal ballot from there involves the use of very weak pigeons.
Give free testosterone injections and Viagra burgers to old rural republican white voters to change demographics in favor of republicans who will otherwise shrink.
Send American Supreme Court for training to India so that they understand how democracies are saved by money rather than justice.
Sack Anthony Fauci and give our healthcare management responsibility to China without any ego. Let’s face it. That country is better run and it is all Obama’s fault.

I have many such plans to make America great again and elevate it to the highest standards of democracy like that of India, Turkey and Brazil. I want to assure you I am doing all it takes to get the legal and electoral system ruined by Obama to work and save American democracy by putting the throne of America under my hypercapitalist ass. I am moving heaven and earth and even hell, to ensure that Biden doesn’t come to power and get me tried for those fake cases and send me to prison. I survived impeachment and saved democracy once. And that gives me faith I can do it again. Melania and Ivanka and Jared are with me in this fight for democracy. They have strengthened my resolve to not let Biden come into the White House in different, unique ways. For example, Melania told me that she will not leave the bedroom of the White House even if Biden comes to stay. Ivanka is threatening to run my businesses and I cannot afford that. And once out of power, Jared is capable from anything ranging from terrorism and suicide to extortion and murder. So I have to stay President come what may. You saw how, even after getting infected with Covid, I asked doctors to pump steroids into my body from every possible opening excluding my mouth. And then I stood up in record time and went out campaigning. Only to save American democracy from becoming horrible honest because that is not a good thing. It is a very bad thing.

So now my dear Republicans, please pray for me. But don’t forget your guns when you go to church to see Christ.

And remember, I am always in your hearts and minds.

And underpants.

Yours,

Donald Hump

Bad Research

by Matthew Meduri • November 29, 2020November 29, 2020

M is on the verge of writer’s block, or more precisely, he is so obsessed by a recent review of his latest collection Unrepeatable Acts that he can’t manage to pen a single funny word. His first two books – a collection of stories titled Absurdisms and a slim novel The Dead Jester – garnered praise for being “wild and inventive” and created a voice that was akin to “Vonnegut or Barthelme doing stand-up in a Brooklyn comedy club,” a remark that could either have been an accolade or an insult but certainly appeared as a blurb on his latest book. One would believe that this young writer had steady footing as a humorist. Yet the unfavorable review came from a highly respected critic, an individual for whom M had the utmost respect and admiration. Characters aren’t fully realized, the humor is largely farce, and stories come off as brief, uninteresting moments of nonsense… A literary event of boredom! The only “unrepeatable act” would be rereading this book. Needless to say, M hasn’t heard that kind of criticism since his college writing workshops.

What is most disheartening is that he knows writing humor isn’t easy, and it takes a great deal of tragedy and pain for his type of story: one can’t just vomit this kind of material on command. The critic’s failure to recognize the nuances of emotion truly offends M, possibly even disappoints him because he respects the critic’s work, has been a fan for years, even looked forward to being reviewed by the guy. It was as if the critic hadn’t read the same book. With the little bit of money coming from M’s modest book sales, in addition to his circle of friends and the parties he attends, he considers his life good. His struggles are few, his suffering nearly nonexistent. Since he has apparently lost his sense of humor or comedic thrust, he decides to write a serious story, one that possesses the gritty realism his contemporaries and critics are so fond of. The Great American Short Story.

M thinks hard about his subject matter, what his themes will be. Think domestic, think real. Think family drama. Think epic quest for identity. It’s instant, an epiphany – love, or maybe heartbreak. Why not both? Everyone experiences heartbreak to some degree. There is nothing overtly funny about that. But M has not been in or out of love since his career became his sole priority. He’s had occasional flings but nothing significant enough to provide real pathos. Nothing quite domestic or real or that the literati would sink their teeth into. However unfortunate his own predicament, no one wants to read a story about the miserable and lonely life of a fiction writer, let alone his pitiful writer’s block. Hell, there’s still a debate to whether writer’s block is even a thing. The writing process is not enough to hit his readers in their tender spots. Even Stephen King couldn’t have pulled off Misery without a little erotomania.

M thinks about the people he knows, his friends and distant family. He pictures a beautiful woman dissatisfied with her loveless marriage, a neglectful husband that treats his wife like a child or a servant or an idiot. That story has been told and retold ad nauseam as far back as the Greeks. After several minutes of frantically scribbling ideas, he’s mapped it out as if it were there in his mind all along. It takes him a couple of hours to type it, but he finishes the story and titles it “Strange Love.” The storyline goes like this:

After finally acknowledging her romantic advances, Marty decides to begin an affair with his friend Rita, the dissatisfied wife of the distant and insufferable Joe, a man whose appetite for food and male camaraderie is equal to his desire to control and belittle his wife. Full of pity and longing, Marty asks Rita to meet him at a local bar one weekend, coincidentally on Halloween. Because Joe is possessive and jealous, Marty advises Rita to dress in costume and to tell Joe she’s going out with her girlfriends. Marty will show up dressed as a woman as if he is just part of the girls. Although it’s an unusual situation, she agrees. She’s desperate. When they meet, no one recognizes them (Rita is dressed as a German beer maiden). They go to the women’s restroom, lock the door, and consummate their liaison, Marty still in costume. Their meetings become more frequent: Marty always in women’s clothing and a wig, Rita expressing increasing dissatisfaction with Joe, and Marty trying to convince Rita to leave her husband. Each date ends at Marty’s condo. Joe confronts Rita about all the time she has been spending with her new girlfriend. Rita confesses she is a lesbian and leaves the son-of-a-bitch Joe for the “new woman.” Marty and Rita move away and live a satisfying life together.

M promptly emails the story to C, a friend and writer of domestic realism, with a message telling him that this is the story that may place him as the John Updike of their era. This could be the story that shows the critic how wrong he really was. M receives a response the next day from C stating, “Even if this was a humor piece, it wouldn’t work. Have you ever met a woman who goes for the drag thing? I haven’t. If this is supposed to be realistic, the part about the cross-dressing needs to have more substance. Your character doesn’t seem trans, this doesn’t feel like a love triangle, and there’s really no heartbreak at all. Everyone feels mechanic and practically emotionless. It’s like you’ve never met real people, let alone men who dress in women’s clothing. Frankly, the story is kind of shitty. Take some time and do a little research. It’ll only help. By the way, this feels like a straight, white dude wrote it. It’s a little obtuse. Like, don’t use the term ‘transvestite’ at all. Are you trying to be offensive? Who even is your audience?”

What the hell does he know? If that bastard had an imagination, he wouldn’t be writing about real life. It’s also not offensive if it’s what the character is thinking or part of his personality. Maybe that’s the only terminology he knows, or maybe this takes place in a previous era where that is acceptable. But after some thought, he considers just deleting the story and forgetting about writing altogether. C’s probably right. M’s got enough money to live comfortably for a few months, and he could always pick up copy editing or find a teaching job if he wanted. Fuck it, right? What’s the point? But he can’t stop writing, and he is determined to make this a good, readable story. M has always sacrificed himself for the sake of the story.

Unease comes over him as he envisions himself interviewing one transvestite – er, cross-dresser? – after another. It’s not that he has a phobia of drag queens or men who cross dress. He’s always loved Rocky Horror Picture Show or Tootsie. When The Birdcage came out, he saw it twice in the theater. His anxiety stems from the way they might ridicule his absurd and clearly naïve questions about a day in the life of a… He Googles “non-offensive term for transvestite.” Gender illusionist. That had a nice cadence to it. He mostly wants to know what it would be like for a gender illusionist to have an affair with a consenting married woman. Is there a subculture or fetish he doesn’t even know exists? M has done plenty of unorthodox research for stories, but just the thought of this whole other unknown universe makes him feel like this story is a mistake, another gag from the class clown who never takes anything seriously. He walked the roof’s ledge of a ten-story building near his apartment when he wrote a story from the point of view of a serial base jumper who fakes his own suicide. He went camping with a cryptozoologist in the Cascades in an attempt to meet Sasquatch (despite his disbelief in the creature and the field of study) when writing his story, “Being John Lithgow.” He even took laxatives for an entire month, which won him a week-long hospital stay, when he wrote a story about a man whose obsession is to have a bowel movement on every floor of Empire State Building entitled, “The Art of Defecating,” later reprinted in his collection Unrepeatable Acts under the title “Shitting to the Top.” Perhaps it was merely the thought of personal confrontation that made his palms sweat and gave him an aching feeling in his stomach.

For days M wonders how he can give this story the emotional truth it needs. He breaks it down as he sees it: main character in disguise, affair between main character and an unhappily married woman, main character and the woman fall deeply in love and run away to start a new life. The gender illusionist needs to feel authentic, he thinks, and the relationship must evolve naturally. How would a relationship like this naturally progress? The parts of the story that seem most domestic, most real are taken from his own life. Marty is a stand-in for M, Rita and Joe are stand-ins for two married friends, R and J, respectively. He altered each person’s appearance a bit: Marty is tall, boyishly handsome, with a full head of black hair, contrary to M’s short stature, sandy brown hair, and soft, feminine facial features; Rita has blonde hair and large breasts as opposed to R’s red hair, petite frame, and flat chest. Joe is an out-of-shape Italian with a big car and thick mustache, while J lacks the aforementioned facial hair. Their relationship is as sad and loveless as M portrays it in the story. Maybe the characters are a little cartoonish.

Realizing what he must do for the sake of the story, M calls R and asks her if she would like to meet at a bar one evening. She asks him why they haven’t talked much since their kiss a few months back. M apologizes. I didn’t want to make things awkward between the three of us, he says, so I thought I would stay away for a while and focus on work. He asks to make it up to her by buying her a drink. Despite her overbearing husband, she agrees. They plan on Tuesday, ladies’ night, the third Tuesday of the month. At that particular bar, men dressed in women’s attire get half-price drinks.

M goes to Forever 21 at the mall, a store he remembered overhearing a few female students talk about when he taught a fiction seminar last year. Finding it difficult to pick the exact outfit, he finally decides on a simple black and white dress with blue flower print, black leggings and a pair of black flats. He stops at a party store and buys a blonde wig, amused by the whole experience, wondering if this is really what it felt like for a man to buy himself these items for the first time, yet it was a mere simulation of the experience.

They meet on Tuesday. R is taken back but laughs it off, given M’s sense of humor. M is not the only man dressed like that; the place is packed. He makes a joke about half-price drinks. Odd way to catch up, she says, but I’m glad you asked me out. She orders a Captain and coke, and then another. Keeping this night as close to his story as possible, he suggests the upstairs bar. He grabs her hand, and she smiles as he guides her through the crowd. When they reach the top of the stairs, M turns around and kisses R. She kisses him back. Follow me, he says into her ear over the loud music playing and leads her into the unisex bathroom only feet away from where they were. He shuts the door and kisses her passionately, the whole time feeling a little beside himself, slightly ashamed. R doesn’t resist, and in fact, the act of public sex was her suggestion months ago when they had kissed, but M declined for the sake of her marriage. She discourages him from wearing the wig while they have sex, citing her difficulty to be fully in the moment. Regardless of her objection, he leaves it on, and they continue their coupling. The two leave after another hour, R hugging him tightly as they say good-bye. I’m glad you came to your senses, she says. M drives home to revise that part of his story.

Due to M’s impatience and desire to finish his story, rather than waiting a week, M calls R that Saturday and asks if she would like to have a drink, go to his place afterward. J is predictably at a football game with friends. R accepts. He mentions disguising himself like the time before, but she says it’s unnecessary since J is occupied elsewhere. They hang up. M hesitates, considering the situation. Sure, he could facilitate and capture the emotion of the situation, but the verisimilitude is lost if he isn’t in costume. How then would this be an authentic representation? The story must come first, despite the woman’s feelings. He wears the same outfit, arrives at the bar several minutes before R. This time he is not so inconspicuous but drawing great deal of attention, mostly negative. He orders a beer. The bartender tells him that Guys-Dress-as-Ladies’ night was last Tuesday. He’ll have to charge full price. M tells the bartender that he’s not here for half priced drinks but researching a character. The bartender asks if he is an actor.

A group of guys – college age – heckle M from a booth a few feet from the bar. One of them gets up, walks to the bar, and stands next to M. Tranny show is at the bar on the other side of town, faggot. Slightly taken back but not at all surprised by the display of toxic masculinity, he turns to the guy and politely tells him to go fuck himself. The guy connects with a right hook to M’s left cheek, knocking him clear off the bar stool, unconscious.

When M comes to, R is standing over him, asking if he is all right. Someone to M’s left tells him a man punched the guy that hit M because he thought the guy hit a woman. Mayhem ensued. They help M to his feet and walk outside. R asks M why he is dressed like that. He knows he has to lie if he’s going to salvage this relationship, his story. If he lies about this and the story is published, he’ll have a lot more to explain, and the blow to R may be even more severe. So, out of some odd sense of obligation, he tells the truth, every detail. What is he doing? This is not part of the story. He feels sick and nervous. She begins to laugh.

Confused, M asks if she’s alright. As sudden as she began to laugh, tears emerge, and she’s crying. He notices other people watching the fiasco unfold. R is embarrassed. He feels horrible, but it is out of his control. This whole scene is a mess, and there’s no real way to fix the story. It’s best he just scrap it. He damaged one of the few people who truly cared for him, maybe even loved him.

You did all of this for one of your stupid god damn stories? R shouts. Fuck you, M. I don’t ever want to see you again.

M tries to think of something to say, but R’s back is turned, and she retreats at an ever-increasing speed. Alone with wig in hand, M walks to his car and drives home.

The story seems rather pointless now. The events that transpired ruined any chance for him to make this a good, authentic story. He should have never tried to impose the parameters of fiction onto his reality. No one else would have agreed to such a thing. He had taken advantage of her for the sake of a story that would never see the light of day, an experiment to prove he could write realism. That he knew how love could be written. Clearly, he does not. Fuck realism.

A few days later M calls R to apologize, but she doesn’t answer. Why would she answer? She owes him nothing. He leaves a voicemail. He tells her he really cares about her and that he’s sorry. M wants a second chance, though he doesn’t deserve it and knows she won’t talk to him again. He calls her several more times, but it’s no use. She’s never speaking to him again.

In an attempt to either rationalize or make sense of his current situation, M writes down the events that transpired. From the rejection to experimenting to the research and taking advantage of the emotions of his friend, this was all to service his ego. He could turn it into an allegory about the way life mimics art. He could title it “The Other Woman,” making some kind of analogy with R as muse or art as romance. Or something of that nature. If he just can construct this in some way so that the comedy hits just right, the critic will see it and regret his harsh and misconceived review.

Feeling the desire to talk to someone, M phones C and, throughout the duration of the call, tells him everything. The moment M finishes his confession, C laughs hysterically. Offended by C’s outburst, M scolds the other writer, telling him that there is nothing funny about his predicament.

Of course, there is, says C. What you did was ludicrous. You created artificial situations and tried to force the results in your favor. It was unethical and pretty mean. But also very stupid.

You told me to really research this so I could make that story better.

I never told you to dress like a woman and fuck some guy’s wife, says C. You take things too literally. You essentially faked the real.

M is silent. He doesn’t know what to say.

Let’s be honest, M, says C. You had to know this wasn’t going to end well. And did you even learn anything from this experience? Something about people? Sensitivity? Life? Even though you write these stories, they aren’t just yours.

Again, no response from M.

Listen, says C, I think you can salvage something from this, but I don’t mean fixing that shitty story you sent me. Throw that away. What you can do is turn this into an essay. Make it sort of like “when research goes wrong” and send it to a magazine that deals with the craft of writing. I guarantee they will eat that shit up. It’ll be hilarious.

I don’t want this to get back to R, says M.

Use different names, says C. Do you really think she’ll see it? The only people that read that shit are writers and college professors. No one will see it.

So M sits at his computer and recounts the whole story, typing as if R was holding a gun to his head. The essay begins from the moment he receives the critic’s disappointing review that propels him to write the Great American Short Story, leading him to do research as a poor man’s gender illusionist where he not only sleeps with his friend but betrays her confidence all for the idea that literature is more important than the lives we lead, which compels him to confess to C while the insensitive prick has a good and well-deserved laugh. He titles the piece “Bad Research.” Not his finest work, but the first piece in a long time he has felt any affection towards.

He submits the essay, and it is quickly accepted and published in the magazine where the critic is on staff. A few weeks later, M receives a postcard in the mail from the critic. I’m sorry you felt that way about my review. I liked the book so much more than your previous work. Let’s hope you don’t treat all of your friends like that poor woman.

The note leaves him with the same feeling as R’s absence.

#FlashFriday Editor's Pick flash fiction micro fiction Sobia Ali editor's

TOLSTOY VISITS HIS STEPMOM

by Sobia Ali • November 27, 2020November 27, 2020

Photo by Strijdklaar47 (copied from Flickr)

The weather had turned for the better since the last night. She had retired to her room when he arrived at half past ten. So early! He was astonished. She used to wander like mad all over the house till the small hours, in the old days. Things change, he thought. But not here, they are the same here, he reminded himself. It is me who has changed, who needs to remember.

He had not recognized the servants either, except for one or two. Was it now Varya’s daughter? So young and naive. And that footman just passed was the old Ulrich’s son? He was almost happy sitting there before the fire and sipping warm coffee. He had dozed, remembering his old childish fantasies.

Someone must have helped him to his room upstairs, undressed him, and put on the red comforting nightgown. He rose early, refreshed and expectant of the morning, and dressing quickly, came out in the garden. The cold autumn breeze woke something old in him, not memories, but fleeting moments of emotions experienced in the past. I am getting to be an old nostalgic fool, he chided himself, not really minding. I always was, even in my early childhood when I had formed no real memories, he laughed.

In the orange light of the early morning, and the new sun beginning to climb the eastern sky, and under the trees laden with ripening fruits, he stood sniffing the air. There was an unpleasant thought scraping against his mind that he tried to shrug off. He did not want to back off now. She would have woken up and been told of his visit. She would be getting ready to come down.

A bluish light, curling upwards, settled on everywhere. He saw her as if through a veil, sitting at the center of the huge table, her face turned sideways towards the girl unfolding her napkin. The breakfast looked delicious, causing a dull ache in the hollow of his belly. He reached for the bread, so fresh and inviting. The children were staring at him, puzzled. He knew vaguely that they were her grandkids through his young brothers and sisters. He smiled at them, wondering if no one had really ever told them about him.

Then he became aware of her eyes on him. And a strange fear tugged at his heart, because in the depth of his soul he felt something rise. Something that had lain there coiled, unseen, for so many years. Could it be so? His breath caught in his throat. Had his doubts about himself been true? He concentrated on her withered hands, and how they shook when grasping things. This was an old trick of his; try pity when all else fails.

Her skin grooved, her once proud figure slumped forward, and her gray hair scantily covering the scalp. He tried to list all the time’s depredations, while the other part of his mind recalled in her the noble, elegant lady; the heart of the society. He hoped he would succeed. It was just a matter of faith. He needed to trust the good God.

The boy on his left wanted to pick up the butter plate. Too late he realized that the plate was too heavy for the boy’s small hands, and the next instant it had dropped. The cups and saucers were shattered, the spilt tea mixed with the butter. It was all a great mess. Two maids hurried over.

Suddenly he dredged up the courage to look directly at her. She was observing everything with a calm resignation. Was it now restraint on her face? He decided not. He was no longer astonished at anything. Not at her behavior. Not at the acts of his own heart.

He saw the child’s unafraid face, and the little knot of forgiveness started unspooling through his ribcage.

She sensed his staring and turned to lock her eyes into his. Then the corner of her lips were raised in a beautiful smile and, instantly, the whole image of her old self that he had been trying to put together emerged before him. A sob was forming in his throat. My dear Nikolay, she said, very softly.

He tried raking up the old resentment, to set a defense against his own weakness. Then wordless, he swallowed up the sob.

Twisting the Reels

by Ned Carter Miles • November 22, 2020November 22, 2020

Anna’s snoring loudly in my bed, her back to me, and I’m lying on my side staring at the wall. I reach down for a glass of water I left strategically on the floor and knock over last night’s wine bottle. There’s nothing to spill, but it rolls across my uneven floor to the opposite corner of the room, and bumps into the shoebox containing my father’s personal effects.

The bottle stops Anna’s snoring in a single, sharp snort and I feel her turn toward me. “Do you want to open it?” she says through a yawn. This was why she came over last night, for moral support, but after two bottles of wine I still chickened out and we watched a movie, nothing about which I now remember, and fell asleep. If it were Anna, she would’ve opened it right away, but then Anna’s dad isn’t a mind-fucking alcoholic. I’ve been to her parents’ house. Her dad cooks and her mother compliments my clothes and jokes that she’d borrow them if she thought they’d fit.

“I don’t know yet.” I say.

“It might be good?” Anna puts her hand on my arm. She’s waking up now and her voice is already getting louder and more high pitched, like an engine warming. My voice is always the same, day or night.

“I said I don’t know. Jesus.”

“Okay, I’m sorry.”

My head hurts. I look for the actual glass of water and drink half, then hand the rest to Anna. She says thanks and as she drinks her hair falls over her face where she leaves it. It’s knotted at the front but looks perfect. She hands the glass over and I lie on my back and balance it on my stomach. Anna says nothing, and I know it’s ridiculous because I snapped at her, but I’m hurt because she’s stopped trying. I want to accuse her of not caring, but I manage to resist and am congratulating myself for it when, from somewhere, I say: “Do you think you could ask before you borrow a shirt for the night? I might want to wear it the next day.”

“Sure,’ she says, calm and understanding as she gets out of bed and takes off the faded Funkadelic teeshirt with the two massive holes. She starts dressing from the pile of her clothes at the bottom of the bed, and I feel nervous sick.

“Okay, I’ll open it.”

She turns around to look at me and sits back on the bed, smiling. “You want me to bring it over?”

“No it’s alright,” I say, getting up.

It’s April and the floor’s a little cold under my feet, then under my butt as I sit cross-legged before the box and slide it toward me. Anna stays where she is.

Inside is mostly crap: a contact book with barely any numbers in it; a ticket stub from a show he played at the height of his only-ever-modest success; a few photographs including one of my mother, which I find both annoying and creepy because they were separated before she even died. Then at the bottom, underneath the other stuff, there’s a cassette tape. The label looks like it’s been stuck on where an old one’s peeled off, and in black Sharpie and his handwriting is my name.

“Are you okay?” Anna asks because I’m not moving.

“Yeah, I found this.”

She comes over to look, “You think it’s a message or something?”

“I don’t know.”

“I can leave if you want to listen to it?” Her voice has become annoyingly soft. The only thing I want less than for Anna to leave is to hear my father’s voice. I can already hear excuses and accusations bubbling up to the surface he’s made a half-assed show of smoothing over, knowing he’ll have the last word: I know I was never the best dad, but you…

I remember when I was eleven and sad because of something that happened at school. I think maybe a friend had moved away. My father and I were driving and I wasn’t saying much. We didn’t say a lot in general. “You know, most kids fall out with their parents for a while when they’re teenagers and they make up when in they’re in their 20s. That’s pretty normal.” he told me, keeping his eyes on the road, “but I wasn’t so young when we had you, and you’re probably not going to get that chance. You should make more of an effort.” He was right about one thing. We didn’t get the chance.

“I really don’t want to listen to it.” I say.

“Okay, you want me to get some coffee?”

“Look,” I say, “I get I’m being a bitch and not a lot of fun to be around. Maybe I should just call you later?”

“I didn’t say you were being a bitch.” She squats down to me and puts her arms around me, and I bristle. “It’s really okay to feel angry. I think that’s meant to be pretty normal.” She isn’t holding me tight but it feels like someone’s squeezing my chest way too hard. I try to stay still but jerk away involuntarily, and she looks genuinely upset.

I think that when I was a kid my mum used to hug me, pick me up, stuff like that. Whenever I’ve visited Anna’s house her parents jumped on her, and then on me too. Even her dad hugs me, and he isn’t even a little bit weird about it.

“I’m sorry,” I say without sounding it, “I really think maybe you should go.”

“Okay,” she says, “love you.”

After Anna leaves I feel horrible. I go to the kitchen and make a cup of tea. My housemate’s away for the month and there isn’t any milk so I have it black with sugar. One of my last memories of my mother is making her a cup of tea by myself. I’d have been seven or eight. She made this huge fuss and I felt so proud. Then my father told me I’d forgotten the milk. I remember so clearly how bad I felt, but when I think of it now I can’t tell if he was mocking me or trying to give advice. His voice was flat like mine. Sometimes I say things to people meaning to be kind and they come out wrong, or I sound sarcastic when I’m not. This happens a lot with Anna.

I have a sudden, surprising urge to hear his voice, like it’ll be comforting somehow even if he says shitty things. I get the tape from the box and hold it for a moment, feeling for something other than moulded plastic, and then I realise I don’t have anything to play it on. It’s funny to me how I hadn’t thought of this before. When I was a kid, tape players were everywhere. My dad used to have one in this room in our house where he practised – he called it his study. One time he bought me a Prince cassette from a charity shop and put it on there, and I started dancing around the room. From then on I used to carry it in there sometimes, and he’d let me put it in and push the button, but I always had this nervous habit of fiddling with things, and after a while he’d do it himself because I’d stop the tape accidentally. One time when I was dancing I knocked over his bass and he got insanely mad at me and I didn’t go in again for a long time, only once or twice more before my mother died, and then never again. When I was a teenager I had a CD player with a tape deck built into it, but when I left home I did it quickly and most things stayed behind.

I try my flatmate’s room in case she has a machine but the door’s locked, so I try to think of friends. The best candidate’s Tay, who’s really more a friend of Anna’s than mine. That can be said for 95% of the people I know. He’s into music and weird old tech-stuff and he lives in the neighbourhood, but he’s also kind of a dick. I told Anna I thought this once.

“Why?” she asked, “I think he’s really sweet.”

“I feel like he just tries too hard,” I said, hearing and disliking myself.

I’m not going to ask Tay. I pick up my phone and the screen says I have several messages. I ignore it and start composing something I can copy/paste to people:

Hey!

Hey,

Hey, weird question:

Hi, sorry to ask, but

Often when I’m going to text people I get nervous, I think because of what it means if they don’t reply, so a lot of the time I just don’t. When I see people it’s usually because Anna invites me along. She always invites me along.

I put my phone away and lie down on the bed, staring at the shoebox – a fucking shoebox, that’s it. That and the old car that he hadn’t driven in years because he was too drunk. I have to pay to get it scrapped.

I bring the box onto the bed and take its contents out again. I only looked at the top few photos on the pile before, but this time I keep going. There aren’t many – not for a lifetime – and a couple are of me, both taken by my mother. One of them I recognise because it used to sit in her kitchen after my parents separated and I lived at her house. But I know this can’t be the same copy, because when she died it ended up at my grandmother’s. It used to hang above her stairs next to a picture of my mother, and I used to look at them together on the rare occasions my father took me to visit. He always stayed in the car. This copy he must’ve had made while she was still alive.

There’s another, much older photo at the bottom: a troop of boy scouts, and I recognise him in it right away. We have the same eyebrows, same cheekbones, same intense look. He must be about ten in the photo, and though he’s part of the group he’s stood a little apart, like he’s scared of the others. They’re all smiling these big over the top smiles, and he isn’t. I bring the picture closer, so that me and my father are face to face, and I think how strange it is that I should look so much like a ten year old boy. But then I think of his face as a man with its webs of broken blood vessels, and the thought that we have anything in common makes me angry, so I put the pictures away.

I take out the cassette and lie back on the bed, plugging my fingers into its two holes and twisting. When I go in opposite directions one way the tape gets loose and falls out, and I hold it up in front of the window looking for something decipherable. Twisting the other way the tape gets tight and I feel it strain inside. For some reason I’m tempted to keep going, to let it snap. It doesn’t matter anyway, because I can’t hear anything without a player, and I daydream about a machine that could do the same for people: run them together synchronised and smooth, nothing too tense or too slack, making clear what’s unreadable.

Suddenly I feel lonely, but I don’t want to call anybody. I know people who think about sex not as something inherently pleasurable, but more like a way to relieve their horniness. Most of the time that’s how I feel about being lonely. I think I enjoy seeing people, but it’s complicated. That’s why I love living in the city. You can see a bunch of faces and talk to none of them, and you still somehow feel like you’re in company. There’s a coffee shop nearby that always has a crowd, so I put on some proper clothes and go out.

Outside is beautiful, I think. One of those wet, almost-warm April days when it constantly feels like it’ll rain but doesn’t. There’s a shine to the pavement and trees and both feel lush and alive. I’m happy about this because I feel desiccated, and after making my order at the coffee shop I stay by the counter and hold the water jug in my hand, filling and refilling a glass until it’s mostly orange slices and my belly hurts but I feel more awake. I’m near the bottom of the jug, watching two women with the pushchair-equivalents of humvees glance at me like I’m a freak, when someone taps my shoulder and I nearly spit.

“Edie!”

It’s strange. Sometimes I forget my own name.

“Oh, hi Tay.”

“How’re you doing?”

“Yeah okay.”

“I heard about your dad. I’m really sorry.”

“Oh right, thanks.”

“Sorry,” he says, “I know it’s really annoying how people talk to you after somebody dies.”

What do you fucking know about it. I want to say, but don’t. “Yeah well, I guess it’s hard to know what to say.”

“Right? Like when my parents died I was just this fucking angry little kid for years and didn’t get that at all.”

“I didn’t know that about your parents.”

“Yeah.”

For a moment he breaks eye contact, which is rare for Tay. Usually he looks right at you, which I find both unnerving and annoying. I take the opportunity to look at him, and he actually has a pleasant face: tan, framed well by glasses and curly black hair. I don’t find him at all attractive, but it’s not a bad face – comforting, somehow.

“But you’re so… not angry?” I say,” You’re one of the most upbeat people I know.”

“Intolerable isn’t it?” he laughs and looks at me knowingly, raising his eyebrow, and I make an embarrassed smile.

“Hey,” I say, “sorry to ask, but would you have an old cassette player I could borrow, just for the afternoon? You’re into that kind of thing right?”

He laughs, “I don’t know why you’re sorry, but sure. Just let me get something here and we can go pick it up.”

Tay’s flat is close. On the way I ask about his parents, because to my surprise I’m interested. He talks a bit and asks about mine, and I tell him as little as I can. He asks me why I want the tape player and I tell him I found an old unlabelled cassette and I’m curious. He says that’s cool. When we get inside he invites me into the kitchen and goes to his room to find the player.

“It’s got batteries in it,” he says, handing me the machine, “I’d offer you coffee but you’ve got some.”

“It’s fine,” I say, “Thanks a lot.”

“You know,” he says at the doorway, “I always thought of you as Anna’s intimidating friend, but you’re pretty sweet. If you ever want to hang out – you know, as pals – let me know.”

“Sure.” I make a face without meaning to, then worry I’ve offended him.

“No, I mean it. I would like to hang out with you.” He emphases the words, mocking me but gently, and I realise that I wasn’t really listening to what he was saying before, and suddenly I feel kind of warm and not terrible, and I smile. “Yeah,” I say, “that’d be nice.”

Back home I push the cassette into the machine and it’s satisfying how neatly it fits into its place. I hover my finger over the play button, but I can’t press it. I’m scared of hearing his voice, of what he’ll say, of that being the end of it, so I pick up my phone and call Anna.

The phone rings a long time and I’m about to hang up when she answers. I don’t know what to say and regret calling.

“Did you listen to it yet?” she asks, and I’m surprised that she knows this is what I’ve been thinking about all day, and cares.

“Not yet.”

“I think you should.” and I can hear her catch herself, like she’s waiting for me to snap at her, and I feel shitty.

“Yeah I think you’re right, I’m just scared.”

“Yeah I know. I love you. You know that?”

“Yeah I love you too.”

“No.” She says, firm but warm, like you want a parent to be, “you never listen to good things people tell you. I love you, really I do, and I care about you. I’m here.”

I try to let this soak down to somewhere it’ll sit and stay, but I don’t feel a lot. I thank her, tell her I love her too, which I think I do, and say I’m going to go and listen to the tape.

I don’t know how long my finger hovers over the button before I push it, but eventually I take a deep breath, like before a cold shower, and whether in anger or disappointment the first thing I hear makes me want to cry.

Fucking Prince.

For a moment my teeth are clamped shut and I don’t think I can move. Not even a fucking message. Nothing. But then it isn’t any worse than what I was expecting, and after a minute I start to feel a little relief that at least there are no excuses, no accusations.

Then a new song comes on and I start to listen to the tape, or it’s something like listening. I just let it in, and as I get to my feet I realise I’m smiling, and for a second I can see myself as a little girl. Then I’m dancing around my room, and the song’s warping from where I twisted the reels – or maybe just from time – but underneath it all I think I hear my dad.

#EssaySaturday creative nonfiction Essays memoir

Van Gogh Unbound

by Stephen Mead • November 21, 2020November 21, 2020

“No More Bandages” is the title of a mixed-media collage I did in the Fall of 2014. An infusion of empathy is the medical wording I would use to describe how the piece came to be. An instinctive reaction of emotional osmosis could be an equally accurate definition of what took place, though both fail in conveying the passion and the pain. There is an anatomy to this, the sheer physicality of muscles and tendons working together to lift and squeeze glue, press materials to paper, acting in synthesis with the firing neurons of the brain. Wonder at the chemicals released, the serotonin and dopamine perhaps, the hormonal irrigation of a functioning endocrine system. If samples of bodily fluids could be taken from the artist at work, the panels stained on slides, the microscopically photographed would reveal a cosmos working so naturally as to appear abstract. I see these proofs, framed or not, as suitable as the ruminations displayed at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia; Thomas Mütter, a physician who sometime before his death in 1895 donated $30,000 and his 1,700-item personal museum of bones, plaster casts, medical illustrations and other pathological artifacts to what was then called the College of Physicians.

None of the preceding of course was going through my head while working on the collage. The impetus came from the death of a co-worker’s thirty-year-old son, an artistically multi-faceted kind-hearted man whose own writings and assemblage collage pieces, along with his medications and hospitalizations, helped give an outlet for his mental illness. Moreover and as equally relevant, his creative output provided glimpses of how effective art as treatment is during those times when the work produced makes a good case study of that illness in remission. In other words, though mental illness with its symbolic spectres and metaphors may be the subject of art for the person experiencing it, that same person may often create work along an entirely different theme. This was certainly the case for my co-worker’s son and it can also equally be found in the works of such noteworthy figures as Norman Rockwell. Rockwell’s biographer, Deborah Solomon wrote of this duality in her book ” American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell”, a book exploring the groundwork of Rockwell’s relationship with his psychoanalyst, Erik Erikson.

Considering letters and syllables as building blocks, sentences themselves lying within the DNA essential for the health of the brain, its ability to both construct and conceive thoughts shaped as paragraphs are an essential form of exercise, and thus the word, the concept, of catharsis comes to the fore. Trace the word back to its Greek word kathairein, meaning “to cleanse, purge.” Merriam Webster elaborates that catharsis entered English as a medical term along the lines of an emetic having to do with ridding the body, especially the bowels, of unwanted material. It didn’t take the Greeks long to see the theatric emotional aspect of the word, applying it to the writing and performing of Tragedy, even Comedy, à la: laughter is the best medicine. This alchemical artistry is of course still prevalent in such artists as Diamanda Galas, whose sonic vocal/piano work, her multi-octave “music of the spleen”, largely concentrates on the topics of AIDS, mental illness, despair, injustice, condemnation, and loss of dignity.

Wikipedia tells us the term catharsis “has also been adopted by modern psychotherapy, to describe the act of expressing, or more accurately, experiencing the deep emotions often associated with events in the individual’s past which had originally been repressed or ignored, and had never been adequately addressed or experienced.” Sigmund Freud’s colleague, Joseph Breuer used hypnosis while Freud, as an alternative, developed the idea of Free Association; i.e.; speaking or writing the content of consciousness without censor. This allowed patients to “speak for themselves”, and gain insight into the unconscious processes from which personality, the psyche, warts and all, develops. Artists may explore this with the guidance of a therapist or, in some cases, unconsciously allow their craft subscribe to the dictum: patient heal thyself. It is my belief that throughout history and the present, large swathes of humanity, whether they define themselves as creative or not, and whether their illness is mental, physical or a combination of both, valiantly attempt to do just that.

Vincent Van Gogh, of course, to a good number of the modern masses, has become the poster child for the Tortured Artist Syndrome. There is the romanticism in this based on the empirical evidence that he cut off his ear and gave it to a prostitute. There is the ultimate denouement of his being found shot in a wheat field he earlier made paintings of. The bandages which cover his head under a bruised-blue winter cap in a self-portrait painted after the ear incident would haunt even the most insensitive of viewers as much as the piercing blue gaze of the artist himself. My own poetic license now however imagines another scene no brushstrokes ever documented. In that picture, or series of them, a triptych perhaps, a film of stitched slides, the bandages are being unwound. Canvasses appear on each gauze reel unspooling slowly and gently about Van Gogh’s neck and shoulders as the wrapping is taken off. These are the other masterpieces of Van Gogh: his sunflowers, his cypresses, his blazingly humane depictions of the working class; a landlady, a postman. Altogether this is the larger presentation of how varied and complex the prolific Van Gogh was, how his spirit was larger than his wounds, his illness. His life was grand in the sense of sweeping, of immensely and deeply experienced, seen and felt. Despite lack of financial success for his talent, his life was grand and rich in the quality he brought to both its content and context.

“No More Bandages”, the mixed media collage I did both for my co-worker and her thirty-year old son was a humble homage to the kind of grandness I felt he had too in his life. The title comes from a statement he made to several people close to him at different times, the gist of it being: ” if I wore bandages to show mental struggles maybe people would understand that all wounds cannot be seen on the surface, but that it takes courage to live with them nevertheless.” I wanted to bear testament, give witness to such hard-earned wisdom since I believe if there is any point to our existence here on Earth it is perhaps simply that. At the time I did not know I was also incorporating the ancient Sanskrit theme of Namaste, one spirit nodding in acknowledgement to another as a profound form of recognition: I see you; you exist. The expression denotes dignity, respect, deserving of good care. At the very least, if not love, what more could a spirit within a body who may or may not one day be a patient, possibly want? I am not sure my co-worker’s son consistently experienced that from our United States 21st century healthcare system. Indeed, after his death, an autopsy revealed there were genuine causes for severe physical pain as real as the various diagnoses and treatments he received for his mental anguish. I am quite sure, however, that hearing such political rhetoric as we need more guns due to the level of monstrous mental illness in this society was and is not a message of Namaste or panacea for what malfunctions exist in said United States 21st century health care system. Still, broad strokes, I like to hope the majority of people who steer their carts of metaphorical gauze and bandages through the bureaucratic battleground of said healthcare system, go to work trying to do no harm even if not endowed with the Hippocratic vocation which creates a Gilead balm.

“No More Bandages”, though only a collage made with materials any school child might use, had, in its way, aspirations of actually being a bandage, an emotional one anyway. Composed of actual gauze laid over a hand painted photocopy of my co-worker’s son’s face, stickers of roses, forget-me-nots, butterflies and small warmly-glowing jewels, created a sense of depth and a sense of pressing, compressing, something like a soothing ointment both on and in. The words Live, Laugh, Dream, Love cut from different sections of a greeting card floated through the whole. They were and are blue as sky and softly curved as clouds. Of course art could hardly be more than a Mercurochrome-smeared band-aid to my co-worker’s grieving anguish, but if art is catharsis when the pain of loving and living has no cure, perhaps it has served something therapeutically useful for our brief sojourn in Time’s enduring Starry Starry Night after all.

#FlashFriday Editor's Pick flash fiction micro fiction short fiction

MEDUSA GOES TO MORRISONS — BY EMILIA ONG

by Emilia Ong • November 20, 2020November 20, 2020

Photo by photographymontreal (copied from Flickr)

It’s terrible, you see they’ve started using paper bags at the supermarket. Brown paper bags. Well it didn’t take me long to figure out that this presented an unprecedented opportunity. I confess that I am always on the lookout for subterfuge.

Avocados become carrots and pears become onions and mushrooms become potatoes. I watch myself being filmed in the tablet-sized screen which tilts over the self-checkout, and swan past the goggle-eyed man in uniform. His shirt buttons strain against his stomach.

It is not only in the supermarket but it is especially in the supermarket. Everything gets a little sharper in the supermarket; sounds get a little harder, colors a little more glowering. The soles of my shoes seem a little less adhesive, as though suddenly worn of all their tread. I pick up a wire basket on the way in; I glance at the Grab n Go counter; doughnuts assail me, fifty pence a five pack

and the world bleeds, and my eyes skid, and charily ways must be trod

and all these things in your basket, your lost hopes, the witch you never were, the bitch you never were, the child you didn’t bear, the meals you will not eat. The clothes you will not wear, the shoes you keep boxed up, the money you won’t spend, won’t spend until you spend it

no doughnuts though

won’t spend until the day when the cobra coils its snaking chest around your heart, until the day when to draw breath you have in every other way to cease to –

Yes, it’s the finest prison, to be stuck somewhere where everything’s everywhere, where in this albeit everything everywhere there is nothing you can touch. How did I get here. Yes, it’s like being Midas in a way, she thinks, no difference, every difference, what are we talking about, we are talking about domains enclosed about terrains imposed, we are talking about the petrification of your wants, of your slithering wants, we are talking about your wants

of your wants which are not permitted

wanted

that the bags are opaque is what gets me

through

creative nonfiction Editor's Pick Essays

Bradley Beach

by Jack Garrett • November 15, 2020November 15, 2020

This was when I was out on Staten Island. Wintertime, nothing going on. I was still painting in those days, but not much. Nothing like now. But one day I woke up early, dark out, peed, then couldn’t get back to sleep. So I was sitting there in my flannel nightie, looking out my kitchen window, which I did a lot, watching the sun come up over my block and hit the playground across the street. And in the playground was this old piece of public art – a sculpture of a walrus leaping over a fountain. It had always been there, the walrus, and the fountain dry and full of trash, since I’d moved in. But that morning, for whatever reason, I was really looking at it. I was trying to do what they always told you in class – take a good look at the crap that surrounds you, right? I don’t know. Does anybody remember 25 years ago? Before everybody knew everything? Do you?

Anyway, I was looking at the walrus. And on his face was an expression of – joy, I guess. Actually, he was laughing. Laughing as he hung there, frozen in mid-leap over a dry, cracked shit heap of a fountain. As if what was below hadn’t caught up with him yet. And sitting there in my kitchen, just like that, I started to cry. I’d never been a weeper. But I sat there and did that. And when I finally stopped, I began to work. On paper – I didn’t have any canvasses ready. But I drew all day. Drew the walrus. Best stuff I’d done in a long time. And it felt good.

So that night, still feeling good, I get this call, and it’s this guy, right? Guy I used to know. Friend, not boyfriend. Sweet, but kind of a freak. And cocky, but off, you know? We used to make fun of him, me especially. Really, I was a shit to him. In a way though, we’d been tight, and at some point I’d just totally blown him off. I mean, it had been years since I’d even thought about him. I’d heard he moved to Idaho or Indiana, someplace small and empty, no place to me. And sitting there on the phone, hearing his voice, I started to cry again. One of those days.

I remember asking him —How long has it been? and him saying —Who cares? and laughing, like it was his backhanded way of forgiving me. That’s how it felt, anyway. But he seemed anxious too, edgy, he had something to say. So I’m sitting there trying to keep it together, and he starts telling me about this “project” of his, saying —It’s a mindfuck, Betty, so corny, like code we used to use for anything anybody actually thought about, right? Which for me wasn’t a whole lot.

He said —Betty, I’m doing this thing. This magazine.

And I said Shit because then I remembered. He used to talk all the time about being a writer. Talk about it. Only time I ever actually saw any of his writing we were down on the shore one summer. Early 80’s. Bunch of us rented a little place. At night we’d get high and he would pull out these pages and start reading to us. More like reciting, holding forth, you know? I mean, it was unbelievable – on and on about the ocean and passion and bliss. He’d be shouting this stuff, spit flying, waving his arms. And of course I’d lose it. I don’t think I ever laughed so hard in my life. I’d be like doubled over on the couch and I remember once peeking up and he was looking right back at me, very solemn and still, and I had to look away. Had to leave the room.

So here, years later, on the phone, feeling a little sick, I said —Shit, you’re a real writer now? and he said —Huh? and I asked him again, and – nothing, like he’d dropped the phone without a word. Or worse, like at least one of us had forgotten everything.

When he finally answered me his tone changed, he goes —Betty, listen, I’m into publishing now, alright? Getting impatient with me, one thing I definitely remembered about him, but now I blamed myself. And when I told him that was amazing he deflected of course, said —Sure it is.

So my throat got tight and I said —Listen, it’s good to hear from you, to hear your voice, right? I was starting to feel too much, more than I should have, more than I probably did, at least about him. I started to go into this thing about how I’d underestimated him, how I regretted this and that, bla bla bla, I didn’t know what I was saying. I was just trying not to cry anymore.

He did me a favor, cut me off. —Betty listen, we should get together, he said, and suddenly it hit me that he was really out there, not just a voice from oblivion. He said —Betty, I need your help.

So, like that. Turned out he wasn’t in Ohio or Wyoming or wherever I thought he was. He was in town – well, Sunnyside Queens, wherever the fuck that was. So I’d been in the city most of my life and didn’t know where Sunnyside was, but then I sure as fuck wouldn’t have known where New Dorp Staten Island was either, if I hadn’t had my ass kicked out there by the bullshit rents. I remember thinking —What, I can’t even live in Brooklyn anymore? I’m not allowed? I have to be put out, away from everybody else, and I mean way out, nowhere near the ferry, where nobody’d have to look at me?

Anyway, he said let’s have coffee and let’s have it at this place near a photographer friend’s studio in Sunnyside. Okay, no, I didn’t ask what friend or why there. I figured it was convenient for him, he knew this place and just mentioned in passing how it happened to be near his friend’s studio – like when people tell you something and they add these extraneous details for no reason, or dropping names, you know, “Jeremy” this and “Valerie” that, people you never met or even heard of, but there they were. To make it a likelier story, I guess.

I bundled up. February. Wind blowing off the water. Went down to the bus stop and ducked in behind the plexiglass, stomping my feet to keep warm, thinking about this guy, about the old days. How I’d been. Talking shit. Taking people down. Easy targets, like him. Anything for a laugh, to stay on top, hold the room. Like my tits gave me the right. Pride before the fall. Because here I was, a fat, aging, wannabe artist, my kitchen for a studio, all alone, not even a cat to ignore me. I hated myself, with reason. And here out of the blue, this guy, this old friend who I’d long ago left behind without a glance back, seemed to be giving me a chance for – what. Redemption? I never quite got what that is, exactly.

And while I’m waiting for the bus, this little old lady, red sauce Italian, waddles up to wait with me. Seems just dandy in her thin little headscarf, while I’m hugging myself in layers of wool and down. I wanted to ask her, Aren’t you fucking freezing, lady? But for what? An excruciating conversation about the weather and the neighborhood and her big ridiculous family and WHY YOU NOT MARRIED, YOU SO PRETTY, YOU GOTTA HAVE BAMBINI! BAMBINI! BAMBINI! the whole bus ride? I would’ve ground my teeth to powder by the time we got to the ferry. I pretended she wasn’t there. But I remember her. Because something can’t mean nothing, yeah? You tell me.

Whatever – blow-by-blow – bus, ferry, two trains and a couple hours later, I come back up into the cold in Sunnyside. I found the place, a diner on a street of old warehouses, and went in, late of course. And there he was by the Men’s, half turned away from me, talking on a payphone, smoking a cigarette – more like dancing with a cigarette, arms out, receiver squeezed between his ear and shoulder. I waited by the counter, watching him – short leather jacket, shrubby mustache, pork pie hat, not his style at all. But in fact, he looked very much at home, and a lot, lot older. Like he’d earned the benefit of the doubt, right? Then he noticed me and bang, his body sort of snapped, like a snake striking from ass to hat. On the phone he said —Here she is, and hung up.

—Betty, honey, he said and took me in his arms, you showed up. I squeezed him tight and closed my eyes, breathing in some noxious stink coming up out of his collar, like flop sweat under a layer of Paco Rabanne. Smelled sad. With a nod to the waiter, he led me to a back room and a corner booth. When I took off my coat he held me at arms-length and looked me up and down. Said —It’s so good to see you, Betty. And I was like, Jesus.

Finally, he let me sit. —Welcome, he said, like this was his place. I looked around, as if admiring the Greek crap decor, avoiding his eyes. We were alone back there. —Coffee? he said and before he got through saying it, there was a cup in front of me. I didn’t drink coffee but I’d drink this.

—Thanks, I said to the waiter but he was already gone.

Then, like some ritual, my old friend took off his hat and set it on the table. —Do you realize, he said, that within a mile radius, you’ll find some of the biggest movie studios on the entire East Coast? Right here in Queens.

—Wow. Queens. Who knew?

—I did, he said, or I do now anyway, and waved at somebody over my shoulder, but when I turned to look, there was nobody there. When I turned back, he was stirring his black coffee.

—So, I said, Idaho?

—You what?

—Isn’t that where you went? Or Indiana someplace?

He scowled at me, but not like he meant it, then flicked his ash and looked at the coal end of his cig. —Fuck no, he said. I mean I thought about it.

—Oh.

—An idea. You know.

—So you’ve been here all along? I said, but he didn’t look up.

—When I was a kid, he said, I used to stick pins in my mother’s cigarettes. Take the pack from her purse, dump ’em out, put a little pinhole in the side of each one, near the filter, so they wouldn’t, you know, draw. Then put ’em all back in the pack.

—Really, I said. What did she do?

—Nothing. Not a thing.

—She ever quit smoking?

—No, he said. Then he looked up at me. —Betty, listen. I’m really glad to see you. I mean, right?

—Sure, I said. I mean, me too. He was nodding and smiling at me now. I was smiling and nodding back. We were like a couple of bobble-head dolls, our asses glued to old ass-molded leatherette.

—Betty, you’re an attractive woman, you know that?

—Shit, I said. I got old.

—Fuck old. You look terrific.

—Yeah, sure. You’re not so bad yourself.

We were saying about the lamest shit possible, but I was on automatic now, not having seen any of this coming.

—Sometimes I think about you, he said.

—Huh?

—No, I do. I remember you, Betty.

—I remember you too.

—Yeah, but I really remember you, he said. He dropped his eyes, blew smoke into his lap, scowled again. —Let me tell you something I’ve learned, Betty. Something about women and age and time.

—Alright.

—Alright. Some women, he said, have something special.

He looked sort of embarrassed so I reached out and put my hand on his. —Hey, so do some men.

—If you say so, he said, looking down at my hand. Then he put his other hand on top of mine and sort of lifted the whole thing up and down. —Mmm, got a nice hand sandwich here, he said and went to take a bite.

I pulled it away with a laugh. —You nutjob.

—You’re the nutjob, he said. You were fuckin’ nutty, you. You’d do anything.

—Me? What about you? I said, but I really didn’t know what we were talking about anymore. See, the thing was, he and I, we’d never slept together or anything, it hadn’t been like that. I mean, it never really came up, right? But laughing with him then, I realized he wasn’t an awful-looking guy, and I realized I’d always known that, without ever thinking about it. And it made me feel a little different sitting there, even with him smelling like he did.

—But like I was saying, he said, some women, and I’m not talking about girls, little teeny-whatnots, but women, mature considerable women, like you in a way, have something special. And what that something is, actually, I call power.

I waited for him to keep going, in case he said something that made sense, but he just stared at my coffee like he noticed something floating in it. —That’s nice, I said. So this magazine, for fuck’s sake, tell me about it.

—Yeah well, that’s exactly what I’m doing, what this is all about, why I wanted to meet with you, you in particular, Betty, to see if you’d be willing to help me with this thing.

This last sort of spilled out of him in a rush, like suddenly it was urgent. —Sure, I said, that’s why I came. What is it? Design work, illustrations? I told you I’d help if I could.

—Well, I wouldn’t want you coming all the way out here for nothing. I mean, if you didn’t want to help me, you could’ve just stayed home, right?

—Whoa, I said, what the fuck? You asked me to come, I came. I mean, once I knew you were in town I would’ve wanted to see you anyway, but here I am, you asked me to help you, and I fucking will. Just tell me what you need me to – oh, wait. I stopped, my heart sinking. —Is it money? You need money? Because I really don’t—

—Betty, what? he said. No. Fuck no. Please. I do not need money from you, Betty. No-no-no-no-no. He smirked and shook his head.

—Shit. Sorry.

—Forget it. Drink your coffee. A moment passed, he wouldn’t look at me, then —So you really want to hear about this?

—Fucking A! Absolutely! Tell me already, will you? Practically begging him.

He gave me a look. —Betty, may I first say something to you?

—Yeah, of course. What?

—I have always thought of you as a very beautiful woman.

—Huh?

—I mean like model beautiful.

—Fuck off.

—I mean every word.

—Sure you do.

—You have a gorgeous body.

—Shit, guy. My head was swimming now, trying to think of the last time he would’ve seen me, what, in a bikini or something? Maybe ten, twelve years before at the shore? —The fuck are you talking about, Bradley Beach?

—Bradley Beach, he said under his breath, impatient again. —Bradley Beach, sure, but that was a long time ago. I’m looking at you right now, Betty.

I looked down at myself: old jeans, leg warmers, big baggy sweater over an old boyfriend’s flannel shirt, puffy down vest, knit scarf around my chunky neck hanging down in my splayed lap. I was about to turn 40 and almost quit caring. I dressed to hide my ass. —Are you fucking with me? I said.

—Betty, he said, I admire you. You know what that means? Admire? In the Latin language it means look at. I admire you, right?

—Sure.

—Admire. Like, Mira cholos! Yo, look at this! Right?

—Uh huh.

—Yeah well. I have admired you for a long time. More than I think you know. And what this is now is, I want to actualize that admiration, if you follow. I want to pay tribute to the beauty in you. And by chance, he said, lighting another cigarette – by happy coincidence… He took a long drag, then angled his head to blow the smoke, but held my eyes with his. No more bobble-heading.

—But let me finish what I was saying before, he said as the waiter came, topped off my coffee, and disappeared again. —What women have, certain mature, substantial women have, is power. That’s what I call it anyway. And I’m not talking about what kind of job they’ve got or how much money they have, that superficial shit, what kind of hair or shoes or clothes they wear, alright?

—Alright.

—What I’m talking about is how they are inside, underneath their nice clothes and shit, you understand?

—I think so, I said, though by this time I was fuzzier than ever.

—Good. That’s good, Betty.

—And where do I fit in with this?

—That’s the happy coincidence I was talking about.

—Well, I said, you haven’t really said what it is, though. I mean, you said you were starting a magazine—

—With several partners.

—With several partners, okay, you’re starting this magazine, but beyond that I’m not sure I get you. What is it, like a self-help thing?

—Not exactly.

—Not exactly, I said, rubbing my eyes. The heat or something was starting to get to me.

—Okay, so what exactly? I mean, I sort of get your idea about a power women have, you know, “inside” but—

He stopped me with a finger on the back of my hand. —Inside their clothes, Betty, he said. Inside what hides them. That’s where the power is. Because there are women out there, especially women of a certain age, who are very, very special, and what they can do, Betty, what they can do is they can choose to show everyone how special they are. That is power.

—Oh, I said.

—Ah, he said, but a lot of them, of a certain age, shit, maybe most of them, you’re thinking, Do I really want to see that?And the answer is Nuh-uh.

—Uh-huh.

—But the ones you do want to see, you really really want to see, alright?

—Alright.

—So the question for me was: who, of these powerful women, do I really really want to see? And that’s when it hit me. Oh shit. Betty.

And looking at me, he smushed out his cigarette, then kept that hand moving. It came across the table, and the fingers opened, and very gently glided down my cheek and cupped my chin.

And that was that. I mean, what I said yes to was, I thought, something less – a lot less, okay? – than what’s out there now for everyone to see. The stuff with him, I swear, I did not know that was going to happen. And sure, maybe he slipped something in my coffee but I’ll be honest with you, okay? I liked the guy. I don’t know. He was who he was, as the kids say. It’s not like he forced me do those things, right? It was all just one thing, then another.

The magazine never came out. He stopped calling. I think he was embarrassed. I could’ve asked for everything, the proofs, negatives – he may have even offered. I didn’t take. I didn’t even look. It was my gift.

That’s it. That’s the story. You manage to laugh? Is it what you expected? Better than I was on the street, strung out, desperate for cash? Sure. Just try to remember when you look at those pictures you bothered to print out and throw all over the bedroom, that the story you’re telling yourself is not about me. You think you know me, and why wouldn’t you? You see me, talk to me, sleep with me – every day. I’m your lover, your partner, your wife. Remember?

Anyway, thanks for getting through this. Really, I’m grateful. Who reads, right? There’s just one more thing, since you’ve gotten this far, I’m asking you to do. But it’s big. I assume you’re alone now, that I’m not around while you’re reading this. What I want you to do – is quit jerking off and come find me. You know what time it is, what day it is, right now, as you hold this in your hand, I don’t. So you know where I am. At the studio, the coffee shop, the bar – you know me, you know where to find me. So do that, okay? Please. Either go, get out, leave me the fuck alone – or come take me home.

This story will stay right here on the kitchen table, and the evidence all over our unmade bed, until you do.

Feelin’ like a Criminal: Trauma in ‘My Dark Vanessa’ through the music of Fiona Apple

by Sarvat Hasin • November 14, 2020November 14, 2020

Maybe she spent her formative years
Dealing with his contentious fears
And endless jeers at her endless tears
Or maybe she just got tired of watching him
– ‘For Her’, Fiona Apple

My Dark Vanessa is replete with literary references: after all, much of the action takes place in the classroom of an English teacher. Strane gifts these to Vanessa, hooking her in by comparing her hair to the colour of red maple leaves, giving her “Emily, Edna, Sylvia”, saying she reminds him of the section of Lady Lazarus (from Ariel): “Out of ash/I rise with my red hair/And I eat men like air”. The references are close to the bone: Lolita with faux coyness. He builds Vanessa out of these references: Lolita when she is seducing him, Lady Lazarus when his attraction to her is a threat to his position at the school. The onus of their relationship, as sculpted by Strane, is on Vanessa. In return, Vanessa tries to share Fiona Apple with him, something Strane cannot understand or connect to. The high school sections of book are set in 2001. Criminal, Apple’s first and one of her most potent singles, was released in 1997.

In the video, Apple is lying on beds and in bathtubs in various states of undress. Her thinness and youth are on display. The light is strong on her face, like a polaroid glare and her eyes are big and wide. She slithers around other bodies but we stay focused on her face, its yawning mouth. The song, like so much of Apple’s oeuvre, is a kind of anthem for young women, for girls who feel their sadness is particular to them. Apple on the bed is admitting she’s been a bad, bad girl. She says the song was written about using one’s sexuality to get something. Sexuality here is in Apple’s hands — it is her weapon and she is a criminal.

‘Criminal’ is the song that Vanessa tries to give Strane in response to Lolita. These texts are expressions of how they see their relationship. Strane uses Nabokov as a road map for their relationship, to populate and validate the narrative he is building for what happens between them. In return, Vanessa offers music.

At his house, Strane gives her beer and strawberry print pyjamas. He takes pictures of her on his bed and as she poses for them, Vanessa says they remind her of the Fiona Apple video but he doesn’t know what she’s talking about even though she had written out the lyrics for him and left them on his desk, the way he left her poems. Strane doesn’t engage with these: she pores over the texts he offers but he dismisses hers. It is partly a commentary on the age disparity (he’s never heard of Britney Spears, for example) but also that his reluctance to really engage with her version of events. He builds a narrative around both her motivations and his, feeding them to her over and over again until she believes them. The storytelling aspect of the relationship doesn’t end with the poetry and the novels. Strane refits the beginning: he says she was the one to chase him. Over the years, he will tell her this story again and again. He puts the burden of the relationship on her, that his desires have been risen by a “darkness” in her.

The book is split between two timelines — Young Vanessa, in 2001 and Vanessa as a grownup in the late 2010s. Young Vanessa’s love for Fiona Apple is well documented. Importantly, Apple predates Strane in her life. The summer before she meets Strane, Vanessa mourns the loss of an intense friendship and listens to Apple for hours in her parent’s hammock, saying it makes her “feel better than happy.” If Strane sees her as a seducer, as his undoing, Vanessa sees herself in Apple — like a “criminal”. After the relationship ends, she stays in contact with Strane, very much entrenched in the web of his fantasy. Like Fiona, she feels she’s been “careless with a delicate man”. Music is a tap into her feelings but it is also a way to explain the world as Vanessa sees it. The book understands this about teenagers, the particular way in which the music can take on lyrical significance: the soundtrack to anyone’s youth is filled with the meaning that we fill into those songs.

After the relationship is over, Vanessa stays in contact with Strane and is still very much entrenched in the web of his fantasy. As the book opens, something is happening all around her. There is an awakening spreading like wildfire through social media and the news: the #MeToo movement unfolding and creeping closer to her. The movement rushes over her, threatening to break the fantasy she’s been cherishing which, for so long, has been the story of her life — turning what is romantic to something sordid. Throughout the book, we watch her repel this narrative, concealing it from her therapist at first and finally unfolding the story to her (and us) full of concessions for Strane, all the ways in which she drove him crazy and is therefore responsible for the events that took place. Many stories about similar relationships end in school — My Dark Vanessa is a rare book that explores the aftermath in as much detail: the way the school and even to a degree, her parents, find it easy to believe that the blame is Vanessa’s, easily swallowing the lie that what has occurred here is no more than a schoolgirl crush that has gotten out of control.

I read the book in 2020 and Fiona Apple has just released a new album. It is unlike anything I have ever heard. At the core of it is the repeated nature of contending with trauma, and the actions of powerful men. In ‘For Her’, Apple says she has written a song that contains many stories, most of them not hers, based on conversations she’d had with women including one in particular who wrote about the experience she’d had as an intern in a film production company with a man who claimed to be (as Strane does) her mentor and protector. It is easy and painful to imagine Vanessa listening to this song, Vanessa whose whole life has centred around keeping Strane safe, on hiding the secret he binds her with, connecting somehow to the song: “Maybe she spent her formative years/dealing with his contentious fears.” The melody of the song is furious, frantic, reflection of the cacophony of stories that Apple is giving voice to. A full circle; Apple’s songs were consumed by young Vanessa Wyes and became part of their stories. Apple then went on to hear the stories, from women in similar positions and put them to song.

Fetch the Bolt Cutters is heavy with catharsis, a thrumming, pulsating album. A tense and spiky heartbreak runs through it, dark with mistrust. Her songs have a way of making you feel inside them, that rare quality that writing can sometimes have by being very specific of hooking you deep into the belly of the song until is about you. Kate Elizabeth Russell’s writing has a similar effect so that even if you didn’t go to boarding school and end up in a traumatic relationship with your teacher, the teenhood of that character, her vulnerability and sharpness can still feel like an echo of your own. The book is dedicated to “the real life Dolores Hazes and Vanessa Wyes whose stories have not yet been heard, believed, or understood”. The act of reflection is built deeply into the project of the book, just as it is built into the project of Fetch the Bolt Cutters. Looking at the two texts in this way creates almost a Russian doll effect: I, the reader, can see myself in Vanessa, who in turn can see herself in Apple’s songs.

The progression from ‘Criminal’ to Fetch the Bolt Cutters charts the journey that Vanessa makes in the book almost perfectly, from a character who blames herself for the relationship to one who is swept up in the movement surrounding her. Another student at the same boarding school comes forward who has been assaulted by Strane and her story is picked up by the media. It haunts Vanessa as she moves through her life, made small by her father’s death, by the looming shadow of Strane that seems to keep other romantic or friendship complications at bay.

For years, Vanessa believes that what happened between her and Strane isn’t abuse but a romance. She believes in the power that Strane claims she had over him: that even after she left, Strane’s behaviour and his continued abuse of young girls was something she’d unwilling orchestrated. Now, as that illusion shatters, the novel asks us: what does Vanessa do with that version of herself? The novel is concerned with this question, with Vanessa’s life rather than Stranes. The media focus in these instances is often on the perpetrator, analysing the crimes and how they got away with them. The same attention is rarely afforded to the interior lives of the person at the centre of the story: My Dark Vanessa goes into the story deeply. It doesn’t just track the way the events played out and the immediate aftermath but follows the trauma as it bruises through the decades, a long take on an idea that has populated the media as a quick read on our phones. The harrowing nature of the story doesn’t end with what is done to Vanessa when she is fifteen. The work of unmasking the abusers, holding them to account is one thing. The act of coming to terms with trauma is a different track, a lesser explored narrative that My Dark Vanessa is deeply concerned with. It asks, what Vanessa should do with her past self, the version that grew up believing that what occurred between her and Strane was a love story? How does she detangle herself from a relationship that moulded her so completely without invalidating her sense of self?

Her view of herself, her own sexuality, the thing that she felt made her a Criminal is at odds with the narrative she is being presented with. To some degree, we all shed out younger selves and become new people as we grow older. But Vanessa is now having to come to terms with the idea that the person Strane built her to be never existed — she was never responsible or in control of any of the situations. She has spent her whole adult life trapped in this version of herself, unable to access it even in therapy until now. The title track of Fetch the Bolt Cutters is a reference to the tv series, The Fall in which Gillian Anderson’s character, a detective, tells the police to the “fetch the bolt cutters” to break through a locked door and release a victim of sex trafficking.

The song, the whole album really, is about releasing yourself from a trap — something must be broken to get out. Vanessa has to break through the cocoon of that relationship which she has been caught in the web of for so many years. The texts sit side by side in a way that feels almost painfully tender: the books ends its journey in 2017. Strane is dead, killing himself as the storm threatens around him and leaving Vanessa to fetch her own bolt cutters. We are left with strands of hope for her: she is getting a dog, going to therapy, speaking openly to her mother again. I can picture this Vanessa, a few years into the future, screaming along to this album in the shower and perhaps finally feeling the full catharsis of someone else’s experience echoing a version of her experience, the clashing dark heart of it.

#FlashFriday Editor's Pick flash fiction micro fiction short fiction

KEEP YOUR KNICKERS ON

by Caroline Grobler-Tanner • November 13, 2020November 13, 2020 • 1 Comment

As a teen, I was obsessed with my knickers, whether to allow boys into them and getting them in a twist. My mother instilled in me the importance of ensuring my knickers were always on and clean because “God forbid you should have an accident and end up in hospital.”

I had three types of knickers: everyday cotton briefs, pairs with dodgy elastic for period days, and my convent school regulation grey granny pants. When I got a Saturday job at Marks and Spencer’s underwear department, I discovered knickers could be sexy. With my discount, I purchased a pair of yellow lace panties. My mother put away my washing one day and must have thought the lacy string knickers were a hairband. I found them wrapped around my hairbrush handle.

My best mate Patsy claimed to be a feminist. I was intrigued by her strident stance and short peroxide hair. Feminism was a mission, she explained. I understood we were in the second wave and up against the patriarchy. “We have to be free to do the zipless fuck,” Patsy said. I imagined the zipless fuck was doing it with jeans on and the zip down, but I couldn’t work out whether your knickers were on, and I wasn’t sure how any of this would be freeing. I was pondering the technicalities when I told Patsy we should take action. I heard the lads were going down to the pub that night. Tone Williams would be there, and I fancied the pants off him Maybe I could try out the zipless fuck with him to see if it worked. Patsy was all for it, but she had to babysit, so I went alone on the exploratory mission.

I cycled to the pub and went straight to the ladies to conceal my zits. I’d just had a perm that had gone fizzy. I looked like a poodle with an electric shock. Nevertheless, I persisted. I felt sassy thinking of the lacy knickers hidden under my drainpipe jeans like a naughty secret. The boys arrived in Grub’s Ford Cortina. They all had four-letter nicknames, Grub, Kipp, and Tone. Lady Di had just got engaged to Chaz, who didn’t know what love was. Kipp said he couldn’t imagine them doing it, but I was just thinking about Di’s knickers, practical cotton or sensuous silk?

I drank beaucoup Babycham and went out back to the car park with Tone. He didn’t get into my knickers because as soon as we started getting it on, Mr. Gunner, from my street, arrived at the pub with his wife and shone his car lights right at us. Mrs. Gunner tutted in my direction. I turned away and yanked up my drainpipes, but the lace of the knickers got caught in the zip. Never mind the zipless fuck, the zip was fucking fucked. My bladder was bloated, but I couldn’t get the zip down to go to the loo. I sat on a barstool, legs tightly crossed with the yellow lace poking out, my hands cupped around my privates like a codpiece.

The boys wanted to go to the chippy. I wasn’t going to risk being given the four-letter nickname – SLUT – so I said my mum wanted me in by ten, and I best be going. As soon as they left, I skulked outside and wet my pants. I cycled like fury to get home to release myself from the soggy drainpipes. It was pitch black on the backroad. I must have been hit by a car head-on and knocked out cold. The culprit left me for dead. Grub dropped the lads at the chippy and happened past in his Cortina. He saw me lying in the ditch and drove to my house to get my mum.

I was unconscious for hours. When I came round in the hospital, mum was there with Patsy.

“You nearly died for the cause,” Patsy wailed and came over to hug me.

Mum was frowning. She had that kind of disappointed look that mothers get.

“They had to cut them stupid smelly jeans off you,” mum said. “Why did you have a hairband under your jeans and no knickers? If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times, and you arrive at hospital with no clean knickers on. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, the shame.”

I remembered nothing. I looked down at my bruised and battered self. Under the hospital gown, I was wearing my regulation grey school knickers – clean, of course.

#FlashFriday Editor's Pick flash fiction micro fiction short fiction

GLUE

by Terri Mullholland • November 9, 2020November 9, 2020

Photo by Angel Talansky (copied from Flickr)

She had been collecting supplies for some time: fabric, yarn, scissors, and glue. Strong glue. She needed this to hold together.

Everyone wore face coverings now. It was hard to recall what people looked like without them. Over time they had become larger, covering more and more of the face. Nobody wanted to show their real skin; only their eyes remained real.

The papier-mâché trend had been slow to start, but now everyone was doing it. Full papier-mâché masks, with a sealed mouth and slits for eyes. Some made them look like their real faces, others had one for every occasion: a work mask, a party mask, a dating mask. Every time she went to the supermarket there were at least two people with Elvis Presley’s face.

When she made the first one, she wanted it to be as fantastical as possible; she made the nose deliberately long and pointy, added piercings, a tattoo across the forehead.

But it was never enough. She always wanted more.

Then she saw the dead fox by the side of the road. Its beautiful amber pelt reminded her of a cat she had once owned.

She took it home and peeled off its coat, leaving a layer of skin to which she could apply the glue. She began attaching the fox fur in small sections; it was amazing how well it took, like turf bedding down into her skin, until her face was completely covered. Then she used the whiskers to make a grille to conceal her eyes.

She admired the effect in the mirror. In the sunlight her cheeks glinted like burnished gold. The fur already felt part of her.

She picked up her handbag and left the house. She wondered how long it would take before everyone else was doing it too.

Unicorn Cake

by Erin Schallmoser • November 8, 2020November 8, 2020

It was summer vacation and Kiki spent her afternoons on a beach towel in the backyard. She sprayed lemon juice in her hair and read magazines while sunbathing, a rare combination of activities that pleased both her mother and herself. That’s how Annie found her one day. Kiki named her that later, of course, because of her ginger fur and destitution. She sauntered right up to Kiki, brushing her swollen belly against Kiki’s oiled one, and started yowling like they were old friends who hadn’t gossiped in a while.

“Are you one of the weird kids, too?” Kiki asked, glad for the distraction. She brought out a can of tuna and a dish of milk and Annie never really left after that.

At the party there is glitter confetti, neon balloons afloat with helium, and a photo booth stocked with props. There is a unicorn-shaped birthday cake stuffed with sprinkles, and small, pastel-colored snacks. A stereo pushes out today’s top 40s and gangs of preteens silly dance and chase each other around the backyard. Kiki watches them, dressed in black cut-off jean shorts and an oversized band t-shirt. All of them are classmates, but most of them are not friends. Somehow, over the music, she hears Annie’s bells, and sees her streak of orange fur through the rainbow streamers, sweaty calves, and summer sunshine. It’s almost time.

She walks up to Jessica, a friend, sort of, at the punch bowl. “I’ve got to get out of here.”

Jessica is filling up a plastic cup with pink sparkly punch. She nods and marches to the center of the backyard. Jessica screams: long, loud, and high. Kiki’s mother swoops in. Classmates swarm. Kiki slips away to the barn, like a ghost, or an angel, something unknown and unseen.

At the barn, there is the creak of the door and the slide of the wheels as Kiki pushes it sideways, engaging her calf muscles so they pop out like a jack-in-the-box. There is the sunlight, mingling with dust motes. There is the smell of dirt and horse hair. There is the feeling of being close to old secrets.

Kiki finds Annie up in the loft, nestled on top of a hay bale. Annie’s torso distends and stretches, little peaks and valleys randomly appearing as the inhabitants grow restless. Ripples roll down her side and her body contracts into a C shape. She shifts into a low crouch, and with one more smooth ripple, a small wet sac is released. Annie reaches her mouth down to it and licks, breaking apart the slick layer of protection and revealing tufts of hair, brown, black, and orange in color. Annie chews at the cord that still connects the kitten to her, but does not seem inclined to eat her offspring. Kiki is relieved. The kitten gropes its way to one of Annie’s nipples, bumping its nose against it before connecting with its mouth.

“Is that a stray?” Annie’s mother had asked one day. Having just gotten home from work, she popped her head out into the backyard, keeping the rest of her body behind the sliding glass door as if she was afraid that Kiki’s teenage surliness was contagious. Kiki scratched Annie’s head and pretended not to hear.

“I said, is that a stray?”

Kiki looked up from where she sat cross-legged on the ground. Her mother wore a crisp pantsuit and her lipstick was never faded or smudged. Kiki didn’t match her outfits with her jewelry and she didn’t wear makeup, even though her mother had sent her to the drugstore with a crisp twenty-dollar bill for that very reason. Kiki said she didn’t want to wear it, but really she was scared she’d mess it up, and instead of a Cover Girl model, end up looking like a hooker or a zombie.

“This is Annie,” Kiki said.

Her mother shook her head, started to close the sliding glass door again. “She’s not coming inside the house!”

Before Kiki can think of words to begin to describe what she’s just seen, it happens again. Another lumpy moist ball comes out of Annie and she reaches for it, bumping the first away from her body in the process. The second kitten is a ginger like its mother, and loud and whiny. The third kitten comes out like water from a faucet, but Annie’s body shakes from the effort. The three kittens bumble around, taking a few groping steps before their legs crumple under them. They move like robots. Annie breathes heavily.

Kiki’s mother threw a fit when she started sleeping out in the barn. “Why can’t you like pop music and nail polish?”

“I want to be there when it happens. I need to. There’s a chance Annie might eat them – it’s natural, but I can’t bear to think about it.”

“Neither can I. You read too much.”

Kiki walked past her with a sleeping bag, pillow, an armful of books, and a flashlight. Her mother threw up her hands. “I just don’t know what to do with you!”

Annie slept on Kiki’s chest that night, flattening her out like book pages on flower petals. We are like death and life, Kiki thought as she fell asleep. Mother and daughter, so close together, so rotten and sweet. Can’t have one without the other.

The fourth kitten is pitch black and smaller than the others. It seems content to remain where it landed. Annie reaches her head towards it, but is too occupied with the other three to do more. The kitten’s body moves only in echoes, like a Jello platter someone bumped into. Kiki crouches down and leans closer. She sees the rib cage moving, struggling to do what it is made to do, but a rich muffling noise is the only result.

At the pet supply shop in town, a few days ago, Kiki bought a stack of canned wet food, and a collar with bells on it. She slipped it on Annie’s neck, while she ate the salmon flavored meal. “It’s so I can hear you. You can let me know. You’ll let me be there when it happens right?” Annie stopped eating long enough to nuzzle her head into Kiki’s palm. Kiki thought about her carnival goldfish that she had when she was five. Her father had won it for her. She had fed it too much and it went belly-up. Kiki cried, loud and wet, but her mother just picked up the bowl and took it to the bathroom, clucking her tongue.

Kiki swoops a hand down and scoops up the fourth. It fits in the palm of her hand. Annie, defensive, hisses and swipes a paw, striking Kiki’s right forearm with a weight that draws blood. The fourth’s body is warm and immobile in Kiki’s palm, like a coal removed from a burning fire. She sets the kitten on top of her thighs and wraps the inside of her t-shirt around the wet burning body, rubbing her hands back and forth. Now she sees the kitten’s face, where a thick cord of mucus still clings, and she wipes roughly at it. The dark blob expands and contracts. The kitten lets out a sore crackling cry, proving that air is circulating its lungs. Kiki holds it up against her chest for a few moments, feeling its heart beat with hers, then places it beside Annie and the rest of the litter.

The night before, Kiki’s mother surprised her by bringing dinner out to her in the barn. “Your birthday party is tomorrow. Don’t forget.”

Kiki shoved the food in her mouth all at once: lasagna, salad, garlic bread. Suburban resentment made her hungry. “No one will show up.” Kiki was the weird kid, but soon she would be the weird kid with kittens, and that would somehow make it more bearable.

“All of your classmates from last year are showing up. All their mothers have RSVP’d.”

“I won’t have any fun.”

Her mother shrugged. “Suit yourself. Your classmates will.”

Kiki watches the cats, a complete and potent family now. Annie is a mother; her kittens are sons and daughters. Kiki looks at the mucus and uterine tissue on her t-shirt, bits and particles of glory and magic, wondering if Annie will ever force her kittens to be something they’re not. Doubtful. Kiki can see her backyard from a window in the barn loft. A song she likes plays on the stereo. Her mother holds the knife, about to cut the unicorn cake into slices and give it away to everyone, one small portion at a time.

Some afternoons, Kiki’s mother would join her out in the backyard, bringing a glass of wine and a Danielle Steel paperback. She’d perch on a lawn chair. “The party is happening, whether you like it or not,” her mother said to her one day, turning pages but not really reading. Kiki had already been sleeping out in the barn for about a week. Annie’s belly was close to bursting. She resembled a pinata toy, and Kiki knew her mother would secretly like to take a swing at her belly. Kiki knew if things had turned out the way her mother had hoped, she wouldn’t be an only child, carrying all of her mother’s hopes and desires on her bony shoulders.

“It could be any day now,” Kiki told her mother. “I can’t promise I’ll be available for a celebration.”

Her mother shook her head. “You’re turning thirteen. Of course you’ll be available for a celebration. Just tell me what you’d rather have as a theme: unicorns or mermaids?”

Kiki picked unicorns, because sometimes she felt like one: something ridiculous that no one really believed in.

The Frugal Repast

by Caroline Fernelius • November 8, 2020November 8, 2020

Art by Stella Shannon.

Self-Portrait

Dear Oscar, I wrote an entire failed book chapter last fall, the fall when we met, about William Hazlitt’s concept of gusto, but it turns out that my writing on it was a mistake. It was a mistake because no matter how many words I wrote, I couldn’t get any of them to move. They stood in place, in time, even, right there on the page, and that’s when I knew I had taken the wrong approach entirely. And I want you to know this now, I guess, because if you ever read it you might get a bad idea – a bad impression. You might disagree with Hazlitt and think that things don’t move after all, Oscar, when they absolutely do, and if you don’t believe me I want you to look up Titian’s Self-Portrait right now and study carefully the painter’s ear. It will hurt to look long at the folds, at the lobe that gives way to staticky black. It will hurt because the ear is operating on you, and you’ll recognize, too late, that you never even had a choice. Dear Oscar, when I think about radiance, hunched over my desk in the apartment on West 100th or at the corner booth at Café Amrita on 110th, I think about Titian’s ear, and I want you to have it (it being the ear) at this juncture, this juncture being the one where everything is just starting to make sense.

The Dream of the Shepherd

Dear Oscar, in 1914, Ferdinand Hodler penned a letter to his friend, the writer Hans Mühlestein, chronicling the physical decline of his mistress, Valentine Godé-Darel: “This beautiful head, this whole body, like a Byzantine empress on the mosaics of Ravenna – and this nose, this mouth – and the eyes, they too, those wonderful eyes – all these the worms will eat. And nothing will remain, absolutely nothing!” A year later, Godé-Darel died, and the Swiss artist created a series of oil paintings depicting her on her deathbed. Dear Oscar, I posit for myself no sanctimonious role here of féministe resurrector. We are all always taking what isn’t ours. Season 3, episode 6 of The Sopranos, which we watched one early morning after the kind of encounter that left me thinking about circles – how we were always going in them or around them or miraculously, through them – proves this. I told you as such, that morning punctuated by a sequence of ambulances roaring down Amsterdam. I told you that Meadow Soprano was my favorite character but that my love for her wasn’t an easy one, that the prostitute was murdered, after all, for her, that she survives her own sexual becoming not in spite of the violently uneven niches women must occupy in mafia machinery but because of them. Dear Oscar, I was prepared to make this argument once, but honestly when I think again of Hodler I end up thinking of you in bed, uncovered, which is magic, and which my line of vision is, thankfully, fundamentally incapable of transmuting into dust, which is of course always already what happens when a man looks at a woman, dead or dying or not.

Whalers

Dear Oscar, when I look at this painting of Turner’s I become someone I met a long time ago, a woman in a dream within a dream who lived by the sea and made large baskets out of seaweed in order to carry a seemingly infinite number of crab shells in her possession. When she ran out of coconut meat, the woman would take a shell and carefully grind it into a fine powder, which she then mixed with saltwater, a concoction that kept her – however uneasily – alive until her scavenging efforts were rewarded with greater success. Dear Oscar, the woman in the dream within a dream is hospitable. She offers me a taste of this strange provision of hers, and without fail I am too afraid to try it. I worry that the ground bits of shell will coalesce in my abdomen, and, sensing the reconfiguration of its long lost home, a crab will find its way inside. At this exact moment of reckoning the dream within the dream evaporates, leaving only one layer of dream, which often seemingly bears no relation to the woman who lives by the sea, who I visit unwillingly but who nevertheless bids me no harm when I arrive on her shores. Dear Oscar, I want the month of August back.

The Forest at Pontaubert

Dear Oscar, when we met I had been trying to write for some time about the erotics of the art encounter, but I decided to stop and commit the pattern of the creases in your bottom lip to memory instead. I did this out of no sense of love (we will, perhaps, return to that). I looked in the first place because I knew it would be important to my work, because, in fact, I knew that the looking would be the closest I’d ever get to putting my hands inside a Georges Seaurat painting. The thing is, it’s already working. Last week, when Mel at Café Amrita gave me my whiskey sour, sans cherry, I recalled very suddenly a panel of some kind (whether I actually presented in front of this panel or whether I simply dreamed at one point that I had done so is beside the point, you’ll see). The members of this panel were very invested in my answering a question involving the museum as moratorium – they repeated this phrase many times, the “museum as moratorium.” I did not understand the question, either in real life or in dreaming, but I do now, and it’s all because of you – because of you I might have even unriddled the great mystery of being, which I am beginning to think has something to do with the carefully policed boundary between viewer and viewed. It is, after all, unbearable, the kind of green Seaurat delivers, knowing full well we cannot devour it. We cannot even caress it. Dear Oscar, I took a single sip of that whiskey sour, left a ten on the table and ran down Central Park West until I reached the plastic barrels outside the park entrance on 96th, and when I got there I vomited the kind of vomit that takes everything, even the idea of itself, and replaces it all with a thin white snow in June at the intersection of 96th and Central Park West. Dear Oscar, that snow was like stardust.

Basin Street

Dear Oscar, nothing is known of Remo Farruggio, aside from the fact that he was born in Palermo and died in Provincetown and in between he invented empty space. I mean this very sincerely. Prior to Farruggio’s birth, or, more specifically, to his becoming as an artist of real import, men of letters took out their telescopes and other strange, even unspeakable objects. With these, they sketched different kinds of emptiness, from the first visible black hole to the distance between each particle of lead comprising their own written names on torn pieces of parchment. But when Farruggio began his project, they shrugged. There was nothing else to do or say. The internet and the analog archive, tasked with cataloguing this unbearable discovery, did exactly what one would expect: they made a gap of their own, a gap precisely the size of the streets in a Farruggio painting. It was for the best, the technologists of the internet and the analog archive agreed. And so this is why nothing is known of Remo Farruggio, aside from the fact that he was born in Palermo and died in Provincetown and in between he invented empty space. There was nothing else to do or say.

Fish Market

Dear Oscar, I sat down to write you a story in so many words, but the life of Joachim Beuckelaer begins and ends with maybe. It is possible. Perhaps. Allegedly. I can say this: when Joachim was a boy in Antwerp, he often went to the River Scheldt by the North Sea, his pockets filled with mud and other buzzing things. Sometimes his brother, Huybrecht, accompanied him, and the two children engaged in many heart-stopping duels of body and mind by the river weeds. On one such afternoon, Joachim and Huybrecht made their most daring deal yet. Whichever boy could catch a fish in the waters down below using only his own two hands would win the right to their aunt Kathelijne, a beautiful woman who dyed her long tresses with the hard red berries every child in Antwerp was warned not to eat. The brothers had just assumed their positions along the river bank when a mild storm came to pass, and the boys fled, sensing trouble. Dear Oscar, it is not known precisely why Joachim and Huybrecht left the river bank, but there exist at least two distinct possibilities. The first is that they feared punishment from their mother for staying out in the rain, and the second is that, primed for their prey, they realized that they did not know which outcome would be worse: for the other boy to have Kathelijne, or to possess her himself. The following spring, Katheleijne married Pieter, a craftsman from a neighboring village, and Joachim, confronted suddenly with the finality of his choice to forgo the fish, cried and cried, his hair tossed with river mist for the occasion, and that is all that is known for certain about the boy painter from Antwerp.

Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)

Dear Oscar, Jackson Pollock wanted to say something and it killed him, so I’ve resigned myself to searching what does pure language mean on Quora.com and allowing the replies to speak for themselves. One interesting thing is that many users interpreted my query as related to computer programming languages, which was not what I was looking for in the first place but turned out to be even better. Here’s what I found. Because I cannot understand these languages in the traditional sense, I knew I had to find some other way to read even the most basic equations. I spent a great deal of time looking at them, but they kept not making sense. In fact, they were doing that thing that words and numbers sometimes do where it actually feels like they are not making sense on purpose. I kept thinking and hoping that the key to my understanding would be a visual one; for example, that the shape and size and typeface of an “x” or “z” would somehow lend itself to my interpretation of its mathematical or programmatic function. I kept doing this, but then it occurred to me that perhaps such a feat would require a long-lost or else still-undiscovered methodology of reading, and that discovery, Oscar, is better than every attempt I’ve ever made to say something combined, because the latter feels like scoliosis and the former like my hands are moving in the dark, touching the all that is there and the all that is not.

Madame Cézanne in a Red Dress

Dear Oscar, as a collector of subjects I can tell you there is none so powerful as the hated wife. For example, Cézanne disowned Marie-Hortense Fiquet but continued to paint her. He painted her twenty seven times, not including the hidden portraits, which we imagine probably exist but will likely never possess. The critics call her Mona Lisa with a scowl, but Oscar, I think this is unfair. Marie was simply unsure. A crime nonetheless but a different one. In truth, there was little Marie could agree upon, and the burden of this chronic indecision – or else a continual deciding and then deciding again – manifested in the stroke, in the look that ultimately declined to register anything, even blankness. Cézanne tried to paint it out at first but even he knew that he had to wait until his wife left. The hated wife is a spectacular subject but not a perfect one. After she took the train to Paris as she had said she would do, the artist suffered a brief bout of mania and could be heard some cool nights skidding stones across the pavement in front of the Aix Cathedral. He did not know that he knew that he would paint again. Dear Oscar, Cézanne realized that only in Marie’s unyielding absence could he paint clearly the solemness of her hands, but the story does not end there because when a wife is hated she is cautious with her demands. In other words, she waits. And so, when the painter died Marie took the many thousands of Francs from the sale of his studio to Monaco, where she gambled them away alone one evening, her dress and the walls and the ashtray and everything red.

The Frugal Repast

Dear Oscar, I want to tell you about bespeckled geraniums in the Park in late spring, how they are constantly being made and unmade in the hour between the first train’s departure from Katonah to Wall Street and the inaugural cup of coffee drunk by a man who lives, alone with his collection of permanent markers, in a rent-controlled studio between Amsterdam and 86th. He had a wife once, or at least he believes that he did, but he cannot presently find any photographs of her, and so he has taken to printing large traceable portraits of aloof lovers at the public library branch on Columbus. These he takes back to his building and, after braving six flights of stairs (each taking approximately two to three minutes to ascend), copies onto white poster boards that he purchases at the Duane Reade for a dollar fifty. I would like to tell this and more, Oscar, but after beginning I realized the unsuitability of presenting to you a willful aesthetics of unmemory. But no matter. The night after the day I first presumed to have lost you, I either dreamed or believed that I dreamed that a man wearing a bright orange baret stopped me on the street in SoHo and slipped a folded piece of paper into my left back pocket. The paper had been folded an inexplicable number of times, and so it took a few minutes to unfold it completely, but once I did I realized that it contained a note: Hungarian Pastry Shop, 8 pm. And so I either went or dreamed that I went or believed that I dreamed that I went to the Hungarian Pastry Shop that evening at eight, but when I arrived at the designated time I saw that the café was deserted, aside from an old man who was writing in a slim blue notebook and sipping hot tea through a straw. Dear Oscar, the note meant nothing at all, and I cried of relief and ordered an Americano to go and then I left.

Hindsight 2020: Notes on the First Year of the Trump Presidency

by Kevin Hadsell • November 1, 2020November 1, 2020 • 1 Comment

“History is written by the winners, so it largely depends on who’s writing the history.”
—William Barr, US Attorney General

“The world has become a Mel Brooks movie, grown sentient and hostile.”
—Jon Bingham, ca. 2018

January 20, 2017. I traveled east on I-84 toward Gresham, Oregon, as dawn broke over the hills. Up ahead Mt. Hood loomed in the distance – a pointy dark void in the sunrise, like someone had carved out a space where the sun should be. I sipped coffee out of a travel mug and stared at nothing in particular. This is it, I thought. The last cup of coffee of the Obama administration.

That day I had come to Gresham High School to impersonate Crystal Hansen, English teacher, gone for reasons never specified in the sub notes. During my second hour class I managed to steal away to the teacher’s desk to take a peek at the inauguration ceremony on CNN. He had already been sworn in. Within the small muted square of the CNN livestream, Donald Trump, now 45th President of the United States, moved his lips inaudibly in front of the cameras, giving his inaugural address to the nation. What is he saying to us? I wondered, a question that would occupy my waking mind on and off for the next four years.

January-February, 2017. The days went by. I watched, transfixed, as White House press secretary Sean Spicer appeared on my television screen. I found myself wondering: who was Sean Spicer, and why was he so angry? What compelled him to berate members of the press like a middle-school principal? He told us, “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period,” an obvious falsehood. He told us, “The President’s tweets speak for themselves,” whatever that meant. He told us some things without even trying. There was the press conference in which he appeared at his podium with his American flag pin turned upside-down on his suit coat. People across the Internet and Twittersphere spent much of the day pondering its significance: what did this mean? Was he trying to tell us something vital about the state of the Republic? Was it a coded signal of distress? A cry for help? Nobody seemed to have a clue, least of all Spicer himself.

In some ways, the man seemed just as lost as the rest of us.

During a graduate-level English class I was taking at the time, we discussed Sean Spicer, both as a person and as a symbolic construct. “It’s interesting to see him come up against walls of discursive desire,” our instructor told us. “He’s someone who is not comfortable in his symbolic space.” This struck me immediately as true: Sean Spicer seemed to struggle almost daily with his role as a symbolic entity. What did it mean to be at home in one’s symbolic space? Was I at home in my own symbolic space? Were any of us? As a substitute teacher, I also found myself on shaky symbolic ground. My job was to show up at the appointed time, fulfill a bare minimum of my professional responsibilities, and disappear at the end of the day like nothing happened. Much like Spicer himself. There seemed to be something in his eyes that haunted me. A certain emptiness, a discomfort; something troubling him, perhaps, about his role in the administration.

At least, this was the story I wanted to believe.

I began to suspect, after a time, that this administration was suffering from a crisis of narrative. That it affected the press secretary in particular – the person responsible for explaining its actions to the rest of us – struck me as especially significant. Around this time I read an article online titled, “Sean Spicer’s 11 Worst Moments Since Becoming Trump’s Press Secretary,” featuring subheadings like, “The Time He Tweeted His Own Password,” “That Time He Staked the Claim That Donald Trump Doesn’t Own a Bathrobe,” and “The Time He Announced Donald Trump Was Going to Be His Own Housing Secretary.” All of it seemed to point to a weird meta-narrative developing around the White House in which the press secretary himself generated headlines rather than merely announcing them. Maybe this was simply the dawn of a new era, the first postmodern presidency. Maybe this is what the op-ed columns meant when they referred to “the new normal.”

March 2017. This “new normal” seemed to follow me throughout my day-to-day life, a sort of mood or general ambiance.In March, for example, I found myself at Milwaukie High School subbing for a Mr. Nathan Ware, whose classes consisted entirely of study hall. The room was cavernous and inexplicably huge, and seemed curiously shorn of the usual classroom decor – maps, student projects, motivational posters. Instead there were heavy cinder block walls painted white, and several pillars that ran floor to ceiling, spaced out at regular intervals. The ventilation system blew cold frigid air, whistling absurdly through some trick of the airflow like a cliche “wasteland” scene on a movie set. There were no windows.

“What happened to Mr. Ware?” a student asked. “He must be really sick, huh?”

“No, he’s fine,” I replied. “He’s just at a golf tournament.” I pointed to a space with “boys golf” scrawled in black pen. “It’s right here on the calendar.”

He looked skeptical. “Ok… But you’d tell us if he like, you know, died, right?”

“Well yeah,” I said. “I have no reason to believe that any harm has come to Mr. Ware at this time. But if I hear anything I’ll let you know.”

He nodded, returned to his seat and proceeded to stare at nothing in particular for the rest of the hour. The air vent whistled softly in the void. I was sure Mr. Ware was alive and well, but I had no way to verify this. My job was simply to deliver the official message to the students on behalf of the school: Mr. Ware is alive and well. Now do your homework. It wasn’t a press conference, exactly. But I did get the word out.

April 2017. I stood outside Gresham High School in the rain, surrounded by staff and students. The fire alarm blared through the parking lot, across the neighborhood, signifying an emergency, a fire, an existential threat to the school. This was not a planned drill. The students’ work, as well as my teaching materials and my own coursework, had been left behind, possibly burning to ashes at that very moment. The students stood around in groups, huddled loosely with their classmates and largely indifferent to what was happening inside. So far, at least, the school remained intact. But my own students were nowhere to be seen. In the distance I could see a few students casually stroll out of the parking lot, drifting off to parts unknown with nobody moving in to stop them. More joined in, one or two at a time, out through the fence, into the town of Gresham, to the gas station, the pizza parlor, the Mexican restaurant across the street whose name I could never remember. They moved through the crosswalk, off the edge of the parking lot and into the day. I looked out across Gresham, past the monolithic boxy shapes of the school grounds, the blacktop, the old brick building possibly burning down where we stood, the chain-link fence surrounding the perimeter. All of it felt significant, somehow, in a way I couldn’t really explain.

The sirens in the distance grew louder. The traffic remained largely oblivious as it droned on along Division Street. The rest of us stood around and waited, trying to figure out what it all meant. It wasn’t easy to tell. There was still no official word yet from the administration.

May–June, 2017. The printer whirred to life. I watched a single sheet of paper move through the rollers of the machine, heavy with ink.

The face of Sean Spicer stared back at me.

This was my “Garden Spicer”: newly printed and endlessly replicated through the wonders of modern technology.

According to a piece in the Washington Post, shortly after the president fired James Comey – director of the FBI and leading the investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia – Spicer attempted to evade reporters’ questions by hiding in the bushes outside of the White House press office. Soon after, the “Garden Spicer” began making its rounds online: a downloadable PDF image of the press secretary’s face for display in – or among – the bushes. I began seeing them here and there, in the lawns of my neighborhood, left by parties unknown. And now I had one too. I took it down to the bushes at the end of my street and gently placed him there, half-obscured by the foliage, as the sun set over the houses of Portland. I think of him even now: Sean Spicer, White House Press Secretary. Sean Spicer, wishing only to hide from the press, to disappear into the bushes, into a maze of hedges where no camera could penetrate. It isn’t so hard to imagine. Spicer had, in that moment, transcended his physical form. He had become a two-dimensional paper cutout of himself, an endlessly-replicated symbolic construct that signified whatever it was he had come to signify. Perhaps returning him to the grass and shrubs was the most humane thing we could do: to let him disappear into the American landscape, to depart as air as Walt Whitman intended. Perhaps he would at last be one with the land and people – accepted, forgiven, reabsorbed into the lawns of our nation.

Sean Spicer is gone now, of course – replaced briefly by Anthony Scaramucci, the White House Communications Director who lasted ten days in the position, followed by Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who lasted longer, then Stephanie Grisham, who never held an actual briefing, and finally Kayleigh McEnany, who remains with us still. But Sean Spicer is the only one I can recall with any clarity, even though all that I know of him has been beamed down from telecom satellites in outer space. Perhaps Sean’s crisis of narrative, his unease with the symbolic role he played within the administration, had become my own, as well.

Not long after, I listened to a Democracy Now! podcast featuring writer and activist Naomi Klein. “Trump is not playing by the rules of politics,” she said,

“He’s playing by the rules of branding. … The game changer for him was The Apprentice. That’s when he realized he could enter the stratosphere of the superbrands. … He was about building up the Trump name and then selling it and leasing it in as many different ways as possible.”

And so it goes. Trump – the name, the logo, the corporate brand – no longer signifies a person so much as an abstract entity leasing the Trump name to others. There is Trump cologne, Trump golf courses, Trump natural spring water, the Trump Home Furniture Collection, Trump-brand steaks, a line of Trump menswear, and the much-maligned “Trump University,” now closed for good. I think of Trump Tower, rising out of the cityscape of New York, gleaming in the sunlight. I think of the Trump logo, replicated on buildings across the world, a symbol for something now impossible to define. Maybe by now the Trump name has come to mean whatever we want it to mean. I look back at these scenes and wonder where this leaves us now, in the year 2020, as we head into campaign season amid numerous crises, both real and self-inflicted. I ask myself where it all fits in the symbolic universe I inhabit. It’s hard to say. I really have no idea at this time.

January 20, 2017. 10:55 pm. The city was restless. In the distance I could hear the drone of police helicopters and a voice shouting through a megaphone at the protesters gathered in downtown Portland. Outside the bar I found my bike and unchained it from the corral. On the way home the lights shone across the Willamette like constellations, to all appearances the same as it ever was. But something seemed to have shifted in the past 24 hours. The world felt different, somehow, in a way that was difficult to describe. What was it? I saw the usual graffiti along Eastbank Esplanade, flying past in jagged script and spray-painted onto the cement. Some of it spelled out words and aliases, some merely symbols that I could not decipher. I wondered what it meant. I found myself unable to interpret any of it, and I wondered if this, too, meant something.

Overhead the traffic roared across the concrete overpass like a river, ancient and timeless, winding its course through the city. I told myself that today was just another day in Portland, that nothing had really changed. It will all make sense tomorrow, I thought, as I made my way through the winding streets of my city, to sleep it off, whatever it was.

#FlashFriday flash fiction micro fiction short fiction

THE END OF THE 20TH CENTURY

by Linda Mannheim • October 30, 2020October 30, 2020

Photo by Volpin Props (copied from Flickr)

All the zines were printed at Lehman Brothers. All the zines were printed at Goldman Sachs. All the zines were printed at Merrill Lynch.

All of us had jobs temping. All of us rode the N and the R and the F into Manhattan every day. All of us thought it was hilarious our jobs didn’t involve doing much, but we weren’t paid much. All of us mocked the people we worked for, who worked there for real.

All of the copy rooms were chaotic. All of the copiers chugged out page after page. No one would ever know if you ran the zines off, stapled their spines, and brought them home.

All of us thought we were undercover. All of us dressed in clothes we would never normally wear. All of us switched identities after hours.

All of us found ourselves abandoned streets below Houston late at night. All of us crammed into filthy loud places to drink. All of us eventually gave up on having a good time and went home.

All of us approved of riot grrrls. All of us liked the anger. All of us thought there was change in the air.

All of the people who worked on Wall Street for real seemed oblivious. All of them lived in a different world than we did. All of them got to that other world on suburban commuter trains.

None of them knew what we used those copiers for. None of them knew what we thought of them. None of them knew what we did at night.

None of it survived the decade. We lost what we wrote or threw it away. Riot grrrls got co-opted.

The millennium ended with a Republican in the White House. Then planes slammed into the Twin Towers. The music stopped and the war began.

The Supplicant

by Claudia Ross • October 25, 2020October 25, 2020

In all my years at the company, I have never worked with such an attractive and well-meaning management team. The consultancy draws a unique kind of individual. We appreciate efficiency, we understand the now. Not everyone lasts – but those that do get to walk in each day to the long, warm windows off the lobby and the stiff breeze coming in from the Atlantic. I know that management, of all people, thinks what I think: that from the annals of higher education, we alone have made it. We are the tall glasses of water, the tailwinds, the firm handshakes. We are the deserving people.

You, as senior members at the company, know this better than anyone. You have seen the company at its worst – the plagues of the unfit, the underqualified. While I have not been here as long as you, I know our workforce like the back of my hand – I learn fast. There is a delicate balance, like an ecosystem, that each new hire threatens to tip in one way or another. We approach additions like a mother bear does salmon swimming upstream – mouth open, snarling.

The Communications Specialist is an integral role not easily filled. It was previously held by an ambitious, erratic young man named Noah, who eventually left the company to work on a novel about computer programmers in a remote part of Canada. Many years ago, it was me. My hair was long then, my body thin and pliable. The position changed my life. I am invested in its lineage for this reason: I participate in the hiring process whenever the vacancy needs filling. This time, the hiring committee hopes to find a young woman with a diverse skill set whose interests lie primarily in the social realm. Noah was committed to the work but harbored secret creative fantasies that meant his communication – anything from advertising copy to companywide emails – leaned toward the self-indulgent, serving an internal predilection for certain words and phrases.

I want you to meet Jorie Feldman. I know a good applicant when I see one.

First off, her resume is impressive: an internship at a popular radio news conglomerate, another at a digital media outlet known for their offbeat sports coverage. She speaks Mandarin, English, and some Hebrew, the result of her dad’s early career in banking and a couple of private schools in major American cities. More than anything – and this is clear – she is a student of mass experience. Jorie could spot warehouses known to host long dance parties within just a couple of days in a new city. She seeks crowds with the rabid attention of an only child. Despite this, Jorie’s capacity for human connection is slim: she has just a few close friends scattered across the globe, preferring short, intense interactions with men and women that end as quickly as they begin.

My past experiences with Communications Specialists have taught me to value this kind of behavior. The best people for the role enjoy the same obsessions they are meant to be selling: they are quickly infatuated with luxury goods and are deeply emotional, connected intuitively to the joys of consumption. Their interests, plotted on a graph, are sharp as mountains – in the course of a week or so, Jorie might buy a plane ticket to Sweden, learn the mating rituals of black doves, and acquire used beekeeping equipment. She is beautiful. She dresses like a local in a country you have never heard of.

To hire a new employee is to see into the beating heart of the company and emerge from it bloody and smiling, having found that narrow crevasse where your candidate will thrive. We are not fools – we are doctors of aptitude. After years of licking up every drop of sweat off the company’s brow – after eating its excesses and sleeping in its womb – I have learned to consider nearly every aspect of a prospective staff member. Each facet of a life has a profound effect on the capacity of an individual to fill the requirements of a position.

Jorie has fallen in love – and out of it – just once before. This is important: long, committed relationships make for distracted, unambitious workers. But Communications Specialists that lack intimate experience are often callous and off-base, out of touch with the tangibility of desire. This balance, foreign to some, is my second language. Details like this can make or break an employee.

It happened over a summer Jorie spent in Mexico. Her father was on leave with the bank. Her mother, a retired engineer, took a position as an adjunct professor at the UNAM in the Distrito Federal, the biggest and most prestigious university in Central America. She taught a seminar in turbulence, an emerging field at the intersection of aerospace and climate change. Jorie found it poetic.

She left her parents in early June to spend the summer in Cuernavaca, a small city an hour south of the capital. She found a language school online affiliated with a small college in Minnesota, praised for its liberal professors and local connections. She enjoyed herself: There were narrow streets with awnings and laundry lines that reminded her of Italy. On religious holidays, local kids dressed up in masks with long beaks and sharp devil horns, walking into restaurants and screaming at diners. The windows of radio taxis rolled down by hand with small leather cranks. Jorie was abstinent in Mexico until she started eating mangoes with her bare hands, letting the juice run down her arms and mingle with her sweat. The skin peeled off the fruit like butter.

She met the architect at a wedding outside the city. The wedding was in a garden, verdant and full of mosquitoes. Bougainvillea lit up in the corner of her vision. Orange blossoms, lizards. Jorie spoke riddled Spanish to the architect, who made fun of her. His irreverence charmed Jorie. Their relative inability to communicate made the affair seem brief and lost in time. Her Spanish improved immensely: the couple kissed at every stop light. When he left Cuernavaca to do an interior remodel in Tepoztlán, Jorie felt as though a gap opened in the world around her, like a ledge or a stair she expected suddenly vanished, leaving her foot to come down, hard, on bare concrete.

For that whole August, Jorie walked around the city with her mouth stained purple by hibiscus juice, attending her favorite restaurants alone. The one she liked most was almost entirely outside, with tables generously spaced under wide umbrellas and dim painted lanterns. Peacocks strode through the field below the dinner guests. Jorie ate her meals in almost total darkness. There, she imagined speaking to the absented architect. The language barrier was lifted: they discussed childhood, music, movies. It was the good kind of haunting – it filled her up inside like a soda. In September, Jorie flew home, her red cheek against the cold window.

She didn’t tell anyone about the abortion. I hope I am not overstepping in divulging this information – I share it here for the purposes of explaining her specific disposition. The night Jorie found out about the pregnancy, she drank five dry martinis from the campus bar. She did not want to know what the architect would say – it was the architect’s – and she was more comfortable with her own displeasure than with anyone else’s.

Jorie knew that a few women in her family had gotten abortions under worse circumstances. Clothes hangers, rum. Still, she delayed a visit to the doctor’s office for several weeks. A landscape grew within her, a fantastical archive from which Jorie mined experiences of her and the architect’s brief life together. It was helpful on plane flights and car rides. It distracted her from the burdens of loss and decision-making, filling up a vacant space with something cool and light. She rode each memory like an elliptical.

At her first in-person interview, I asked her to describe a meaningful experience associated with a pair of shoes, and how she would sell it to an imagined constituency, an age group between thirteen and eighteen, male. Jorie was dumbstruck – no sector of society was more foreign to her. This was my intention. She crossed her legs under her, hoping we would fail to notice the battered loafers she chose to wear to the interview. After a stale three minutes, clarity dawned. Jorie’s description of a wet, grassy field was enchanting. She lingered – beautifully – on the feeling of water and salt dripping down the backs of thighs, of feet swaddled in wicking cotton socks and light, performance-enhancing sneakers.

I buy it, said one senior manager.

We nodded at her in widespread approval. She passed the next test easily: a car, for instance, brought to mind dimly lit passenger seats and the swift, musical rotation of traffic signals.

On her departure from the conference room, I shook her hand. I think you’ll be very happy here, I said. If you, and we, so choose.

She looked at me. We have the same two-tone eyes: one green, one brown. A feeling emerged within me, a kind of desperate desire to hold her arms with my own. I felt embarrassed – only rarely does this sense pierce the surface.

The interaction, though brief, had a pretty strong effect on me. Despite what it may look like, I have not spent the entirety of my life in elevators and air conditioning. I was a girl once. I know my kind – the darkened corridors of apartment buildings, the afternoons of fruit and sex. When I graduated from college, I was cut to my knees by heartbreak. It was in the cool dawn of my mistakes that I joined the company. I still go on dates, but I don’t find them appealing. How could I? Each day I walk into the waiting arms of our offices, greeted by that long and careful hug – those cavernous, expectant lungs.

We are here to pull girls like Jorie from the jaws of men. The best young Specialists weld themselves to the spine of the company, they embrace it, they breathe it in like fish in water. There may just be one special moment in a young person’s life where this kind of fulfillment is possible. There are forks in our roads that we are not always aware of when they happen – these are the things that a hiring professional must notice immediately. It is my experiences in the bowels of loss that lend me that special touch – the ability to know exactly when the apples are ripe for picking. When the soil below them is rancid – full of piss and shit.

I am the first to admit that my talents have not come easy. I am no natural. Like Jorie, I have not always erred on the side of caution. You know this: I came to you, hungry, in the eager throes of youth. Communications Specialists hold many lives within them. Without the company, we die of dreaming.

What can I say? I need it, this world, the way a fractured arm needs a splint.

This is to say that the choice may not always be obvious – I know it was not with me. After all, not everyone can suckle from the perfect teat. Some of us have to fight for it.

It is the duty of management to discover potential at the precipice between a broken heart and a healing one. From the window’s thin ledge. This is it: the moment when every new project and report will be like a Heimlich maneuver for the heart. It is not just a job – it is a resuscitation. After the right training, Jorie would be the company’s Molotov cocktail: all potential, with an imagination that has only just been plumbed from the oil well of experience.

I am unique among my coworkers for my attention to the hiring process – I can sniff the perfect candidate out of a landfill. A good predator will stalk its prey for days, weeks, even months. It is an investment, a calculated risk. We Specialists didn’t get born into ourselves. We grew, slowly, like weeds across a garden. With the support and motivation of the company, I learned to put my passion to use. My sad eyes met the steady gaze of the company. They never wavered. For Jorie, I hope the same. Every young lamb needs a gentle wolf. Please.

Lenin in the Sky

by Olga Sezneva • October 24, 2020October 24, 2020

It was our first morning in New York, together again, after some time apart, very much in love. You, pushing thirty, a rising star at a famed university, a part of the scene; me, still in college, for the first time in America, full of hopes. I remember our outfits: nineteen ninety-three, the time of platform boots – you had on Air Jordans – tapered legs on your overalls with straps carefully assembled to hang down. We dressed with care then. Fashion is a merry-go-round, isn’t it? My children covet the cat-eyed shades as much as I fancied them, and I wonder if yours inherited your love for unbuttoned shirts over graphic tees.

Ah, how grown up and mature you appeared to me! You had a small rental on Bank Street, its very end, a few yards away from West Street – you, its single occupant. How otherworldly to have a place of your own seemed to me then – me, who knew nothing of kitchens and bathrooms that were not shared with other residents (they lined up when a demand on the use was too high), traces of their existences always present on the kitchen stove, in the bathtub, at the front door, by the phone. How extraordinary, in every way superior, everything looked to me in that New York: the grange of subway entrances was a true urban grit and the silver-clad brick underneath graffiti felt enlivened compared to the naked concrete of the middies in which my family lived.

It was quarter past eight when we stepped into the city out of the dimness of the basement. The sun blinded us. August had just turned into September, but autumn had not yet tinted the greens and blues around us and the ground breathed warmth. We were two lovers enthralled by one another, everything felt great, things were great, I was giddy with anticipation, excited to be introduced to the city. No place had ever captured my imagination more than New York, and now I was there – here! – in the city! – walking by your side, sensing your furtive glances at me, feeling elated.

The sky presented not a cloud, and a sliver of water the color of mercury glittered at the end of the street. Is it the great Hudson? I gasped, you nodded, I wowed and held you by the wrist (we were still at the stage when skin-to-skin sent electric charges, giving an extra beat to my already racing heart). You did not let me recover and pulled me gently around. There, hovering above the brownstones and red bricks of Greenwich Village, some distance away from us, in that same bright sun shone a crown. A crown! In the sky! Seven radiating arches mounted behind one another ascended in a spire, their stainless-steel cladding burned my eyes. What a great greatness upon grandeur! My first skyscraper! Van Alen’s masterpiece pierced my heart and injected it with the sublime. I came close to an overdose but you – you! – came to my rescue. You took my hand and ushered us into a French bistro, into the safety of its tiled interior. Let’s have breakfast, I am famished! – and just as my senses quieted a waiter shook them wild again. Another love potion was placed before me: coffee! Oh coffee that only New York, that bubbly cauldron of many cultures, can brew: French press/Italian espresso, pour-over/pressurized, pounded/roller-grind, Arabica/Hawaiian Kona, whole milk/half-and-half/soy, 80 cents/8 dollars – all ready to hit my palate, familiar with only one kind of coffee, the instant kind. And served how! You looked at me with a wicked smile over the rim of your cup when I lifted the simple white vessel that was brought to me: coffee in a bowl? What is it? Travesty or ingenuity?

Half past nine and we were back on the street flooded with people. Energized, we met its charge. Plumbers, office managers, salesclerks, accountants walked hurriedly past us hailing taxis, stepping onto buses, scurrying to the subway. The chatter of voices rising from the sidewalk, the holler of ambulances rushing past, the screeches of cabs pulling over for passengers, honks of buses interrupted in their measured flow – all the sounds came together as a rhythm of sorts. Smells colonized our senses. Vanilla, garlic, sewage, frying oil, laundry detergent, rotting garbage, stench and aroma whiffs ebbed and flowed and swaddled us. We kept walking: 10^th Avenue, New York Pizza, Post No Bills, 99c, Tuxedo To Rent, Walgreens, ATM, Union Bank, New York Nails, Curb Your Dog, Taxi Only, 6^th Ave SE Exit Only, Church of the Immaculate Conception, Union Square, 4566LNQRW… You hid your joy the way you hid all your vulnerabilities: behind standoffishness. I covered my insecurity with affected cockiness: Was this your great university, The New School? But you’re such an old school! A vendor stood on the corner of W. 14^th Street with a shiny metal cart and a large umbrella. From underneath rose the yellow smoke of roasting chestnuts next to an oversized coffeevac and a display of donuts. Coca Cola. The white scribble across the red field gave me a moment of respite, an iconic image, an early messenger of the change that was taking hold of my hometown – but roasting chestnuts, in the street, in the heart of Manhattan? Selling them to passersby to eat? I looked at you in disbelief and you offered to buy some. I held the paper cone in both hands, not knowing what to do with them.

Noon, and we were crossing Alphabet City. ABCDEFG… Next time, won’t you sing with me… I hummed, taking steps twice as quickly with the LMNO, tripping over them faster, like I’d done in the language school right before I came. I looked up at you, inviting – expecting – you to join, but you didn’t chime in, were not pulled into my play. Instead, you halted it. We were coming to an intersection, broad and busy, six lanes filled with trucks and cars to the curb. There you took me by both shoulders – not a gentle hold but a firm grip – and turned me ninety degrees. What was it, another river you wanted me to see? I suddenly felt resistant, stubborn, disobedient. I tried to worm myself out of your hold. I wiggled my shoulders. I pulled forward. You didn’t let me loose. You held me steady, fixed. Look, up there – you stretched out your hand and directed an index finger towards the sky. I let my eyes run along the line it charted. When they reached the terminus I fell through the black hole that suddenly opened in my reality.

Lenin! A statue of Lenin was drifting in the sky. So immediately recognizable, a silhouette wrapped in unspeakable intimacy, a memory pole. It was standing on the rooftop of a building (I could see it), but the effect was of flight, chunks of white clouds, that now appeared, moving rapidly in the background. Lenin, not a person but an icon, cast in stone, a monument elevated to the eleventh floor of a midrise, a monumental shadow above a bustling street. What was he doing there, floating in heavens foreign to him, his country – my country – in shambles? How did this Lenin travel here? Was he bought and boxed, transported and now displayed as a trophy, visible reassurance to a winner rewriting history? Or maybe, he was brought and installed as a metaphorical end of that history, soon to become part of the rubble heap – I’d read this somewhere – growing sky high from the storm called progress that had been blowing from Paradise. But where, then, was this Paradise? Had I not already arrived in it?

The look on your face as you turned to me was: didn’t I just show you something unexpected-startling-surprising? The glare I sent back was a scream: not him-not here-not again! It was already a few years since the Berlin Wall had fallen, and back home, the televised spectacle of Lenin statues toppled with the vigor of a sick person ingesting medicine he’s certain will cure him was wearing off. Few could resist the allure of the vengeful act after being told they had been outright duped, and I was certainly not an exception. But the ideological fatigue was only a frothy layer on the emotive cocktail that was splattering in my suddenly emptied ribcage. Right beneath it, and in contrast to my displeasure, floated a comforting familiarity – as when, in a moment of a complete estrangement, we welcome a detested relative. Didn’t I also love Grandpa Lenin? Didn’t I practice, in grade four, drawing his image, tracing the contour of his profile, striving to achieve a semblance between the awkward stroke coming from my hand and the mastery of icons that filled the public space around me? The outline of his bold forehead and his bearded chin were stored somewhere in me. Saddled with them, I stood, motionless, on the side of the street, and there unfolded in me an unsettling emotional inkling of uncertainty, a pang.

The shock was this: the statue was and wasn’t Lenin, and consequently New York was and wasn’t foreign, and you – what then were you? Lenin was floating in the alien to him – to me – sky in celestial ignorance. It was Lenin – it was impossible not to recognize the iconic extension of the right hand – and it still wasn’t, because the coffee we’d had and the chestnuts that had earlier warmed my hands did not align with the statue or the gesture. Together, they’d never form a reality, and did I ever want them to? The hand, I knew, was meant to direct one’s gaze to an indefinite, but brighter future, but from where I stood – the side of an American street whose name, you said, was pronounced au – the future I came for and wanted looked very different.

At the center of my emotional concoction, however, floated the most unexpected impression. It was my image of you. The thickness of the confection in which it swam could still hide an early thinning of the contour, but a rupture had already formed. Its widening hadn’t yet started, but a sudden annoyance at your hands placed on my shoulders, a new irritation at your incessant commentary, the obligation to tag along that I felt suddenly and so sharply – all of these announced its inadvertent coming. I looked up at Lenin, then you, with your outstretched hand. You too envisioned a future for me. You lured me into an enclosure, within which you took charge, scripted scripts, designed a stage. Benevolent, maybe, but a ruler, nevertheless.

Quarter past twelve. I turned around and kissed you on the mouth, a hard-pressed kiss, making sure that my teeth left a mark on your lips.

Very Little like Alan

by Jacob Frommer • October 18, 2020October 18, 2020

There was no offer to pick me up from the station so I walked the two miles to Alan’s beach house. I had not been to the Hamptons since college and as I passed each blonde mansion hiding behind its tall green hedge, I was reminded of their self-importance and why I had not returned. Alan’s house was at the end of Dune Road, where the street meets the ocean. A grey box of shiplap and glass tilting toward the sea, I remember when his parents bought it. We were in ninth grade and his father had just made partner at Booth Capital. I climbed the wide wooden steps, knocked three times and after a moment Alan appeared. He gave me a weak hug which brought me back to the hollow of our shared childhood. He was stockier and had balded fully. His eyes were small and sharp like a beach lizard. He turned inside as if we had seen each other that morning. I kept my breath in my throat and felt I had made the wrong decision in coming. I dropped my bag by the door and followed guardedly as he showed me the house, pointing to signed baseball jerseys in shadow boxes hanging next to photos of him and his father holding tightly to celebrities looking to get out of frame.

Simone came in from the den at the back of the house, by the ocean. She was bigger than I remembered and for some reason this made me happy. She was clutching a braid of dry brown hair and a distressed cotton shirt hung designedly off her shoulder. She had a dark, round face and green eyes that weren’t Jewish. We had met once, when I visited Alan in college six years before. It was the last time I had seen him. As she hugged me she held my neck and whispered how thankful she was that I came. Then she held my hand as though we were friends. Alan watched as he twisted the caps off two beers and I could not tell what he was thinking. He looked haggard, as though years of the wrong choices had finally stepped out of his interior. We had used him, our small group of friends, at first for his toys and late bedtimes then for his money and apartment on 83rd and Park. I suppose that’s why I agreed to come, to make amends.

Simone showed me to the guest room. A fastidiously made bed, clearly unused for many seasons, sat opposite the door. The room was decorated in shades of tan and grey beneath a low white ceiling and was clean bordering on sterile. My window looked out over the driveway, a cobblestoned circle from whose center thrust a rusted sculpture of a dolphin jumping over expensive rocks. Across the street was a golden marsh that stretched inland for a half mile to a row of small, local houses. The sky was bright blue and the distant, colorful homes looked inviting. Black wetsuits dried on bleached porch railings. Wind chimes swayed easily across the marsh and tickled the closed window. I tried to gain a sense of why Simone had called me here, something to do with Alan’s depressive moods or his space-filling drug habit, both of which I ignored, we had ignored. Or just as often benefited from. When we were seniors in high school, Alan would carry a roll of cash and offer to pay for us.

I showered and returned downstairs. Despite the pleasant view at their backs, Alan and Simone were in the den facing the television. Simone was looking at her phone while Alan’s back formed a mound as he bent over the coffee table. I took my beer from the island in the kitchen and walked past them to the porch. The beach was crowded with visitors, some on bright blankets only feet from the house. The wind was warm and I tasted seaweed. Alan knocked on the window and waved me inside. The air in the house was freezer burned and I wanted to go back outside but I was their guest now. He had rolled a joint and offered it to me but I declined so he stood and went outside. After he left the room, Simone told me with pride while still looking at her phone that Alan recently began leaving the house to smoke. When I didn’t respond she looked up and said again how thankful she was that I came. When I asked why she had called and was so insistent on my coming, she was evasive to the point of irritation. “I felt he needed a friend,” she repeated. “It gets lonely out here, just us, by ourselves.” As though they were forced to remain at the beach. She spoke with a childish lilt despite being twenty-four or twenty-five. I could tell by how she sat on the sofa that she hadn’t grown up with money, that maintaining this indolent lifestyle was a priority and possibly, though I could not see the angle currently, one reason for her calling me here. Or I could blow it up, I thought. A few words and I could put Alan in his BMW and send us all back to the city. I had that power over him, we all did.

Last I heard, Alan was working for his father but that seemed improbable since it was early Monday afternoon. I asked Simone what Alan did for work but before she answered she asked if she could take a photo with me. She had wedged into our brief phone call that she had a large social media following. I thought it was not difficult with white walls and beach views to trick people into believing your life was pretty, you were pretty. I said maybe later. “He talked his way into managing Beach Bar. To stay busy.” Stay busy. As though Alan didn’t have to work. He didn’t, few people from our community did, but they did. Wealth as a tool, not a crutch. She muted the television and turned toward me. “In the beginning he was good at it. I think he liked being around people, but like all his jobs he got bored and quit. That was three months ago.” She said this with no judgment, as though it happened weekly, and until then I hadn’t realized Alan was living full time at the beach. That was the sort of thing one heard about after synagogue or over brunch. “What do you do for work?” I asked, trying to assemble a day in their life. She turned toward the television and lay back down, stacking two velvet throw pillows beneath her head. “Online classes,” she said before turning the volume back up and continuing with her phone. I went outside to Alan who was leaning on the railing and looking toward the ocean.

“Beautiful,” I said, coming up next to him.

“She’s pregnant. That’s why she called.”

“Congratulations,” I said too quickly, unsure of the right tone.

“She wants me to shape up or stay the same, I honestly can’t tell.”

“Don’t you speak to each other?”

“Of course we do.” He left it there.

“Was it planned?”

“Shit. You know it wasn’t. We’re keeping it though.” His face was serious like a child’s. He turned back toward the house. He took a long drag and offered me some but I waved it away.

“Do your parents know?”

“They know,” he said as though I were Marcy or Donald. He was rolling a pebble beneath his sandal and blew an impressive cloud of smoke. The sunbathers nearest the deck turned at the sour smell.

“When’s she due?”

“December.” He stretched upward revealing his belly. For the first time since I arrived, we made eye contact. “I’ve been feeling lately like I have a calling to be a father. I can give the baby everything it needs. I’ve got my fuck-ups but—”

“Fuck-ups? You’re a good person, Alan. You know that, right? I wouldn’t be out here if you weren’t.” I immediately regretted saying this. It shone, in my mind, and I’m sure in his, a bright light on all the years I was not there, not me or any of the others. And when we were there, we weren’t really. Alan and I stood in silence and I felt a great chasm between us. If he asked me to leave in that moment I would have.

“You sweet asshole,” he finally said, breaking into a smile. He was shorter than me by half a foot. “Look at Jack, look at Goldberg and Steven and Danny. All you guys have shit going on and I’m in my parents’ beach house.”

“So you live in a beach house. Everyone would love this,” I lied. “Look at this view. And I hear you had a job. Fuck-ups don’t get jobs.”

“It wasn’t even the alcohol,” he said, heading off my assumption. “AA solved that. It’s these locals. I couldn’t stand them talking about nothing anymore. The city’s two hours away. Get on a fucking train.” He had never been able to control his temper. My chest grew tight but instead of his face reddening as it always had he relaxed his shoulders and smiled. “But you’re here now. Richie Geft, in my house. Let’s celebrate. Please, for me.” He held up the joint and I took it.

The rest of the day passed in surprising camaraderie. Alan and I went into the ocean while Simone stayed inside. We took a drive around town and he showed me a small storefront just off the main drag he was considering buying. He told me about all of his failed ventures over the past few years, each an attempt at fulfillment without doing any work. That evening all three of us sat on the porch, Alan and I drinking beer and recalling our time together as children and teenagers. In the romance of the dimming beach, it felt to have been a genuine friendship. Occasionally, Simone would look at me over the candles. When Alan went to the bathroom, she took my hand and held it in her lap. I was drunk and let her. When Alan walked out I quickly moved my hand and Simone relaxed back into her seat. I felt like he had walked in on us. I knew he had seen but he stayed silent.

The next morning was overcast and wet. I came downstairs and Alan was sitting on the porch. I had plans to walk the beach and do some writing. That is also why I came, to write. In our community, teacher must be a step to something more. The sound of the sliding glass door made him turn.

“Fun night,” I said as I took the chair next to him. The sun was behind the grey ceiling. A wind blew off the ocean, snapping the nautical flags on the property next door. Alan had a beach towel draped over him.

“Very fun,” he said. Without taking his arms out from beneath the towel he turned in his chair to face me. “She likes to do that.”

“Do what?”

“Hold other guys’ hands in front of me. Kiss other guys. I don’t mind. She’s not fucking them or anything.”

“Are you sure?”

“Where would she do it?” he laughed. “She’s with me all the time. She called you out here to help me with this baby, didn’t she?” I didn’t know if that was why she called me but I couldn’t argue nor did I want to. Before he mentioned it, I hadn’t remembered her taking my hand. It soured the night in my mind and I thought this was the moment of confrontation but Alan sat calmly and stared, lost in thought beyond the black line of the horizon. We sat on the porch for a while before Alan said he had a meeting with a local real estate developer. I spent the rest of the morning trying to write in my room. The air conditioning was on high and the carpet was plush and still had vacuum tracks in it and now my footprints. Despite the gloomy day the light was generous from the large rectangular window. Simone stuck her head in twice to ask if I was hungry. Without turning I said I wasn’t. The second time she came in I realized she hadn’t moved from behind the door after she closed it. I stopped breathing and we were both suspended on either side of the wall, listening for the other.

Over the next few days, Simone was aloof and sometimes flirtatious and Alan and I held easy conversation. In the mornings I would walk along the beach by myself and in the afternoons I split up my writing by taking a swim in the ocean. Alan sometimes joined. Aside from a night out at Beach Bar, Simone didn’t leave the house other than to accept food deliveries on the front porch. My impression of her shrunk as my feelings for Alan grew. An introspection lit our conversations and I felt small because I had been too harsh in my view of him. While we walked with our feet in the green ocean I apologized for our friendship but he wouldn’t hear it. By the fifth evening, I found myself coming around to their way of life.

On Saturday, when Alan was out of the house, Simone knocked on my door and came in without waiting for a reply. She came over and leaned against the laminate desk. She had yet to tell me she was pregnant and I hadn’t brought it up at Alan’s request. After a brief, confusing silence she kissed me. I kissed her back more out of shock than desire then quickly pulled away. She looked at me with what I think she believed were searching eyes then said in a rush, “I’m pregnant.” I said I knew and felt that if I did not move we would go further so I stood and walked over to the bed. She remained against the desk looking very young and I sat on the bed with my hands tucked beneath my legs. As she stood there I grew to detest both her and myself. She had lured me into their melodrama and I had let her. After a few minutes of expectant silence she left. I booked a ticket for the morning train.

Alan came into the room about an hour later with his hands held up. “It’s okay,” he said. “Please don’t leave.” I was surprised that he made the leap to my leaving and knew as soon as he said it that he would never become more than he was, not for this baby or ever. I realized how many times he had over the past week excused what should have been confronted. He kept putting himself after Simone, after me and the few people who had watched him stay in one place all his life, as if he were hoping to become so small that nobody would pay him any attention or expect anything at all.

“I didn’t even have time to react,” I said, not knowing if this was true.

“It’s the hormones, right? Isn’t that what they say? Let’s hit the beach.” He smacked my thigh and stood from the bed.

“It’s not fine, Alan. Not for me or you or her. I never asked to be involved in your relationship.”

He quickly looked hurt. When we were children, if a teacher reprimanded him, he would push out his bottom lip and feign sadness and it worked every time. At that age it was some great trick but now it was terrible to witness.

“She’s carrying my kid.”

“She can’t go around kissing your friends. You need to talk to her.”

“We do talk. All the time.” They had barely spoken during my stay. “You haven’t been through what we have. You wouldn’t understand.”

I wanted to ask what they had been through but didn’t. It seemed that neither had been through very much, that even their hard times, whatever they might have been, were beige.

When I came downstairs the next morning with my bag hanging from my shoulder, Alan jumped from his chair.

“Not yet, Rich. You just got here.”

“It’s been almost a week.”

“One more day. A few more days,” he pleaded, forcing a smile and going from foot to foot.

Simone came down the stairs clutching her braid. She had just come out of the shower and smelled warm and floral. After I spoke with Alan the night before, he had called Simone into my room and they apologized together. It was surreal, this pregnant girl and her boyfriend, my old friend whom I had for so long treated like a doorman, a chauffeur, an ATM, both apologizing for her having kissed me. To rid us of the discomfort I suggested we walk the beach. It was a clear night with enough stars and a warm breeze to soften the preceding few hours. The three of us walked in silence for a long time. Eventually Simone jumped on Alan’s back and we began to laugh. We ran in and out of the surf. We ground our elbows into the sand and stared silently at the constellations. We felt we had gone through something. I fell asleep to the sound of their laughter from the master bedroom.

“You can’t go,” said Simone, holding my arm. Their pleading embarrassed me. I had booked my ticket and said so, but they rebutted that a ticket was good for any day of the week. That I could at least stay through dinner. That we hadn’t even been to any restaurants. When he said this, Alan smacked his head as though he had forgotten about restaurants. He looked like one of my students searching frantically for an answer. As I stood watching them press me to stay, I recognized what I had been feeling throughout my time with them. It was not easy creating a full life, not in the Hamptons or the city or anywhere. They wanted to feed off my efforts and I had no intention of letting them. Not that I or Jack or Goldberg or Steven or Danny had our lives perfectly together. But Alan didn’t have his life together enough to even look like he didn’t have it together. His life didn’t register outside of this house. There was a poisonous malaise that colored everything they did. My other friends’ beach houses were empty.

Whether in anger or ignorance, neither offered a ride to the station. As I walked, I realized that the guilt I felt was the result of a manipulation they were not even aware of committing. Pulling into the shimmering, muggy city, I held nothing against them.

A few days later, Alan called to thank me for coming. I encouraged him to find a job and move back to the city. I told him he should call when he did. Soon the school year started and I had no time to think about Alan. Four months later, during winter vacation, he called me but I ignored it. He left a voicemail saying that he had moved back to the city and that he was looking for work. He stated with pride that his father had offered him a job but that he had turned it down. He ended the message asking if I would get a drink to celebrate his new baby, Charlotte. When Steven and I went to dinner that night, he told me he had bumped into Alan, his girlfriend and their baby on the street. I said his girlfriend’s name was Simone and his baby’s name was Charlotte. Steven said that Charlotte looked very little like Alan.

The Adidas Yeezy; Or, The Self in Modern Times

by Marek Makowski • October 17, 2020October 17, 2020

A failure on a Yeezy release ends like all existential disappointments: without notice. Is this existential? Sitting in digital waiting rooms, which don’t exist, for interminable amounts of time? Believing in a page of text, written to everyone but also to no one, that tells you to relax, that promises you will enter soon?

The worst of disappointments occurs when the website permits you entry to the item page – so familiar! O, the look of home – and allows you to select your size, even submit your payment and shipping information, then informs you that there has been an error (an error? my error?) and the selected size has been bought out. On yeezysupply.com, the page simply shows a line crossed through your order, as if you have been carelessly crossed out, rejected by the universe. Elsewhere, you get no such notice. In this situation the adrenaline may send you into a frenzy. With nowhere to go, you can only click back to the home page and tread once more to the end of the waiting line, which you accept only out of desperation, with no chance for success.

Once, purchasing through Dick’s Sporting Goods (an unusual vendor for Yeezys), the checkout page informed me that my credit card information had been declined. This credit card, my credit card, the credit card I use every day to purchase yogurt and bread, milk, water, and eggs, had been declined. Well then. What was I now?

Only later the disappointment washes over your illusions. You are like a child who has overslept for the carnival. You glance out the window – the Twitter feed – and realize it’s dark, everyone’s gone. Only later does the website officially inform you of your rejection, your loss.

Of all these rejections, the most simple but the most painful is delivered as a commentary on your mangled human condition, with three words on a blank background: “We are Sorry.”

No, but I would return to the Yeezy hunt. I would not submit to the robots. I would not allow myself to age and die having lost to software and machine.

Kanye West began with spare collaborations, then with a five-year Nike partnership. There he designed the Air Yeezy 1 and 2, which sold for two hundred and fifty dollars and have recently been resold for between three and six thousand. The shoes’ prominence generated their popularity: Kanye West, the most influential musician of his time, designed them. Kanye West wore him – he wore the Red Octobers, so bright, so rare – to match an all-red suit as he performed “Runaway” at the 2010 Video Music Awards. Perhaps his vision and influence caused him to abandon Nike, which he said would not allow him royalties or creative control, for Adidas.

In February 2015 Kanye released his first shoe with the new company: the Yeezy Boost 750, a sneaker-like boot with Adidas’s “Boost technology” (a layer of soft, elastic, compressed foam pellets) in the outsole. The shoe reminds one of an elephant’s floppy ears: a strap covers the laces at the front, and the suede upper looks unstructured compared to traditional leather boots. These first released with a light grey upper on an off-white midsole, followed by a darker grey upper and a brown upper on a gum midsole, and in all black. On the exterior, one cannot find any logo. The design is the branding. So is rarity: the model retailed for three hundred and fifty dollars and has resold, in the past three years, for between fifteen hundred and four thousand dollars.

Next, Kanye released the Yeezy Boost 350, which has become the most popular model. In its two versions, it features a tight sock-like upper, shoelaces (they do not need to be tied due to the shoe’s elasticity and fit), a ribbed midsole (the defining feature of the 350), a pull tab at the back of the shoe (to slide on your foot into the tight upper; not included on several models), prominent stitching across the surface of the upper, a translucent or non-translucent stripe (starting with the V2), and a lifted, exaggerated silhouette that curves like a canoe hull at the wearer’s ankle. Cutouts in the outsole reveal the Boost and the only branding on the exterior of the shoe, which presses unseen against the ground. These also come in more limited reflective models, which sell for more than nonreflective versions on the secondary market.

The Yeezy Boost 700 released in 2017, and with it Yeezy helped reintroduce a fashion for the dad shoe, a sneaker with a chunky sole, albeit one in earth tones and with dramatic detailing across the front and midsole. This distinctive detailing causes me to gasp when I see it in the wild, on the street. Later that year he released the Yeezy 500, another low-top sneaker, slimmer than the 700 but still striking with its midsole’s rounded, muscular curves. There are also the miscellaneous Yeezy Season releases, the high-fashion and higher-priced combat boots, crepe-sole boots, duck-like boots, and desert boots. More recent models have begun to look more organic, with striking designs seemingly ripped from our musculature and the recesses of the earth. He has not done all this alone, of course: but in coordinating design teams, just like in coordinating rappers and producers, he has overseen a collaborative team of artists to make clothing and shoes that resemble a new aesthetic, the changing aesthetic of Kanye West.

In every product Kanye West has challenged divisions between high fashion and street style. In an era that most worships the aural and the visual, he has risen above most, if not all, artists. We carry his ideas on our bodies – on our shoulders and feet. We carry his music, like so many others’, in our pockets and memories and ears. How many headphones one can see in the city when walking to work, sitting on a bench, taking the bus? Headphones now scarcely visible, wireless, playing his dreamed-of sounds, incorporated almost invisibly into the self.

I arrived late – years late. I began to seek Yeezys so late that one would think that I labored alone.

Kanye West launched the Yeezy brand with Adidas in 2015, and I struggled to buy a pair for the first time in 2019 on Yeezy Day. This mass restock of popular models happened on August 2, the result of a rumored warehouse closing (though who can trust rumors, especially on Twitter?). Experienced sneakerheads, armed with their quick order-placing robots, could purchase pairs that resold for hundreds of dollars more than their resale price. I, an inexperienced shoe buyer, one who wore shoes only to cover his feet, one who never actively copped nor dropped on a pair of sneakers, simply wanted to own a pair of Yeezys.

The releases alternated between adidas.com/yeezy and yeezysupply.com – one model at a time, for thirteen hours. I failed all thirteen hours. I failed with the 350 V2 Butters and the 350 V2 Semi-Frozen Yellows, I failed with the 350 V2 Belugas and the 350 V2 Sesames, I failed with all the 700s, I failed with the 350 V2 Clays, I failed with the 350 V2 Blue Tints, I failed with the 750 Light Browns, I failed with the two pairs of 500s, and I failed with the 350 V2 Pirate Blacks. I failed so much that, sometime in the sixth or seventh hour of online queuing, I thought I would never hold the shoes.

Sometimes our ideas of the shoes – of their beauty, worth, and perfection – destroy our experience with them. Search online and you will find several of these sneaker obsessives who buy rare shoes, patter about in their bedrooms occasionally and at a family party only once, then return them to their dust covers, to their boxes, to their cool dark corners, away from the threat of destruction, of no longer being new. I know more than one person who has told me how they purchased a pair of Yeezy Boost 350 V2 Triple Whites, so clean and simple in their design, and who shook their heads, sighed, groaned that they messed up, the sneakers got dirty, and they are ruined. These are shoes designed for the ideal – for the clean minimalist halls of the West and Kardashian palaces – and not for our cluttered homes, our bars where drinks drip and spill, our dirty sidewalks and trails.

My first pair of Yeezys was the 350 V2 Triple White, which I purchased at the end of Yeezy Day in fatigue and disbelief. This model, in this particular color, is not rare. It is the least rare and the first mass-produced Yeezy (Kanye had famously declared “everybody who wants to get Yeezys will get Yeezys”). I eventually sold them for a small profit because of their sizing. I had not worn Adidas sneakers in years, and the shoe constrained my ten-and-a-half athletic foot, and its sloping aesthetic disrupted my balance, making me feel that I would fall over with any step.

These sneakers produce a philosophical conundrum: I no longer understand an objectivity of measurements and metrics; I no longer understand my feet. What is true to size? What is true?

An item’s price on the aftermarket correlates to its rarity and design. Without an appealing design, nobody would want it. Without its rarity, nobody would pay so much for it.

I have already listed several resale prices for sneakers designed by the Yeezy team. The rarity of each product also relates to the rarity of celebrity. We want to feel close to celebrities, and we want to steal some of their attention. So we follow them – literally, we stalk them through paparazzi lenses and online posts. And this all in the time of “stans,” of celebrity apostles, of followers of the icons of Beyoncé, of Taylor Swift, of Ariana Grande and Kanye West.

True identity, celebrity, adverting, and the manufactured self – these have become indistinguishable in the past century and especially the past ten years. On Instagram, for example, one struggles to see what is real or false: why someone poses in a particular way and place, and whether they do so because they want to collect admiration and likes, or represent an advertiser, or show who they think they are, or show who they want to be. Advertising by stealth has allowed social media to become the most important advertising platform. When it comes to beauty and so-called wellness, Instagram has been the most effective.

So we buy Yeezys, not New Balances or Reeboks, for the aesthetic. We buy Kylie lip kits for particular shades, and to look beautiful – beautiful like Kylie Jenner. We also buy Yeezys and lip kits because we want to be unique, unique like everybody else, and because we want to fill some empty, unscrolled space within ourselves.

We buy all these things to achieve a vision – of the personal aesthetic, of our more perfect selves. In the masses of new trends and same-looking styles, daily decisions about color and form persist, and in each outfit we can locate secret cues of the visual artist. We buy to achieve that vision. And we wear new sneakers to be cool. We wear them because we imitate by nature and we believe that if we wear the chunky silhouette of the Yeezy 700s, we will be as talented as Kanye West; that if we will smear whatever powder or gloss or color by Kylie Jenner, we will be as adored as the Kardashians, and we will possess their beauty, however financed or engineered.

My parents fled for this country, like many others, seeking a better life. They sought money and comfort, perhaps even the illusion of freedom and dreams – things all scarce in Communist-controlled Poland. When I was a child, they dressed me with respect for the institution of the American school, with respect for the opportunity of education. They dressed me in vests, button-down shirts, dress pants, leather shoes, and blazers. Eventually I relented, wanting to be like the others. I wore t-shirts, sneakers, and shorts. Formal clothes remained for holidays and church.

I walked this earth for a decade in mis-sized clothing, in shoes too long for my feet, unaware of how I looked. The so-called social media had just begun; few boys like me cared to style themselves in adult fashions. We had hoodies with large logos; we had outfits that mattered only for their cleanliness (a faint odor was okay, so long as they did not stink).

In college I saw Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty, and I marveled at the protagonist’s clothing. It showed his character; it showed Italian class, artistry, and decadence. Watching Jep Gambardella walking beside the Tiber and swinging in a hammock overlooking the Colosseum and discussing art at cocktailed tables and sitting on smoothed marble and velvet couches in colorful blazers, I joined the centuries’-old human obsession with fashion as aesthetic and as self-characterization. I marveled at the contrasted colors, the tailored clothing, and those brogued shoes, in tan and brown, polished and shining.

I purchased a pair of two-toned brogues later that summer. I wanted to return to my self in the past, to the childhood photos – dressed in vests and suits, no longer to praise the opportunity to live and learn in America but to manipulate my image, to see if I could dress myself in beautiful clothes, to make myself beautiful by beautiful things. Now I wear button-down shirts and blazers because I am a grown man, because I am comfortable in them, and because of what they silently say to passersby. I have also learned a lesson my parents’ generation did not yet know, which is that to dress well one does not need to dress formally, and that to dress casually, but deliberately, can tell as much or even more about aesthetics, taste, influence, power, convention, and feeling.

A decade ago, the Yeezy Boost 700 silhouette would not have been popular. If the shoe released then, it would have been called unfashionable, for it looks like a better-designed version of the thick shoes old people wear, those fat white sneakers old men keep on after morning doubles and wear for comfort around their neighborhoods, their doctors’ offices and Walmarts.

But could it have been popular? Yeezy designed and released it. Now our culture revisits styles from the ’90s, long out of fashion, to represent innovation and coolness. How much did the dad shoe come back because of our era’s desperation for nostalgia? How much did it come back because of one team’s creative vision? What would the world look like without Kanye West?

Now do not confuse my voice on the page with reality. I am neither a “sneakerhead” nor a reselling fanatic. I do not display a sharp clean line dividing the top of my hair with its parted side; in fact, my barber shaves only a faint fade into my hair, and the part is natural. I am not one of those seventeen-year-old boys you read of online, those boys who sold enough Yeezys and Jordans to buy themselves a Tesla at the age of seventeen, nor one of those glasses and clean-beards you meet on the plane who say they create software to purchase mass quantities of shoes, nor one of those YouTube reviewers who display their collection on shelves and who sit before a clean countertop (the beat drops during the slow-motion, the close-up, the on-foot spectacle), nor one of those twenty-somethings who flick at their phones on the bus and who walk the street in joggers and bomber jackets that swish. I use the verb cop sporadically, and then only ironically. I do not Tweet about what is fire or brick; I do not Tweet about taking an L. I do not post Instagram photos with stacks of cardboard boxes, or photos in which I have piled heaps upon heaps of sneakers around myself. Until recently, I did not even have an Instagram. I am none of these men.

Rather, filled with interest and bemusement, I like to observe. Disappointed by each bot-made devastation, I turn to Twitter, where I do not have an account, and I wade through the toilet bowl of the world. Here, though, I find less of the ego-petting and speaking to the self that characterizes social media today and encounter posts more reminiscent of the early social media, where one shared only the most trivial observations and thoughts. Here I find people desperate to buy a pair, people desperate to sell a pair, people frustrated and elated with electronic success – all in that glorious language of sneaker buyers and sneaker sellers, that language of drip, drop, sick.

In the digital era, there are people who follow life and there are people who live life. Kanye West works all day. He writes music, designs clothing and shoes, builds dome prototypes, collaborates with artists, sketches new fonts, arranges his choir, meets with his business partners, travels, eats lunch and dinner, reads the Gospel, prays to God, speaks to his wife, calls his friends, takes photos with his kids. When he steps into public view, where the paparazzi wait, he is advertising the Yeezy brand. Similarly, the Kardashians often do not post online to escape into a non-reality, but they advertise their products in subtle comments and pictures.

That leaves the first group, the people who live through social media, a copy of a copy of a copy of reality. In streams of unchronological, undistinguished “content,” intentions become invisible. These people cannot see out the papapparazzo’s frame: they cannot see the conception of the shoe, the construction of the shoe, the laborers and the marketers and the creatives, or the business plan, or the life of an artist who makes beautiful things and leaves the frontiers of social media to create. These people only see what they are meant to see. The influencer is their friend; they will get that perfect body; content is life; Kim Kardashian is beautiful, her sister’s lips are beautiful, her other sister’s face is beautiful, her sister’s sister’s clothes are beautiful, and shoes, Kanye’s shoes! Kanye’s shoes, I need to buy them, they look good, they look fire, they look sick.

Have you seen that video circulating the internet last fall? In the photos preceding the video, Kanye West speaks to DJ Khaled on a runway between each man’s private plane. Kanye stands with his arms crossed and his feet planted wide, and he wears a plain white shirt and gray sweatpants – all which emphasizes his shoes, black on cream and white, a silhouette from the future, the then-unreleased Yeezy 700 V3. DJ Khaled is wearing a pair of Jordans, the famed sneaker brand of the past.

The video documents the end of the encounter. Kanye, now barefoot, hugs DJ Khaled goodbye. DJ Khaled is holding Kanye’s shoes – the very shoes that Kanye was wearing – and walks away, inspecting them, grinning and turning them over in his hands. Kanye, who at this moment has removed himself from political diatribe, who has overseen choral performances each Sunday for most of the year and has spoken about giving, who has spoken about becoming a Christian again, who has shared he will release a new album entitled Jesus is King, walks in the background away to his jet in his socks.

Kanye West’s creative vision overpowers every element of his shoes. You cannot look at a Yeezy without seeing him and his distinctive artistic personality. This makes wearing the Yeezy both alluring – you have somehow joined Kanye West, become one of the few – and impossible. You cannot easily style a pair of Yeezys as a simple part of an ensemble, as you would style a pair of white or black leather sneakers, or dress shoes, or boots, or slippers, or any gym shoe. The Yeezy shouts with his vision; it blinds with his voice. This quality ultimately marks Kanye as a successful artist and distinguishes him from so many others. As with writing, we use clothing each day for its utility and depend on its reliable near-invisibility. But sometimes a great new writing confronts us, sometimes we see a new sneaker, a new Yeezy, that speaks in new voices, that looks from new vantages, that rejects the reliable, the invisible, the expected, and before we can rationalize what has occurred, we can only respond with attention, admiration, and awe.

Last fall, many believed the Yeezy Boost 350 V2, most popular of models, would soon end. With rumors of an updated version, people thought the brand released a few of the last. One of these is the Cloud White, which looks like a cloud blue and which displays differing patterns and knittings across the shoe’s upper, giving the impression that it was stitched together from various fabrics cut and shred across the shoemaker’s workfloor, or that it was stitched together from different pieces of clouds and sky, ripped down to us by bare hands.

On the release date, I procured three pairs, one of which I retained for myself. I wear it occasionally, and I am content. The sneakers are comfortable, like all expensive sneakers should be, and sometimes when my eyes fall to my feet I admire their design. When I wear them I am wearing something other than shoe. Rather, I am wearing the Adidas Yeezy Boost 350 V2, a shoe with a creator who has made himself an icon and with a market and legacy that has overswelled its original intents. The shoe means too much. When people see me they do not see me, but they see a man wearing Yeezys. A man wearing the Yeezy Boost 350 V2 in the Cloud White colorway.

Eventually, last November, the V2 continued to be produced and Kanye released the newest iteration of the Yeezy, the Yeezy Boost 380. The first model was called Alien. The shoe’s upper is gray, covered in cream-yellow splotches and waves, creating an estrangement and a shock on first glance, for they are unexpected and otherworldly. The midsole appears to be smoother, more rounded and pronounced. Clear and sizeable holes punctuate the side where the previous model displayed a translucent stripe. At first I did not like the design, but after observing the shoes for long I have started to admire them. They contain the allure of the shape of an alien – something we have only seen askew, in dark and fog, in prototype, paparazzi blur, and sketch. In other words, this latest version looks both old and new, like the version before that and the version to come. Old and new – like all our human neuroses, desires, and fears.

#FlashFriday Editor's Pick flash fiction micro fiction short fiction

ON THE RECENT SERIES OF DISAPPEARANCES IN YOUR SMALL TOWN

by Kaitlyn Lynch • October 16, 2020October 16, 2020

One by one, the bodies in the lake floated to the surface. I wish I could tell you this was a metaphor for self-discovery or healing from childhood trauma or whatever else your meditative self-help podcast guru warbles at you while you drive to work every morning. It’s not. It’s real life. In March, the snow melted, and the lake thawed, and we had to watch as these bloated bodies full of holes and pond scum all rose up from where the frost and the winter had been hiding them for so many months.

Maybe it could be a metaphor too, I guess. I don’t know. If that resonates with you, if you read this and you think wow, emotionally, I feel like a frozen lake with a dozen grotesque, prismatic blue corpses, then I don’t really know what to tell you. Get a therapist, maybe. A really good one.

I don’t know what the police investigation could represent. The journey of self-discovery, maybe? Although I can almost assure you, you really don’t want our police chief digging around in your psyche. Or any representation of him. He’s like seventy, really angry all the time, and he constantly smells like canned ham. Who even buys canned ham, anyway?

Not the point. None of this is the point. The point is that those girls are dead. Eyes wide open, hard as a rock dead. And it’s horrible. It was horrible when they went missing last summer, and now it’s horrible all over again watching the cops have to tell all their parents that now they’re really one-hundred-percent-for-sure-absolutely-positive-I-really-mean-it never coming back home.

They sent the new guys to the doorsteps. The ones right out of the academy. All of them were barely older than the girls themselves. They weren’t prepared for that shit. The parents wailing and screaming and falling to their knees. Mrs. Worthington even threw a lamp at one of the guys. Barely missed him. He was so shaken up he had to take the rest of the day off. Some tough guy he turned out to be. Someone points a gun at him, no problem, but a suburban housewife wearing a ratty bathrobe and curlers in her hair chucks a thrift store table lamp over his shoulder and he needs to go lie down.

And then the mayor gave some kind of a press conference. It was only the real vultures who showed up with their big news cameras and those weird fuzzy microphones. Always dressed ready for a funeral. Maybe it’s cause they’re always hoping for one. They hardly let the poor guy get his carefully prepared words of condolence out, standing up there with his halfway soggy notecards. Just crowded the stage shouting all over each other and pushing and shoving instead, asking their own carefully prepared inflammatory questions. No one cared about the answers.

No one cared. All these girls just . . . disappeared. Into thin air. Someone made it like they just didn’t exist one day. And that’s what they ended up being reduced to. Fish food and election year bullshit.

Do you think anyone would care if you died? Or even just went missing? That was what I ended up asking myself. Every night, I found myself wandering around my house in the hour before the sun rose, looking at my reflection in all the mirrors. I came to a sort of unsettling peace with the shapeless way my face looked in the dark like that. Knowing that I existed but unable to make out exactly how. Or why.

That was what I did instead of sleeping. Stared into the place where my eyes should be and wondered what made me different from the girl lying on the cold metal slab of the coroner’s office, cut open but not bleeding. Maybe the only thing that would change is that if you took a scalpel down my chest, everything I’m made of would come spilling out, a liquid red defense mechanism, some sort of silent scream.

I didn’t know any of those girls, but I really don’t think we were too dissimilar, you know? I think it could have been any one of us in the lake, just waiting to be found. I think, in a way, we all kind of are. We’re all kind of trapped by something, and we can go left or right or down, and we can see the surface, touch it — it’s right there — but no matter how hard we try, you just kind of have to wait for the spring to come and say look, there was nothing you could have ever done to save yourself, and that’s okay, it was always supposed to end like this.

Huh. I guess it is a metaphor, after all. What do you know?

Guilty as Hell

by Ian Woollen • October 11, 2020October 11, 2020

Jury duty in an Illinois prairie town. The county seat. Supposedly, an open-and-shut case. Drunk guy with a gun at a Halloween party. Helen tightened and retightened the clasp on her hair bun. She was having trouble concentrating on the testimony. Caw, caw, caw.

Black crows massed on the oaks outside the arched windows of the venerable courthouse. Caw, caw, caw. Low, afternoon sun illuminated the judge’s bench. The domed chamber resonated with gravitas, except for the crows and the blinking neon Royal DaySpa sign next door.

Helen, a middle-aged seamstress, was serving on her first jury. Finally, after all these years. Last to be chosen: a familiar situation. Jasper, her wiseacre, tow-truck driver husband, frequently joked that she must have been doing something to disqualify herself. Lifelong fears of a buried flaw. Last to get her license. Last to lose her virginity. All her friends had been called for jury duty, some more than once. But, as with those earlier thresholds, Helen explained it to herself as worth the wait. To more maturely appreciate the sacredness of the moment, and to dress appropriately. She fingered her great-grandmother’s brooch. Althea, the pioneer schoolteacher, would approve of this sober frock.

“Helen, are you coming to lunch?” asked the other female juror, a teller from the credit union.

“Where you all going?” Helen said.

“Over to Denny’s,” the bank teller said.

“Oh, again.”

“Any better ideas?”

“Got an apple in my purse,” Helen said.

“Better ask the foreman for permission to stay.”

The foreman was a hunchback in a three-piece suit. Helen recognized him from the reference desk at the main library. He shrugged and tapped his watch. Whatever that meant. No one seemed too concerned by Helen’s immobility. Chairs creaked and scraped. Everyone went about their lunch business with a somnambulant resolve. The attorneys, the prosecutor, the defendant in his orange jumpsuit (too poor to bond), the smattering of relatives and aggrieved partygoers. And the esteemed judge, who Helen had voted for many times because of his patrician features that he used with closed-eye aplomb to ignore the trial while dozing.

Helen released the hold on her purse. She adjusted her dress and leaned back and breathed in the aura of the Law. She rubbed her neck and tried to imagine the look on Jasper’s face when she announced: “I stopped at Royal DaySpa on the way home and paid sixty bucks for a massage.” One lone figure, a woman wrapped in a ratty, black shawl, remained perched in the gallery. Her withered voice altered the silence.

“Like sitting in an empty church, ain’t it?” the woman croaked.

Helen offered no response. She tugged at her brooch.

“Hard to believe that when I was young, we girls still wanted to grow up to be nuns.”

Helen nodded ever so slightly and stifled a smile. Fearing a breach of courtroom etiquette.

“Instead I marry a dirt farmer and end up with a son who never could say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’,” the woman continued.

Too close for comfort. Helen’s son, Luke, had not called home for a month. And when he did call, it was mostly breathy silence. Luke was serving two years over in Terre Haute for illegally towing college students’ cars and extorting money to retrieve them. Helen sighed and closed her eyes, wishing she were at the restaurant with her peers.

“My boy done told his story honestly. Sat up there by the judge and bared his soul. All the ugly details. And nobody ended up hurt, remember. Except for his daddy who died of shame. That’s the punishment. That’s his cross to bear. The boy made a full confession and now he deserves a penance. You send him to prison and what happens to me?”

Clearly, Helen had made a mistake. Strayed from the flock and exposed herself to jury tampering. She coughed and reached again for her purse and pulled out a tissue. Helen jumped up and fled the chamber, coughing, pretending to some pulmonary distress.

She jaywalked across the street to Denny’s. Crow calls rained down upon her like jeers. Goddamn crows. She resolved to write a letter to the editor. Helen was known for her curt complaints on the opinion page. She began a draft in her head as she entered the restaurant. Thankfully, one space remained at the crowded banquette table in the corner at Denny’s. Afraid of being dismissed, Helen said nothing about the pathetic mother.

Helen accepted the bank teller’s offer of her leftover onion rings.

“What’s up?” the foreman asked.

“Checking in with my husband,” Helen said.

“You’re married to Jasper from the garage, right?” said the juror in blue sweatpants.

“Twenty-four years.”

“How’s he doing? Used to be on my bowling team.”

“Jasper is Jasper.”

“That’s for sure. He wouldn’t put up with all this blather. Waste of our time. Don’t know why we had to listen to that punk kid incriminate himself all morning.”

The bank teller said, “Seemed that he wanted to get it off his chest. And if he’d pled guilty, wouldn’t have had the chance.”

“It’ll be over this afternoon,” the foreman said.

“Closing arguments could go on a while.”

“Nah, they’ve got other fish to fry.”

“Anybody want these chicken nuggets?”

All rise. Helen kept her eyes away from the gallery. She focused on the overweight teenage defendant. Sunlight splayed across the defense table. Bulbous head, small ears. A tattoo creeping up out of his collar at the side of his neck. The kid bit his fingers and glanced up repeatedly at his mother.

“A crime of passion is still a crime,” the prosecutor intoned.

The passion-defense did not fit this boy. More like a cataclysm of frustration, Helen thought. The judge issued instructions. The central charge: intimidation with a deadly weapon. Maximum sentence five years. Helen felt a hot flush on her cheeks. Chairs scraped again and a white-haired deputy led them single file to the deliberation room.

No windows. Bright overheads. Smell of cleaning products.

“Okay, let’s get this over with,” the guy in sweatpants said.

“How about ‘guilty as hell’?”

“Shouldn’t we review the testimony?” Helen spoke tentatively.

“You want to spend another day in this place?” said a bald juror, who laughed and sneezed.

And maybe he had a point. Maybe Helen didn’t want this experience to end just yet. Lord knows Jasper could make his own supper for once.

“We ought to give a little time to this, to show some respect for the process,” said the bank teller.

“The kid didn’t show no respect, especially to his daddy. Gave the man a heart attack.”

“Right, yes, that’s important. The defense was trying to argue that father and son were quite close and that the father’s death is punishment enough.”

Helen saw the threadbare shawl around the woman’s shoulders, and heard an echo of a stricken voice, citing a different kind of law.

“He just turned nineteen, barely an adult,” Helen said.

“We’re getting into some gray area here. Our job is simply to decide if he’s guilty of the charge, or not,” the foreman said.

“Can we at least review the events?”

A kegger at a fishing camp on the frozen river. A popular girl and a drinking game, involving dares to venture out on the ice. The defendant, who cannot swim, refuses. Bringing on shoves and taunts. The girl gives him some sympathy flirting. Which pisses off her boyfriend. Who pulls down the defendant’s pants and teases him about his weight. Defendant leaves the party, threatening revenge. Hitch-hikes home to get his father’s gun. Daddy, on oxygen, partially disabled from a tractor fall, tries to hide the weapon and calm his son. They argue. Mother is away, working a night shift at the Village Pantry. Defendant steals his father’s gun and his truck and returns to the party an hour later. Brakes and fishtails. The truck slides into a ditch. Daddy phones 911 to report the theft and complain of chest pains. Defendant crawls out of the truck with the gun. He brandishes it at the cabin, yelling, “Death to assholes!” Slips on the ice, falls. The gun discharges into a tree. Partygoers run out and sit on defendant until the police arrive. Daddy dies later in the ambulance.

“What’s going to happen to the boy’s mother?” Helen asked.

“That’s not our problem,” the foreman said.

“She’ll be all alone, trying to take care of those farm animals.”

“You can’t hang this jury because you’re worried about the mother.”

“Let’s get Jasper on the phone. He can talk some sense into Helen.”

“Can we could recommend a work-release sort of thing?” the teller asked.

The sweatpants guy said, “I need to go to the bathroom.”

“It isn’t supposed to be like this,” Helen muttered.

“Perhaps you should talk to someone, a priest.”

“Or write another letter to the editor.”

All rise. Caw, caw, caw. Tree limbs outside the windows teeming with shiny birds, as if they’ve assembled to hear the verdict. A murder of crows, indeed. The judge’s ramblings, very faint. Helen hears none of it. Or rather, she’s hearing her own judgment. Each of the myriad crows representing a felony against herself. Many of them over the decades, screeching at the farm girl who wanted to become a nurse, at the young woman who wanted to be a schoolteacher, like her pioneer forebear. Helen strokes her great-grandmother’s brooch. Inside her purse is the key to her husband’s gun cabinet. Helen knows what Jasper would do about the crows. What about Luke? What would he say? Helen hopes this trial will at least provide something to talk about with her son the next time he calls.

crime Editor's Pick

Starchy

by J.Ray Paradiso • October 10, 2020October 11, 2020

Leaning forward in a taupe leisure suit, customed by his goombah Tony the tailor on Mulberry Street, Sam “Starchy” Pullano looked like an unfrozen frozen banana.

“Fly?” he said. “No fuckin’ way. Only birds fly, and I ain’t no fuckin’ canary. Capiche?”

“So, you gonna drive, or what?” said his associate.

“No, I’m gonna take a fuckin’ houseboat from here to Vegas. Are you dumb as dirt or a fuckin’-cluckin’ turkey?”

Micky Marzullo’s crew nicknamed him “Starchy” cuz his lips were always starch-stiff under pressure from the pigs in the 5th Precinct. “There are two things you must always remember,” Marzullo told him before he made his bones and became a soldier and christened a made-man. “Never rat on your friends, and always keep your mouth shut.”

“Whatcha gonna do in Vegas, Starch?”

“What I’m gonna do is none of your frickin’ business, but I’ll give you a taste outta respect for a special guy.”

“A special guy?”

“You ask me one more question, and I’ll cut your fuckin’ tongue out and feed it to my cat.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

“Didn’t mean to what? Stick your head so far up your ass you can smell the Ganges?”

“I’m sorry. I’m…”

“Shut the fuck up, just listen.”

“Okay already.”

“Okay, when I was in Nam – they say war is hell. They don’t have a fuckin’ clue about war. War isn’t hell. It’s heaven for every psychopath, every mother fuckin’ serial killer who ever lived – when I was in Nam, a guy, a special guy, let’s say I owe the guy LARGE, and I’m going to Vegas to close my account.”

“Your account?”

“Now, I am gonna cut your fuckin’ tongue out. Get over here, you, you, beggin’-to-be Halo Natural Wet Cat Food!”

Swearing, “I don’t wanna hear any Pho-slurping Viet Cong in Umberto’s Clam Bar,” Starchy enlisted in the Army, earned the rank of E6 Staff Sargent, commanded a Centurion tank and received a Silver Star for gallantry in action at Nam’s Battle of Ben Het Camp. Driving from Little Italy to Vegas would be a piece of cannoli, he thought. Remembering Umberto’s mantra – Fail to plan, clam to fail – he planned his trip as carefully as the swallows fly 6000 clammy miles in mid-March each spring from Argentina to San Juan Capistrano.

Planning began at Grumpy’s gas station. Grumpy was known in all five boroughs for his BIG heart, lil dick and vaffanculo attitude. “Fill it up, top the fluids and check the tires,” Starchy told Grumpy, who replied, “Vaffanculo,” then gave Starchy a BIG hug, a box of Toscanello Speciale cigars and nine, his favorite number, lottery tickets.

For eats and drinks on the road to his first stop, he went to Allidoro’s on Sullivan Street for eight Marco Polos on focaccia, a case of Peroni Nastro Azzuro from East Houston Street Liquors and a bag of chocolate pistachio cookies from Ferrara’s. Then, back to his apartment with orders for Stash, his Super.

Stash, whose real name was Mario Gargone, had a mustache about the width of his 95-year-old Mother’s beard, so everyone in Little Italy called him Stash to honor his Mother’s beardgevity.

“Will you please water my plants, feed my cat and collect my mail?” Starchy asked Stash.

“No worries,” answered Stash. “May I use your hot iron to fashion my Mother’s beard while you’re away?”

“Your Mother’s beard or your stash, Stash?” asked Starchy.

“My Mother’s, Starch, honest. My stash is starchy-stiff like my pants the day after I first kissed Simone Santorini.”

“That’s way more than I wanted to know, Stash. I promise to bring you beard product samples from Vegas.”

Starchy attended LaSalle Academy in the East Village, where he took four years of Latin and was required to memorize most of Caesar’s Bellum Gallicum as a requirement for graduation or burn in the white fires of hell for eternity. A fair-skinned boy who wore sunscreen 24/7 and drank chocolate milk, he chose to memorize Caesar. Remembering the conquering Caesar wrote, “Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres,” he decided to honor him and divide his trip similarly.

The first part of his three-part trip would be from Little Italy to Paradise, Indiana, where he knew a former sword-swallower, who now owned a piece of Happy Smile Dentistry. Using his trusty slide rule, he estimated that the distance was about 850 miles, which he could drive in about 12 hours, if he ate on the fly and didn’t stop to pee. Tanks didn’t have toilets, so he knew he could handle the pee part. But eating on the fly would be iffy, cuz he suffered peripheral neuropathy and had only 69 hours of training to steer with his Caesarian nose and Johnny Wad schlong.

The second leg of his trip from Paradise to San Antonio, Texas, he estimated at about 1000 miles, which he could cover in about 15 hours, again nonstop. There, he knew a former cocaine dealer, who now owned a wildly successful kite shop. The last leg of his trip from San Antonio to Vegas he estimated at about 1300 miles, which he could cover in about 18 hours, again nonstop. There, he would close his account with the mysterious special person.

Specifics about Starchy’s experience at his three stops are sketchy like the Dead Sea scrolls. But rumors abound like the number of times he destined-for-hell lied during Confession and tried unsuccessfully to tie a bow tie and STRIKE THREE wrote to Sophia Loren for a dinner date in the garden patio at New York’s oldest Italian restaurant, Barbetta’s on East 46th.

At his first stop in Paradise, Indiana, it’s rumored that he bought gas and supplies, then swapped stories with the former sword-swallower about downers:

“Counting down to December 25. Knocking over the Christmas tree. Running to my room. Diving under the covers. Crossing my heart and hoping to die. Begging Santa to forgive me.”

“I got a call from a rich downtown bitch to do her brat’s birthday party. During my performance, I stuck a sword to far down my throat that the B called 911. One the brats called me a phony, so my assistant stuck a sword in the kid’s chest and pulled it down-down-down to his belly button.”

At his second stop in San Antonio, again it’s rumored that he bought gas and supplies, then traded stories with the former cocaine dealer about UPpers:

“Sitting on my Grandma’s lap. Listening to her read-a-long, again and again and again, as many times as I begged, to Capitol Records’ Hopalong Cassidy and the Singing Bandits. 78 RPMs. Unbreakable in normal use. Featuring Bill Boyd as Hoppy with Andy Clyde as California, Rand Brooks as Lucky and Topper the horse as himself.”

“As I was lighting my coke pipe, a pig busted in my apartment and asked what we’re gonna do about my situation. So, I offered the pig a toke. He sucked the pipe upNupNup, turned Tiffany blue and bought a one-way ticket to PigsVille HIGH in the sky.”

At his final destination, much less is known like the whereabouts of the Arc of the Covenant and the solution to Reimann’s Hypothesis and the exact length of Stash’s Mother’s beard in centimeters. His goombahs in Little Italy wondered if he ever closed his account, whatever that meant, with the mysterious special person, whoever that was.

What is known is that Starchy’s plants died and his cat jumped out of the window and Stash rented his apartment to a Professor of Psychopharmacology at NYU. Oh, and Stash’s Mother is buried at St. Wilgefortis Cemetery in Baffi, Sicily.

Years past and Starchy was mostly forgotten. Some doubted he ever existed. Others prayed to him to ca$h out LARGE in Vegas. Most mumbled, “Starchy was some ancient crazy goombah. Whatever, who gives a shit.”

Editor's Pick flash fiction friday flash

VIEW OF THE POND

by Natascha Graham • October 9, 2020October 9, 2020

In the pond, she watches the fish: quick, silver, blood orange, speckled, larger this time, having grown enormous last summer, and now, at the end of spring, they grow again, just before summer grazes lazily at the edges.

She watches the pond from the front of the house. Upstairs. Her bedroom. In a pause between painting, where her brush wilts in the bottom of a green glass (a gift Clive had brought back from Trehern? India? She couldn’t recall which) where the water is the same yellow as the trees. She wipes her fingers on the seam of her skirt where it won’t show, hums a note of a half-forgotten tune half-played on the piano last night, hears the soft creak and close of the front door and watches Duncan, in the same grey buttoned-down cardigan and brown corduroy trousers he’s been wearing since January, step out.

He leans back. Stretches his back, and takes in the morning air. He walks slowly. Takes his time from doorstep to pond, a short distance of only a few steps, but he pauses, slow, gentle, takes in the bluest of blue skies, the fragile warmth of the sun, closes his eyes. Stops. Then, with hands in pockets, looks out across the water, watches the fish gulp and pop their lips at the surface, the flash of gold and silver, a fin, grey striped and shining, slicing the water here and there.

The pond, an eruption of life, of light, a million dazzling, shimmering dashes and moments of sunlight ablaze on the water’s surface.

She wonders what he thinks, standing there, the shadow of Charleston at his heels, then, turns instead to dry her brush, to dip, now, into the red-pink of a curtain, brought back into this room, this house, this home, where the sun warms her face through the glass.

She paints: draws the color in waves, becomes for a moment, the painter, instead of the observer. Then, almost as if she has willed it to happen, the sun shines brighter, bringing her back beyond the glass.

Duncan, gone moments, minutes or hours ago, is replaced by the hurried halting stride of Virginia. She too with hands in the pockets of her skirt, only hers are balled, straight arms, shoulders tight. She moves fast, wide-brimmed sun hat covering her face, though Vanessa knows she is whispering, mouthing, perhaps, the words of other people, a novel, an essay, or, perhaps, a letter, after all, one needed only to receive a postcard arranging or confirming an appointment to see that here was a mind with a twist of its own; always a quip or unexpected phrase.

How different, the two of them, the sun-bleached Virginia of the day, all soft edges and soft smiles, then the glowering, glowing Virginia of evening time, shrouded in a fitting gloom that suited her well.

Only hours ago, last night, she had been fizzing with possibility, arm draped over Vita’s, sitting on the floor, at the foot of Vita’s chair, finger making circles over a knuckle. A look, a gaze, a moment in love between conversation.

She remembers, whilst working the deepest pinks of the curtain into soft folds, the hours of the evening before, spent over wine, after dinner (Lytton had bought a goose), Virginia, sitting in the half-light she loved, seemed to draw the thrill of the coming night into herself, only becoming more alive when her moving hands became shadowy, the teasing bite left her voice (now more the purity of Virginia than the fang of the Woolf) and her features became visible only when she bent forward to poke the fire. Twilight and firelight were her illumination, distorted, fragmented, gloriously glowing, perfectly fitted with her imaginative penchant for seeing things aslant rather than dully straight, and she grew confident in her own game, a task willingly undertook, taking the offerings of the table, a bit of information handed to her as dull as a lump of coal, only to hand it back glittering like diamonds.

She rouses herself, makes a final brushstroke, the painting is done, new, perfect, and, stepping back she sees not the view, but Virginia, now sitting in the garden, where the blackbirds call, and the sun is high. Virginia, amongst a garden ready to spring forth with lupins and delphiniums, veiled in the slight romantic haze which surrounds a nature deepened by thoughtfulness and melancholy, whilst Vita, sleeping somewhere in the house, busies herself in the back of Virginia’s mind, swarms, overcomes, and Virginia smiles, relaxes, and welcomes the sun.

somewhere there is an abandoned refrigerator

by Emily Cayer • October 3, 2020October 3, 2020

You know who doesn’t mind a high desert in July? The scorpions.

Lift a pot lid doing the dishes just to rouse yourself in the afternoon and whoop, hup, babe bring me a shoe, fuck—

don’t wanna take my eyes off him

Big boy, flat dead, tail smashed off, in the bottom of the kitchen sink, stripetail, at least not a bark scorp (those’ll mess you up but good).

Katie swears that one monsoon she saw a refrigerator float past when the street became a river, a beat-up white fridge out of someone’s kitchen or maybe abandoned on the street for special garbage pickup and she said the thing was just crawling

crawling

with a family reunion of stripetails, and we’re talking an extended one, cousins up from as far south as Hermosillo, everybody with a plus-one, crawling

all over the thing, keeping themselves up out of the water, playing king-of-the-fridge, and the winners get to live.

Years ago.

You don’t forget seeing a thing like that. No matter how fast the water is moving. I can’t forget it and I didn’t even see it except in my traitorous mind which likes to whip out the image every now and then to horrify me.

Andrew lives in a miner’s shack up the gulch, and the people who live up the gulch know all about scorpions, and he told me a trick:

You get a regular old clothes iron and you plug it in and put it heat-side down on your flagstone (if you’re fancy) or your concrete steps (if you’re not, and I’m not) before you go to bed.

When the scorcher days turn cooler after sunset (tonight there’s a projected low of 71 around four a.m.) the scorps edge their way under the iron to feel that sweet heat, flatten themselves out, and they are not gonna have their tails up, not gonna be prepared for you when you wake up in the morning with killing on your mind because one of the kinfolk from that family reunion got into your bed and Jesus when your arm found its business end you woke up knowing exactly what had happened even though you’d never been stung before because nothing

nothing

hurts like that, nothing—

—and so you get up and before even coffee you get a hammer and lift the iron and quick so they don’t realize what’s happening – bam bam bam bam take that bastard sons of bitches

You take your revenge.

But even if you get five or six or the whole family reunion party planning committee, you still aren’t gonna rest easy because somewhere there is an abandoned refrigerator in rushing monsoon muckwater that you wouldn’t clutch at even if you were drowning, even if the current were carrying you towards the churning mouth of the underground tunnel to the open pit mine, a refrigerator where the once-white surface is desert-dust brown and

crawling.

Editor's Pick flash fiction flash friday short fiction

A CLEAN SHAVE

by Tom Walsh • October 2, 2020October 2, 2020

“Do you take walk-ins?” I ask, after shutting the door against the wind. Mint tea perfumes the air. “You do straight-razor shaves?”

The shop is empty, apart from the barber, who rises from a pouf in front of a small TV. “Indeed,” he says. “I have been stropping my blades — just for you . . . ha!” Uneven black stubble covers his face and neck, unexpected in a barber.

“You would like the full Turkish hot towel experience?” he asks, spinning a red leather barber’s chair toward me.

I slip my jacket off. “Yes, if you have the time.”

A clean shave takes time.

He drapes a towel over my shoulders, dips his fingers in oil, and rubs my forehead, cheeks, neck, upper lip. He applies more oil, massages my eyebrows.

He rolls out a steam machine, directing the warm mist toward my face. My pores open, granting escape to my natural oils, dirt, unholy thoughts. I want them all stripped away.

“It will be better if you unbutton your collar,” he says. I decline; it is too soon.

When I close my eyes, I see my stepsister, Bobbi, a singer with a raspy voice tuned for tragic songs of desperate nights. At 37, her new manager promises her a tour on the Continent.

I hate her voice: “You’re such a loser, Theo. You have no talent. Why do I keep you around? Oh, right — grandfather insisted, and the solicitors. Maybe after my tour I’ll get rid of you.”

The steam machine stops. I open my eyes and my gaze lands on a black-and-white photo, a portrait of a man in front of a barbershop in front of a mosque.

“Is that your father?” I ask.

“Grandfather. His name was Manuk, like my father after him and like me after my father. It was taken in Constantinople, before it was Istanbul, before the war, before the genocide.”

Manuk the third brings a hot, white towel from a back room.

I, too, am a third. Theo II’s ghost haunts me most nights, ever since I found him hanging in the stables, an ending that no doubt hastened the death of my grandfather — Sir Theo — a week later. I was 12; Bobbi was 22 and had already moved to London. Events — and the will — brought her reluctantly back to care for me.

She visited the stables only once, and told me never to take down the small length of rope that clung to a rafter. “He got off easy,” she said, and never spoke of him again.

Manuk holds the towel by two corners and waves it in front of the steam before wrapping my face. I twitch when the towel blocks my mouth; a momentary panic before realizing I can still breathe.

The towel absorbs the oils and dirt, if not the thoughts.

Bobbi’s latest assault was against my neck drawings.

“This is your ‘big reveal’, after 18 months?” she sneered when I showed them. “These are childish, Theo, uninspiring. Your so-called art school owes me a refund.”

One kind word from Bobbi to her friend and my drawings would hang in a SoHo gallery. I’d serve champagne and brie on opening night.

The drawings she attacked are my best collection: Necks rendered in black and grey charcoal, with accents of red and pink. Striated lines bending into curves. Subtle shading. Broken lines. She didn’t know it, but the drawing she held was of her own neck. “This is just worthless, Theo.”

Hers was the first live neck I sketched. I drew it on the train one evening while she stared out the window.

Soon, I was sketching necks in cafes, at the Tate, on the Tube, in the Cross and Thistle. Long necks, stubby ones, muscular necks, scarred necks, wrinkled ones, twisting necks, necks with bulging veins.

“Now it is time for the lather,” Manuk says, rousing me from my thoughts. He dabs my face with a brush covered in shaving cream. “We must make sure each hair is coated. As my grandfather insisted.”

“Was your father also a barber?” I ask.

“For a short time,” Manuk says. “He was many things, for short times. But he was not successful, like my grandfather. He was political, which was noble, but brought trouble to our family that he could not face.”

He picks up a razor, stretches taut the skin on my cheek. Two flicks of the wrist, then he wipes the shaving cream off the blade onto his palm. He continues silently, efficiently removing my week-old stubble.

As he works, I see the scar on his neck.

He catches my eye. “A youthful mistake,” he says. “I am happy the rope broke. Most days.”

In the mirror, I see my collar has dipped, showing the angry red abrasion.

“You will be too.”

We’ve Only Just Begun, Frankie

by Bethany Bruno • September 27, 2020September 27, 2020

“We’ve only just begun to live
White lace and promises
A kiss for luck and we’re on our way…”

“We’ve only begun,” I sang in a hushed declaration. I sat in an empty pew, staring at the water-stained carpet below me. Completely ignoring the horrific sight that stood guard before me, which was my father’s human remains now bounded within a large green urn I bought off of Amazon.com. The oblong container sat atop a white roman column, even though it was clearly made of Styrofoam, at the front of the half-empty room. The death of my dad was not a shock, but an uneasy welcomed sign of relief. He was now at peace, and so were we. Well, at least we hoped we would be with time. That was the go-to line, “at least he’s at peace now,” even if I thought it was a load of crap. I never imagined praying for my father to die, but I also never imagined I’d be inside a building that temporarily housed his ashes like some sort of weird art show. People came from all over, most were family, but some were strangers. I never imagined that at twenty-eight years old, I’d be attending my father’s funeral. I also never believed I could create a mixed cd filled with all of the hits from the seventies, or that the sweet melodies from the Carpenters would serenade a container of human remains.

“Before the risin’ sun, we fly
So many roads to choose
We’ll start out walkin’ and learn to run

(And yes, we’ve just begun)…”

“This is when Karen Carpenter really shows her skills,” the stranger near me said aloud. The sound of a tambourine shaking enters, as well as the chorus. It’s a true love song, “We’ve Only Just Begun” by the Carpenters. In the seventies, the song exploded onto the music scene and soon it was playing in the background of someone’s first kiss, first slow dance, or maybe when they lost their virginity in the back of a shag-carpeted van that reeked of mildew. For me, I first heard this song on the dusty radio of my dad’s beat-up red truck. Because he was a plasterer in Miami, my father often picked me up right after work, covered in powdered concrete. If you smacked the passenger seat with your palm, a cloud of white smoke rose then gently fell back into the fibers of the cushion. If you didn’t know this information, you may have thought my dad was a cocaine drug lord, like something out of Scarface. One afternoon, on a typical Florida rainy day, I was picked up by my dad after another lame day of school. We weren’t close then, and I was as angsty as I would ever be. I was a rebel with a cause, and that was to be what was known as an “emo” in 2006. So naturally, I hated all forms of music that weren’t “deep.” But on this day, he turned the volume knob on the radio and out arose a voice, that sliced through the truck with a wave of wholesomeness. Karen Carpenter’s singing was so clean and fresh, amongst a sea of crusty or hoarse female singers. She sounded like an angel, or something that was not of this world.

“They don’t make songs like this anymore,” he said. “Love was everything. Now, it’s all about having sex or doing drugs. Your generation doesn’t know anything about good music.”

I nodded in agreement, before letting out a small “heh.” Did I actually believe this statement to be true? At seventeen, I wasn’t about to let any old guy tell me what’s good or not good. Besides, there’s a reason classic rock is classic – it’s old, and old is boring. My dad was a man of the seventies, where he loved everything from southern rock to disco. That decade was the prime of his young life, much like this moment was the prime of mine. It would take me at least ten years before I began to bow down at the rock gods of the seventies and eighties. It would take another two years until I appreciated this Carpenters song, and to lose my dad at the same time.

The day after I held my father’s hand as I watched his body seize then come to an utter stop, we began planning a “Frankie” funeral. I wanted to celebrate the peculiarities and interests of my dad. This included the color green, everywhere, even the flowers. I went to the flower shop with my mom, where I spotted these green puffy-looking flowers that just screamed “Pick us! He would think we’re so cool!” So, I did, much to the disgust of my mom, who thought we should have gone with a more “traditional” flower set. “They look like something out of a Dr. Seuss book,” she said. “Maybe, but he would have thought they were ‘Coolio,’ as dad would say,” I said. Also, as part of the funeral planning, we asked that all attendees wear green, as a symbolic gesture. And to top it off, I brought in my dad’s Incredible Hulk keychain, that had then been on his truck keys for at least fifteen years and placed it upon a table near his urn. It’s safe to say that we had the green part down, but I wasn’t done yet. There was one crucial element left and I had to make sure it was perfect: the music.

If you’re of Italian heritage, classical music is often softly playing as mourners say their goodbyes. Josh Groban is played frequently, as is any sort of opera. But I didn’t want to send my dad off with music he didn’t jam out to when he was alive, so I surely wasn’t going to do it post-urn. Nope, this was a Frankie funeral, which meant absolute classic rock all the way. Even his life quote, which is placed on the service cards along a picture of him smiling with his signature chunky mustache, was by Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Simple Man.” The quote read, “Forget your lust for the rich man’s gold / All that you need is in your soul.” Not even the funeral director could have possibly written a more perfect summary of who my father represented as a man.

A few days before the service, I sat down at my kitchen table with my mom. I pulled out a green blank cd, opened up my CD-ROM drive on my laptop, and began composing what would be known as “Frankie’s Mix.” I felt ecstatic while carefully choosing each song. Before long, I had over a dozen tabs open that all contained YouTube music videos of various songs. Some songs, I knew by heart, like “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” but others felt like a long-forgotten memory climbing back to the surface with each strike of the guitar chord. Then came “Simple Man,” naturally, and I threw in some Steve Miller Band and Glenn Campbell. Each song, I had to assure my mother that it would be to my father’s liking, so I occasionally turned to her and claimed, “I remember Dad listening to this song on the radio, he loved it,” I said. That’s when YouTube, in all its wisdom, recommended the video for “We’ve Only Just Begun” by the Carpenters.

There are always certain songs that when you hear it, bring about feelings of innocent joy. Like reuniting with a long-lost love, the song feels like everything is good in the world once more. This song encompasses every scope of emotion that enters my body as the melody serenades my ears and reaches the depths of my soul. And, as I walked around the funeral parlor containing family, strangers, and long-lost acquaintances, I could feel their reactions to the beautiful melodic rhythm of the song. The funeral director, a man in his late forties, marched straight up to me, shook my hand and asked, “Are you the one who created this mixed cd?” I nodded, unsure of what I was about to face. To be honest, I half expected to be told that it was an inappropriate choice for such a somber event. My mix definitely wasn’t anything like a Josh Groban cd. Instead of receiving some sort of backlash, his neutral expression turned into a large smile as he reached for my right hand and shook it. “In all of my years working in this industry, I’ve never heard such a great mixed cd, great job” he said, before walking away to greet the late arrivals and direct them to the sign in sheet.

I sat there for a moment, filled with complete and utter pride. In some sort of weird cosmic event, I felt like I just shook the hand of my father, and not the funeral director. Maybe this was a sign, a sign from Frankie to let his only daughter know that I did good. That though his life was over, but mine had still only just begun. And with the Carpenters song slowly reaching its completion, harmony penetrated my broken heart as my personal eulogy for my father came to a nourishing end.

“And when the evening comes, we smile
So much of life ahead
We’ll find a place where there’s room to grow
And yes, we’ve just begun.”

—The Carpenters, “We’ve Only Just Begun”

Mr Spire

by David Ralph • September 27, 2020September 27, 2020

Usually I’d walk into town by the river, taking the boardwalk, but this day I turned onto Talbot St and as I neared the intersection with O’Connell St I saw a female figure in front of me, staring up at the Spire. Thick black sheening curls cascaded down her shoulders as she craned her neck skywards. There were clouds scrolling past, the afternoon bright and fresh. It was her generous curves from behind that had drawn me in but as I closed the distance between us, something in me suddenly hoped her face would be a disappointment. It wasn’t. I asked her if she’d like a photo beside the monument. She was holding up her phone.

I zoomed in with the camera. She had these big pillowy lips too. I zoomed out, and when I handed her back the phone I told her that the Spire was meant to inspire, that the architects were asking Dubliners to be more surefooted, to have confidence in themselves.

— See, if you say it quickly – a spire – it sounds like aspire.

I invited her to press up close to the steepling steel structure and explained that when you looked up from tight in, it gave the impression of tapering off into infinity. Our heads brushed once or twice as we circled the base and stared up.

— I feel dizzy, she said. — But it’s a beautiful theory. Aspire.

— Yes, aspire, I said. I fanned my hands out to the city. — The sky’s the limit. Of course they couldn’t find an Irishman with enough confidence to build the damn thing.

— Oh really?

— An English company designed it in the end.

Her name was Sabine. She was from Berlin. She’d been here only a month, she was looking for work. I told her if she needed a guide I’d be happy to show her around the city. We swapped numbers, exchanged a few texts about meeting up. Then one or two of my messages went unanswered, and I didn’t persist.

It was months later and I was out running on the seafront in Clontarf. The promenade was littered in plastic bottles, driftwood, condoms, polystyrene cartons, seaweed; there had been a storm surge the day before. I reached a crumbling old concrete jetty that had half sunk into the sea. Clouds trembled on the water; the rigging of sailboats chimed in a soft breeze; the tide sucked and sloshed below me. When I turned to come back in I saw Sabine strolling along the promenade. I waved.

— Hello! she called.

— It’s … Sabine, right?

I remembered her name perfectly well.

— Did I see you out here a few times? Sabine said.

— I run this way sometimes.

— I was thinking to text you.

— Oh. Why didn’t you?

— I don’t know. She shrugged. — Thought maybe you’d better offers by now.

— Better offers? Yeah, there was a stampede of women chasing me all the way up Fairview.

— It must be the sweat. It’s so attractive!

— I think I lost them. I wiped my brow theatrically.

— So, you still trying to pick up tourists at the Spire?

— I’m barred now. The police said I was becoming a pest.

Sabine laughed. — You still have the same number?

— No, I said, a mock-wounded tone. – Got a new one after you didn’t answer.

— Really?

— Yeah. It’s one, two, three, four—

— Hey! She shook her head playfully, the loose chignon her hair was tied up in tumbling down.

— I still have the same number, Sabine. I’d be happy to hear from you sometime.

— Okay, I’ll text you next week. I’m late now but I promise not to disappear this time, she said. A few paces on she looked back. She was smiling now. — You know, you’re in my contacts as Mr Spire.

The following week, we met by Stephen’s Green railings, strolled round. I was unsure what to do with her on our date. I felt clumsy as I pointed out memorials to the famine, busts of political figures, the bullet-scarred stonework. I was doing most of the talking, nothing but inanities really, and it was a pressure to perform that had me on edge. Was this even a date anyway? I grew conscious I was talking too much.

— It’s hardly the weather you moved here for, I said as a light rain started to fall. The green that was still in the trees formed a canopy against it.

— Oh please. Even now it’s like summer in Berlin.

— So what has you in Dublin?

— I’m a refugee.

I couldn’t be certain she was joking. – But you’re a German citizen, no?

— I ran away from a man, she laughed. — A love refugee.

— Ah!

— We should have our own country, and she laughed again.

— Well, I said, unsure where to go with this, – I suppose it’s a kind of fleeing.

Past the cherry blossoms we came to a bridge. In the stagnant water below a pair of swans swam past a pontoon in the stateliest manner. I suddenly wished I had some of that same self-possession, those same slow sure movements. Sabine smiled at me, placed a gloved hand on my arm.

— Show me something I haven’t seen. I’m around this part of town every day.

I brought her up The Coombe, on into The Liberties. The Tivoli theatre was still there then. On Francis St we browsed in an art gallery, some antique stores, and on Thomas St I had to translate what the stall-traders were shouting, the hoarse flinty voices lost on Sabine. We continued on into Pimlico, taking all these backstreets along rows of redbricked terraced houses. As we walked, Sabine explained that her ex-boyfriend Dieter had actually followed her over here for a time; this was why she’d gone silent shortly after we first met. There was no need for an explanation, I said, feeling a jolt of jealousy.

— Dieter thought we could fall in love twice, she shook her head. — But once something is spoiled.

We came out to the Guinness factory. Sabine recognized the cobbled streets, the big black gates. — I think I saw it on TV, she said, and when she turned her face to mine I got a different kind of jolt. I had noticed a metal stud flashing silver just below her mouth.

A string of cars sped past, tires slapping off the centuries-worn stones. A tourist couple in a horse-drawn carriage stared down at us as they went by. The strangest scent hung in the air, horseshit mingling with the barley being malted inside the brewery.

— It’s total kitsch inside there, I said, gesturing at the black gates. — But if you want a really good pint, I can take you someplace. I reached out a hand to take a sprig of something that had caught in her hair. I handed it to her.

— Oh, Sabine said. — From the park. It’s wild rosemary, I think.

— You have amazing hair.

— I have a lot of hair, she groaned, grabbing a fistful of curls. Then this teasing smile skipped over eyes as she threw the rosemary away. – People will think we were rolling in the hay, she said.

— God! I laughed out loud. — We wouldn’t want that, would we, I said and immediately wished I’d said something else.

We crossed the river. The rain got heavier all of a sudden. We broke into a run. We stopped up at a set of lights, panting and smiling at each other. I felt Sabine’s hand touching my hand. I felt it again. Our bodies eased into a sort of embrace as the traffic swam past.

— Okay, come, quickly, I blurted and surged out onto the road, the smacking sound of my shoes off the wet tarmac growing louder with each step, turning more like laughter. When I reached the other side Sabine was still standing on the far pavement.

— So the trick is to let it settle, I said, placing her drink on a coaster. We had a table in a dim corner of a bar in Stoneybatter. — Let it go completely black.

A creamy moustache formed on Sabine’s lip as she took her first sip of the stout. I brushed the white foam away, and we exchanged looks. A man was tuning a fiddle by the fireplace. The front door opened, and more musicians piled in.

Sabine told me she’d wanted to be a musician herself, she’d been in a conservatory in Bremen but had dropped out. Dieter was in an orchestra; they’d met at the conservatory. An arrow of jealousy sliced through me. I pictured a tall charismatic figure, wild-haired and prone to tempestuous outbursts followed by tender, defenseless apologies. I took up my drink. When I put it down Sabine reached for my hands. She stroked my fingers.

— You could play piano with these, she said. — They’re the perfect proportions.

This was my opening. But I hesitated. Then I began complaining how I had no talent for music and slowly slid my hands from hers. — I’m actually tone-deaf, I said with a laugh.

The musicians started up. I always drank too fast when I was nervous. I rose to get us another.

When I sat back down, the band was droning through a repertoire that sounded like some animal quietly dying in the sump of a low field. Sabine said she could appreciate traditional music intellectually and historically but not in any emotional sense.

— It’s deeply unsexy, isn’t it, I said.

— Yes I cannot picture those men ever having sex.

I made a joke about requesting the band to play “Sexual Healing” but Sabine didn’t laugh. We were constantly out of step with one another. She picked at something on her top, then she turned away. She was concentrating on the music now, the glow of light from the fire dancing amber over the instruments. I knew the moment was gone.

I thought I might have blown things for good with Sabine. But early the following week, she texted with another invite, this time to a party at an apartment in Rathfarnham, followed by a gig at a club I’d never heard of, The Balkanarama.

Bicycles cluttered the hallway of the apartment. I squeezed past them, came into the living room. Barely audible electronic music was coming from a laptop in a corner. On a wall was a poster for the film Blue Velvet. I spotted Sabine standing by an open window. She had on a silver sequined dress that stopped well above the knee. Some bloke with high-set cheekbones and feathered hair handed her a drink before I got all the way across the floor. This turned out to be Julian, who lived in the house and worked with Sabine. He didn’t make eye contact with me once, he didn’t offer me a drink, and he was standing far closer than necessary to Sabine. They had been discussing Berlin, and Julian was making out like the city was his spiritual fucking homeland or something.

— I literally had the best night of my life in the Berghain, he said. — Well, it was a three-night rollover all wrapped into one, and he laughed.

— The party scene in Berlin is big, Sabine said.

— I really have to visit, I cut in. — Sabine, what neighborhood are you from?

— My God! Julian said, still without looking at me. — You haven’t been to Berlin! You’d swear I’d just confessed to never having seen indoor plumbing. — I lived in P-Berg with these deejay mates last summer, he boasted. – They’re on the Derelikt label over there. Then he began telling us about all the drugs he’d taken in the city, this pill, that powder, uppers, downers, sometimes both at the same time. He laughed again and I thought about pushing him out the window.

— I don’t do drugs, Sabine said in the bluntest Germanic manner.

— Me neither, I lied, and shrugged. — I find drugs are … I guess they’re just kind of boring.

— Well, it was just a phase really, Julian retreated. — Not that I’d touch them anymore.

— You should visit sometime, Sabine said to me. — You’re my Dublin guide, I can be your Berlin guide.

— Sounds like a plan, I said brightly.

I went in search of the toilet and a drink. When I came back a woman called Lorraine was talking with Sabine. Julian had left.

— So you’re the Spire guy, Lorraine said. — I’ve heard about you.

— All good I hope.

— I’d say you’re still on probation, and she laughed. Sabine smiled at her shoes, shook her head.

A bottle of mescal was produced. Sabine and Lorraine were all conspiratorial glances, trills of speech, as they filled me in on the romantic intrigues playing out at the party. Lorraine was on the lookout for a fellow called Ferdia, but he’d failed to turn up. Then some other girl came over and told us taxis were on the way, the doorstaff in this place were strict, if we arrived late we mightn’t get in. Sabine fixed us a large measure of the mescal. We clinked glasses.

People jumped into three waiting cars outside. When I went to get in beside Lorraine and Sabine the taxi was already full. I ended up sharing with a guy I recognized from college, whose name was Simon.

— Crawling with foreign chicks, was how Simon described The Balkanarama as we rode along.

— I’ve an eye on that German myself. Sabine.

— You’ve a well-trained eye then, Simon mock-punched my arm.

Once we reached town he directed the taxi driver down a series of roads that grew narrower the closer we got to the club. We talked about our old lecturers, the mad sessions back in the day. Simon worked as a band booker now. Both his arms were busy with tattoos that I didn’t remember. The car turned down a laneway, then went through a low tunnel. When we came out the other side, a long queue had formed along the wall by the entrance. Simon told me to follow him. He walked straight up to the head of the queue. Simon and the bouncer high-fived. We got in for free, the big metal door banging shut behind us.

I had to shout to be heard over the music. — I’ll get us SHOTS, I said to Simon. — Back in a SEC. Heat pulsed off the packed-in bodies, strip-lights flickered overhead. Alcoves with little private booths flanked a dancefloor. On a stage beneath a blue spotlight an accordionist, snare-drummer and violinist were tearing through some gypsy numbers. The violinist, sweat-filmed and swarthy, had his eyes shut in a shamanic trance as he zigzagged his bowing arm faster, building up to a crescendo. I shouldered my way past a girl ahead of me, straining to catch the barman’s attention.

After I finally got served, I went looking for Simon to give him his drink. I found Sabine and Julian instead, seated at a table in an alcove and deep in conversation. Julian was pressing in close to Sabine. She was laughing at whatever he was saying. She crossed, re-crossed her legs, she ran her hands through her hair.

I sat down with them, and my arrival brought their talk to a sharp end. A silence developed. I downed my drink in one. A wry look on her face, Sabine idly fingered the lip of her glass. Julian strained his neck to get a better look at the band. I reached for Simon’s drink, thinking I should ask Sabine if she was up for a dance.

— Hey! Julian said suddenly, standing up, gesturing for us to do likewise. — This is where the music goes mad.

The violinist was jerking his bowing arm violently, his eyes feverishly wild. The thump of the bass beat faster; the snare-drum fizzed a crackling tempo. The music climbed, climbed, until, for the briefest instant, it seemed suspended in the charged air. Then, from behind the thick pleats of a scarlet curtain, a woman wearing nothing but a see-through sarong and a fuchsia-pink lei flounced onto the stage, crashing cymbals overhead—

The crowd went berserk.

Julian jutted his chin to Sabine. — Shall we? and he inclined his head towards the dancefloor.

I stood frozen by the table, watching as Julian wrapped an arm round Sabine’s waist. They disappeared into the crush of writhing bodies. I picked up a drink from the table. It was Sabine’s, her dark red lipstick staining the rim of the glass. I drained that too.

I shoved my way to the bar again. I downed another shot. Before I knew it, I was barrelling past dancing young men and women. I remember knocking into a woman’s side, sending her drink splashing onto her blouse, her boyfriend glowering. I pushed past another swarm of bodies, and another, only to find the same frantic dancers everywhere. Passing a table I picked up someone’s drink, tossed it back. Scanned the room. They were not visible anywhere.

Stepping into the bathroom, I kneeled and craned my neck up under the cubicle doors. Simon was in the last one, racking out a line of cocaine.

— Simon, I called. He opened the door.

Back out on the dancefloor a vaporous mist was rising from the neon tiles, and beneath the confusing flicker of the strip-lighting I tried to think as I danced like a lunatic next to Simon. I thought Julian and Sabine must have left. I thought that’s what they were laughing about at the table, and that I was the butt of some elaborate joke the two of them were playing.

A jovial, stocky man wrapped a strong arm round me, pulled me in tight. Dancers spun past me, a sea of singing faces swimming in and out of focus. Breaking free, I staggered, but as I righted myself I felt a tug at my elbow. When my eyes focused again, it was Sabine’s face I saw first.

— Where have you two been? I said quickly. Julian was behind her.

— Where have you two been?

She pointed to a spot in front of me. — Are you blind?

— That’s quite the traditional gypsy dance you were doing, Julian said, a big stupid grin across his face. He nodded at the still-spinning dancers. — I think it’s called kolo style.

— Julian, is there anything you don’t know about?

— What?

— You’re just so knowledgeable about Berlin, Berlin nightclubs. Now it’s gypsy dancing rituals, I said. At least he was looking at me now. — What else are you an expert on?

— Dude, whatever, he said and turned back to Sabine. They danced.

She had such grace, the way she would dip her hips on the downbeat, her torso twisting and sliding in a groove that seemed to belong to her alone. I beckoned Simon over and we elbowed our way in on them, my eyes locking with Sabine’s as I bobbed and half-stepped. I was feeling fired up all of a sudden; guess it was Simon’s cocaine on top of all the drink. I was feeling good, I got into the dancing, I felt myself absorbed in the music that was mixing with the sweat and the perfume and the humid heat until I noticed that Lorraine and some others had joined our little group. Lorraine was dancing with Simon. Happily, Julian was nowhere to be seen now.

A thump of the drums came from the stage, as if announcing a new phase of the night. Lorraine and Simon kissed. There was a loud crash of cymbals. The spotlight above the bandstand swerved, beaming a big blue shaft out onto a section of the crowd. I could see Sabine looking at Lorraine and Simon. I took Sabine by the hand. She felt sleek and pliant as I spun her out, drew her back in to the quick number. Then the band slowed to a kind of waltz. I leaned into Sabine. Julian could go fuck himself, I thought. I could feel her breath on my cheek like fingertips. Then, realising she’d clasped her arms round my neck, I slipped my hands down the scaly fabric of her dress and rested them just above the swell of her ass. She looked up into my face, her eyes big, expectant.

And I just couldn’t do it, I couldn’t bring myself to lower my head and seal my lips on hers. She was just too beautiful. I looked away, I made a space between us. A short time later Julian returned, and he seized his chance to muscle in again. With a jerk of his head Simon indicated we get off the dancefloor.

— Boyo you’d want to wise up, Simon said as he slammed the cubicle door shut. He cut me out a particularly large line of cocaine. – Horse that into ya. That German is game.

— I don’t know, I said, whipping my head off the cistern lid, — stiff competition out there. That Julian’s a real prettyboy. Looks like he’s in a boyband.

— Exactly! A fucken boyband, and he shoved me out the door. — You look like you’re in a real fucken band.

Back out on the dancefloor I couldn’t find Sabine. I fell in beside a bunch of strangers and danced with them for what felt like a long time…

A male figure poised in the motion of fleeing was stencilled into a neon exit sign. Julian had just come back from the bar with drinks. He was rangy, his long frame arched up over Sabine as he handed her a glass. She laughed at something he said and her head tilted towards his. Then Julian held his glass to Sabine’s mouth and she drank from his drink. I turned round. I felt drenched in my own failure. I felt I might choke on spite. I had a better idea than sucker-punching Julian as I pressed my way through the crowd that was already thinning. — Hey, I said to a bouncer. — That guy over there, I pointed at Julian’s back. — Yeah, by the exit. I’m pretty sure he spiked that girl’s drink. Yeah, the one with the hair. He dropped some kind of pill in it, it went all fizzy and she was drinking from it.

The bouncer said something into his earpiece. A moment later he was joined by the bouncer posted on the door outside. I was asked to repeat my story. Then both bouncers ploughed through the crowd and in one swift violent maneuver they had Julian hoisted up by his arms like a pathetic ragdoll and carted out the exit door. I laughed. I had at least salvaged something. I left through the front entrance. I never saw nor heard from Sabine again after that night. Even today, I still fantasize about a time machine where I could travel back to that nightclub, to that pub, to that set of traffic lights, to the foot of the Spire. I want to grab that young eejit I was and tell him that you need to pounce on the opportunities when they come round, because the truth is that Sabines don’t keep on coming round and Sabines are far fewer that you’d ever have imagined.

The Balkanarama’s heavy metal door banged hard as it closed after me. It was not a pleasant sound. It seemed to ring in my ears as I walked the maze of empty streets, turning this way and that. I had no idea where I was going. A parked car had its passenger window put in, a spray of broken glass all over the pavement. I turned down another street, and another, and when I looked up it was the light on top of the Spire that I saw blinking. On, off, on, off it blinked as I walked, but no matter what turn I took, it never seemed to draw closer. It was always a street away. Then a taxi came up behind me and slowed. I put out my hand for it to stop.

#FlashFriday Editor's Pick flash fiction micro fiction short fiction translation

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL RUINS

by Carol Bensimon • September 25, 2020September 25, 2020

In this short piece, Brazilian novelist and short-story writer, Carol Bensimon, posits the life of a pool man after the virus has wrecked the tourism industry and the rich have retreated into larger and larger houses that contain inside them all the entertainment that they could possibly need.
Translated from the Brazilian by Zoe Perry and Julia Sanches.

Back when all the hotels were open, Edgar worked as a pool cleaner. He’d go from place to place in his teal VW bus: Recanto das Hortênsias, Pousada das Montanhas, Hotel Serrano, Pousada Edelweiss. The most beautiful things he’d ever heard while cleaning pools had come from the mouths of children: was it his job to save insects — an ant lifeguard! — was he gathering dry leaves for his collection, wasn’t he too old to be playing with a butterfly net?

The virus shut down the hotels. Their managers sent Edgar voice messages saying they wouldn’t be needing his services for the next few weeks, always ending on a positive note. But he wasn’t so optimistic, or stupid. He spent three nights driving around. He had a clear picture of the ruin around him. He’d known the place before the chocolate factory theme park, before the chairlift, before the festivals. He could picture the darkness. He could hear the crickets and see the vines slowly creeping up the concrete columns. He pictured the abandoned casino, except multiplied by a thousand, two thousand. How many times had he slept in those half-finished rooms when he was young? All he needed was a bottle of Velho Barreiro and a blanket. Edgar never found it difficult to imagine failure.

Tourism was the first thing to seem superfluous as the new world took shape. Hotels reopened like hostages trying to put on a smile at the first rays of sunlight; gold balloons at the door, loud music, clowns on stilts, a forced cheer to try to mask the trauma. Only everyone was broke. What’s more, people were now aware of what had previously been invisible; even if they did happen to find themselves in a hotel room, satisfying the old desire for faraway places and a break in routine which, thankfully, could be paid in six easy installments, it was as if they could now see the ghosts of everyone who had been there before them. A crowded room. A museum of saliva, fingerprints, dead cells. How many other guests had touched those same buttons on the remote control?

The pools never reopened. The managers posted “temporarily out-of-order” signs. “For your health and safety” signs. Edgar covered up twelve pools in a single day. At the edge of the last one, he left a bee drying in the sun, its wings still stuck to its fragile body, its striped abdomen pulsing. He got in the van with everything he owned and went down the mountain towards the capital.

He worked at the houses near the big lake now. He wore a mask and gloves. Everyone kept their distance. They’d open the automatic gate and not even come to the backyard to see if he needed anything or check on what he was doing. A glass of water was too much to ask. Rich people still had the privilege of fear and wanted all their leisure confined to their houses. Some of the buildings were decades old, which you could tell by their size. It was as though dreams used to have more room to grow.

In any case, as he sprinkled powdered chlorine into pools or installed solar-powered heaters on the roofs of houses, Edgar found it easy to imagine the neglect and emptiness around him, because eventually all those desperate people out there were going to knock down the gates, break the windows, and steal everything they really needed and everything they thought they needed, just as was happening in places called Quito, La Paz, Buenos Aires, Los Angeles. What impressed him most of all were the scenes on television of people looting a shop that sold — it sounded like a joke — televisions! He also saw houses on fire in places whose names escaped him, and people rolling out carts heavy with freshly laundered clothes that didn’t belong to them. Aside from those news segments, which were always accompanied by the sounds of sirens and of things exploding — he could still hear birdsong where he was — there was also news about a second wave of the virus, a third wave, a fourth wave. About one thing, he felt sure: tiled pools would make more beautiful ruins than ones made of fiberglass.

Sometimes a girl or boy would appear behind a barred window so unexpectedly it made him shudder. The bleakest things Edgar had ever heard while cleaning pools had come from the mouths of children: could the powder in his bucket kill the virus, would the inflatable dragon be all right after Edgar touched it, could he tell them what life was like out there?

Chippendales

by Wendy BooydeGraaff • September 20, 2020September 20, 2020

I am vain. I’ll admit it. My sister used to sing that Carly Simon song to me. You’re so vain. You probably think this song is about you. I felt bad about it in high school, my vanity. Now I wear it proudly. Why not lean into it? My physical attributes are the one thing everyone compliments me on, asks me advice about, even though I work in educational policy and they should be asking me about early childhood education or something similarly meaningful.

“Your hair – it’s beautiful. What products do you use?”

“I’ve been looking for a dress like that. Where did you find it?”

“I never thought to wear that combination, but it works!”

Of course, the next event, I see them wearing pink and orange together, or the dress from Style House, or styling their hair wild and curly – a new perm imitating my corkscrew style. I don’t mind, I’m not the jealous type. Besides, I’m always looking for the next look, and really, it’s at least fifty percent in how you wear it. Throwing money into products or fashion isn’t going to do as much as putting together the whole look.

When I met Jake, it was a relief to have a friend that didn’t obsess on my style. He was more interested in societal change. We met up for craft beer and talked about city policy and the environment. We biked the county trails on the weekends. I didn’t think it could possibly lead to anything beyond friendship because I’m vain, and Jake, well, Jake is hairy in all the wrong places. He’s good about personal grooming, so it’s clean hair, but it’s everywhere. Also, he’s a bit gnomish in the face, which doesn’t quite work with his broad shoulders and unwieldy body. Yet there was an unselfconscious sexiness inside of him that over time, I couldn’t resist, and it had everything to do with him not making how I looked the basis of our relationship. He cared an awful lot about my perspective on issues, he listened to hours of my latest ideas on national curriculum initiative, and when he talked, he paid attention to my every reaction, which in my opinion, is what led to what happened in the bedroom. Sizzle. Bang. Pop. We got married.

Fast-forward seven years, and there I was my style undiminished and unaffected by marriage just as Jake’s lack of social convention in the physical sector remained the same. But somehow, there I stood, at Aric and Lou’s garage sale, staring at the framed Chippendales poster propped against the legs of a dining room chair. Each and every Chippendale – there were six of them – looking right at me, as if they knew something about me that I didn’t.

Aric walked over and stood beside me, his chin in his hand, relishing his thinker pose for a good moment before he said what he came over to say. “Well, here’s something we have in common.”

I blushed, still looking at the hard bodies with tuxedo bow ties and cuffs, waxed chests glowing. “Oh, I don’t know if I’d call this an interest,” I said. Jake and I were philosophically anti-objectification, which was not a mainstream view. Porn is touted as a relationship enhancer though there’s research that also shows the opposite; Jake and I felt quite sex positive without it and had agreed we’d each stay away. Chippendales weren’t porn, but they did objectify the male body. I couldn’t tear my eyes away.

“You know, they don’t dress that way anymore,” Aric said. “At least not everyone in a line, wearing the same bowtie and black pants. Now they all have different looks, though one might have a bowtie, another might have cuffs, as a nod to their individual brand. Lou and I were in Vegas in March, and wow, they’ve got an act.” He tapped the edge of the frame. “This here is vintage.”

“Love Vegas,” I said. I did, but not for the casinos or shows. It was the easiest place to use as home base for hiking the desert, climbing around Red Rock Canyon, and then going back to the hotel to have a phenomenal spa experience before an indulgent celebrity chef dinner. Jake and I made an annual trip of it.

“They cater to the ladies, though,” Aric said. He folded his arms and looked down at the poster. “Eighties Chippendales – you just can’t find that kind of glamour today.”

I pulled a lock of hair down and twisted, the thing I do when I’m not quite sure how to proceed. It was uncanny, their eyes. “Do you ever feel like they’re watching you?” I asked.

“Yes,” Aric said sidestepping first one way, then the other, his own eyes trained on the poster. “Oh yes! Mesmerizing, aren’t they?”

“You just made a sale.” I handed him a ten-dollar bill and he peeled off the blue price tag.

“Hang it in the bedroom,” Aric called after me, and I stopped halfway down the driveway. There was no way Jake could see this. Or know about it.

I went back up the sloping driveway toward Aric. I considered placing the poster in its spot against the chair, but that felt rude and somehow condemning of the conversation Aric and I had just had. As if I was above staring at a hard body. “Please don’t tell Jake,” I said to Aric. There must’ve been something vulnerable in my eyes because Aric’s eyes softened.

“Oh honey,” he said, his hand on my shoulder, “it’s like it never happened.”

“Thank you,” I said. As I walked back down the driveway to my car, I wondered if that had been pity in Aric’s eyes – oh I couldn’t stand to be pitied. My life with Jake was nothing to be pitied. Jake was not to be pitied.

I hefted the Chippendales inside and down the stairs into the basement furnace room, where I stared at them a long time. The Chippendales had stared back at me, their poster eyes following me the way that painting of Jesus did in the Vatican. I fluffed my hair and read approval in their eyes. I lowered my neckline. Yes, their eyes said. Yes, yes, yes.

No, I answered myself much later, after dinner with Jake, after wine, after soul-searing sex, where not only our bodies melded, but every single nebulous emotional brain cell forged into that mystical place. The Chippendales had nothing to do with this. I rubbed my palm across the dark hairs on Jake’s shoulders and he mumbled a line from a book we’d both read that was completely wrong for the moment – so completely and purposefully wrong that my laughter shook the bed.

If Jake found the Chippendales, I’d say it was a joke, a gag gift for my sister. I snuck downstairs while Jake snored. The Chippendales stared. Their eyes admired my flushed skin. I shook my head. No. I stuffed them behind the hot water heater, facing the cinder block wall, already forgetting them.

Back upstairs, I closed my eyes, at peace with myself and with Jake. I wanted exactly what I already had. I dreamed of six shirtless and soft-stomached Jakes in a line, dancing at me with bowties and tight pants, chest hair glossy with sweat, cuffs scratching up and down my body. I pulled off the six pairs of cuffs, the six bowties, the six pairs of pants, and naked, the Jakes melded into one giant Jake that lavished on me the shadowed intensity of morphing dreams.

Over the next weeks and months, Jake changed incrementally. He needed a belt for his jeans when previously his pouchy stomach held up his pants. His shoulders felt harder when I hugged him. He came home from work late, carrying a gym bag, and headed straight to the shower instead of the cutting board where we always chopped the salad veggies together. When we brushed our teeth at night, he didn’t notice the foamy faces I made in the mirror. He didn’t catch my eye in the mirror at all.

Then one Saturday I walked in on him in the bathroom. He was pulling wax strips off his chest, his surprisingly muscular chest, and barely flinching as the hair ripped out at the root. Three boxes of wax strips sat open on the counter. A bottle of self-tanner. Body oil. “It’s February,” I said. “February in Michigan.”

“Yeah, but we might want to go to the Caribbean last minute.” He leaned in and gave me a kiss. I saw his gaze flicker to the mirror as he kissed me a second time, getting the side of my face instead of the full-on lip press I was expecting. “How about it?” he said, flexing his biceps, his image rippling in the mirror. “Want to get my back?”

I pressed and pulled off long strips from his back. I rubbed in the self-tanner. He stood face forward toward the mirror. “You know you don’t have to do all this for me,” I said. “I love you the way you were. Exactly the way you were.”

He shrugged, and studied himself. He popped his pectorals up and down. “I like me this way,” he said.

I tried to catch his gaze, to laugh together over my raised eyebrows and pouty lips, but after a minute or two of him not noticing me, I gave up. I balled up the waxy hair strips and tossed them in the trash.

I went down to the basement. The Chippendales were still there, behind the water heater, facing the brick wall. I pulled them out. There was dust on the frame, but their faces and chests were polished clean, a round shadow of dusty haze around each one as if they’d each been rubbed like a genie lamp. I stared at their hard chests, their shiny white teeth, and finally, I stared into their eyes. One by one, down the line of Chippendales, I watched their eyes shift away. They no longer saw me. Their gazes stared beyond my shoulder, the way a bored partygoer looks around for the next conversation, looking for someone else who could do this all so much better.

#FlashFriday flash fiction micro fiction short fiction

NAME HER FOR HOPE —

by Ashanya Indralingam • September 18, 2020September 18, 2020 • 1 Comment

Photo by John Gillespie (copied from Flickr)

I was born at 6:04 p.m. on the 3rd day of the Moon’s skulking journey across the skylands. She is a child of Krithika, the temple priest tells my mother, and so her name must begin with the letter A. Krithika, one of the 27 Nakshatras, the daughters of King Daksha, each destined to spend just one starstruck night with the Moon, that crater-faced playboy of waxing lust and waning affections.

My mother is neither religious nor superstitious. She has just returned home to Malaysia with a Masters degree in Economics from the University of Wales. She is 32 years old, of sharp wit and strong will. She has no grand desire to be a mother, at least not with the feral yearning of the women of her time. But what she does have is an unnamed baby girl. And a first letter is better than nothing. Anything else? asks my mother, sneaking a glance at her watch. She is wearing her week-old motherhood with a grogginess that feels dangerous. Perhaps she can wrap this up in time for a quick nap before relieving her mother of the newborn.

The temple priest has a prominent diamond-shaped mole under his left eye, which he strokes absent-mindedly. Moles convey wisdom, everyone knows this. In his other hand he holds a laminated chart. A wheel with 12 sidereal solar signs, the ecliptics divided 27 times with coordinates, padas, and their rulers. He studies the cryptic circle, then looks to the sky. Only it is not a sky but the thrice-patched temple roof. The Krithika constellation consists of six stars that bear a resemblance to a knife, the temple priest says to my mother. Or a razor. Anyway, something sharp, he clarifies.

My mother thinks of the knife that cut me out of her. Her fingers go to graze the still-protruding stitches that welt across her lower abdomen. You forget the birth, her sisters tell her. The hormones, they wipe your memories. Do they also steal my Self? This part my mother says only inside her own head. She is independent and prone to speaking her mind, but even she knows some things are better left unsaid.

Your child is born in the presence of Agni, says the priest. The Sun God, he offers after a beat. My mother, with her short hair, and her ability to butcher even the most basic of Tamil words strikes him as too Westernized. She wears pants and a blouse to temple, not even a kurta. The priest wonders why a woman like this would even come to the Gods seeking a name for her child. He rolls his eyes toward the heavens and this time he notices the way dark-green mold is smearing itself across the cherubic faces of Shiva and Vishnu, creeping toward Brahma’s outstretched hands even. He sighs, taps his mole, and studies his chart. Baby naming and blessings pay the bills. The second syllable can be sha or aa, he volunteers. It will make her compatible and agreeable.

My mother thinks of all the things she hopes for this baby. None of them has anything to do with being agreeable. She feels a tap on her shoulder. Behind her, my father steps up, beaming a smile that hasn’t left his face since he first held his daughter. Here is the reason she has agreed to this charade. A husband who believes in the Gods when she does not. In his arms, he bears a silver tray laden with half a coconut, betel nut leaves, and a garland of still-wet frangipani flowers, freshly strung. My mother ushers him forward, grateful for his timely intervention.

My first child, says my father to the priest. We must give her a good name. The rolling r’s of his mother tongue flow from throat to lips effortlessly and put the priest at ease. Here is one who is clearly of the faith. Name her for hope, says the priest, reaching out to mark my father’s third eye with vibhuti. My father brings his palms together and bends his head to accept the sacred ash. Behind him, my mother heaves the tired sigh of a non-believer.

A Legacy of Aunting in the Literary Community

by Emily Verona • September 13, 2020September 13, 2020

“You are inimitable, irresistible. You are the delight of my life.”
—Jane Austen in a letter to her niece, Fanny, on February 20, 1816

I was twelve years old when my first niece was born, five years younger than Jane Austen was when little Fanny Knight came into her life. You don’t get a say in becoming an aunt. It just happens to you. No action or qualifications required. In my over twenty years as “Emmy” to the young children in my family, I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about what it means to be an aunt. It can mean nothing – people go their whole lives without meeting extended family members. I, for one, didn’t really see much of my aunts and uncles growing up. But when you take that role and nurture it – then it can blossom into something meaningful. Something beautiful. It can change your life. And theirs.

With five married brothers, Jane Austen had over thirty nieces and nephews. She did not know all of them well – some were born after her death, but there are some lovely first-hand accounts from those who did know and love her. Though Jane spent plenty of her time working on her novels, she also made room to write tender, thoughtful letters to Fanny throughout the girl’s youth – offering advice in love and life as only Jane Austen can offer it. And Fanny (though said to be her favorite) wasn’t the only niece she doted on. Anna Lefroy followed in her aunt’s footsteps by writing novellas and would often send those works to Jane, who would write back with thoughts and constructive suggestions. In 1817, as Jane’s own health was failing, the esteemed author continued to go out of her way to compose cute coded messages to amuse little Cassandra, a niece who was only eight years old at the time. The fact that Jane had heart and wit and want to mentor these girls and pen some of the most iconic novels in literary history remains the lens through which I enjoy viewing her most.

Growing up, I knew from a very young age that I wanted to be a novelist – a storyteller – and was subsequently fascinated by great women writers of the past. Jane Austen. Emily Dickinson. Virginia Woolf. Louisa May Alcott. With the exception of Virginia, these women never married. None of them had any children of their own. Such knowledge only deepened my curiosity – my almost familial love for them and what they represented for me.

I was born and remain the youngest of three children. I’ve never had much luck in love and, even if I did, I’ve never been sure about having children. I was diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) at the age of six. It’s heredity and by the age of twelve or so, I’d begun to worry about what I might pass on to my kids. It’s not a guarantee that your kids will have OCD just because you do but there is a chance and given all the emotional torment than can accompany the disorder, that chance was enough to frighten me. Eager to find meaning – to find solidarity – I started to look up to my childless literary icons even more so; I felt a kinship with their lifestyles and aspired to emulate their strength, talent, and self-possession. The, albeit small, ways our lives paralleled gave me comfort. They individuated themselves and, in doing so, defied social norms and expectations.

Louisa May Alcott was already thirty when she became an aunt. She never married, but two of her sisters did and in 1879 her youngest sister, Abigail May, died in Paris shortly after giving birth to her first child. It was May’s last wish that, in the event of her death, her daughter, Louisa “Lulu” May Nieriker, would be raised by her aunt and namesake in Massachusetts. The relationship between the acclaimed author of Little Women and Abigail May, a gifted painter in her own right, had not always been an easy one – there’d been competition and judgement and jealousy – but when it came to Lulu’s life there was no one May trusted more. And Louisa took Lulu into her home without question and continued to look after Lulu until her own death in 1888. I think about this dynamic sometimes, the love Louisa must have felt for this little creature she had never asked for – had never dreamed of knowing – but loved all the same.

This year, I turned thirty. My brother’s children – a daughter and a son – are both teenagers. My sister’s two girls are making their way through elementary school. I am single. Childless. I don’t own a home. My work is freelance – no benefits and definitely no “promotions” on the horizon. I know on a rational level that such markers are not necessarily signifiers of personal growth but they are so often viewed as such. ~~Subsequently~~Consequently, I compare myself to my siblings in these areas and see quite plainly that their paths are more conventional than mine. They are A to Z, whereas I’m A to Q to Y then back up to G again, then M, and finally just a long, infinite line of em dashes. But being an aunt to my nieces and nephew – that is something which, for me, feels like a solid. A constant. I might struggle with my sense of self – the worth of who I am and what I want – but I do know this: I can be good for them. I can enrich their lives in some small way. They need not be my own to have my heart. I see proof of our bond in how they grow – how my youngest nieces take on their own creative projects after years of my setting up crafts for them after school. I see it every time they laugh at an inside joke or when one of them is crying and I can distract her long enough with something silly so that she forgets how she’d stubbed her toe. I can wish them a Happy Birthday. Give them presents even when their parents tell me they don’t need more stuff. Text them words of encouragement and support for all their endeavors. Perhaps they don’t necessarily need all this extra affection, but they have it. I like to believe that means something.

Even Emily Dickinson – famous for her reclusive nature – was known to possess a gentler side when it came to her niece and nephew. It was said that she used to put treats for the children in a basket and lower them down into the yard from her bedroom window. And as they grew, her fondness for them grew too. “Although I was but seventeen then,” Emily’s niece, Martha, once wrote, “we talked of serious or imaginative things – situations in books – or wondered about the future, gravely comparing our absurdly unequal conclusions – without a sign on her part of the crudity of mine… She was always sweetly welcoming, though any interruption must have cut in on that time she so wanted; for Aunt Emily was busy, always busy. When she read, she was next busiest to when she wrote.”

Virginia Woolf’s brilliance (and mental health challenges) loom so large that we often forget that she could be anything other than what history has shaped her to be. “She is often portrayed as unmaternal but this seems inaccurate,” notes Virginia’s great-niece, Emma Woolf, in Newsweek. “She adored looking after her sister Vanessa’s children, and she and Leonard hoped for a family of their own.” Virginia had just turned twenty-six when Vanessa’s son, Julian, was born. Four years later Virginia married fellow writer Leonard Woolf, but the bipolar disorder which hounded the writer throughout her life convinced everyone – Leonard, Vanessa, the doctors – that she could not endure the physical and emotional strain of motherhood. Virginia’s opinions on the matter became secondary, but regardless of what she wanted the facts remained the same. Here was a woman who would not have children. She knew she would not have children and so she also must have known that watching her sister’s children grow would be her only opportunity to witness or experience anything in that realm.

“You are inimitable, irresistible,” Jane wrote to her dear Fanny, . “You are the delight of my life.” I know this feeling well, for my nieces and nephew are the delight of mine. I love these four kids so completely and it is such an exceptional love because it is one that I never expected to encounter. I thought you had to be a parent to feel this way, but when I think about my relationship with them – the way Jane wrote so movingly to Fanny … there is something cosmically cohesive about being involved in their lives. Watching them grow. Contributing to their childhoods. I know my love for them is not maternal, but there is an instinctiveness to that love – a protectiveness. I cherish them as well as the indelible mark they’ve left on me. The capacity for compassion they’ve nurtured in me. I don’t always know what moves to make in my own life, but I know the role I’ve taken on for them. It is uncomplicated. It is steadfast. I know who I am for these kids – and through that sureness of self I know I will find my way. There has always seemed, at least to me, to be a legacy of aunting in the literary community – and I take comfort in knowing it is a community to which I belong.

Catch and release

by Scott Rothschild • September 13, 2020September 13, 2020

A crazy woman moved into our building. She came from the apartments across the street that are being torn down, the ones my Mom and Dad call the welfare building. When she walks through the courtyard where me and my friends are playing, she talks to us, asks how old we are and what grade we’re in. Once she said to me and my friend Anna, “Girls, enjoy this beautiful day.”

Her name is Mrs. Delaney. Her makeup smells sweet. She hurries up the stairs and opens her window and sits there, holding a long, black-handled knife and waves it around and screams curse words about people who she says have done bad things to her. Her shouts echo off the walls of the courtyard until her voice gets sore and then she slams her window shut so hard that it sounds like a gunshot. I’ve seen and heard Mrs. Delaney do this several times.

My Dad tells me, “Don’t bother her.” But my Mom says, “Someone should help that poor woman.” And my Dad says, “Help her? She’s harmless.” Then my Mom says, “I want to move out of this neighborhood.”

My friend Anna wants to go fishing. I don’t know where she gets these ideas. Anna’s Dad is the building super and they live in the cellar where you can see the pipes near the ceiling.

Anna has a German Shepherd named Bonita and two large fish tanks and a bird cage that usually has two parakeets. Every now and then one of the parakeets dies and Anna and I have to bury it in the park with a crucifix that Anna’s Mom makes out of a pen and a pencil taped crossways. She says the bird can write letters from heaven with the pen and when the ink runs out, it can use the pencil. Last time, the ground was frozen so hard we threw the bird and crucifix in the trash.

Anna’s Dad has fishing stuff, so he gives us spools of line and hooks and little lead weights and shows us how to throw the line. He gives us half a loaf of bread to make little balls of bread to use as bait. My parents say Anna’s Dad drinks too much.

We get off the bus where Anna says we can walk to the river. There’s garbage and tires and even a refrigerator half submerged in the water. We sit on a rock and throw our lines past the mud. Either the fish aren’t hungry for our bread balls or they’re sleeping or there just aren’t any there.

We give up fishing and jump from rock to rock. We pick up some dead tree limbs and use them for balance. With the tree limb, I poke what looks like a garbage-can lid. But the object jerks quickly, stirring mud in a black cyclone.

It’s a giant turtle, not the kind you see beneath a little plastic palm tree in Woolworth’s. It looks like a prehistoric animal. Its bumpy shell is covered with river muck.

Anna and I use our sticks to push it to shore. Once the turtle is on the bank, I bend over and start to pick it up from either side of its shell, when the turtle’s head pops out and then bending backward, goes half way up its shell, snaps at me and then disappears back into the shell.

I drop the turtle and jump back. Then a hissing sound comes from the turtle. It sounds like it is on fire. The turtle waits a few moments and then slowly turns, sliding back into the river.

Anna is already jumping to other rocks. She shouts and I look and she has found another turtle but this one is much smaller. Its legs stretch out as Anna holds it high in the air. “I’m keeping him,” Anna says.

We find a bag to put the turtle in. Several people on the bus ride home give us advice. “Don’t let that turtle out on the fire escape,” one man said. Anna smiles. “I won’t,” she says, “we live underground.”

Back at Anna’s, her Mom and several of Anna’s aunts sit around the kitchen table drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes and talking. Her mother isn’t happy with Anna because of our fishing trip, about Anna’s Dad giving us fishing stuff and the new turtle and tells us, pointing with her cigarette hand, to put the turtle in the bathroom and go outside. We sit on the stoop wondering if we are in trouble.

Suddenly our screaming woman approaches us. Her lipstick is smeared. Mrs. Delaney remembers our names and asks us how our summer is going and Anna starts to tell her about fishing and the turtles. I tell her how the big turtle almost bit me. “That sounds like a wonderful adventure,” Mrs. Delaney says. “I bet you’ll think twice before poking an old animal again,” she says to me. She smiles and reaches in her purse and takes out two quarters and gives me one and Anna one.

She climbs the stairs to her apartment. Soon we hear her yelling out the window and see her waving that knife. People step over us on the stoop, going home, and don’t even seem to notice.

#FlashFriday Editor's Pick flash fiction micro fiction short fiction

ARMBARS–IOWA CITY 1995

by Uzodinma Okehi • September 11, 2020September 11, 2020

Photo by Seyi Ogunyemi (copied from Flickr)

1. As I’d begun to do lately, get out paper, my stack of comics from under the bed. I start drawing.

Jittery, a twiddling, nerve-pulling runway, touch-down, to pencil scratching, scratching, then, finally loose, pulling fast, mostly figures and buildings — clench-fist, huge-foot-figures, and as always like I’m really moving, lunging, soaring all over the room inside my skull . . .

Also, a disturbing pattern! And already, how many times, seeing some girl, even only once, and from that point, life feels somehow sweepingly altered. Not that I’m not gonna fuck Inez. Because I’m right there, just gotta break through . . . Also! And also, that table I had in my room, at six, seven years old, with legs to look like giant pencils, and feeling absurdly, thrillingly into it, this drawing all night, and sitting here with paper and pencil, funny the little details I remember . . .

Drawing, The Movie and Inez, and non-secrets of my distant childhood past. An hour? Maybe three. Sweat under my arms. And none of it makes sense anymore, drawing the same hooked line over and over, down the page. Until the phone rings. Without thinking, I get up off the floor.

Blind man, groping, like a cat scratching — and what am I even drawing? Not cities, just lines, line after line. Not even ideas, not yet, feelings, curlicues, into drawing up off the corner of the page, and easy billowing, the steam off those motherfucking Chinese, Asian mountains . . .

But from the vantage point of — I don’t know, a floating world. And, ok. Second or third week, boxing class. I’d been pumped, about everything, The Movie, when he’d first showed us that front round kick I’d stepped up, I was able to really crush into the bag, or it at least sounded impressive, but also no real weight behind it, I could tell, the way he was watching, because everyone was getting excited, kind of pumped too, hi-fiving me when it was my turn again, Leah, that was her name, I remember her saying, Wow, or something, close to my ear, her hand on my arm, for a second, and Keith there saying nothing, but watching; tiny, deep-set, dead eyes, in his mesh shorts, probably thinking how quickly he could take me apart with elbows, about armbars, about punching me in the face, knocking my teeth out, or whatever.

All the drawing. Because of the number one thing me and Abdul had agreed on; non-stop action.

“So I’ll draw it.” As opposed to a script. No problem. I’d seen a picture somewhere, of Hollywood storyboards, looked a lot like comics. That next day, downtown, to Daydreams, I get a random stack. Deep-80’s. Avengers. Ann Niocenti Daredevils. DC’s Checkmate. Few things with Gil Kane drawing the covers . . .

And here, months later, still no script! Still stuck, erasing, re-drawing, same blank-face guy, running. Like, doing some kind of retarded squat lunge — no, wipe it, instead, hatch over that back leg, vertical strokes, now, ok, running . . .

Middle school. To maybe, tenth grade. The entire world there in my room, sitting, reading comics, filling sketchbooks. And I hadn’t drawn much, not since then, but right back to that same feeling, buzzing, welling up, and in a strange, almost cosmic way, connecting everything . . . Scene from Fist of Legend! Jet Li jumps up, snaps dude’s leg, like that, same excitement, and, (ha!) — Keith as the perfect big boss waiting atop the pagoda, drunken kung fu fight like, like drawing, man, FPS, like 15 frames per second!

Blocked

by Reggie Gilliard • September 7, 2020September 7, 2020 • 1 Comment

Had she slid her plant back a few inches the night before? The plant was a gift and she treated it with abundant care: it was repositioned as the seasons changed to catch sunlight, watered diligently, spoken to, plant-sat when Vi herself couldn’t attend to it. Weekly she slid it out of its usual spot to sweep up dead leaves and dirt. Yesterday was that day. She could remember preparing a pitcher of water, and wetting the soil until it was damp to the touch. Could remember the browning leaves, flecks littering the floor. Could remember setting the pot back in the same spot that it always sat, enough space separating it from the wall to allow for its leaves to droop, lightly, at the end of their stalks. This morning the leaves brushed the wall, beginning to bend. She pulled the plant a few inches toward her.

Her curls fell about the sides of her head as she unwrapped her scarf, coiled like loaded springs after last night’s sleep. She was content to leave them that way. Violet worked from home, which meant trips to cafes and libraries to maintain her sanity, followed by bouts of hermitic reclusion. Today was a day of the latter sort. She would hunker down on her couch – a cup of tea to the right, laptop centered, and two warm, day-old scones to her left – trying to turn the phrase that her cursor had been blinking, mockingly, in the middle of for days.

The screech of the kettle beckoned her across the short length of her apartment. In her hurry to turn it off – the walls here were thin and she was careful to be considerate of the neighbors – Vi knocked over the cinnamon which she kept precariously perched on the ledge of the stove, just above the oven timer. Frustration flared as Vi watched the little bottle careening through the air. There was a small gap between the stove and the wall, too small for most of her spices to fit into, but big enough for her cinnamon, which was packaged in a container a quarter of the size of the others. Her cinnamon falling behind the oven would mean that she’d have to move the oven; having to move the oven meant she’d have to deal with whatever was behind the oven. The prospect didn’t excite her. The cinnamon had fallen last week too and, as she’d scooted the range forward to grab it, a mouse dashed for a hole in the wall, squeezed in, and disappeared. That was the first time she’d seen any pests in this apartment; she’d sealed the hole and placed traps all throughout the kitchen (if the corner of a one-room studio could be called that) the same day. But she couldn’t be sure that the mouse was gone. Vi wasn’t in the mood to do battle with a rodent, even a small one, at this time of day.

The cinnamon didn’t fall. It got caught in the gap that, just last week, it had slipped into. Violet was grateful, but surprised. Her efforts to close that gap last week had failed, she was sure. Pipes and knobs protruding from the wall and the oven meant the chasm was something she would just have to live with. Still, she could not deny what she was seeing; the cinnamon was still neatly wedged between the oven and the wall as proof. She slid it out and placed it on the stove.

Still poring over the cinnamon, Vi poured her cup of tea. She popped two scones into the convection oven. They’d be ready in minutes, but she could use that time writing: Lord knows she needed it. Writer’s block didn’t do justice to the rhetorical drought that Vi currently found herself in. It went beyond having no ideas – she couldn’t find the right words to say anything. Her sole consolation, if there was one, was that she undoubtedly did her best work at home. She was hopeful that today would bring the deluge of metaphors and similes that she was used to enjoying.

This was not to be. Every clever idea she’d ever had sunk into the soft fabric of the seat as her body did. Five minutes later, when the scones were ready, Vi was in the same place that she’d started. Now she found herself torn between the desire to produce a single word and her aversion to burnt food. Reluctantly she wrenched herself away from her spot on the couch and headed toward the kitchen. Though her body moved, her mind did not follow. Vi was consumed by the unchanged page.

She bumped into the kitchen counter three steps later, so engrossed was she in thought. But three steps was too soon and this realization broke Violet’s trance. Her apartment was small – a one-room studio with a couch and bed along the north and south walls, and the kitchen and a set of three windows on the west and east wall respectively – but it wasn’t so small as to be traversed in three steps – not unless the person walking was tall enough to play on a professional basketball team. Vi whirled around, perplexed, hoping to see something that would explain how she’d reached the kitchen so quickly.

What she saw added further to the mystery. Normally the sun shone through Vi’s windows and gave her room a warm glow. It lit up the tiles separating the bed and couch from the wall, but the light never touched either piece of furniture. The sun rose and passed overhead, its rays never quite reaching the mahogany legs that supported her bed, never reflecting off of the blue fabric of her couch. Until today. Today, streaks stole across the couch’s armrest and the bed’s footboard. They crept slowly, as tendrils, further up and along her upholstery.

Surely her eyes were playing tricks on her? Surely there had been other days when the sunlight had touched her couch or bed? Try as she might she couldn’t remember those days. She had spent some part of every morning in this apartment for the better part of a year now; likely as it seemed that she was simply mistaken, she wasn’t ready to believe that she’d been so inattentive, for so long.

She began walking, slowly, toward her windows. She’d made it about halfway before a grating sound, as wood on metal, drew her attention back toward the kitchen: back toward the oven. Vi knew what must have been the source of the sound. She whipped around and froze, stunned by what she saw. The oven, which shortly before had been separated from the wall was now firmly pressed against it. Its metal legs were scraping Vi’s hardwood floors as the whole apparatus advanced toward her. An onlooker, entering the scene at this moment, surely would have thought her mad were it not for the din. The oven’s movement was almost imperceptible. Yet for Violet, who lived with this oven every day, it was unmistakable.

In an instant it was clear to Vi what was happening and clear what she needed to do. She judged the pace of the oven and assumed she had ten minutes. Ten minutes before she either suffocated or was crushed by the walls of her apartment. Ample time. She slipped on a pair of shoes and headed for the door. A simple solution to a simple problem. If the apartment was intent on shrinking, fine, but Vi didn’t need to be present when the constriction was complete.

Constriction, though, does not proceed through the application of localized pressure. No, when a predator constricts it encircles, applies pressure from all angles. Vi learned the horror of constriction as she looked up at her door. It was no longer its usual shape. The pressure of the walls bearing in on either side had made it convex. It was growing increasingly warped every second. She tried the lock – it didn’t budge. Even if she’d been able to open it, though, the latch she’d installed on the inside of the door was now impossible to unhinge. She tried bursting through, shoulder first – tried kicking it open. Nothing worked. Two minutes and several beads of sweat later, she was no closer to making it out of this sarcophagus.

Vi whipped around and made for the windows. On the second floor the choice she faced was between death and broken bones. She would choose broken bones every time. Unfortunately, that choice was not hers to make. The vice grip that her apartment now found itself under had already decided she was not to exit that way either. Her portals to the outside world – the ones that had sustained her and her plant, the ones she had sat near on rainy days to watch as people scurried to safety and listen as cars whooshed by – were now no more than two-inch slits. Vi tried to muscle them open, but it was impossible to pry them loose of their locks.

Tools! She grabbed a wrench, hammer, screwdriver; went to work on the windows prying, screwing, trying to shatter. After two minutes she was getting nowhere and, frankly, she knew that, even if she did manage to eek one window open, there was no hope in fitting through it.

The windows, then, weren’t an option. The tools, however, brought new hope. Maybe she could unscrew the latch she’d had installed or, if that didn’t work, maybe she would be able to remove the door from its hinges entirely.

To access the screws which secured the door to the wall one had to be able to open the door. Detaching it entirely would be impossible. Vi went to work on the door latch. A minute later, the latch clanged to the floor. A smile crept across Vi’s face for the first time since she’d realized the walls were closing in on her. She set to work unscrewing the deadbolt next. The first screw slid out in seconds. Vi spun the next. It turned, and the smile became a large grin. It turned further and Vi felt her heart jump, warmth flush through her, her focus intensify. It turned further. It turned further still. The grin began to fade. It turned. Vi’s blood ran cold. The screw turned for what felt like a full minute before Vi conceded that it was not loosening. It wasn’t her, Vi was working more furiously than she ever had, but the deadbolt was old – the screw was old. The screw was stripped. It was not going to come out.

She let the screwdriver clang to the floor. Flung the wrench across the ever-shortening length of her apartment. Violet had exhausted every escape option she could think of. Sweat skied down her cheeks, tears welled up in her eyes, her shoulders slackened, tension flowed out of her muscles, and the fight drained from her body. She estimated that she had about two minutes left to live, and, rather than fight, she finally gave up resisting and began to make peace. She was going to die. The walls now circumscribed her furniture almost perfectly. The bed and couch were touching, the plant’s leaves were slowly being crushed, and her kitchen was in her “living room.” Vi had nowhere to go. She flopped on the couch, defeated. The laptop still rested in the place it had been when she’d begun writing this morning, cursor blinking as if to mock her. That could not stand. She may not have been able to stop the relentless march of the walls, nor could she stop whatever force had set this process in motion, but she could stop the unchanged page from redoubling her failure.

For the first time in days, too, she had plenty to write about. It takes a lifetime to come to peace with dying, for those that ever do. Vi had only minutes and this fact brought a flood, not of metaphors and witty language, but of sincere questions: What would she tell her parents if she had one more opportunity to speak to them? Her friends? Her sister? Who deserved an apology that she’d never gotten around to giving? Who did she admire – respect, appreciate – that she hadn’t told? What had she put off, for fear of failure or judgement, that she should have done? And how insignificant was that phrase, for a piece her heart wasn’t in, for a publication that didn’t care about her career?

Vi had thirty seconds to let as much of this thought and emotion flow out of her as she could. Thirty seconds before she was pressed between two walls and made paste. Thirty seconds to do the writing she should have been doing from the start. Thirty seconds to write how she really felt. Thirty seconds, yet for Vi, there was no pressure. Her mind was clear; she knew what she wanted to say.

She typed the first sentence. The walls stopped.

Coronavirus, or the voices to forget

by Aaron Hughes • September 1, 2020September 1, 2020

Art by Arsène Marquis.

The power of language

Language is not neutral. It shapes what we can and can’t say, and how we say it. It gives us the flesh of our worldview, the bits and pieces we use to express everything we feel, and everything we think. At the same time, in the exact same gesture, it marks out the edges of this worldview, the places where words dry up, our voices with them.

Language was born of power. The worldview it puts together is not banal, the product of some aseptic or immaterial history. It is the view of the dominant ideology, of a series of beliefs that structure capitalist society and push it forward. The “what” and “how” of language – the ideas it makes sayable, the images it lays out before us, the spaces of discussion it opens and forecloses – are entirely determined by the people in power.

[…]

Language is a vector of capitalist ideology, and capitalism centres around norms, an ideal of the subject. It works to frustrate the expression of lives beyond a male, cisgender, white, heterosexual, able-bodied norm, to make them unspeakable. We have made up our own words to describe ourselves, and the violence done to us. We have reclaimed words once used against us. Language rubs out our bodies as lived, redraws them in its own image. We see this when we look beyond it.

Language and ideology move forward together, confirm each other in reciprocity, so that the space for speaking to life outside the norm tapers to nothing. Health, too, is an ideal. It points to the logic of maximal productivity, the need to extract the most work from people. In a society underwritten by this logic, there is no place for illness. The sick and the unwell embody the limits of the capitalist project, the flaw in its founding logic. There can be no space to talk of illness as it is lived, or for people to take up “being ill” as a political identity.

There are no words to express pain, of any kind. Part of the agony of illness, of periods, of sexual violence, comes from our having everything to say and no way to say it. When we are sick, or in pain, or traumatised, language comes apart in our throats. We choke on the unsaid. Sometimes, we speak to something, make our own words. Write poems, or poetry. We place, here and there, the rough-hewn bricks of something to be built, but not yet so.

As it picks apart our vocal cords, language rips the telling of our stories from our hands. Our silence pays testimony to the vice of a language found wanting. And yet, it is taken for our complicity. If nothing is being said, there must be nothing to say. Above the silence, the story of illness comes to be told in the third person. It unfolds through the plagiarism of lives and bodies. And the sick – bound up and mutilated – can do little to stop it.

Silencing the “others”

Only a real human discourse could communicate illness as it is lived, as is stretches out through time. In its place, society is fed a diet of crumbs and old chestnuts: the story of an illness that moves on, leaves no mark, that is scrubbed of pain and fluids. Enraptured, we lap up a whole mythology of illness, where the hero always gets the better of his condition. Where he takes back his rightful place in society, and becomes productive once again.

The foundations are laid out. There is the good sick person, who doesn’t complain, who stays upbeat, who recovers, who regains his strength and who, needless to say, is rarely a woman, and even more rarely a person of colour, or poor, or fat. And there are the others. Those already shunned for their race, their gender, their bodies. Those who cry out and moan, or whose bodies are marked or twisted with illness, carry its slant. And above all, those who refuse to contort themselves (back) into the injunction to productivity.

They must be silenced, at all costs. Stories of illness that inspire concern or disgust make sick people into human beings. They embody a refusal of the requirement for us to create, to invest, to (re)produce endlessly. Their silence is imperative. The sick must be emptied of any substance, stripped of their humanity. The human urge to identify with others must be fractured, rent apart: there must be no empathy, no connection, no reciprocity.

The sick person must be different, “other”. Must not be “us”. That is, apart from the “good” sick person, the one who gets better, or who keeps quiet. He knows his role well, doesn’t blush, doesn’t corpse as he plays the model citizen. He is welcomed back into the fold, the ranks of “us”, with open arms. A golden example of state values. A person we would do well to identify with, a figurehead for the requirement to be ever more productive.

But if sick people make too much noise, or the wrong noise, or if they defy the injunction to get better, they are firmly pushed out of the “us” that claims to be universal. Are made to be “them”. Just as people of colour, queer people, disabled people are pushed out. Along with the fat, and the ugly. Along with women who wear burqas or niqabs. Society folds itself in two, bisects itself into those who are complicit, and those who never could be.

Language firms up this distinction. Makes it seem natural, organic even. Language defines the parameters of our worldview: the duplicity of society is taken up and reproduced as given in every dialogue, every discourse. Language gives voice to those within the norm to take it from those without. It works to strip us of the stories and the bodies that we have given and that we still give everything to articulate.

And us, the others, not the “us” of society, we are left screaming and soundless. We have no pens, no paper, no tongue, no windpipe, even, to speak up or out. They hand us words to talk about our bodies: disinfected, hard, unable to convey the truth that we live. They weigh us, measure us. Rummage about inside us. They talk about our bodies and our pain in a foreign language. The language of doctors, of pathology and pharmaceuticals.

With careful, gloved hands, medicine amputates our tongue (that already was hanging by a thread). It cuts out our voice box, sews up our lips, and all in the name of science.

[…]

Metaphors, or the dust in our eyes

The exercise of rewriting our stories relies upon metaphor. […] Metaphors paint illness as war. The sick are fighters: they fight against disease. Or they are victims, people who lost their battle with illness. And doctors, for their part, have a whole therapeutic arsenal at their disposal. Illness is also invasion: of foreign bodies that break down, that infest, that eat away. Imperceptibly. A violation of the borders of the body. We talk about illness in these ways, and often without recognising the damage.

[…]

The primary function of metaphor is to convey an idea. To attach, through image and association, a set of meanings to something. And because the metaphors used to talk about illness are taken for granted, the meanings they convey are too. When illness is war, we must speak of an enemy. When there are victims, we must talk of guilt. When there is invasion, we must point to an outside, and an outsider. Metaphor has naturalised a vision of illness that speaks to foul play, to the existence of a hostile, foreign element. An enemy.

In a society that takes up metaphor unthinkingly, the intimate affair of lived illness is reworked into a story of two halves, ripe for public consumption. Refracted through this artifice, the sick person is called upon to play victim and culprit. But they are the only person in the line-up. Society finds them guilty. The trial was staged, it had to be: in the duplicitous logic that splices up society, health equals innocence, and illness equals guilt.

And if or more exactly when the sick person is found guilty, they lose their rights. They are not owed anything. No sympathy. No care that is deemed unnecessary, or too expensive. No time-consuming explanations. No attention paid to the ways that their body is touched or moved. No need to invite them to parties or to meetings. No adequate support from the state. No adjustments to the social landscape to level things out. Society points to their guilt and refuses to pay a penny more than it deems necessary on improving their lives.

It suits the established “us” to have a reason to banish the sick. They were always looking for one. They are loath to be reminded that illness can happen to anyone. They jump on this fiction, lap it up. It’s an international bestseller. The moral of the story? Illness is the sum total of poor life choices. If you get sick, you asked for it.

Society takes up this mantra, learns it by heart. Greedily. In desperation, almost. It beats beneath every conversation, every piece of gossip, every children’s story. As if immunity could be learned off by heart. As if making fiction into fact was the only vaccine we ever needed. They slip on the emperor’s new clothes, and drink to their good health.

The imperative to other

Sick people are pushed out, come to find themselves in the margins with the rest of us. Here is the underside of the logic of production: the logic of destruction. They go hand in hand. What must be destroyed? Anything and everything that points to the flaws in the capitalist project. A project that is also that of white supremacy, of the Church, of the heterosexual family, of the gender binary, of the beauty myth. It seeks to erase any body that is undesirable: deformed, lacking, dirty, corrupted. Any body that ruins the view.

It wasn’t enough to cut out our tongues. They must cut us out of their world.

After all, there isn’t enough to go around. A nontruth made truth. Not enough money, not enough housing, not enough love. People must be made to set themselves apart, fight among themselves, tear resources from each other’s hands. To struggle with one another, rather than against the system. All in the name of a hierarchy of value that itself is pure façade. Thought up by rich white men who wanted to eat their lobster in good conscience. Take care, sir, remorse doesn’t pair well with the delicate flavour of oysters.

But they aren’t serving lobster in hospital. Nor are they serving oysters. The entire apparatus of the regime tends toward reproducing the distinction between “us” and “them”, making it real. That’s the real pearl of capitalism: all of society is dragged into an endless struggle to be recognised as one of “us” and, to do so, must make a point of designating the people who should be “others”. Game, set, and match.

Except the game was rigged from the start. Majority rules, you see. You only have to put two and two together. […] And sick people, of course, will always be in the minority. Will see themselves confined to the margins. At least until they recover, if that is even possible. If the cost of recovery isn’t too high. Some will, and will take up their place among the ranks of “us”. Will turn their pockmarked, purpling skin inside out and slip back into the norm. Others won’t be able to. Still more others were already cast out. The winds of change blow softly indeed.

In all this, every new illness, every new nonwhite ethnicity, every new expression of sexual desire, in short, any new way of being a body will take up this distinction of “us” and “them” when it emerges in Europe or North America. Its place is already laid out, neat, level. Has been for ever. Since the capitalist project birthed a need for the “us” to endlessly observe and appraise, to cleave ways of being a body into the palatable and the unsavoury, the appealing and the disgusting. The new, the foreign, the not-“us”, must always be “other”.

[…]

A virus like any other

Coronavirus is nothing new. Not for us, anyway. Not for the “others” who have seen this before. With the first whispers of plague we could make out the sound of the old machine coughing back into action. Unhinging its jaw. We watched from afar as politicians passed notes to one another, shared wide wry smiles. We watched up close as suspicion spread through the streets. We saw, because we’ve seen it before, how your eyes grew weary, how you pulled your children in tighter, how you crossed the street at the sight of us.

Maybe it will be different, this time. After all, you talk of heroes and victims, of doctors who get sick and who die, even. We know that anyone can get ill. Maybe the sick will be spared, this time. How can society cut itself up, find an “us” and a “them”, when everyone could have the virus, or spread it? And after all, haven’t we been told that “we’re in this together”? That we all have a part to play in the “national effort”?

All of these things are true. Except: the unity of some implies the disunity of others. Their exclusion. We can only come together in the face of something, or someone, else. And to talk of a “national effort”, we must have a nation. And nation, at its very root, implies non-nation, foreignness: the logic beneath national unity is that of international disunity. So that the “we” who are “in this together” is not everyone, but a specific subsection of society, “us”. The powerful wave these grand ideals in the air, their fingers crossed behind their backs.

Lest we forget: we are at war. The entire country is being called up. The contours of our world are redrawn as war zones. Our hospitals are the front line, the trenches. Our doctors and nurses are soldiers, heroes, martyrs. There are field hospitals, and war cabinets. The air grows heady with the sick-sweet perfume of nostalgia. For blitz spirit, for wars gone by, for national heroes. Even the Queen does a turn, gets us all dancing to the beat, humming along to Vera Lynn’s wartime classic. “We’ll meet again.” We get drunk on the past.

People must be made to see: we are under attack. Bombarded on all fronts. In the minds of the public, Europe has become a battlefield. And to speak of war is to speak of an adversary: foreign, hostile, savage, immoral, infidel. To point to a mysterious not-us who is the antithesis, the exact opposition of our national values. “Nation” has long since been a synonym for “us”. The amalgam of enemy and “others” is a foregone conclusion.

But coronavirus is not a war. It is a virus. It has no will, no ill intentions. The war metaphor implies a force that is hostile, belligerent: the virus is neither.

[…]

Coronavirus, our worst enemy

When the virus is pictured as an invasion, people begin to look around themselves to find the source, the enemy within. The danger could be anywhere. The killer hides in plain sight, commits atrocities in broad daylight. Invasion drives our obsession with people who don’t have symptoms, and with “super-spreaders”. Perhaps the enemy knows they have the virus, perhaps they don’t. Anyone could be culpable. Society becomes a house of cards, a shifting mesh of mutual suspicion, where everyone is guilty until proven innocent.

The enemy takes shape, or better, takes shapes. It could be the person who coughs, their mouth uncovered, or the people who stray too close to one another. Perhaps it is the kid out skateboarding in the street, when everyone should be home, or the elderly or disabled person who rests for too long on a park bench. It may be the hoarder who has bought up all our supplies. The eye of suspicion falls on them, takes note, moves on. Social media echoes endlessly with hysteria, the same few tales of defying the new world order.

In the ardent exchange of accusations and hearsay, the enemy fills out. It remains foreign and hostile and cunning, but distends out in different directions. It accumulates sins and flaws. This is Schrödinger’s enemy, a figure of paradox whose inconsistencies only add to its menace. The enemy we weave is both active and passive, both the malicious agent of infection and its unknowing accomplice. In the first case, it is the criminal, spiteful, the epitome of evil. In the second, it is reckless and foolish. Either way, it is dangerous.

And yet, even as it takes form, it still lacks a face. Better still, it has too many faces. The enemy could be anything: it becomes a repository for everything we despise. The enemy could be anyone: it won’t be. Society is already riven with a distinction between the good and the bad, the “us” and the “them”. Irresistibly, the new division takes up the old one: “us” has always been shorthand for citizen and patriot, just as “them” was always code for enemy, for “other”. The new sustains the claims of the old, and vice versa. Ad absurdum.

[…]

This is how the tale unfolds. How they rewrite history before it takes place, a history that, in any case, couldn’t have been written any other way. Us, the “others”, we saw it coming. We’re used to being your scapegoats. The mistrust in your eyes is nothing new. Nor is your presumption of our guilt. Queer, people of colour, sick, disabled: we’ve grown up with the burn of your eyes on our napes, the frisk of your intrusive hands. We’ve long borne the weight of an identity marked out as improper, impure, ignorant, inferior.

The real collateral damages

Still, we see the danger. Better than most. Those of us who have made our homes in the margins, who drape ourselves in shadows: we already pay handsomely for our sins. We are long shed of our illusions. The costs will be extortionate. Not least because now, we are no longer abstract threat, some menace on the horizon, but the enemy of the people. The angel of death itself. The hands around the throats of those who grow cold.

We were once the possibility of the destruction of society. Now, we are its realisation.

Our lives were already precarious. Many of us don’t have homes, or heating, or a way to feed ourselves. We work part-time, on zero-hours contracts, or on no contract at all. If we even have a job, that is. We were already in financial ruin, isolated, exposed. We already lived violence of all kinds, everywhere. In public and in private. We were already walking on eggshells. And so we clench our teeth, and wait for you to strike.

Not directly, of course. Not most of the time. You only have to bide your time. Our bodies are depleted: from where they are left untreated, or starving, or red and wincing with the violence of your hands or your mouths. Illness is not a neutral event. It takes place in our bodies, that are run down, that are marked with addictions or violence. Our immunity has been compromised: we are more likely to get sick, and more likely to suffer complications.

To be clear: we are going to die more quickly and in greater numbers than you. In your prisons: you’ll say we shouldn’t have broken the law. In your clinics, your care homes: you’ll say that we were vulnerable, we were already on the way out. (At least now the kids can have the house.) Rather you than “us”, the good ones. The healthy, innocent ones.

And when we die, who will count the bodies? Who will count the bodies of the homeless who die in the street or in shelters, of hunger or cold or of a lack of care, because people still don’t give a fuck? Who will count the bodies of the women killed by their partners? Of the men killed by theirs? Who will count the bodies of the people who take their own lives after months of abuse, or of isolation? We aren’t holding out any hope.

Because if we are the enemy, if we are guilty, then we don’t deserve your sympathy. We don’t even deserve your healthcare. When we fall ill, we confirm your suspicions. Stoke the fire of division and, in doing so, further undermine our claims to fair treatment. The hierarchy of value that already determined our possibilities comes to determine the value of our lives. How much is a life worth? Very little, it would seem, if it’s one of ours.

This is how you justify what should be – what are – impossible choices: of who gets help, of who we care for, of who deserves a bed. Of who we save, and who we leave to die. (You leave us to die.) In your eyes, that see in metaphors, we deserve to die: we are to blame for our own sickness as well as other people’s. Here is the function of the division of society: it reduces our claim to equal treatment, to compassion and care, to humanity.

Inhuman, and prohibited from reclaiming our humanity, our lives are worthless.

Perhaps the deepest irony is that we can’t die. Not in your eyes, at least. We were never alive, never full subjects to you: how could we die? We were only ever the outline of a body stripped of emotion or desire or pain. Because language has stamped out our capacities for storytelling. And it is in the exact space that separates from society, the space of silence, that is charged with the unsaid and the unsayable, that we expire, soundlessly. You will throw our bodies in nameless graves, and try to forget.

(This essay has been abridged for this publication.)

Neighbors

by Chris Cascio • September 1, 2020September 1, 2020

The blonde spent about half of each day out on that new porch. She was this pale little thing with gaunt eyes and tattoos on her calves, and she always had the baby in her arms – a beautiful little girl with black, curly hair. When the baby wasn’t on her mother’s hip she tottered along the planks trailed by a pack of yammering, clumsy young pups. Downstage in the yard, the husband worked on cars and motorcycles and tended to the adult Pit Bulls in the kennels.

The blonde’s father had built the porch. He’d re-lined the pool and then built the surrounding deck. And the fire pit. It was a big yard, and he was always there in the beginning. This wiry guy with white curls reaching out from beneath a blue baseball cap. He’d erected the fence and the covered dog kennels at the head of the driveway. He probably remodeled the inside of the house, too. It looked like they’d pretty much gutted the place after buying it, judging by the pile out near the road. Then, after the work was done, we just didn’t see him anymore – just the blonde and the baby and her husband and all his buddies. And the dogs.

Well, I didn’t see him anymore. Laurie didn’t really pay attention to any of that, and she wasn’t thrilled that I did. She’d started giving me the business whenever she caught me treating the kitchen window like a proscenium. And I’m not sure she appreciated seeing the baby paraded around like that, either. I mean, she’d been ready since we’d moved in together, and I’d been resisting ever since. And now these people had moved in with the baby and the puppies, and well it just didn’t help things. Not that I didn’t want a child. I just didn’t think it was smart. Not yet. I was still doing changeovers at the plastics plant, and what would she do? She couldn’t keep cleaning rooms and linens even part time at the Montfort, at least not for a while. Not with an infant. And it’s not like we could afford daycare. We had to be responsible, and she knew that, she’s smart, a heck of a lot smarter than me, and so we didn’t even talk about it anymore because we both knew how the conversation would end. Anyway, she probably didn’t like seeing that little girl out there, bouncing on her mother’s hip all day long. She probably didn’t like her mother either, or me looking at her mother, even though it wasn’t like that. For me it was more of a spectacle. It was more about the husband, really, and the racket they had running with the bikes and those dogs.

The husband was this stout Spanish guy with a beard and long black hair that he pulled into a small, tight ponytail. His buddies were always there, partying and yukking it up, revving their bikes and buggies and quads. Every afternoon was an extravaganza, a rally and barbecue rolled into one. At some point they’d all tear ass down the street, and then an hour later they’d roar back and it would start all over again. All the while, the blonde parading back and forth and sometimes resting in a patio chair with that baby.

Every. Damn. Day.

They also had a couple of old, black pugs that roamed the yard. Pets, not like the Pit Bulls – those were cash crops. The pugs were sweet little things. One night, one ended up at our place. I pulled in after my shift and opened the car door, and there she was, just sitting there in the road like she’d been waiting for me. Those big eyes, you know, full of ardor, like they’ve got something important to say or like they just need something so bad, something only you can give. I couldn’t see how she’d gotten through the fence, but it was dark and I didn’t really care. The dog was meat if she stayed out there in the road, and so I walked her back over, around to the front of the house and knocked on the door.

The blonde answered, opened the door just enough to give me this acrimonious look, like she wondered just what the hell I thought I was doing standing on her porch at that hour.

“This one’s yours, right?” I said and motioned toward the dog, who sat comfortably beside me in that way pugs do – legs out with their weight on one hip. “She got out. She was out in the road.”

“Gertie,” she said. “Get in here.”

The dog scurried in. While shutting the door, the blonde grumbled thanks and flashed a glance that said she thought something was clearly wrong with me.

When I slipped into bed, I kissed Laurie between the shoulder blades. She exhaled and rolled over and lay her head on my chest. I kissed her forehead and began telling her quietly about finding Gertie, that little face in the dark. She slid her hand across my body and up to my shoulder. I stroked her hair. Then she drew her hand south, and I stopped talking. The night had been long. I’d busted my hump at work to make sure first shift could run the new bottles on the main lines. And then the look on the blonde’s face. She didn’t need to look at me like that. The dog had been right next to me, for Christ’s sake. Treated me like I was the dog – or one of the goons in the yard. First words we’d ever spoken to one another and she does that. God, Laurie would have loved it. But if that dog could talk. Then we’d hear some real gratitude.

I needed to decompress. I slowed my breathing and thought about my body, one part at a time. First my feet. Heavy. Done for the day. Then my calves. Thighs. Hips. Shut it all down. Then Laurie’s hand stopped, and I heard her sigh as she rolled over, pulling the covers and settling into sleep with her back to me.

Laurie called me on my lunch break the following night to tell me the police had closed the road at the corner, that they had the house next door surrounded. Said she figured I’d want to know, but I could tell from her voice that it was an ordeal and that she really just wanted to tell someone. They’d fought plenty of times over there, the blonde and her husband. Usually it was just yelling that boiled over onto the deck, which was normal enough, not to judge or anything like that. This time, though, things had become physical. The police had taken the husband with a gash across his shoulder and chest. But it was the blonde who then tried fighting the officers. They ended up using a stun gun on her. Laurie said the girl was a whirlwind of arms and legs in the road right up until the moment they shot. Then she was down, just down, and everything became quiet. The next day, the newspaper said that she’d called the police because her husband had pulled a handgun on her.

That day the house was dark. The driveway was empty. The blonde, the baby, and the husband – all gone. The buddies, too. But the dogs were still there, and that worried me. Noon came and neither of us had seen anyone stop by. Laurie thought I was crossing a line when I said I wanted to go in and feed them.

“It’s not your place,” she said. “Besides, they have to have somebody feeding them. You’ve seen the way they are with those dogs. It’s his business.”

“I think that guy has more than his dog business to worry about.”

“What does that even mean?”

“I’m just saying the guy’s clearly hustling. I mean with the dogs, and the bikes – you don’t think he’s doing all that work for free, do you? And everything in cash no doubt. And he gets his wife’s father to renovate the entire place?” I wagged a thumb toward the kitchen window. “Come on.”

That’s when Laurie folded her arms. “So that’s it? You feel sorry for her?”

I set my hands on my hips and bobbed my head side to side the way I do when I have no idea what I’m supposed to say. “Kind of. I guess. Yeah.”

She smiled one of her smiles, that I’ve learned have absolutely nothing to do with whatever I think they might mean, and looked out the window at that empty home and then walked into the living room. “Fine. Go feed the dogs.” She sat on the recliner and put her feet up. “But don’t go in that house.”

“I’m not going in the house,” I said as though it were just a really stupid statement. I mean, it wasn’t like the house would just be left open anyway. Like, who would do that? Leave it open so someone could just go in and take … whatever they had in there? The pugs?

The pugs.

“But what about the pugs?” I asked in earnest.

“You’re fucking kidding me. The pugs?” She shivered, like she had suffered some kind of mental glitch that threw her brain offline and forced her to refresh. “You understand that you can’t break into someone else’s house, right” she said, “like, no matter how noble you think your ridiculous-ass intentions are. I mean, for fuck’s sake, Carl, it hasn’t even been twenty-four hours.” She stood and started walking away. “They probably have a lot to manage, you know, with getting arrested and probably trying not to lose their child.”

I followed. “But what if the door’s unlocked? Can’t I just feed the damned dogs, give them some water? They need water.”

She stopped and turned. She was working to hold it together. Could see it in her jaw. “Then call the cops and tell them so they can send someone over to take care of it.”

Call the cops. They’re the ones who tased the poor girl after that jackass pulled a gun on her. Yeah, sure, I’ll call them.

That night when I got home from work, Laurie had left the small table lamp burning in the front window, her way of letting me know that she had already gone to bed but that I had a plate made and waiting in the microwave. I sat in the car. The house next door was still dark and empty. Those animals didn’t deserve to be left alone without provisions, even for a day. They couldn’t tell that it was probably temporary. They can’t tell those sorts of things. They only knew what they knew: they’d been left alone and they didn’t have what they needed.

And so I went.

The dogs roused as I entered through the gate, but they never barked. They just approached the fence and watched. I hadn’t seen them up close before. Each one was massive – short, but just impressively wide. Something about their shapes in that darkness reminded me of pictures I’d seen of alligator snapping turtles. Feeding them was easy enough. Each pen had one of these rotating bowl sets built right into the fence. The hose was right there at the side of the house and they had plastic barrels filled with food. The dogs waited patiently while I filled the bowls. Then, from the end of the line I watched all eight drink in unison.

It was then I thought of the pugs, I couldn’t just leave them, not if I could get to them and when I’d fed all of the others. They’d need water, too. They deserved water.

Turning that back-door handle felt like scratching off a lottery ticket. I hoped and hoped and as it rotated my heart raced and a rush ran up the back of my neck into my skull. Laurie couldn’t blame me for this. She disapproved on principle, sure, but when all was said and done and those dogs had been cared for, she’d see it differently. She’d see that I was a caretaker – a father – at heart.

My first step into that dark kitchen was met with a flurry of paws on linoleum, followed by collisions with small, warm bodies as they barreled past my legs, and ultimately out the door. I caught my balance and looked in time to watch two small backsides disappear down the porch steps and into the yard.

Now, I’d closed the gate behind me, so I didn’t run immediately after them. I knew better, but Gertie had managed to get out once, so I knew I couldn’t waste too much time. I found a large bowl on the kitchen floor and filled it from the sink. Then I grabbed a ceramic bowl from the counter and filled it from the barrel outside. Then I went out to collect.

Luckily for me, pugs aren’t what you might call runners.

I spotted the first one sniffing through the grass near the pens, possibly looking for a spot to do its business but I wasn’t waiting. I scooped it up under my arm and brought it right back to the kitchen. One done; on to number two. At first I couldn’t see the other one. I walked the perimeter of the fence, worked to keep my gaze away from the streetlight so my vision would adjust to the darkness, and a minute later I saw it trotting near the fire pit. I gave a low whistle and patted my thigh, and the dog came right over. Such a good dog. I petted its head and I couldn’t be sure if it was Gertie or if the other one had been. Still, I picked it right up and it was back to the kitchen for that one, too. On the porch, I set the dog down right in front of the door and crouched behind it, cracked the door, and pushed the little bugger inside.

The hay was in the barn.

In our microwave was a heaping plate of Rice-A-Roni with pork chops and stewed tomatoes. I heated it until it steamed and then sat down with it on the recliner. When I eased into bed beside Laurie, she didn’t budge, and I don’t even remember my head hitting the pillow.

In the morning, there was a pug floating in the pool.

Laurie woke me up to tell me. She’d seen it, this thing, while getting ready for work. A mass of black something. Maybe some foliage or a garment, she hoped. But it looked like an animal. There weren’t any stairs descending into the pool, just a ladder. Whatever it was that went in, it never made it out. She said she really hoped it wasn’t a dog, but I knew as soon as I looked out the window. I think she did, too.

“Let me go take a look,” I said.

I stood poolside with my hands on my hips. I could hear the other dogs as they paced in their kennels. The dog in the pool floated near the middle, its four legs extended downward. Probably exhausted itself trying to get out. I’d always considered drowning to be one of the worst ways to go, but to surrender out of exhaustion? I couldn’t – just, no. And I just couldn’t figure it out. I had definitely gotten both dogs inside. I went to the back door and tapped on the glass. Two pugs scampered into the kitchen from the far end of the room and began scratching at the door. I looked at them and then at the dog in the pool, and then back at them to make sure I was seeing correctly. It didn’t make sense, so much that I became disoriented. Something had gone wrong with the world. The ground seemed to get closer and then farther away and then I grabbed the railing to steady myself.

Unless there had been three. Oh, God. There had been three.

Back inside, Laurie’s face said it all, and I realized she had figured everything out before waking me. She didn’t require anything more from me at that point, no admission or explanation, just my face as confirmation. Hers was disappointment and regret and anger and hurt and a measure of pity. She needed me to see what I had done. “Gertie,” I said. And then she stepped forward and leaned her forehead against my shoulder. And so maybe there was love, too. Anger and pain and shame and regret and love.

And then maybe I heard a car pull into the driveway next door but I didn’t look to the window. I just stared back at Laurie and I didn’t know if it was the police or the blonde or the husband or one of the friends, or the blonde’s father. It would have to be the father, I figured. He’d get out of the car and immediately see the dog in the pool. He’d draw it in with the skimmer, wrap it in a sheet and bury it, and he’d curse himself for not building those stairs. He’d probably come knocking on the door, too, all of our doors, right down the line, asking with clear, honest eyes if we’d seen anything. And I’d stare at him a long while before telling him the truth, before spilling it, that I had been trying to help but had screwed it up. Screwed it up big time. And he’d understand and be beyond disappointed but wouldn’t get angry. Not worth it, he’d know. He was someone who had raised a child and suffered idiots and knew better. But he’d wear the hurt on his face, in the lines around his grey eyes and mouth. And I’d see something in how he looked at me, the same look I’d felt myself giving Gertie that night in the road. This poor animal, I’d thought at the time. Helpless thing, knowing only what it thought it knew, wandering out in the dark where nothing good comes to the ignorant. Something so unequipped, incapable of even getting itself home.

#FlashFriday Editor's Pick micro fiction short fiction

AGAIN, YET AGAIN

by Lakshmi Gill • August 28, 2020August 28, 2020

Photo by
Ken Walton
(copied from Flickr)

I was sitting in the rail station waiting for the 10:30 to London when a mother with two small children sat beside me, her daughter wedged between us. The girl was maybe ten years old with piercing blue eyes she now pierced at me. I glanced away and with my peripherals noted her stare had deepened. Not your museum look where you see a mummy and wonder about the mysteries of human beings, somewhat awe-struck and half-scared. Not your “look, Mum, there’s a lady on the other side of the platform” observation, idly noting the presence of another across the divide of the tracks.

No, this was fierce, like she had never seen the likes of me before and she was not sure what to make of it but whatever it was, deep down she didn’t like it. No, not a cute puppy or a baby panda. Something undefined, still untold but not alongside Christmas morning expectations, heart-thumping, finger-lightning unwrapping, but more like uncharted territory, terra incognita, what’s this, is this going to hurt me? and if it is, can I fight it, make myself big, wave my arms about?

This staring had lasted for about five minutes while I was debating whether I should stare back, speak up and say “staring’s rude” or “whatcha starin’ at?” or “yuh lookin’ at me?” and may then have to deal with the mother, harassed as she was with the fussy smaller son. Or maybe just stare back, say nothing, and see how she liked that, but that seemed to go down to her ten-year-old level; on the other hand, if I didn’t she would continue to do this at seventeen, at thirty, at fifty-three, at sixty-nine . . . Should I teach her a lesson now and straighten her out?

Bugger all. I had been through this forty years ago in Canada. I couldn’t believe it was happening again.

The Gun

by Townsend Walker • August 23, 2020August 23, 2020 • 1 Comment

It wasn’t hers. Sue hadn’t wanted it, but there it was, on the seat beside her. “For your protection,” they said. “Just in case.”

She was driving I-90, Seattle to Chicago, beat-up Honda, catching coffee when she could, haunting rest stops for cramped leg sleep. Running a package out for a guy she knew. Said he couldn’t trust UPS. “Something delicate,”he said. Sue didn’t understand, it seemed solid, nothing rattling or shaking. But the pay was good, and she was between gigs.

“Lots of empty country,” they said. True. And it was fairly dull till Lookout Pass on the Montana border.

The Honda wheezed its way up to the Dena Mora Rest Area at 4700 feet. A little wooden shack of a place with vending machines and a couple of friendly truckers. “And what’s a little lady doing up here by herself?”

“Hauling freight,”Sue said, trying to fit in. She explained about the package, an instrument of some kind, guy who was the friend of the lead guitar. They warned her to be careful, pointed to a tattered poster on the wall. Fuzzy picture of a boy and girl in their mid-20s. MISSING, last seen December 1, 2015. Their car was found in the lot, but they’ve never been. The older trucker heard they’d walked into the woods to get away from people, to do, you know, something private, never came back. Searched the whole area, and have done for the last three years, no people, no bones.

“You’re not going to find me in the woods,” Sue said.

“I’d say that’s good thinking. Couple of years back, man shot what he thought was a wolf, but wasn’t, brown matted fur and big, six feet nose to tail, big canine teeth. Denton is a ways from here, but never know, wolves roam.” The trucker went on to explain that any number of people thought it was a dire wolf, a prehistoric hypercarnivore, competed with the saber tooth tiger for meat, supposedly extinct for 10,000 years, but things reincarnate, climate change, all that. The more he talked, the creepier she felt.

“Just now remembered,” the trucker said, “the Grateful Dead, before your time I reckon, had a song called ‘Dire Wolf’. Went something like, in a black and bloody Fennario, a dire wolf collects what’s due.”

Sue shook and a dribble of sweat ran down her back. “I’m out of here, guys.” She bought three cups of coffee, black, from the machine, an assortment of high-energy bars, jumped in the Accord and raced down the Bitterroot Range, kept moving through the canyons shadowing the winding road, panicked about staying on the road, outrunning the dire wolf, and keeping her car in one piece. It was breathing badly. Finally, Missoula. A cheap motel, Mountain Valley Inn at $55 a night. Fell into bed, nodded off. Not long. Woke, at the foot of the bed, a dire wolf, tongue lolling over its teeth, brown bristly hair raised on its neck, a low growl, a clack of its teeth, closer, a high-pitched rumble, a scream, hers.

Coffee in the morning. Her goal was Little Big Horn, 400 miles away. Grandfather, a couple of greats back, had been there. Before she set out, waitress in the café warned her to be real careful in the Bozeman-Billings stretch. “By far the worst stretch of highway in the U.S. of A. More people get killed, day and night, than anywhere else.”

“How come?”

“Alcohol and drugs. You’ll see, all the little white crosses with flowers round them. Honoring idiots, I’d say.”

After that, she hugged the right lane all the way down to Little Big Horn, spooking only when big horn sheep appeared on the mountain side. Now she was into flatland, and flat it was. Checked into a motel in Hardin, then off to the battleground. Found her ancestor’s name on the list of the dead, George Moonie, Trumpeter, so that’s where the family musical gene comes from. Park guide talked about the Ghost Dance. Native Americans and their animals, back to prehistoric time, rise, join the living to oust the white man.

That night, so tired, she fell asleep instantly. Woke. She smelled foul fur, heard scratching at the door, clawing, crinkling wood, deep growl, light on, low mewing, paws padding away. All lights on, rigid, sitting up in bed, gun in hand. Dawn. She showered, dressed, turned the doorknob. The outside of the hollow core door was shredded.

Coffee, energy bars, gas and the road. Some 40 miles past the town of Lodge Grass, a rock hit the windshield. Shattered it. She jerked at the wheel, nearly drove off the road. Where the hell did that come from? She slowed the car to a stop and sat till her breathing got down to near normal. The sun caught hold of the edges of exploded glass, turning her windshield into a web of rainbow colors.

She couldn’t see driving far with a slivered windshield and had no clue where she would find a new one in this wasteland. Certainly no cell signal. The uncovered two percent.

In the rearview, Sue saw something move – back alongside the road, by the loose rocks. Her stomach lurched. She grabbed the gun, found the safety, clicked it off, willed her legs out of the car, onto the pavement. She’d face it. Caffeine-alert, she walked down the road, scanned the horizon, hair whipped around her eyes.

But it wasn’t there anymore. It was behind her.

Opera at the Bistro

by Sienna White • August 22, 2020August 22, 2020

For a short three months, the 26^th St. Bistro delivered its promise of a good job. I liked working there. I could talk my way into a decent tip if given the chance and I always got plates out on time. The regulars there were mostly women, mostly older, who’d come in and gossip about grandsons and politics over buttered bread. When the conversation ran dry around nine, they would depart, leaving a prismatic array of oiled coffee and crushed sugar. It would be a quick, loping sweep back to the steamed cacophony of the kitchen, where I’d dump the lipstick-stained mugs into the sink and nod to Amanda, our prep chef, with whom I became endlessly and irrevocably obsessed.

Amanda had worked at the bistro for at least three years. She had thick, pale arms and could pound through a bag of carrots with a meat cleaver. No one crossed her, or even came close. She scared the shit out of everyone. Even our boss Kim rarely looked Amanda in the eye.

“Soup’s on?” she’d ask, her gaze shifting elsewhere, the doorframe maybe, or a bird outside.

“Yeah,” Amanda would say. “Out in ten.” The quiet chatter of forks and hushed conversation often drifted through the silence until someone blinked, and it was always, always Kim.

I interacted with Amanda as little as possible under the keen, pressing knowledge that any conversation I tried would inevitably be annoying, and every joke I slipped her way would be left unread. “Thanks,” I’d say when picking up plates, and she’d grunt in response. That was about it for our friendship.

Amanda’s frame shielded the prep table from view and often I’d catch Kim peeking to see how much longer the food would take. Each time she did so, teetering over on her clogs, there was an anxious fear in her eyes, like Amanda was a skittish bear whose mood could flip on a dime. It made me nervous. I often wished that Kim would stop.

I didn’t know much about Amanda, other than she liked opera and seemed to be sad. This sadness drew me to her. It was irresistible, in its own way, a mystery to her massive, mooning face. No one knew much about her. She showed up to work in a bumperless Honda and tended to frown when leaving her car. Midday, she liked to smoke on the steps outside, looking over the snow-spackled parking lot, and blow long, gray streams from the gap between her teeth. I never talked to her on break – that was always her time – but sometimes I found myself watching from the dining room with its triptych windows and powdered-cheek seniors at Amanda with her anger and oily tattoos. I was an astronaut, and she, a distant, pockmarked meteor. All the cold, empty space between our worlds, and I, face smashed up against the telescope, wanted to be closer, to know the atmosphere, to feel its weight.

No one on staff seemed to talk to Amanda, even though she worked five days a week, prep, lunch, and dinner, not to mention acting manager whenever Kim wasn’t around. She didn’t hire people – that was Hunter’s job – and she didn’t yell at them either. I worked at the 26^th St. Bistro for three months and never spoke to Amanda for more than a minute. It wasn’t for lack of want. Everyone seemed to understand that if you didn’t talk to Amanda, she wouldn’t talk to you, and this was better, in some way, than another, hypothetical alternative.

Of course she had her quirks, and in between the empty slats of her countenance, sometimes light would shine, a secret glimpse into her life. One time her phone rang and she rushed to the walk-in fridge. “Barrett?” I heard her say. “I told you not to call at work.” She also listened to opera, which I loved. It was such a romantic, silly thing for someone so gloomy and silent. I noticed she liked Italian more than German, though she never listened to the same suite twice. Every aria was punctuated by the heavy thud of her knife.

When my shift got off, I always tried to make a point of saying goodbye to her. I hoped this action fell into the penumbra of “acceptable kindness,” as I was stuck in this rut of a vision where she’d look up and smile and I’d see something I hadn’t before, an end, maybe, to the enigma of her being. Instead she would glance up and raise her eyebrows in acknowledgement, a gesture as opaque as everything else about her.

Amanda also had the odd habit over volunteering for Saturday clean, the worst shift in the house. Even Kim winced when assigning it. But Amanda would usually interrupt and volunteer that no, she’d do it, yeah, that’s fine. It could’ve been a money thing. But it didn’t feel like it.

I had to do Saturday clean once and was stuck elbows-deep in dishwater long past midnight. Driving home, listening to late-night NPR, I discovered a wet noodle in my hair. Pulling it out like some wriggling grub, I was surprised to discover I was blinking back tears. I submitted my two-week notice at the first sign of spring.

My last day arrived on the wet, flat end of May. Everyone looked unwashed and irritable. Even the gaggle of seniors seemed grumpier than usual, like hospice loomed and the grandkids no longer called. I wanted my coworkers to know it was my last day but couldn’t think of an appropriate way to share the news, and so I just waited my tables and smiled obediently at Kim. Clocked in my hours and clocked out at nine.

Amanda had Saturday clean again that night, and seemed to be in a rush to get people out the door. Maybe she was having a party, I thought, or a pint of beer to herself once everyone was gone. Maybe she liked to do the monologue from the Pirates of Penzance.

I found her in the back, redolent of nicotine, and she stapled my receipts with the heel of her day. “Last day, huh,” she said gruffly and I was so taken aback I nodded once and said nothing more.

“Cool,” she told me, sliding the packet into the register. You could hear cars driving by outside, their tearing grumble fading from view. I was the last person left besides her in the kitchen. The special that night had been salmon au vin, and the kitchen was so messy it almost seemed magical. Plates gleamed with grease, wine glowed in the bottom of every glass. There was a terrible poetry to it all. The washer gurgling up mouthfuls of steam. A pool of lettuce in the sink.

I wanted to offer to help, but I didn’t, because I knew she’d say no. As I turned away, I felt her watching me leave, and wondered if I was now complicit in this empty silence, the general ignorance and apathy most people assigned her. I opened the doors of the 26^th St. Bistro to a wash of cold May air. It seemed the loneliest place in the world. Walking across the parking lot, for a second, I thought I heard opera starting up in the kitchen – something low and interesting – but then a car passed, and the sound got quieter and quieter, till I couldn’t hear it anymore.

#FlashFriday Editor's Pick flash fiction micro fiction short fiction

BAD QI

by Lucy Zhang • August 21, 2020August 21, 2020

He licks her big toe, glides his tongue across the arch of her foot, softens the cracked and toughened skin of her heel with warm saliva, and then presses his nose to the skin right above her tarsometatarsal joint. The arch of her foot curves with an elegance the rest of her body lacks. Your feet are so beautiful, he tells her, the same thing he said yesterday and the day before. What about my face? she dares to ask. But it’s like she hasn’t spoken; he strokes her foot in silence. So she begins to wonder: what if there’s something wrong with her face? A droopy eyelid putting her left eye in a perpetual squint? A blunt nose shaped like a rubber bouncy ball? She reaches for her phone so she can see her reflection in its dark, glass screen, but he places his large hand over hers and shakes his head. Just look at me, he tells her. But when she does, he is licking her toe again, avoiding eye contact, clamping a hand down on her ankle. She can think of plenty of things more delicious than her toe: kimchi fried egg, chewy balls of glutinous rice flour stuffed with black sesame paste and sugar, an ice cube stuck to her tongue. Mother never let her drink ice water – it would throw her body’s yin and yang off balance. No, she says. Stop. She leaps up, grabs the nearest t-shirt on the nightstand – it’s his t-shirt, the one that reads “I’m Senpai” even though she’s two months older than him – and tugs it over her head. He shrugs and shifts his gaze to his phone while readjusting the covers, don’t stay up too late. Her slippers slide against the hardwood floor as she walks. She has never really given her gait much attention but now she wonders if she’s making her calluses worse. Maybe she can walk less, she thinks as she reaches the bathroom, places her hands under the faucet, splashes water onto her face. When she was still learning how to tie red string into a knot of good fortune, a plea to Buddha for a beginning-less and endless life, she also learned to paint her face white. He will like you if you look like a nü gui. The ghost of a woman who had all the right incisions on her sketched double eyelid, now drained of orbicularis oculi muscle and fat tissue, a woman without a hint of bad Qi or wrinkles or blocked meridians, all rolled away with jade, a woman whose hands and feet were tiny – stubs capping the ends of limbs. The first step to become nü gui: her feet must disappear. She glides back to the bedroom. He is still watching videos on his phone, swiping to a new video before the previous can finish. She sits on the bed beside him. He reaches his hand over to stroke her toes. He jolts, pulls his hand back, slick and warm with red. What have you done? he yells, finally looking up. But when he makes eye contact, he cannot recognize her face.

#FlashFriday flash fiction micro fiction short fiction

=

by Alan Michael Parker • August 15, 2020August 15, 2020

Photo by ITU Pictures (copied from Flickr)

The way the two women walk six feet apart, one on the sidewalk and the other in the empty street = the way the body and the soul walk together in the afterlife.

Chatting = remembering.

How one of the women gestures with her hands when she speaks, shaping the air into invisible shapes = ideas in the afterlife, shapes made of air

= is a statement of equivalence without value.

The way the other woman, the one whose body seems still even as she speaks, seems more introspective, more of a listener = how a person in life encounters the unknown, if they’re lucky, to speak and listen to the unknown.

When the space between the two friends on their night walk = intimacy, they have achieved their goal, which is not to let the particulars of existence determine personhood.

Six feet apart does not = six feet under.

Walking in the street where there are no cars = a feeling from childhood, from summertime.

Walking on the sidewalk with her friend walking in the street = a feeling of maturity, being ever-so-slightly in charge, that first moment of control, an inflection point of adulthood.

Both women laugh when they get to the cul-de-sac. One woman has an especially great laugh, with a bit of a bark to it, and the other swallows her laugh a little, but laughs so well at everything. They both know this is funny, as they consider without speaking whether to circle the loop in the same formation, or to change their walking arrangement as they walk back home, and who will walk where. The spontaneity of their laughter, and the eye contact held for longer than the laugh lasts, make them stop for a moment, smile to one another, and to understand without comment –

that this = the seen and the unseen –

and the luck when all of the affections between all of our differences are = .

Graffiti

by Alison Miller • August 15, 2020August 15, 2020

My sister texts me when I’m at the gym to tell me that her pap smear is irregular. She’s going back for a biopsy in a couple of weeks. Don’t tell Mom, she says. It might be nothing, but I don’t want to have that conversation with her yet. This is the hardest part of being an oldest sibling, and I imagine the worst part of being a parent, too: the feeling of helplessness that comes from not being able to protect her from the bad things in the world – or, in this case, the bad things inside her own body.

Blue ballpoint pen, University of Texas bathroom: Glory and bask in every single moment of your struggle.

I take pictures of the words on bathroom walls, sometimes copy them into my notebook. Some are written in smudgy pencil on the inside of the stall wall, some printed in bold marker over the hand dryer, some scratched into the mirror. Some of it’s ridiculous and banal. I love dick. Call for a good time. Some of it feels strangely profound.

Black sharpie, Epoch coffee shop in Austin, Texas: Hell is always getting what you want. Hell is the reward for free thinkers. Heaven is the reward for sheep.

I am good at procrastinating, good at doing everything except what I know I should be working on. I cook frequently, I work out almost compulsively – tasks that are just productive enough to assuage the guilt I feel for not writing or looking for “real” jobs. I have never thought of myself as someone who was afraid to fail, but it has not escaped my notice that it’s much easier to bake cupcakes than it is to write a decent story.

Black sharpie, heart drawn underneath, New Orleans coffee shop: You don’t have to be better than anyone else. You just have to be better than yourself.

I used to get up and meditate every morning while the coffee brewed, but lately my yoga practice has fallen to shreds. I’m lucky if I do an hour a week. I tell myself that the reason I haven’t joined a studio in Seattle yet is because they’re so damn expensive.

What I miss most, though, isn’t the structured classes or the earthy, lavender-y smell of the studios, but the feeling of someone else holding space for you. The knowledge that, if you were to collapse right there on your mat, someone else would hold up the sky.

Stenciled black spray paint, sidewalk curb in Austin, Texas: Transcend.

A couple of weeks ago I turned the shower up hotter than usual and sat down in the tub with my forehead on my knees. When I was a teenager and my parents were fighting or I felt unloved and inadequate, I would close my eyes in the shower, put my head against the tile wall and repeat “I’m okay” until the words drowned out everything else, until I believed it enough to wash my hair and shave my legs and carry on.

Now, sitting on the shower floor under the too-hot water, I run my hands over my whole body, squeezing calves, feet, hips, chest, arms, face. I thank my body, as I have been taught to do, before standing up and moving on.

Black eyeliner, strip-club locker room, Austin, Texas: Don’t forget: you are a queen, you are so fucking beautiful.

I am slightly tipsy, skyping my best friend Katie in Texas. It’s late at night, even later for her. She’s talking about the wedding she’s planning – a destination wedding in Ireland – and how she and Ryan are starting to look at houses. She tells me she’s rethinking her decision to apply to PA school after she graduates with her Respiratory Therapy degree. She doesn’t want more school to interfere with having children. I ask what’s the rush, why can’t she do both? and she reminds me that she is prone to ovarian cysts and that testicular cancer runs in Ryan’s family, so they really do need to get started sooner rather than later. The longer you wait, the more likely your gametes are to turn on you and mutate, coding nasty secrets into your unborn children’s DNA for you to unravel later: things like cystic fibrosis and Fragile X syndrome and sickle cell anemia. I learned this as a junior in college, wide-eyed and awed even at 8 AM as my Genetics professor drew diagrams of all the ways that things could go terribly, terribly wrong.

Talking about houses and babies, even in the context of someone else’s life, makes me vaguely uncomfortable – me, whose biggest commitments in life are my dog and my student loans. Still, I love her and I want to be involved in her life so I make the effort to be interested even though all of it sounds like a series of small domestic deaths to me, things I have spent years consciously training myself to despise and resist. She asks me about grad school applications, whether I’ve heard anything back yet. “I know you really want an MFA,” she says. “But if you do get in, what are you going to do with it?” I suppress my annoyance and say I don’t know, maybe more school after that? and insert my usual quip about wanting to avoid being an adult as long as possible. She makes a motherly sound and says, “Well, you know I support you, but I just don’t want you to look back and regret your twenties.”

Red sharpie, La Tazza coffee shop, Austin, Texas: I don’t feel at all like I thought.

When I am stressed or anxious or having an existential crisis I remind myself that I am a bag of blood and bones on a spinning rock in space that is hurtling around a burning ball of gas (or incandescent plasma, if you prefer that version) and that nothing I do matters. Also, entropy is constantly increasing and the heat death of the universe will eventually kill us if we don’t kill ourselves first. Rinse and repeat as necessary.

Black ballpoint pen written at a slant, dive bar, New Orleans: Too weird to live, too rare to die.

I started dating again recently, out of boredom or loneliness – it doesn’t really matter. I’ve kept a list of my favorite things men have said to me recently:

“It’s weird, because you’re so cute and energetic and then you say really dark shit.”

“No offense, but – most of the girls I’ve met who are into the stuff you are have daddy issues.”

“Even if I didn’t already know you were a writer, I’d have figured it out anyway. You just really like yourself.”

After this last one, I fight the urge to tell him the price of this hard-won self-love, patchy and incomplete as it is. I imagine giving him an itemized receipt detailing the cost of my self-acceptance: the alcohol consumed, tears shed, sleep lost, miles run, scars acquired.

Black pen, all caps beneath a drawing of a stick figure with horns and a pitchfork, Epoch coffee shop, Austin: Hell is forgetting yourself.

At a stationary shop in Seattle’s International District, I buy a sticker with a hairless sphynx cat on it for my sister because I know she likes them. I’ll mail it to her next week with a note. It’s nothing, a tiny gesture, but hopefully it will make her smile. I do not consider myself to be exceptionally nihilistic, but it has occurred to me lately that most of life on earth seems to consist of making infinitesimal gestures of resistance against the inexorable overtures of an advancing darkness.

White paint, big blocky letters, Aspen coffee shop, San Antonio: Hell is empty. All the devils are here.

Ace

by Frances Koziar • August 9, 2020August 9, 2020

The first time I tried to deepen our kisses, she pulled back uncertainly. Not uncertain about herself or what she wanted – unlike me, she never second-guessed herself – but uncertain about whether she was about to lose me.

“I don’t do that. Sex. Or anything like that.”

I blinked, gave her space, tried but failed to understand all of layers of what was happening. So I answered the question she was asking.

“That’s okay,” I said honestly after a moment’s thought. “Sex … doesn’t require two people,” I pointed out, quirking my mouth up at the side.

But her gaze had remained somber, her eyes giant wells of vulnerability, and my heart had broken a little.

“I just want you,” I said, and after staring at me for a moment in disbelief, Shakisha had hugged me tightly, as if I were a raft in the sea instead of someone equally shipwrecked by the oppression of the world.

I remember the fierceness of that hug, of how my lungs had constricted as if the pressure of her life had been passed on to me for one moment, as I stand outside of her office building, the brilliant green leaves of spring tugging up out of the ground and unfurling from the branches, the dazzle of the sun glinting directly into my eyes.

“Sorry,” I bumble as someone has to step around me and my sprouting backpack because I don’t even notice them until they’re there, but they just smile and say something dismissive, and my eyes swing back to the building looming in front of me.

I grip my crutches harder than I need to, take a breath, and walk up to the front door.

I pluck at my clothing as I wait for the elevator inside, adjusting what I’ve already adjusted, and pat down my short, freshly washed hair. I’m wearing the red-plaid shirt Shakisha gave me for my last birthday, a pewter dragon necklace at my throat, and my favourite pair of old jeans. It’s me, but … I feel shabby all of the sudden, as I climb into an elevator with a woman dressed to the nines, black miniskirt and stockings and business suit. Not queer, I note, and probably not disabled, the way she tries to avoid looking at my crutches, embarrassed. Her skin is a light, ambiguous brown though, as if some Shakisha is hidden in her past like a gemstone lost in ore, and I think of a beautiful brown face, think of a thousand smiles and tens of thousands of conversations leading to today.

I know what it feels like to be on the spot – no one can use crutches for spina bifida or grow up in poverty and not know that – but as the elevator counts up the floors to hers, I have trouble breathing, as if I’m climbing Everest instead.

“Who was he?” I dared ask, pointing to the photo on the shelf in her room as our relationship had been beginning, knowing, somehow, that it told a sad story. She had been smiling like a child at a carnival in the image, their faces pressed side by side, brown to cream like the patchwork of life.

“Oh, he’s…” and she had shrugged, and put the photo face down.

But didn’t remove it.

“Dead?” I offered quietly.

But she had just shaken her head. She had taken a step away from me, and then turned back. Later, I would realize that that moment – turning back to me – had changed everything.

“He was my fiancé,” she answered, and something about how she had held herself defiantly just then in that dress of flowery blue made me think, strong. “He left me,” she explained honestly, and then her dark brown eyes had strayed to the face-down photograph. “He was sleeping with other people.

“Because I’m an ace – asexual,” she had added later, and that day, I had told her clearly and firmly that that had nothing to do with it.

Ace, I thought now, was a word that had layered for me like a reflection in a room full of mirrors. It meant scoring the highest. The One. The prize in a deck of cards.

The elevator stops and the woman walks out. My eyes catch on her high heels – silver and purple. With the black skirt and white blouse, she’s basically an ace flag.

The doors close again and the ground shifts beneath my feet like an aftershock from everything that’s changed in the past two years.

“I wish I had your spunk,” Shakisha reflected once, while she’d been taking a break with me, sitting on a park bench and watching everyone run about and sweat in the summer sun. “You always seem so … tough. Like you just barrel forward like a rhino while I sit and be sad when things happen.”

I don’t know how I would have responded if she hadn’t compared me to a rhino, but that day I had only said, straight-faced, “Rhinos need friends too,” and she had laughed, the sweetest sound in my world.

The elevator door opens with a ding and I walk down a carpeted hallway lined with cubicles, thinking of how un-spunky I feel just then, and thinking, too, that maybe another day would have been better. Another place. Work, really? I can imagine someone saying, but I know that Shakisha loves her job, loves the ragtag bunch of people she works with. I know how hard it was for her to find that, about the jobs she left for racism and sexism and all the other -isms that follow us both like assassins or a personal swarm of mosquitoes, depending on the day.

And maybe that’s why I chose here, today, at the end of a work week. Because I want to give her that same thing: a refuge from a world that has spat us both out at different times. A home away from the storms.

If I could give her that, I think, I would have everything I want.

I’m a mess already, a mess when I see her rise from her desk and call my name in surprise, her smile flashing like a firefly in the night. I think I’m already crying, but I’m focussing on remembering my lines, remembering how I tried and failed and still tried to put this into words. Ignoring the eyes swimming around us, the murmurs, the lights. Trying not to focus on the widening of her dark eyes, the hope, the wonder there, so that I don’t forget how to speak.

I say whatever it was I wrote and memorized, and when a whole half-second of silence follows it, I anxiously pat the pocket on my shirt. “I have a ring,” I babble, “and flowers,” I say, remembering the assorted bouquet sprouting from my backpack like a planter.

I speak because the silence in my head rages like a waterfall, races like my heart, roars like the winds of a canyon as I stand on that precipice and bare myself before the person I love the most.

And then she presses her hands to my cheeks, her umber face solid while the rest of the world spins and whirls like shattered colours through a kaleidoscope, and says – giddily, disbelievingly, laughingly—

“Yes.”

Little America

by Megan Thorson • August 8, 2020August 8, 2020

“God, you drive like you’re ninety,” Scott says.

“I’m going five miles over the speed limit,” I say.

“Do you see any other cars out here?”

Okay, he has a point. We’re on the highway where people die of boredom. Otherwise known as I-80 through Wyoming. It’s isolated and flat and covered in snow and boring as shit. Occasionally tiny prairie dogs poke their cute little heads out of their holes and above the snow. A few bison roam in the distance. But mostly there are lots and lots of potholes for company. I grip the steering wheel and carefully maneuver around these. I don’t care that I’m a grandma driver. This is my car.

“Seriously, if you don’t go any faster it’s going to take a week to get through Wyoming,” Scott says.

“Hey, I’m driving. You just DJ.”

He plugs his cracked phone into the car jack and the Marshall Tucker Band blasts its cowboy-country-with-a-sweet-saxophone through the speakers. I haven’t spent this much time around my youngest brother since we were teens. I’ve been living in Oregon the last six years while Scott and the rest of my family has been in Georgia. Now, my car is stuffed full of all my belongings, and I’m moving back to Atlanta. Deep down I know it’s probably a bad idea, but I don’t know what else to do or where else to go.

I swerve around another pothole.

I have just left my boyfriend of five years, John, my home in Oregon, my friends and a cushy cafe job to move my ass 3000 miles across the country. Classic break-up behavior. I am depressed and on the verge of a turning-thirty freakout. The question I try to ignore on this drive is: What the fuck am I doing with my life?

A gleaming blue billboard greets us out of nowhere.

Can’t wait to see you in Little America! 100 more miles!

“What’s Little America?” Scott laughs.

This becomes the most important question of our journey for the next hundred miles.

“Maybe it’s an amusement park in the middle of nowhere,” I say.

“I don’t have any cell service so I can’t look it up.”

Another billboard. 100 miles to Little America! Spotless bathrooms!

“Ooh, spotless bathrooms!” Scott laughs.

“I think Little America is a truck stop pretending to be a town,” I say.

“Do you think truck stops are considered towns in Wyoming?”

I crack up, shoulders shaking. (Sorry, Wyoming.)

This is good! This is a distraction from thinking about how lost I feel! I turn up the country-saxophone music. I’m also going to ignore the fact that I feel like there are a dozen potholes inside of me and instead focus on Little America.

Are we there yet? 70 miles to Little America!

“The anticipation is killing me,” Scott says.

We’ll be expecting you. Little America.

“Okay, that one was a little creepy,” I say.

“They’re expecting us, Meg! What will we find?”

Relax! 17 Marble showers. Little America!

“Marble showers? Maybe it’s like Oz but in Wyoming. We’ll get sweet hairdos and shiny shoes and ride horses that change color and then get the answers to our burning life questions! Do you think there’s a man behind the shower curtain in Little America?” I say.

“Maybe it’s a prairie dog wearing a cowboy hat.”

We have the same obnoxious throat-choking laugh as our Mom. My shoulders relax and I tap my fingers on the steering wheel in time with the music. Okay, this drive is fun now. I’m feeling good, feeling excited about life! About the future! And Little America!

50 cent ice cream cones in 15 miles. Little America!

“Okay, we HAVE to stop there,” I declare.

“They had me at marble showers!” Scott cries. “I want a billboard that says: Little America – Where happiness is a spotless toilet seat!”

“Little America. Where depression dies and dreams come true!”

“Whoa, Meg. Buzz-kill.”

“Right. No negative thoughts right now. Fifty cent cones are on the horizon!”

Almost there! Little America, exit 68!

I haven’t even had ice cream yet and I feel like I’m running on an insane sugar high.

We’re there! Take this exit!

“WE’RE HERE!” Scott and I squeal.

Little rooftops and a big white sign with red letters rises above the snow: LITTLE AMERICA. There’s a giant gas station, a motel, big travel center, and a dozen 18-wheelers parked all around. Yeah, this is just a truck stop. But a NICE truck stop. This isn’t one of those Podunk truck stops with sketchy dudes hanging around near the cracked bathrooms with coin-op dispensers selling “Love Drops for Her Special Pleasure” for 75 cents. It’s like the Marriott of truck stops. The Grand Piano of truck stops.

We park the car and stretch outside. Crisp, cold air slaps my face.

“Take my picture in front of the sign!” Scott says. We giggle as I snap his photo in front of this historic milestone that is Little America. We head into the huge travel center that is part grocery store, part restaurant, and part souvenir shop.

The signs weren’t kidding about the spotless toilets. I walk into a giant marble bathroom with real wooden doors and brass knobs for each stall. Plus a plush rose-colored couch against one wall, which is something I’ve never seen inside a bathroom. Actually kind of gross to think of couches in bathrooms. Don’t couches absorb smells? But I sit on it anyway, just because it’s a novelty and clearly this is what you do in Little America. Also, I have the bathroom to myself, and relish the solitude after two days of being in a car with my brother.

“Wow, Little America. You sure are fancy,” I say.

I lean back, shut my eyes, and inhale the sweet, clean smell of lemon verbena. Soft piano music plays from overhead speakers.

I hate that I shut my eyes and see John’s blue-grey eyes, teared up, as we said goodbye. Two days ago, I started this drive in the dark, crying as I drove away from the apartment John and I shared for four years, past Freddie’s grocery on 39th Ave., past my favorite coffee shop and park. Sadness wrapped around my neck like a scarf pulled too tight. It can be terrifying to know you have to drive away from someone, something, but have no idea where you are going instead.

They should make truck stops for people in big transition in their lives. For people who are sad, confused, depressed, and scared of the uncertainty of change. Truck stops to have a mental rest, be comforted by tiny wonderful things like 50-cent cones and soft music and room to breathe without thinking so much. Not just a vacation on the beach. In an ideal mental truck stop, there would be kind, wise old ladies who would give you a hot meal and hugs and tell you “Honey, you’re gonna pull yourself out of this funk. You’re enough just as you are. Here, have some pancakes.” And those words and hugs and pancakes would give you the boost, the hope, to just keep driving forward. There would be these cushy, cozy mental truck stops available to anyone anywhere. Truck stops that don’t necessarily give you answers but give you a break from the chaos in your head and a little hope, too.

The soft piano playing. It’s a Ravel piece. Ravel’s piano pieces always sound like dainty flowers to me.

I’m going to be okay, I think. I open my eyes. Get up off the rose-colored couch.

In the busy travel center, Scott and I order fifty-cent ice cream cones. Vanilla, soft serve, on crunchy cake cones. It’s nothing special, but I enjoy it anyway. We eat our cones and peruse the shelves full of stuffed penguins, postcards of Yellowstone, bison key chains, magnets that say WYOMING.

“The bathroom is pretty fancy,” I say.

“I know. I took a picture of it. The guy at the urinal gave me a weird look.”

“Scott!”

He doubles over laughing and ice cream drips onto the carpet. He was kidding. I think.

I love my brother. That boy can always make me laugh.

We get back into the car. I’m in the driver’s seat again, Scott in the DJ seat.

“I’m kind of sad to leave Little America. It gave me such hope for the last hundred miles,” I say, turning on the ignition. “Maybe I’m sugar-crashing already.”

We drive in silence for a bit. The car hums and moseys along and bugs splat onto the windshield. I feel like this godforsaken road will never end. Like I will never leave Wyoming. Like I will never leave this directionless mental state. Where’s the billboard that says: Megan, this is your stop! 38 miles to the place you belong! 38 miles to personal fulfillment!

The speed limit is 80. My speedometer reads 83. It’s 1700 more miles to Atlanta and whatever is in store for me there. I’m not in a huge hurry to arrive and get on with the next phase of my life. But this state of flat, potholed, vast uncertainty is even worse. For now, just getting to Atlanta is the goal. It feels good to have a goal.

“Okay, where to next?” I ask.

“There’s a giant bronze sculpture of Abe Lincoln’s head in Laramie, Wyoming,” Scott declares.

A big grin crosses my face. I step on the gas.

flash fiction friday flash micro fiction short fiction

LIGHTING THE MATCH

by Linda Mannheim • August 7, 2020August 7, 2020

All that winter we read Hannah Arendt, we read Men in Dark Times. The town was freezing, its crossroads banked by snow. It got dark at 3:30 PM. I’d trudge up the road to the seminar room in the renovated barn. The college was made up of colonial buildings at the crossroads: the college was the town. The students were ruddy, sturdy, mostly well off, wearing Shetland sweaters and jeans, cultivating innocence. The instructors seemed like aliens, dropped in that place from cities, there temporarily to tell us about another world.

I’d never read any philosophy before. I didn’t know anything about Hannah Arendt, but I liked the name of the course, which was Keepers of the Flame. I liked the description, which was about how to get through dark times. And I sort of fell in love with Hannah Arendt that year. And I was not the only one. When I asked the guy I sometimes got close to who he thought was really beautiful, he skipped the celebrities and talked about Hannah Arendt.

The instructor went all Socratic when he taught, plump and fatherly, standing in front of us with the weight of his late middle-age, asking us, “Why is it so hard to be the person who lights the flame when it’s dark?” And no one answered. And he said, “What’s the first thing someone sees when you light a match?” And someone said, “You.” And he said, “That’s right.”

So all that spring, I read Hannah Arendt. It terrified me, reading this thing that was so unlike anything I’d ever read. It was not what people where I came from read.

It was not anything I knew. I was afraid of being found out.

But she, like my parents, was a refugee. She, like my parents, was from Germany. I felt seen (as they say). And also at risk of being exposed. What if I were to talk about my family’s past – the dislocation and displacement, the loss and lostness and the fact that, though they were from this same place, they had none of this scholarliness to bring along? I had never read anything by a philosopher before.

The instructor kept bringing us back to the question of: What do you do in dark times? Are we about to be in dark times? How do you keep honest, save other people, save yourself? How do you recognize dogma, avoid it, do what’s right? I thought, this is insane – that I can spend an entire semester talking about this, thinking about this. While the snow was melting, and the ground grew muddy, and the first buds became visible on the trees, I thought, this is the book I’ve been waiting for my whole life.

Good Friday, 2020

by Matthew Vollmer • August 2, 2020August 2, 2020 • 1 Comment

Wind advisory. Blizzard-quick squalls of snow. Front and back yard strewn with limbs: a hurricane’s worth of cones and those brittle little branches slung from the line of eight Weeping Norway Spruces that designate the boundary between our yard and our neighbors’. Theirs? Freshly mowed. Immaculate. Not even a single cone blotching the expanse. Normally, I might have cursed somebody out in my head, but I tried instead to be grateful – after all, it would give me something to do. The director David Lynch, who recently predicted that the world will be a much kinder and more spiritual place after the coronavirus ends, has, according to a recent article I read, stayed busy: meditating, drinking coffee, and making lamps in his woodshop. Mort Drucker, on the other hand, who spent years working as a caricaturist for MAD magazine, had finished his time on earth. Dead at 91. In other news, a mom on Facebook wonders how other parents are handling screen time. Domestic violence is on the rise – worldwide. The Amish are mobilizing, sheltering in place and sewing masks. A sex cam worker says that customers aren’t only hoarding toilet paper, they’re hoarding money. “Don’t get arrested,” I texted a friend, who’d sent me a photo of the porch of the Airbnb in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee – home of Dolly Parton’s Dollywood – that his girlfriend had secured for the weekend. Apparently they hadn’t read the article I’d scanned the day before about an Airbnb owner in Asheville for whom police had been searching; renting houses and rooms for non-essential purposes was now against the law, worthy of a misdemeanor. I fired up the PlayStation, dialed up Red Dead Redemption, and directed my mustachioed avatar, whose head I’d recently paid a barber to shave, to end a poker game at a saloon table with a man by blowing his brains out. This didn’t make me feel better. I tried to watch a TV show about cyborgs who were attempting to rewrite their own codes and take revenge upon the humans that created them but I kept getting lost in the narrative: I couldn’t stop checking my phone. According to ABC News, I learned that thousands of acres of fruits and vegetables grown in Florida were being plowed over or left to rot because farmers couldn’t sell them – as they had been accustomed – to restaurants, theme parks or schools. According to a headline on Newsweek, “CORONAVIRUS IS HAVING A MAJOR IMPACT ON THE ENVIRONMENT, WITH REDUCED CO2, BETTER AIR QUALITY AND ANIMALS ROAMING CITY STREETS.” My phone rang. I answered. It was John, a student. He’d called to discuss a story he’d written about a man whose job it was to produce hand-carved coffins. My advice? Perhaps the man should have death on his mind as he worked. Maybe his only grandson had died – maybe the young man had caught the virus while on spring break in Florida – and now the coffin maker was composing, in his mind, a letter to the boy’s mother, the man’s estranged daughter. John seemed to like the idea. He’d been watching some kind of “land mammal” in his backyard and knew it wasn’t a skunk or possum or raccoon or groundhog but probably an American mink, since after describing it to his mother that’s what she thought it might be. As he watched it, an hour passed – and John couldn’t understand how. “Maybe I’ll get into birdwatching,” he said, no doubt anticipating the long stretches of time yet to come. John’s father had died at the end of January, after a three-year fight with cancer, and when the world hadn’t stopped – when, after the man had passed, and things in the world had continued as normal – John couldn’t help but think that this should seem strange, but now that the world actually had slammed on its brakes, the resulting stillness felt even weirder. Not that the world hadn’t always been weird. Case in point: three days before John’s father had died, that man had claimed that he’d been visited by three angels, though, when asked to describe what they looked like, he had no words to do so. And then, after the man had been dead and buried, his wife – John’s mother – had sat down one day in the chair where he’d lived out his last days – a kind of electric recliner that allows people who can no longer stand on their own to rise up – and that as soon as she’d seated herself, an electric bulb in a nearby lamp had gone out. All over the house, John said, bulbs had been going dark. Furthermore, when he’d returned home for the funeral, he’d noted that the chair itself had been unplugged, and no one could say how. And not just “kind of” unplugged, John said. Decidedly. I marveled. My mother had often sat in a similar kind of recliner during her final days, and as far as I knew, it was still in the living room, in the house were my own father, who was still very much alive, was living. I called him later in the day to check in. Had he heard that people were burning down cell towers in the UK because they believed 5G was spreading the virus through people’s cell phones? My father said that someone – a longtime family friend – had just told him that. And the friend – who works as a judge in Spokane – believed it. “Did you hear,” I asked, “that Trump wants to commercialize the solar system and begin mining the moon?“ My father and I, we don’t usually talk politics, because when we do, we argue, and he tends to err, at least form my perspective, just this side of uninformed. “I wonder what he thinks is in there,” I wondered. “Maybe he’s after the cheese,” my father speculated. “Like what’s his name thought. On Saturday Night Live.” I summoned my impression of Will Ferrell impersonating Harry Caray, the announcer for the Chicago Cubs, and bid my father adieu. I texted my friend – the one in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, and told him to check out nearby Gatlinburg and that even if all the shops were closed, he’d see some crazy ass shit. I imagined the shops that sold T-shirts that used the Reece’s Cup font to spell “Jesus” or images of cartoon rottweilers busting through Confederate flag shirts would be closed. But would the taffy pulling machine still be going? Would the pancake houses – of which there are too many to count – be deemed “essential”? Would their owners have taped signs to their doors informing customers that they were closed for the foreseeable future? Those same signs – handwritten in black ink, like so many goodbye letters – had been taped to the front doors of restaurants all over the town in which I lived with my son and wife, the latter of whom convinced me to take a walk through our neighborhood, despite the gale-force winds. We marched down the street in silence – except to curse the wind. I note the pink blossoms of a tree my mother could have identified but whose name was lost to me. It occurred to me that I might take a picture, since the petals contrasted so nicely with the blue sky, which had been home, for days now, to nothing but clouds. But I wasn’t sure what the point would be or what might occasion my need to look back upon a replica that would fail to capture, in one way or another, the tree’s resplendent color, so I left it undocumented, noting, as I had for days now, the Hindu idea of atma-yajna: the notion that the universe wasn’t just created by God but that everything in the universe – elephants, coral reefs, moths, flowers, people, and viruses – was God, and that he was playing hide-and-go-seek with himself. According to the website of Morad Nazari, an Iranian with degrees in Engineering and Philosophy & Religion, “As Prajapati, Vishnu, or Brahma, the Lord under many names creates the world by an act of self-dismemberment or self-forgetting, whereby the One becomes Many, and the single Actor plays innumerable parts. In the end, he comes again to himself only to begin the play once more – One dying into Many, and Many dying into the One… By the act of self-abandonment, God becomes all beings, yet at the same time does not cease to be God.” I thought this idea beautiful in its inclusiveness and could feel it opening up a space in my heart for even the worst of my enemies. I imagined telling my wife about it, but as interesting as it was to me, I couldn’t imagine that she’d much care, and so I kept it a secret as we walked through the stinging wind toward home.

Perfect Hair Day

by Eve Rose • August 2, 2020August 2, 2020 • 2 Comments

All Val could see from the back of the conference room was row after row of perfect hair. Flawless bobs, splendid blonde ringlets, asymmetric cuts so precise not a strand was out of place. No curling irons, blow dryers or “product” for this crowd. All they’d had to do was wake up, slip on their wigs, and drive to the hospital.

They were there for “Thrive Alive,” a daylong seminar for breast cancer survivors who were at least one-month post-treatment. At 48 days, the name survivor seemed like a stretch to Val. Cancer wreckage was more like it. Beneath their impeccably styled hair, they were nursing amputations; chemo-pickled organs; and skin, burnt and peeling from radiation.

The two morning sessions – “Breakthroughs in Post-Cancer Hormonal Therapy” and “A Diet for Survivors” – were so boring, Val had been forced to analyze coifs to stay awake. Of the 79 women, there were 57 blondes, and bobs were definitely back.

The moderator announced the start of the Q&A and the young woman next to Val raised her hand. Her arm only reached half-way up, as though she were swearing an oath in court, and Val knew they shared the same crippling scar tissue, a side effect of some mastectomies. The woman had on a Cher-like wig, two glossy black pelts draped over her battered chest. Val tried to remember the wig’s name, the Layla or maybe the Rene. She’d spent hours poring over wig catalogues, though she’d never bought one. Now, she was the only wigless one in the room. Just a blue and white striped scarf tied behind her neck.

“Can we eat tofu?” Cher asked. “I don’t want to feed my cancer, but…”

“Hold it right there,” the nutritionist on the panel said. “Try not to assume you still have cancer cells, OK?”

Cher nodded her head and continued, “I’d just heard that tofu has estrogen and I have, I mean had, estrogen-positive cancer.”

“The jury is out on toxicity of tofu.”

Val imagined cubes of tofu next to a pack of cigarettes on an anti-cancer poster.

When the nutritionist asked if she could live without it (not a shred of irony in her voice), Cher twice said, “Absolutely,” as if a moratorium on soybean curd would save her.

Participants asked about juicing regimes, sex after hormone therapy, and the new sugar scare. When the oncologist advised them to eat sugar in “moderation,” the room erupted with demands for greater precision. “Is one Snickers bar OK or should I stick to a half? Does honey count? What about molasses and stevia?”

Val stared out the window, relieved she no longer had to care. For a year, she’d rampaged the Internet for cures, grilled doctors, purchased juicers, ate seaweed, quit drinking, sipped a vile broth made from onions with the skins still on. Anything to boost her chances of surviving Stage 3B cancer.

Stage 3B was the “D” of cancer grades, a near failing assessment just shy of a terminal diagnosis. Still, she’d rallied. She’d joked with her oncologist (“How about if I do a little extra credit and you change me to a 3A?”), agreed to a bilateral mastectomy, and bravely endured the “red devil,” the most wretched form of chemotherapy, reserved for the hardest cases. Even during her last round, when her nose was bleeding and the wood floor by her bed was tattooed with vomit stains, Val believed she would get well.

But three days after her last radiation treatment when she should have been celebrating, her optimism vanished. The fears she’d so vigilantly fought off during treatment consumed her. She was convinced she was dying and should start living as such. She refused to make plans more than a week in advance. She spent most days clearing out closets and drawers to make it easier on her husband once she was gone. She bought him a 12-month supply of shaving cream, Tums, tuna fish, shampoo, and two new pillows as he wore them out quickly with his night sweats. She was nesting – only for death, not life.

She’d even paid $365 for an eHarmony membership for her husband, filling it out in his name and sending him links with her own commentary (“Her Teeth alone Could Make her President” or “Finally, a woman who likes to cook!”).

Jake, her husband of thirty-two years, forced her to go with him to an elfin, silver-haired therapist named Hank. Hank spoke so softly, Val had to sit on the edge of the couch to hear him.

“Five-year survival rates for Stage 3 are 72%,” he whispered.

“What happens after five years?” Val asked.

“Why did you have to ask that?” Jake had said as they left. “Can’t you just accept the fact that you’re probably going to outlive me?”

But there was no ripping the roots out of it. Val had even started to think about suicide so Jake could take advantage of the one-year eHarmony membership before it expired.

After the therapist told them about the seminar at the hospital, Jake hounded her until she agreed to go. In bed the night before, he’d read her excerpts from the web site. “It’s about how to move on after cancer … how to live by living…”

So far, all Val had taken away was a narcotic-free recipe for suicide: Wine, Snickers, and Tofu.

When the Q&A was over, the moderator announced that there would be a “few surprises” in the pavilion after lunch. Val hoped it was a dessert buffet. Since deciding it was over, she’d been eating nothing but sugar and cheese. She’d smoked two packs of cigarettes in the backyard and stood brazenly close to the microwave. It was liberating not to care anymore.

The volunteers had set up café-style tables at the back of the room. There were pink napkins, pink tablecloths, and pink ribbon centerpieces, reminding Val of the nursery she’d decorated for her oldest daughter, back when pink was the color of innocent little girls.

Val grabbed a box lunch from the cart and sat down next to Cher, the newly converted soybean abstainer.

“Hopefully, no tofu in our lunches today,” Val said.

Cher looked up but didn’t smile. “I’m a vegetarian so there are not many protein sources left for me.”

“I’m sorry,” Val said. She reached out her hand and introduced herself, hoping the friendly gesture would make up for her insensitivity.

“Maddie,” said the woman without looking up from her notebook. Val let her hand drop into her lap and looked at the page Maddie was reading. She’d underlined the word, “wine” and a scribble that said “1 glass a day” with a large question mark next to it.

“Do you think white wine is as bad as red?” Maddie asked.

So much for the normal cancer pleasantries: name, stage, treatments. Maddie was all business.

“I don’t think a drink will kill you,” Val said.

“If a dry white has less sugar than red and it’s sugar that feeds cancer, wouldn’t that be better?” Maddie asked.

Val could hear the panic in her lunch partner’s voice. Even when Val had been at the height of her daily juicing, traveling once to Mexico for intravenous vitamin infusions, she never felt she was doing enough.

“Do you still drink?” Maddie asked.

Val had taken to sipping martinis on the deck after breakfast. “I do, but don’t go by me. I’m on the way out.”

Maddie looked up from her notes. “You’re terminal?” she asked.

“Yes.”

Maddie’s eyes widened. She closed her notebook and looked around the room, probably to find somewhere else to sit. The hospital had strict rules about mixing early-stagers with terminal patients, who had their own support groups. They were grappling with different issues, but Val suspected it was too upsetting for the early-stagers, still clinging to their hopes of full recovery.

Val stuffed her sandwich in the box and left for the pavilion by herself. She didn’t want to scare Maddie anymore.

The pavilion turned out to be the sitting area at the entrance to the cancer annex. The organizers had removed the chairs and mobile coffee bar and set up a dozen makeover stations: mani-pedis, mini facials, a tall thin woman doing colors. There was a carnival like atmosphere with balloons and bowls of forbidden Tootsie Rolls at each table.

Val thought about calling Jake to rescue her when a makeup artist in a black smock accosted her. Her young face was thick with cream-colored foundation and harsh lines of blush at her cheekbones. She reminded Val of the aggressive salespeople at mall kiosks.

“Can I help you with your eyebrows?”

“Yes, I’ve lost them. Can you find them?”

The girl didn’t laugh. She’d probably been warned to stay focused on lashes and lipstick, nothing too personal. Val felt bad. Even if she would be gone soon, she needed to be nicer. “Sure, do your thing,” Val said, sinking into the plush chair next to the table. The full morning had exhausted her and she closed her eyes. The nurse told her fatigue was normal, but Val saw it as a sign of her impending death.

The girl worked on her bald brow line with several different pencils before holding up the mirror.

“Don’t they look great?” she asked.

It looked like someone had drawn on her with a black Sharpie. With some white face makeup, she could pass for a mime.

Val thanked the girl and walked on, sidestepping the colorist. She’d had her colors done in the ’80s and knew she was an autumn. If there was a new palette for the sickly grey pallor of her skin, she didn’t want to know.

At the “Five-Year-Survivor Meet and Greet” table, Val saw one of the organizers tugging at her curly brown hair.

“It’s 100% real,” Val heard her say to two participants.

“How long did it take to grow back?” asked one of the women, her wig a bob with razor straight bangs.

“Two years.”

Val saw the hope fall from the bob’s face. Two years was a long time.

This focus on their appearance seemed so dated, like something out of the 1950s. Did men with testicular cancer get a grooming seminar? Prosthetic balls?

Losing your breasts and hair, even your eyelashes, was traumatic, Val thought. But despite all the progress women had made, looks were still their currency and breast cancer had left them all bankrupt.

Even Val felt it. She was the only one in her support group not to get breast reconstruction, worried complications could delay chemo and radiation. She’d opted instead for two silicone breasts she could slip into the pocket of a special bra. At night, standing naked in front of the mirror, she would stare at the macabre version of her flat-chested eleven-year-old self. The sacks of scarred skin, the way her middle-aged belly jutted out, alienlike without the counterbalance of her large breasts. Sometimes, she’d run her fingers over her rib cage, longing for the tingle she’d once felt when stroking her own nipples.

Val was about to leave when she saw the “Christina” sitting on a table at the wig stall. It was one a several styles she’d obsessed over early in her treatment before she panicked one night, afraid that wasting time on wigs would end up killing her. She should be scouring the Internet for cures, not wigs. Like breast reconstruction, wigs were a diversion, a deadly vanity.

Val walked over to the Christina and touched the strands. They felt a little dryer than human hair but seemed real enough. “Wispy with tasteful but fun spikes. Synthetic,” the tag said. The cut was short – dirty blonde with a row of choppy bangs and a few wispy strands framing the eyes. The main attraction was the spikes – they were everywhere, popping up on top, at the sides and in the back, reminding Val of their old Australian Terrier, Snappy.

“Want to give it a try?” asked the grey-haired woman in charge of the stall.

Val touched the blue and white scarf on her head, smoothing it down at the back. She’d found it in a cardboard bin at the cancer center (“Take one if you need it; Give one if you don’t.”).

“It can’t hurt,” the woman encouraged.

Val slid the scarf off her head and sat in a chair at the center of the stall.

The woman plucked the Christina off the Styrofoam head, deftly slipping her hand underneath its cap.

Val leaned back and closed her eyes, as the woman adjusted the wig, sliding it to the left and then pushing it down over Val’s broad forehead.

“Perfect,” she finally said and held up the mirror.

Val didn’t recognize herself. She’d never been a blonde, let alone a spiky blonde. She pulled on one of the spikes and was surprised she didn’t feel any pain at the roots, forgetting for a moment that it wasn’t real.

Val liked the edgy look it gave her, so much less pathetic than her cancer-screaming scarf, and handed the woman her credit card.

It was not until she left the seminar that Val noticed the difference. Not one person stared at her as she walked down the hospital’s hallways. No pitying glances. No looking away. She was invisible, the same as everyone else. The difference was so extreme, she wondered why she hadn’t bought a wig sooner. Had she worn a scarf for pity? Out of anger? (Don’t you act like everything is OK without seeing my pain and horror.)

Val scanned the parking lot for their green Subaru and saw her husband, asleep with his head drooped over the steering wheel. He’d driven her to every chemo appointment, held her hand when the nausea was too much, watched (and even re-watched) Downton Abbey.

“You look amazing,” he said, as she got into the car.

“Don’t touch the eyebrows. They smear,” she said.

“I never saw you as blonde, but I like it.”

Val tried to smile. She knew he was hoping the seminar had worked. How badly he wanted the old fighter back, to be rid of this suicidal depressed woman stockpiling toothpaste.

Jake reached over and lightly touched her new hair. Val could have sworn she felt something.

M and M

by John Kaufmann • July 27, 2020July 27, 2020

“John? Ah hate to bother you. Ah’m callin from the ICU. They’re going to cut off mah foot.”

“They what?”

“Ah know you never make exceptions, but Ah might be late with rent this month.”

“Of course I’ll work with you.”

That’s Martha, a tenant in my mobile home park in central New York. She is right; I never work with tenants. Strictly no pay no stay. Anything else is a slippery slope. Charges of selective enforcement, usury laws, payment plans, possible regulation as a bank or mortgage originator – no good deed goes yak, yak, yak. But Martha’s an exception. She has been there forever, and she has never missed a payment. She is a model tenant – and her foot is being amputated. There is no way she is playing me.

Martha starts to cry. “Thank you, John. Ah have never asked for charity.”

“It’s not charity. They are cutting your foot off.”

“How’s that family of yours?”

Martha grew up in Tennessee. She lives in the fourth home from the end of Gamma Street, near the pump house and the pole barn. She has built an enclosed porch addition onto the front door where she and her husband like to sit, drink lemonade, and chat with passers-by in the summer. The home is painted yellow with blue trim. She supports herself and her husband by running a landscaping business. A twelve-inch gravel perimeter surrounds the skirting, and flowers mark the lot boundary. She mows and rolls the lawn twice a week during the summer. Her son lives in the home across from her.

Martha’s husband, who lives with her, is large and works sporadically. Word is that he abuses her verbally. I suspect he is too lazy and slow to get off the couch and hit her.

Six months earlier, Martha had a stent inserted into a blood vessel in her neck to clear some gunk out of her arteries, and she had a toe amputated. The stent has given her a big scar on the side of her neck that you can’t help but stare at when you speak with her. Jee-sus. I’d hate to see that thing when it got angry. She is only a few years older than me, but she looks skeletal, pale, and badly wounded.

I ask the manager, Dee Dee, “Why the fuck didn’t the piece-of-shit husband make that call?”

Eyeroll. “Uh – huh”.

Away from the park, I go to visit an old friend, M, from my days teaching school. M is a French woman, ten years older than me. When she was younger, she was not classically beautiful, but she was desirable. All the men in the school wanted her. The headmaster wanted her. I wanted her. An older, married History teacher wanted her. God knows what the seventeen-year-old boys thought about her.

She turned out to be a lesbian. Her wife still teaches at the same school. We have stayed in touch. Now, she has colon cancer.

When I show up at her apartment, she apologizes for her short hair. The chemo made everything fall out. It has started to grow back, now that she is on new meds – but will fall back out again, shortly. “It makes you look like Audrey Hepburn.”

“That is a compliment.”

“Well, yeah.”

She looks old and frail, but I can see the younger, desirable woman still inside the old lady. The big, brown, wideset eyes, the slightly too-big, Gallic nose, the weak chin, the full lips, the way she inhales to emphasize a point. Maybe the same thing is inside every old woman – you just need to have known her back in the day to see it.

Martha looks wracked and horrific, but she reproduced. Somebody, somewhere, sometime, found her desirable at least once. Maybe that quality is still in there, hidden from me.

We sit at M’s home, eat lunch and walk in the park, and then I go home. I tell her about the kids. She tells me about the disease. “No doctor will operate on me anymore. The tumor cells are too robust. I have black tissue falling out of my navel. That was from the radiotherapy.”

“Radiation therapy?”

“Yes. They can focus the radiation at a point inside your body.”

I try not to think of black matter falling out of her belly button. I can think of other people’s bodies as case studies, but please – not hers.

She has had ten days to recover from her last course of chemo, so she is pretty strong. She walks me to the subway. We hug, and make plans for everyone to get together later. As I walk down the steps, I see that she has stayed at the entrance to the subway. She is looking down at me as I descend, and she is crying.

Martha goes back to work for a while after her amputation, mowing lawns and digging flower beds on her artificial foot. After a year or two, things catch up. Complications from diabetes, hardening of the arteries, liver failure, long-term stress on her system. Dee Dee tells me that the doctors have sent her to a hospice up by the Lake, and given her six months to live. I dread calling her, but I punch in the number because my awkwardness seems trivial. If she thinks she is going to die when we speak, she does not let on. “Martha? This is John. How are you doing?”

“Ah’m not goin anywhere.”

“Well, you know that GRITS stands for Girls Raised In The South.”

“Hah, hah. Bless you, John. How is that family of yours?”

“My son is going to college next year. My daughter is a handful.”

“They are beautiful kids.”

“My wife wants to mutilate me.”

“She’s a smart woman, that wife of yours!”

“Stupid enough to marry me.”

Martha is in the hospice for nine months. Each time I speak with JB or Dee Dee I ask how she is doing and they say, “Still in the hospice”, or “About to die any day.” Her husband runs up big water bills during the winter. Dee Dee tells me that this is because he spends most of his time at the hospice, and runs the water to prevent freeze-ups while he’s there.

That lazy fuck should install his heat tape and insulate the riser. We told him a million times.

How would he fit under the home? How would they get him out? WD-40 and a winch? Scrap the home out from over him?

During the spring, I ask Dee Dee how Martha was doing. “Oh – she’s out of hospice!”

“Not in a box?”

“Yeah – she’s doing well. They put her in an assisted living facility, but she will be coming back to the park any day. She needs to learn to use her new leg. I went to visit her a few months ago, and couldn’t find her. She was in the kitchen, making pigs-in-a-blanket for the other patients.”

“Oi. Martha.”

“She says that it was like a resort. She had a room to herself, overlooking the Lake. It was the best place she ever lived!”

“She should get terminally ill more often.”

“She was helping Joe Batsakis dig his flower bed the other day. On her artificial leg.”

“While her husband was on the couch, eating pork rinds?”

“Very likely.”

“She’ll bury us all.”

“Yes, she will.”

Shortly after Martha gets out of the hospice, I visit M once more. This time, she is in the hospital. They have her in a private room, overlooking the river. You can see the Queens waterfront across the way, ferries, a few smaller boats, and helicopters taking off and landing from a pad below her window. The window faces to the east; she must have great sunrises. I am not ready for how frail she looks. Her hair has grown back, but she is old. She is sitting in a reclining chair near the window, with an IV drip attached to her arm. Sitting up, or shifting her weight, is a major production. Going to the bathroom is as tiring as running a quarter-mile for me or you. I have brought her mint and basil from the garden, and some tomatoes for her wife. “I know you can’t eat – but I thought you could smell this”. I put the basil in a vase, and I keep the mint in a ziplock bag, to concentrate the scent. She brings both to her face and inhales deeply, with her eyes closed. My wife shows up for forty-five minutes or so, and then heads back to work. M’s wife is teaching a class. I hang around for maybe two and a half hours; other people come and go, but it is just the two of us for most of that time. At first, she cries and I take her hand, awkwardly, unsure of what is a decent interval to hold on and let go. Then, we just start talking. The disease is her day-to-day now, and she talks about her day-to-day. She tells me that she wears a bag underneath her gown around her stomach, which has to be emptied periodically. She can’t eat because fistulas have short-circuited her intestine. Some have broken through the skin, and that is what feeds the bag. She gets all of her nourishment intravenously. She stands up, and we take a few laps around the hospital floor. Until now, she has been wearing a gown that opens to the back. That is not a problem while she is lying down, but her back needs to be covered while she walks. The solution is for her to put on another gown opening from the front, like a shirt – but the logistics of putting on the second gown are complicated by her fatigue, and by the IV pipes. It is a struggle for her to stand up, but she is still mortified that the first gown will slip. This creates an awkward moment. Will this be the only time I see her butt? I hear G-d laughing. She manages to put on the gown by herself. Once we leave the room, I push the IV scaffolding, and she leans on my arm. We walk around the floor clockwise; another two people, an old South Asian woman and a younger woman who appears to be her daughter, are walking counterclockwise laps, dragging their own IV rigging. When we see them, we nod, as though to another jogger on a track. M is tired after five laps. Back in her room, a few other visitors visit, briefly. One refers to M’s wife as her “social coordinator”. I am glad that she has so many people coming to see her. I suspect that if I die in a hospital or an old-folks home, most of my time there will be spent alone. The wife, if she is still alive, the kids, maybe an old student or an old manager. Mike, the manager at my park in northern New York, is loyal. I have tried Dee Dee’s patience too many times. College friends, fellow teachers, grad-school classmates, people from the lawyer days – they have all dropped away. I don’t use Facebook. Even close friends would find out only after I am dead, if at all. That’s what you get for being an introvert with a thick head. Enjoy it while it lasts. When I have to go, M and I hug, she begins to cry, and we hug again. She is lying on the recliner, and she can barely sit up. I have to lift her up to put my arms around her. She feels like a bag of wren bones against me, but I get a hard-on nonetheless. She would probably take that as a compliment. But I can never tell her.

And my life unfolds

by Angana Bharali Das • July 26, 2020July 26, 2020

They brought his dead body in the evening. A shrouded corpse that lay on the drawing room floor. Maya sat near it. This mound of covered flesh that had been her husband of twenty years. She could see wisps of gray hair on his head where it was not covered by the white cloth.

Maya’s husband had been a tall man who towered over his neighbors. He’d had to be laid diagonally across the small room. The cloth barely covering him.

“No,” Maya had insisted, “he will not lie outside baking in the sun, waiting for the purohit to arrive and perform the funeral rituals.”

And so they – husband and wife – waited, both on the floor of their favorite room. One slumped on the ground and the other on a cane floormat. From where she sat, Maya could see the lace curtains discolored with age. The trellis design perforated with holes through which sunlight streaked into the room, casting yellow patches on the threadbare carpet. Her father had bought the carpet years ago, perhaps in a fit of remorse.

It was her father who had arranged her marriage to this man, as he had arranged the marriage of his other daughter.

“A government servant with a permanent job,” he had said. His tone brooked no argument. Her father had been like that. A man rooted in ideas that had been more suitable in the past. Perhaps centuries ago. He had not been lucky with his choice of groom for her, his younger daughter.

Though Maya’s husband could boast of being employed, and in a coveted government institution, the high court, his salary – adequate for him, Maya, and their son – was paltry when divided among his siblings. For her husband too harbored old-fashioned notions of family and responsibility.

“My brother, Tarun, is having a spell of bad luck with his farm,” her husband had said in the first year of their marriage. Maya was still innocent then – in that first flush of married life. Hopeful, even. She had been young and curious, with many dreams. Dreams of exploring the world outside her village, tasting different food. Maybe even Delhi and Mumbai.

But as the years rolled on her husband had stopped explaining. And Maya had grown silent. Her world contained within the drawing room, where she sat and watched the world change around her. The young boys in the neighborhood grew up, married, and became fathers. The girls became mothers or went to the city to work.

Tarun, her brother-in-law, became a father, first of one child, then another, and then yet another. Tarun’s wife was delicate. She needed doctors and potions and rest.

Maya’s husband grew thinner and grimmer. Until one day what remained was only a dry husk of the man he had been.

“Bou, you want to eat something? The auspicious time for performing the last rites is still hours away.” It was Deepa. Her husband’s younger sister.

“Am I not supposed to fast?” Maya asked. Deepa looked pale but composed. It was the lines that zigzagged on the side of her face that surprised Maya. When did they appear? Maya remembered the scrawny twelve-year-old Deepa, all legs and arms, with a wide, gap-toothed smile, who had touched her feet when she had first come to this house as a bride.

Impulsively, Maya touched Deepa’s hands, unable to say anything. A lump had formed inside her throat, and she fought to maintain her composure. Deepa had depended on her brother and his death had removed the crutch that bolstered her confidence, as she faced life unmarried, a perceived burden on her brothers and their families.

“I am here,” Maya said eventually. “So is Bhaiti, your nephew. We will always be here.”

Yes, she would, Maya thought. This room, this house, this village, so near Guwahati, yet so far away, was her home.

“I never knew how the years flew. Your brother was always so responsible, always taking care,” Maya said softly.

Deepa sat down abruptly and began to weep. Deepa had always been quiet, as if her speech had been knocked off under the pressure to conform and obey. Her movements, her clothes, how she spoke and behaved, defined and dictated by her brothers.

All Maya had done was watch, never done anything. Not even when Tarun insisted that Deepa leave college after her second year. “So much money, going down the drain. What will she do with a BA degree?”

A life lived like a spectator. That was what Maya had done, always yearning for something. A life she could not even visualize, let alone voice.

Had he known? Her husband? That vague feeling of dissatisfaction that began early in her marriage and built over the years, until it consumed her.

There they sat. Maya and Deepa at Maya’s feet, until the sun stopped ravishing the curtains on the windows and turned its attention to the roof.

When Tarun stepped into the room, Maya’s heart stopped. She started sobbing, dry sobs, more hiccups than tears.

“Enough,” Tarun said, his voice sharper than it would ever have dared to be when her husband was alive. “Deepa, get out of here. Shirking work as always. Go on.”

Then he turned to the men, who had followed him inside. “Come, let’s take the body outside. Blasphemy, I tell you. Keeping it indoors,” he said, touching the ground with his fingers and bringing them up to his forehead to propitiate the gods.

Has his brother already transformed into a body in his mind? Maya wondered.

They heaved and huffed her husband into the bamboo stretcher they had carried with them.

After they left, Maya sat listening to the shouts of the people, squeezed into their small courtyard, preparing to ease her husband’s entry into another world. She went to the window. The courtyard had taken on an air of festivity, as if for a celebration, rather than a bereavement.

Maya woke up to the dull roar of, “Hari om, Hari om.” The chanting had begun. Maya parted the curtains to look outside. It was dark. Maya sat down again and burrowed deeper into her body.

The chanting went on for what seemed like hours. Until at long last, the pitch fell and slowly faded, and what remained was the silence.

They were taking her husband to the family’s paddy fields where the funeral pyre would be lit. A sob escaped Maya’s clenched lips. She wondered who would light the pyre. Her son or Tarun.

Maya’s sister came in the morning. A diminutive form encased in the folds of her starched white mekhla chador. The garb of a widow. Maya’s garb.

“Have some fruit,” she said. Her voice strong, betraying no grief.

“The period of purification is a month, and it is better if you eat only boiled food and fruits. At least for a few days,” she said.

“Yes, yes,” Maya murmured. The taste of the tea and biscuits – which Deepa had smuggled in through the window – still on her lips. Her husband would not have been perturbed, Maya decided. Under his gruff exterior, he was an urbane man, eschewing convention.

They were sitting side by side, her sister and Maya, when Tarun came in. Again.

“What is it I hear,” he said, standing near the door, a white chador on his bare shoulders. He looked huge standing there. Her husband’s death and the subsequent responsibility seemed to have broadened his already considerable girth. “Bhaiti cannot leave the house.”

“Just to my sister’s,” Maya answered.

“Too much grief. Not good for a young boy,” Maya’s sister added.

“No, no. What about sanskriti?” Tarun said loudly, forgetting he was speaking to two women older than him in honor, if not in age. One his older brother’s widow.

“His father has just died. Look at the gravity of the situation. How can he go and enjoy in his aunt’s house, so soon?” Tarun said, in a voice exaggerated by a growing sense of his own importance. “What will people say?”

Maya picked an apple from the fruits that her sister had brought and carefully cut it into small squares. Her husband had insisted she always do that. Was he watching? Her husband. This casual usurpation of his role.

Maya put one small perfect piece of the apple in her mouth, then another, and yet another, in rapid bursts of her fingers, until her mouth was gorged with the sweet fruit. Nearly choking her. Her eyes on her sister and Tarun.

“I still think a change will do Bhaiti good,” her sister said. Her voice insistent.

But Tarun had already left the room pushing the pliant door with unnecessary force.

In the evening, Maya’s sister left. Alone.

The suitcase that Maya’s son had packed lay in the room where she sat.

It was half open, to reveal the books and clothes he had filled it with.

He came in later. Her son. “Why is khura so angry?” he asked, his eyes red.

“Come and sit next to me,” Maya invited. But he remained standing. Her beloved son. Rendered helpless without the protection of his father.

“He loved you, oh, so much,” Maya had told him, over and over again, on that last day, when her husband had taken his last breath.

“Uncle has asked me to help cut the bamboo,” he said, before leaving. As if he – a sickly, protected boy – had enormous experience in cutting bamboo.

Maya could see him from the window, standing alone in the courtyard. A small boy for his thirteen years, with none of his father’s and uncle’s breadth and height.

The courtyard looked even more festive now, overflowing with young men. A few that Maya did not remember ever meeting. All of them relatives, friends, or acquaintances from the village. All helping with the arrangements for the ceremonies that follow a death.

They were hard workers. These young men. The bamboo skeleton of the pandal stood ready. The tarpaulin stretched taut above and around it. The rains were unpredictable in these parts and could come at any time.

They were expecting the villagers from five villages, Deepa had said, as befit the status of her husband; a respectable government employee, who was also the headman of the village.

“Where did the money come from?” Maya asked. Her voice trailing to a whisper at Deepa’s appearance. The girl had shriveled in two days.

Maya wondered whether the money in her husband’s cupboard had dried up too.

“Has your younger bou recovered enough to help you with the chores?” Maya asked.

But Deepa avoided her eyes.

“Many things need to be done, bou,” Deepa said, her voice almost a whisper and left the room.

Maya juggled her body to find a more comfortable position, and carefully touched the outline of the passbook and checkbook she had smuggled into her blouse on that terrible, first day of her husband’s illness. What had made her do that? Maya could not really fathom. Was it a deep hidden instinct for survival? That animal cunning that lurks in us all.

Her husband’s death, so unexpected, had torn the complacency out of her life.

“I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe,” her husband had screamed. Only it was not a scream, just a weak imitation of one. The words gasped out as he collapsed into a chair. Little bubbles and spit had appeared on the sides of his mouth. A wax figure, already turning inanimate, despite the struggle to live.

Maya had run, as she had never before, “Bhaiti, where are you? Anyone there.”

“A heart condition, I am afraid. Did you not know?” the doctor had said. And there he lay on the hospital bed. Her husband. His life snuffed out of him by the years of riding a rickety bicycle across the bridge spanning the Brahmaputra; somehow never able to save the money to buy a scooter or a motorcycle, let alone a car.

Her husband had grown old, providing and providing, being responsible, being the head of the family, Maya thought. She had grown old too, waiting for something better.

Tarun came in one day, just before the shradha, more perplexed than domineering.

“The bank manager refused to let me withdraw money … said I am not the legal heir. How will we receive kokaideu’s pension?” he asked. “I told that Deepa to search for his checkbook. That girl is useless sometimes.” This time Tarun pronounced the words slowly as if pondering a mystery.

His eyes were staring and his face was pale, as if deprived of oxygen. The bravado gone. Her husband’s money so much a part of his life.

Maya readjusted the chador on her body and sat more upright. The edges of the passbook and checkbook cut a thin line in her flesh.

She thought of her husband. A simple man. A loving man, despite his ideas of doing the right thing.

Every harvest season, her husband’s walk quickened and became energetic.

“This time we will visit the Taj Mahal,” he would say. “I have saved some money too.” And his face would light up with one of his rare smiles. “Maybe Deepa, too. The girl needs a break from household work.”

But soon that little ray of hope would be tamped down.

“Tarun’s middle son needs a brace and a checkup. Poor boy is sickly, and the money I had saved will help.”

Maya opened the front door to let in some fresh air.

“I am going to my sister’s house after the shradha. Money matters can wait. The harvest season is almost upon us. We can use that money, in the meantime,” Maya said, to the woebegone face that was Tarun.

It was more than a month after the shradha, when Maya went to the airport. Her sister had pressed the tickets in her hand.

“Just one ticket, I am afraid. But there will be another time,” her sister had said. Her eyes shifty with the guilty knowledge of a better life. A life she felt Maya also deserved. Maya had not demurred.

Maya had a long history of expecting and accepting her sister’s largesse. It was her sister’s house that Maya had run to in her long years of marriage.

Once a year, she had taken the ferry to cross the Brahmaputra.

Busy people lived in the houses in her sister’s neighborhood. People who owned cars and motorcycles, and ate tandoori chicken and pasta for dinner. For a fortnight, every year, Maya pretended she was one of them.

“Ma, you will be alone from this point here,” Bhaiti said. He looked worried. Maya could see it in the line that ran from his forehead down to his nose. His father’s expression, Maya thought.

The hair that fell on his forehead – despite repeated attempts to tame it – was wet with perspiration. It was a hot and humid day, and the airport was crowded.

“Go home,” Maya said, “no need of waiting. I am sure there will be many people who speak Assamese. I can ask them if I cannot understand anything.”

She stroked Bhaiti’s face, even though he stepped back, embarrassed.

“Ma, look after yourself,” he said, his voice wavering.

“I will,” Maya said, firmly. “You go home, you have to take the bus back. Remember not to take your khura’s words to heart. He means well.”

She walked purposefully toward the entrance of the departure hall. But could not resist stopping, just an instant, to look back to watch her son run to catch the bus.

Maya climbed the aircraft with difficulty. Her arthritis had flared again, without any warning. And to her shame she had to ask the usher’s help to carry her bag inside.

“Just some pickles that I made,” her sister had said, giving her the plastic jars that now weighed her carry-on bag down. The oil had spilled from the jars and created flowers of grease on the side of her bag.

“A mother’s present,” the usher said, and smiled condescendingly before viciously pushing the bag inside the overhead luggage rack. His smile was thin with the knowledge of Maya’s silk mekhla chador frayed with the effort of keeping the cloth clean through the years.

Vivek, her nephew, was waiting at the airport. A young, portly man, with a nondescript appearance.

“Khuri, so you did really come,” he exclaimed. He took her bag from her hand, despite her protests. The smile on his face gave a glimpse of the man who had defied his mother to marry a widow with two children of her own. “I knew you could travel alone,” he said, adroitly skirting his way out of the crowded airport. Maya trotted behind him like a child. The new sandals sliced her feet, as she stared bemused at the people and the advertising boards and the taxi counters – saris and pants and jeans and dresses. A few of them wearing clothes that made her avert her eyes in embarrassment.

When they were safely in the car, with Vivek driving expertly among the chaos of reversing cars and abandoned luggage trolleys, Maya invoked god’s name. Surprising herself. She had never considered herself religious. She had sat through rituals because it was expected, through those endless chanting and rules of when to stand and sit and pray.

“Ram, Ram, bhagwan. Thank you for safely delivering me here and for that sweet, helpful girl next to me.”

A burst of taste exploded inside Maya’s mouth. First sweet, then the bitter-sweet flavor of cumin, followed by the pungent taste of coriander powder, and then the lingering kick from the liberal use of chili powder. Overcome, Maya wondered what the dish was.

“Kadhi, from the neighbors. The mix besan with dahi here, unlike us,” Tripti beamed, from the edge of the table. Her eyes on her bowl, as she slurped over a spoonful of the liquid.

“Taste a little … just one spoonful,” Tripti spoke again, this time to urge her youngest daughter to eat. She didn’t seem too perturbed that her seven-month-old had eaten nothing since the morning.

Vivek ate in silence, his body splayed on his chair.

Both – Tripti and Vivek – had welcomed Maya to their home as if her visit was a normal occurrence. Maya could have been their college friend who had come to meet them.

Maya poured more kadhi into her bowl, while Tripti rose to scoop her child into her arms. The child had wriggled away to roam the room on her hands and knees.

“Baby naughty, baby naughty,” Tripti cooed.

Maya debated whether to remind Tripti to feed the baby at proper times. Maya was after all her sister’s emissary in the household.

Maya’s days in Mumbai passed in a blur – people, bazars, and activity. All those people in the malls and streets. Here, no one bothered her or questioned how she behaved or talked or dressed.

Maya had cut short Tarun’s call when it had come, as expected.

“The bank manager needs your signature. Then I will be able to receive the pension in my account,” he said.

The sound of the doorbell ringing cut through Maya’s thoughts and drowned the sounds that Tripti was making to coax her reluctant baby to eat.

Vivek opened the door. Mrs. Patel, from next door, practically ran in.

“The maid forgot to give this dabba, as well,” she apologized. “I hope you like our food,” she said. Voluble and friendly and a bit overwhelming, Mrs. Patel stood on the threshold, ruddy from her morning cooking, and brushed aside Vivek’s thanks.

Vivek carried the plastic container to the table and pulled open the lid. A tantalizing aroma of coconut and tamarind and other delicious things filled Maya’s nostrils, intoxicating her.

Maya felt herself ask Vivek, “This Khao Gaali, this street, I hear it has scrumptious food and myriad people.”

It was irreverent, this craving for different things. Exotic things. She was still in the mourning period.

Maybe it was her husband’s absence. His kind but closed face, lined with responsibilities. The quest to find a husband for Deepa, which he continued even when Deepa herself had given up hope. “This boy looks promising, he has some business,” he had said, time and again, only to be disappointed when he received news of the man’s engagement to someone else’s sister or daughter.

Her husband had forgotten to enjoy his life. Little by little, Maya had forgotten too the effervescence and inanities that comprise life.

Maya dragged herself away from the table to the window. And looked out.

The window of the first-floor flat looked down on the courtyard. She could see a group of children playing cricket. Five boys and a girl. The girl was batting when the old man she had seen in the building appeared. He strode to the makeshift cricket pitch. His manner that of a person who was used to playing the game, and started bowling. His trousers were stiff and white, and his demeanor animated and energetic.

Further down the horizon – filled with rows of concrete buildings of different heights – she saw a gulmohar tree. The tree was bare except for a few red flowers braving Mumbai’s October sun.

Maya smiled to herself and turned back.

“Maybe next time, I will come with Bhaiti. Maybe even Deepa. Mrs. Patel said she has a room that she gives out for short rentals,” she said.

Then she turned back to look out of the window again. Below her, the old man, having scored a wicket, raised his hand up in victory and clapped it with one of the boy’s hands. His face suffused with confidence and vigor. A man who was used to living his life. Both good and bad.

Maya looked out of the window for a long time. The sun climbed on the horizon and glowed orange and red.

She thought, I had better start marriage negotiations with the boy, that lecturer, Deepa steals out to meet in the afternoons. Arranged marriages are not the only marriage negotiations. Poor girl does not know that I never sleep in the afternoon. And touched the passbook and checkbook that she still hid close to her bosom.

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ARIANE

by Nina Robison • July 25, 2020November 12, 2020

Photo by Helen Harrop (copied from Flickr)

There’s this bizarro technique my doctor’s urging. It’s got a bunch of scientific terms that just sound to me like whatever whatever and no fucking way this is going to help me. It’s called (with letters and a number) a hedonic transplant. It gets my bad feelings replaced with high baseline happiness from another person. It’s like the good witch of the north or a good genie will flow through a vein while bad memories will be drawn out through a different vein. Some research guy or woman will study the sample (maybe labeled Ariane, 9-17 years of age). The researcher will look for bio-this and that, but big deal, what’s the mystery? Nine years old and Fucking Grandpa thinks I’m “shaping up as a woman” and wants to prove it and Grandma doesn’t stop him, she doesn’t believe me? He does it more till I show my teachers where he hurt me. Now I’m seventeen and still in a mosh pit fighting memories like razors.

I’ve been Googling this treatment the doctor’s bugging me about. The woman who came up with the idea was studying her cat, all relaxed, “blinking with contentment” on the sofa next to her. Protected. Secure, paws tucked under, and the woman finds a syringe and takes blood from her cat. Then she and her research buddies experiment with the cat’s blood. They inject it into an abandoned kitty that’s acted all feral and crazy. You can guess what happens; everyone can pet the kitten now, which rubs against them even when they give it shocks. Different protocols don’t work at all on similar cats (nor on me). So they keep transfusing the happy cocktail, which helps some mistreated animals. But humans haven’t been tested that much.

I could expect, during the procedure, to see images the transplanter loves (I call her that rather than a donor — it makes me think of a garden). I might see her favorite trees and flowers. Faces. Surfing waves, a blue glacier? Some images of my own might start — of nice places, my sea horse and Husky and the Black Stallion, years ago. A social life now, parties? I’ve felt icky around boys, but now perhaps I won’t.

So Tuesday I go to the hospital for their experiment. I’m scared it won’t work. Several physicians will be there, and my brother too. Maybe he’d get the treatment if it erases a memory with its feelings. “Good luck, Ariane,” someone might say, the nurse swabbing my vein, maybe. No, not the nurse. It’ll be me. My doctor will smile, with his high baseline, probably, then he’ll say, “Ready?”

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Dear Galactic Living (From the Dystopian Letters)

by AUDREY SHIPP • July 20, 2020July 20, 2020 • 1 Comment

You propelled us into outer space group by group in penis-shaped spaceships powered by bursts of methane in order to send us to our final destination. Even though Earth was ravaged and damaged by overuse of its natural resources, we didn’t think you would force us to leave. Now we’ve gone four or five years with no rain in the time we’ve been here. But how long exactly have we been in the cylinder orbiting the Earth? It’s hard to say really since you make it difficult to follow the day and night cycles of the old planet. Your cylinder doesn’t allow for full solar access since only fragmentary sunlight comes in through the windows. The solar rays partially illuminate our space colony which spreads 4 miles in width and 10 miles in length and which we’ve dubbed the New Orleans. The majority of the light comes from fluorescent bulbs posted inside the cylinder like streetlights on Earth. We settled on the name New Orleans since we’re Black folks in here and other peoples of color. We try to keep it lively with a good vibe and all. But this wasn’t our plan. You were created by the billionaires who assumed power over everything on the old planet. Even though you’ve given us trees and other plants and you extract frozen water from the moon to help us with agriculture, the cylinder doesn’t have enough water for a decent lake. And we do miss the beach. So much. To clean ourselves, we resort to wipes which is a bit childish, but that’s what we do.

You’ve given us scooters to move about or we can take the tram which traverses the 40 square miles of the cylinder. Often we just walk to get where we’re going. Because your closed cylinder doesn’t grant us far-reaching views, when we walk we miss the huge expanse of the sky on Earth and its horizon. But it’s not like we have much of anywhere to go. Our typical workday in our Living Cylinder is 3 hours. To those folks who applied for cylinder life and got an Industrial Cylinder designation, you’ve given a harder life. In that cylinder residents work longer days laboring in the light industry needed for the thousands of cylinders that orbit the Earth. For our pastime we go to the Zero-G Room and do a lot of fun things. We bounce off the walls, float to the top of the room, or we pretend to be mountain climbing on the brown plastic structures. Mountains were such pleasing things on Earth. We miss them despite your giving us e-devices with a plethora of images we easily access to help us remember the height, breadth and roughness of mountains. The young kids don’t know what the mountains were. They don’t know what they’re missing.

After money ransacked the Earth, you offered us our current cylinder life or the Mars colony. We knew the Mars trip would be a killer. It’s seven months from Earth just to get there. And residents there say it’s not as comfortable even though their colony is built on that planet’s surface. Their advantage is access to frozen water, but they constantly wear oxygen tanks. Knowing that only a few people pass the physical exam that allows for the Mars stay, we opted to orbit the Earth endlessly and till the end in our Living Cylinder.

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Fry Person

by Jov Almero • July 19, 2020July 19, 2020 • 1 Comment

On paper, Arman was not unlike the other applicants. His face, just like the others, was young and hopeful. The personal details he had written, basic and straightforward. He was a recent graduate from a barangay high school on the outskirts of the city. His parents were both alive, according to his bio data. Seeing the applicant in person, though, Chris thought the kid might as well be orphaned. Arman was tall but looked unfed. His flesh swathed his bones like wrapping paper on a week-old dehydrated burger.

When Arman introduced himself he sounded as frail as he looked. His voice was devoid of self-assurance as if he were a thirteen-year-old about to break under the weight of a growing bump in his neck and hairs sprouting in previously barren parts of his body. He was seventeen, fit to work, according to his birth certificate, which Chris had to consult, just to make sure.

Hiring was the first store system assigned to Chris. His first crucial decision as hiring manager was whether to give Arman the sixth slot in the roster of applicants to advance to the three-day on-the-job phase of the recruitment process and, in effect, deny the others, who, by virtue of their performance in the interview, were more deserving. Chris reasoned come training he would surely lose patience with Arman’s inevitable incompetence. By then that well-meaning voice in his head will have to relent. For now, he would give him a chance.

Arman and the other applicants were assigned to a crew captain who would train them in three core stations of the fast food’s daily operations – counter, lobby, and fry. They studied the counter station the first day. In the morning Lance the crew captain provided them a module based on the company bible, a three-by-four-inch book in a red cover stamped with the fast food’s logo. The module contained all there was to know about the counter, including the Five-Step Process that begins with Smile and Greet the Customer and ends with Smile and Bid the Customer Goodbye. After studying the module the applicants were quizzed on what they had learned. Arman got the poorest score.

Chris asked Arman why he had performed so poorly in the test and the latter answered he’d had a hard time concentrating. Chris asked if Lance’s lesson was clearly delivered and he answered yes and that it was not Lance’s fault. When Chris asked Lance about Arman’s performance, the crew captain answered it was probably because Arman looked like he had not eaten breakfast.

In the afternoon, the applicants were put on floor in two groups of three for practical evaluation. They had to support cashier persons by assembling products. Each group had two hours to apply what they had learned from the morning session. Arman was part of the second group. At the counter, Arman was remarkably out of place. He never smiled when greeting customers, never smiled when saying goodbye. In the few instances he did, he smiled like he had unlawfully plucked the feathers off a Philippine Eagle and made himself fried chicken. Worse, he did not follow the proper order in which food and beverages had to be assembled per the company’s standard method: cold beverage first, hot beverage next, then burgers and entrees, and lastly, French fries. With Arman at the counter, it was chaos.

That well-meaning voice in Chris’s head grew weaker.

On the second day, the applicants were trained in the lobby station. They had to memorize which detergent to use for table sprays, the right water and detergent ratio for each spray, and during lean hours, which store areas had to be checked and in what order. After being quizzed – with Arman still getting below mediocre score – they were again shoved into action, two hours for each group of three. Arman’s group was blessed with a lean hour, with only a few customers in the dining lobby. But instead of surveying the store exterior for litters and the comfort rooms if they needed to be replenished with tissue paper and the playpen if the plastic balls were still in the pit, Arman stood next to a trash bin most of the time with his head turned to the floor as if he were counting the rectangular tiles that carpeted the area.

That well-meaning voice in Chris’s head, by then, had relented.

Then came fry day.

After studying the fry station module with Lance and after Arman getting the lowest quiz score for the third time, Chris fed the applicants with a hearty lunch before pushing them into battle. They had an hour each at the fry station. Arman was last to train, at 4:30 PM. It was a Sunday and rush hour was expected after the 4 PM mass. The store was located in front of a church and these after-church rush hours were the worst.

At the fry station, Arman was a revelation. He did everything by the book. Despite his seemingly weak arms he followed standard procedure, which was to first line up the empty fry baskets from the rack on a nearby stainless steel table, retrieve a bag of fries from the overhead freezer, and pour fries into the baskets in three passes to evenly distribute different lengths – from the long ones at the top of the bag to the short pieces at the bottom. Even the prescribed interval between dipping two frozen baskets of fries into the hot oil tank he followed. From the proper movement of dispensing salt into the fry pan to the proper positioning of boxed fries on the fry display, Arman got them all down pat. And when the rush hour finally came, not once did he run out of products. French fries never had to be delivered to tables where frustrated customers sat, burgers and soda long consumed.

Now Chris was plagued no longer by conscience but a nagging predicament. Should he hire this kid who was exceptionally gifted in one station but sucked at everything else, or hire one of the consistently mediocre ones on top of two obvious choices?

Chris hired Arman alongside his two obvious choices, an academic scholar at the city’s most prestigious second-tier university and a single mom who had previously worked in rival fast food chains. The three of them would become good friends.

Chris, too, would become good friends with Arman, much to Lance’s annoyance. But it was not the friendship per se that annoyed Lance. Arman was not on the list of Lance’s recommended applicants. Chris’s choosing Arman meant the manager bypassed the crew captain’s decision, his limited authority. But Lance’s irritation towards Chris went further back than Arman.

When Chris got this job, a couple of months after graduating from the city’s premier university, he was trained by Lance in the stations. But unlike Arman, Chris had trained for a managerial position, and would receive a fixed monthly salary as opposed to Lance’s hourly fee. From the time Lance introduced himself as Chris’s trainer, Chris had sensed animosity.

Lance had been with the company since he was seventeen. He was deemed not smart enough for academic scholarships and not sufficiently destitute for government subsidies. Since college was out of the question, he worked instead. From a lobby person bussing tables and emptying trash bins he crawled his way up the ranks until he got his crew captain promotion after four years of service. This allowed him to take charge in the kitchen and an incremental increase to his hourly rate.

Lance was admired and respected by both service crew members and the management team. He knew the contents of the company’s little red book by heart, from the ideal color of cooked fries to the ideal temperature of the chicken fry vat before a batch of wings or breasts or legs or thighs ought to be dropped. He knew all the on-floor protocols like the back of his hand, from the spiels the kitchen crews should exchange between each other when preparing orders to the duration foods are allowed to stay in the heated product bin before they ought to be disposed of and accounted as wastage. Most impressively he knew when and how to maneuver between following protocols and responding to contingencies in nonstandard but nonetheless acceptable ways. This meant doing away with superfluous parts of procedures while delivering the same results.

According to senior managers who had been in the store longer than Chris, most starting off as crew members themselves, Lance had changed drastically in the past couple of years. Although he remained courteous, he had long stopped talking to them, except when it was work-related. He had also taken on the habit of smoking at the store’s back lot, which was prohibited. They explained it must be due to his frustration on account of his delayed promotion to management trainee. The delay was now five years in the running. Meanwhile, the company had been hiring fresh college graduates to join the management team, despite their lack of experience in the fast food industry, or in any work for that matter.

Chris chalked up Lance’s animosity to good old envy.

After Hiring, Chris was assigned Labor Management. This served his goal well with regards to Arman. He gave the latter schedules on the same hours and days he was on floor. In Arman’s first few months of service, Chris plotted him exclusively as fry person. As expected, Arman was completely in charge, completely immersed in the station. His French fries were always crisp, always golden, always rightly salted. His station was consistently clean, his fry vat consistently in the prescribed temperature. During lean hours Chris trained Arman in other stations.

At the burger station, Arman flipped patties perfectly, always with little to no specs of meat left on the grill. He dressed buns quite perfectly, too, with the ketchup and mustard and mayo always neatly dispensed and just in the right amount. At the chicken station his fried chickens were always perfectly breaded, emerging from the vat light brown and generously flaky. When Chris had him stationed at the sink, he realized he had never seen that area so tidy. The pans and pots were all squeaky clean, the floor, grease-free.

For an entire month Chris scheduled Arman at the sink station where his presence was sort of an anomaly. Puny-looking as he was, Arman still thrived as sink person. What he lacked in strength he compensated for with strategy. He’d flatten old cardboard boxes into a makeshift sled for dragging boxes of frozen chicken for thawing from the walk-in freezer to the walk-in cooler.

As Chris’s friendship with Arman grew, his relationship with Lance became even more strained. Lance’s treatment of him deteriorated from shared nods of acknowledgment in the hallway sandwiched by the crew and management quarters to just cold blank stares. Lance’s smoking had gotten worse, too, and whenever they were on the same shift Chris could not help but be repulsed every time Lance returned from his cigarette breaks outside. By then Lance had claimed a corner of the store’s back lot as his personal ashtray.

Chris confronted Lance about his smoking while they were alone in the crew quarters. He explained that company policy prohibited them from lighting up within 50 meters of the store’s vicinity. Lance reasoned he had never read such a policy in the little red book. Chris excused himself and retrieved a copy of the little red book from his locker. He showed Lance the policy, printed on page 95, under the Employee Conduct chapter. Lance laughed it off and explained he must have missed it. Chris again flipped through the pages of the little red book until he found the Employee and Store Cleanliness chapter. He showed it to Lance and reminded him of the cigarette butts he had been ditching in one corner of the back lot. Lance lost it.

Lance shouted at Chris’s face, called him book smart but floor incompetent. He shouted how Chris could not even properly dispense beverages. He shouted how Chris just stood around during rush hours acting all managerial, instead of helping out. He shouted his disgust at how greedily Chris bought into the policy of unlimited food for the management.

Chris’s big bun cheeks flushed. He raised his plump fist eager to land a punch on Lance’s face, eager to have his nose drip spaghetti sauce.

Arman had appeared from nowhere and stopped Chris’s punch from landing by gripping his arm. At first, Chris was pissed at the intrusion. Soon as he had gathered his wits, though, he thanked Arman. The company maintained zero tolerance for violence.

Lance resigned a few days after the altercation. He would relocate to the capital, a starved metropolis on a growth spurt an hour plane ride away, and apply for fast food work abroad, in the Middle East or Canada, according to his resignation letter.

The store lacked a crew captain for more than a year. When there was no crew captain on floor, the manager on duty chose the crew member they trusted most to fill the post. Chris’s was always Arman.

At the crew captain station Arman performed the same way he did at the fry station, like he was wired into the whole production machinery from the POS systems in the counter that received orders to the grills in the kitchen that received patties. He delivered quality supplies that were just sufficient for demand. With him calling food production there were few to zero product wastages because no food stayed longer than allowed by the little red book on the product bin. This also meant customers at the counter always left with their orders and not a number on a table standee.

Arman’s physique considerably improved as well. But it was not because of the crew meal they were given, which was no more than a regular serving of the cheapest burger meal for four-hour shifts and a chicken and rice or spaghetti meal for shifts beyond six hours. His increased bulk was due to all the physical labor he had been doing, especially when stationed at the sink where he had to do a lot of heavy lifting. It also had something to do with his daily baon.

Arman always had a baon of rice and ulam from his nanay who was an exceptional cook. These dishes were usually made of the cheapest vegetables from the market but cooked with so much love and desperation that a spoonful of them went easy with three spoonfuls of rice or more. Arman always shared half of his ulam with Chris. He’d had enough of his nanay’s vegetables, he would say. On four-hour shifts he would unravel his burger and turn the buns into appetizers. He would then eat the burger patty with his home-cooked rice and half of his nanay’s vegetables. On six-hour shifts he favored spaghetti over a chicken meal, which he mixed with his home-cooked rice like the peak of fusion cuisine. These meal breaks were memories Chris cherished. He even documented a few, posted them on social media.

During one of their shared meals, while Arman was eating his rice and spaghetti combo, Chris announced that the management team had agreed to promote Arman to crew captain. Chris had convinced his co-managers that he could turn Arman into a better version of Lance, one with zero bitterness and aggression.

Arman was excited by the news. But when Chris told him he had to train in the counter again to complete his modules and, this time, as a cashier person, he was alarmed. It was the one place he never wanted to be, the counter. It was the one job he never wanted to do, take orders.

But it had to be done. The most Chris could do for his protégé was request for the labor manager to plot Arman’s cashier training and evaluation on the slowest hour of the leanest day – Tuesday, between 7 to 10 AM.

Monday afternoon Chris discussed the cashier module with Arman. He then quizzed him for formality and, with some necessary adjustments, Arman passed with panache.

Tuesday morning Chris and Arman came to work early so they could review all the keys in the POS system and how to punch orders. Chris reminded Arman that should he input a wrong order or should a customer cancel an order, there was no need to panic because he could always call out, Sir, pa-void.

The customers came in sporadically and as such Arman was able to keep calm behind the cashier. He smiled throughout, if a bit awkwardly, and never jumbled the order of food assembly. Chris could not be more proud. Also, he could not be more at ease with his team on floor: Arman and one of his batchmates manning their respective cashiers, a kitchen plus a sink person, and a lobby person.

A group of high-school students on their way to a field trip emerged from two long jeepneys and suddenly it was rush hour. Chris asked Anna to leave her POS and assemble orders on Arman’s behalf.

Chris took over the fry station. He tried his best to keep up but kept falling short. Arman had to give out a lot of numbered table standees and soon the lobby was littered with teenagers milling about, numbers in hand, like auction participants bidding for a box of French fries.

Arman called out, Sir, pa-void, six times. The kitchen and sink persons scurried like jugglers on a wheel. Pans dropped on the floor making noises that reached the lobby. Chris called the lobby person to help out in the counter, draw beverages. But even with his extra hands they still struggled to deliver the little red book’s three-minute service time.

When at last they had done away with the students, they were confronted by an irate middle-aged guy at the end of the line.

Arman had already forgotten Step 1 of the counter process. He went straight to taking the irate customer’s order, worth 6,000 pesos. With no time to recover from the last unanticipated rush hour, the kitchen was now full-on mayhem. There was no way they could prepare the bulk order fast enough so Arman had to give the customer a number and ask him to wait in the lobby. Chris asked Anna to help out in the kitchen while Arman stayed in the counter. Chris was still the fry person, trying to keep up with a new large order, failing splendidly.

It took almost an hour to prepare the order. The customer loaded his fast food haul onto his SUV still irate.

Then: relief.

For the next hour they had few customers to serve, which gave them ample time to recalibrate. Although Chris wanted to hit hourly sales target he prayed hungry customers be led into rival fast food chains, at least until he finished Arman’s training.

On Arman’s last hour behind the cashier, while Chris was inserting the needle of a food thermometer into a fried chicken, thigh part, he heard a commotion from the counter.

The irate customer was complaining about missing French fries. As soon as he saw Chris emerge from the kitchen he redirected his wrath from Arman to Chris whom he’d seen prepare his bag of French fries.

The customer pointed a finger at Chris’s chest, showered spit on Chris’s face. Another customer walked into the store and immediately wielded his smartphone on the confrontation. The irate customer, standing with his back against the door, had no idea he was being recorded.

While Chris tried to placate the irate customer, Arman had already dropped a basket of frozen fries in the vat. Chris explained to the irate customer they were understaffed and they had not anticipated the rush hour. Chris offered him free products to make up for their disappointing service. Taking a cue from what he had learned from his people management class on rapport building, Chris gently placed a hand on the irate customer’s left shoulder.

The irate customer deflected Chris’s hand quite vigorously with his own hand. Next thing, he was calling Chris bakla. It was the kindest of what would become a conveyor belt of unsavory insults.

Loose French fries dropped from a fry basket onto the dining tray in front of the irate customer. They were undercooked and greasy and had yet to be salted. Arman’s eyes were glazed with rage. The customer was dumbstruck. He looked around and saw he was being recorded. He sneered and stormed out of the store.

Chris approached the customer who had recorded the dispute. In exchange for free meals he requested for the video to be deleted, to which the customer obliged.

Chris thanked Arman. But he knew such an outburst was against company policy so he wrote an incident report which he had Arman sign. He assured Arman it was only for formality. As for Arman’s practical evaluation, Chris decided they had to do it again some other time, to which Arman agreed.

The incident became the subject of hushed and reverent conversations between crew members. Arman’s hands were shook, his shoulders tapped, his butt affectionately spanked by peers in admiration of his heroic deed. For weeks Arman was on a high from all the adulation. Halfway through all of this Chris had already learned the decision from the head office.

The day the head manager gave Arman the chop, Chris was off floor. He specifically asked for his schedule not to coincide with Arman’s last day. He did not want to see Arman after receiving heartbreaking news. He did not want to console him with empty promises, or worse, patronize him with incantations on his bright future owing to his hardworking nature. Chris slept the day off.

Chris saw Arman five years after the incident. By then he had already climbed a few more steps up the corporate ladder. He was area manager, in charge of six stores scattered in three cities. He was walking outside the newly built mall where their most recent branch was located. He had just finished his monthly store visit. Their small city’s traffic problem had worsened in recent years so he’d decided to leave his car at the mall parking area, walk the few miles to his next itinerary.

Chris had been exercising regularly the past couple of years. He had lost significant pounds and gained considerable muscles, which he was always ready to show off.

A taxi slowed down and eventually stopped for Chris. The driver, in a tight-fitting short-sleeved shirt and ripped jeans, was grinning from ear to ear. Chris did not recognize him until he rolled down the window and shouted, Sir, pa-void!

Arman explained the taxi he was driving for more than a year now was just one of many owned by a local operator. Chris noticed how Arman had maintained his lean but toned physique despite hours of sitting behind the wheel.

They complimented each other’s bodies.

Arman dropped Chris off at the store in front of the church. He refused to accept Chris’s bayad.

Chris stood stuck where his feet had landed after hopping off Arman’s taxi. His body barely missed the side mirrors of SUVs and sedans headed elsewhere. From up above, the store’s logo was in all its bright glory, making Chris and everyone else hungry. Chris took out a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket and lit up. He perspired like he was next to the fry station, trying to keep up.

Chris remembered those meals with Arman. He remembered he had not once shared his free and unlimited fast food with him because it was against company policy and the little red book always had the last say. From the pit of his stomach something stubborn crept up his throat. It felt like heartburn, it tasted like guilt. Chris burped.

Coffee in the Time of Quarantine

by Corey S. Pressman • July 18, 2020July 18, 2020

Ink. Java. Joe. Brew. Mud. All designations for a miracle in my life: coffee.

It wasn’t always this way. I remember being boastful of my lack of a coffee habit in the early ’90s. And not being coffee-dependent in Portland was a real distinction. It was a badge of honor. I was raised on the eternally topped-off New York diner dishwater coffee. This coffee was a minor appliance, not a work of art. Coffee was merely part of a complete breakfast of corned beef hash and scrambled eggs. So all this hoopla about coffee just seemed like posturing. At the time, all Portland had going for it was a rainy reputation, time-travel dive bars, the Wildwood restaurant, and a quad-shot of Depth Charge at Coffee People. But I wasn’t going to be sucked in. Coffee was just not worth it.

That was then. This is now.

And “now” means life on the lam, living in hiding, tucked away at home in the global witness protection program of COVID-19 quarantine. It has been disorienting to see all the actions and objects of everyday existence bend and break with the strain. Changing one simple element – you are not to leave your house – changes everything. Even coffee.

I eventually succumbed, of course. By the early 2000s I was a true believer. Having kids was my gateway to dependency. Living in captivity with toddlers, subjected to their systematic sleep deprivation tactics, coffee was my only hope. And it delivered – and then some. You see, I was drawn to the black muddy river by the bright promise of caffeine, but I drank all the deeper for java’s sensual side effects, for the flavor. Caffeine is the most widely used psychoactive substance in the world, but that it comes wrapped in subtle aromatic brocades and transportive flavor puzzles that make you grateful to have a face is just not fair.

This wasn’t really true of the first-wave coffee of my youth, but happily, I was forced to the fountain of Joe in the Pacific Northwest at the advent of the Third Wave. Taken black, this coffee was dark and delicious, produced and provided by real people rather than by a long anonymous supply chain like cans of refried beans. Eventually, the hegemony of my children receded, and I was left on the shore – older, scruffier, and clutching a warm aromatic Americano from Coava Roasters. Win-win.

Don’t get me wrong. Caffeine was still central to the experience, and remains the main attraction, but still, I could never abandon coffee and start popping caffeine pills like my friend Luke did. He didn’t like the taste, or that coffee made his teeth yellow. I never fully trusted him after learning about this choice. Luke was no aesthete, it turned out, no sensual gourmand. A life stained with coffee beats the crazed and colorless mania of popping caffeine pills. Right? Of course right.

The jolt, plus its culinary envelope, saved the day over and over again. Saved it from what? From long slogs starting early, from the uncertainty of morning, from the fuzzed-out focus fueled by the perennial fear of business ownership, from knowing people, showing up, from work. Imagine a drug so delicious it rivals wine. Bacchus forgive me – you get your stipend in the evenings, and anyway, you pass the baton to coffee come six o’clock a.m. A circuit of grace. And I figured this circuit would break, as did most of the others when Covid killed all my daily routines. I figured wrong.

Back in the early 2000s, fueled partly by my new passion, I worked with a Portland-based coffee importer to build an educational iPad app for coffee farmers in the Americas and Africa. The iPads were kept at distribution hubs; when farmers came in from their plantations to deliver truckloads of green beans, they would use the app to watch instructional videos about farming and supplemental strategies like beekeeping.

In order to test the interface with actual end-users, we traveled backwards along the coffee bean’s sojourn from shade to shelf. We started in the PDX airport, its indoor air rife with the stale smell of ground coffee from the centralized Stumptown joint. We landed in Lima and visited the cupping facilities where trained palates interrogated meticulous pour-overs, listening for the whispered list poems of flavor notes. They consulted brightly colored flavor wheels with glorious analogies like brown spice, grapefruit, petroleum. Here, I learned to quaff and scribble like a professional taster, each a coffee poet. So much depends on sugar browning.

We drove inland and North, stopping at a massive mill. The colors of these coffee milling machines were magnificent. Lichen greens, mossy browns, yellow mustard, muted pinks, and gunmetal grey stripes and pipes, wide steel boxes fixed with enormous bolts and ambushed by a brigade of miles-long switchback black rubber belts. The ceiling receded in darkness. An open control panel offered a color-coded wire riot – a Brice Marden painting with a Dr. Suess palette.

After the mill we pushed into the foothills, higher and higher onto the lower shoulders of the Andes. On the way, we stopped for lunch at a gas station cum family restaurant. The children peeked from around the kitchen curtain as I ordered. I had a large round stingray omelet with bright strips of fried yucca and aji amarillo aioli. It tasted of optimistic fresh eggs and the infinity of the sea, of easy speed and salt air. It was magnificent. My head swam. So many border crossings at once – eating fish in the high air, upside down in another hemisphere, blown away by something so special to me yet mundane to my hosts. At a gas station. All these contradictions conspired to make me feel like a stranger in my own mind.

Like quarantine.

These past weeks have driven me a little mad, and put me in a state much like that Peruvian culture shock. Upside down, alien to my familiar, it’s been hard to gain traction on anything. Even getting in the car feels strange. So does taking a shower. Just about everything has been weirded. But not coffee. Coffee is perhaps the only ritual that remains. And given the new swathes of time, I’ve been able to explore. I’ve dialed in a French Press technique, weighed my beans and water, used a timer. I am not a precision cook, nor am I a baker. So once I’ve measured everything once, I eyeball it after that. Meticulosity is folly.

Each morning, I wake up excited to get to The Craft. Once in the kitchen, I grind and spend time looking at the grounds, seeing things previously unseen – grain size and shape, colors. The smells at this stage are already intoxicating. I combine the grind with a heavy splash of very hot water and watch the coffee bloom. Multicolored bubbles of all shapes and sizes surprise from the brown, the whole mess slowly rising like a bog come alive. This moment is an invitation, a plea for more water. I fill the press almost full, eliciting a chestnut froth a quarter-inch thick. This all gets covered with the press lid and stews in its own magnificence for about four minutes. I plunge and pour a cup of sweet salvation. Four cups, to be precise. I get a lot accomplished in the morning.

Quarantine coffee tastes better, but not just from the extra care I give it. Daily events like this hold us in place, keep us from the jarring truth that we are upside down in the wrong hemisphere, adrift in a guessing game with fluid rules. Quarantine coffee gives me something – the one thing – to hold on to. Before this, I counted coffee’s virtues as amphetamine and flavor. I am certain now that I will never forget its third, more latent, function: sensemaking. And nothing tastes better than belonging.

We eventually made it all the way up to a finca in the Andes. I was ignorantly surprised not to see coffee plants in rows and fields. That’s what a farm is, right? No. Of course, hillside shade-grown coffee is on, well, hillsides under shady brush. And these were far from view, sloping off in all directions. The farmer and his family were gracious and excited. He took the iPad from me and happily started tapping away. Within minutes, he was watching videos made by an African coffee farmer about growing practices. “How,” he asked in Spanish, “can I make movies to send to this person?”

As the day wore on, he seemed to notice our flagging energy. He spoke a few soft words to his teen daughter, who had dressed up for the occasion. She disappeared into the low smokey house in a flourish of pink and purple. The farmer smiled at us expectantly when she returned with our afternoon pick-me-up. With one hand, she balanced a large round tray topped with several perfect and ancient water glasses. Each was filled halfway with honey the color of sunny hay. And in each tilted a long, slender, polished silver spoon. I took a glass. Suspended smack in the middle of my honey was the tiny black comma of a dead ant who had no doubt died smiling.

The honey was delightfully thin and floral. We all ate standing in the yard in a rough circle, each making happy eating sounds, doing little happy eating dances. This gesture of hospitality, sharing something sweet in the hazy jungle afternoon, pinned us all in place. This was what I found at the origin of coffee. Eating a farmer’s honey and an ant with a silver spoon in my mouth, engaged in an easy ritual that held us to the earth and to each other.

I don’t know how Covid has affected this family, if they are healthy, safe, optimistic. I do know that the coffee from his universe is stitching together my own.

May his honey hold and his silver spoons remain polished.

May we all arrive on the other side with fresh appreciation for the old rituals that hold us in.

Things Behind the Sun

by Maria Prudente • July 11, 2020July 11, 2020

I smelled the signs of trouble.

I pushed my nose close to the lobby floor and hovered a while: sodium hypochlorite. I was new to this apartment building, and I’d come to find that on most days, Angel, my eighty-year-old super who cruised around the neighborhood on his electric scooter, liked to bleach the floors every morning. Maybe he was like me: obsessive, afraid of germs and in need of a daily catharsis. Frankly, I appreciated it. Someone else had taken into account how much muck we carry into our homes from off the street.

I had moved uptown to 200th street – the heart of the Little Dominican Republic, just below The Met Cloisters. The scenic vistas of the Hudson River, grassy hills, and formations of schist and gneiss outcroppings make up my backyard: Fort Tryon Park. It is special. My one-bedroom apartment was spotless, save for the spots of the sticky residue left behind from the moving tape realtors used to protect the hardwood during previous walkthroughs.

The smell started to follow me outdoors. I found chlorine deep in the bluebell and yellow tulips of Heather Garden on my morning hikes. Ammonia tightened its grip as I bypassed each bodega, choking me on the way up the subway steps to catch the one train. The stink was everywhere. My schoolbooks had been exposed to dioxins now, and it was evident with every turn of the page, everything around me was turning sick.

I left my landlord a note:

Angel,
Can we have a chat about the floor cleaner?
I’ll be home by 4.
Thanks,
Maria, 4A

I don’t hear from Angel. I try and escape to the Brooklyn Flea in search of overpriced battered wooden mirrors and prints of comics in French I can only partially translate. The sunshine in May peeked between the clouds, illuminating what had now consumed me; burning my eyes and clogging my throat. I picked up a scarf and sniffed it. I asked my friend if it smells like a rotten egg or mold or urine. She peeked her head out from beneath the tent of African drums sold as side-tables and sniffed: I don’t smell anything.

Back home, I struggled to hold onto my purchases, but Angel joined me on my elevator ride up anyway. I’m sorry I just saw your note. I don’t clean the floor this week. Not yet.

My house turned to poison. It watched me sleep. It dirtied my fingers when I typed. It seeped into my mat, where I stretched. It stained my new purse. It coated the bathtub, muddied the kitchen sink, followed me into dressing rooms, contaminated my drinks, it traveled by train back home with me to Virginia, it punctured holes into my skin. It snuck up on me. It made me dizzy. It made me unclear. It made me worry. It made me unclean.

When my father told me that he had cancer, I was in nature. Musk lifted from the bluebell and yellow tulip garden beds. The cardinals created a path, and I followed them over to a bench to watch boats glide south on the Hudson River beneath the George Washington Bridge. The sounds of chatter dissipated, the cries of the children blended into the sound of the wind, and the smell of chemical bleach turned to heartache, turned to heavy, turned to relief, turned outward, and looked at me. Suddenly, it was gone. I’d been smelling the signs of trouble for days, and then it found me.

I prayed for levity.

Several months later, in December, I threw myself a 30th Birthday dinner in the West Village two months late. It seemed like the kind of thing a woman who turns 30 would do. Until my party, my mind was a puddle of worry. There was no escaping loads of coursework, the new job at the university with the rock star professor, and the internship at a magazine with an editor who’d become a mentor to me. There was no escaping the weekend road trips with my brother or the solo flights to Pennsylvania to visit my father between chemo treatments. There was no escaping the car or the airplane if I sneezed or coughed – if I was ill, then I couldn’t see him. But I’d come this far. There was something arrogant and dangerous about it: contemplating the blanched color of my skin in the airport bathroom mirror, giving myself little tests. How long had it been since I sneezed last? Was it between takeoff and searching for baggage claim? Was my father really at risk of exposure? I got good at measuring sickness. I got good at measuring signs of trouble.

V sat across from me at my 30th Birthday dinner. I blushed. I levitated. My prayer answered. We had known each other through a mutual friend for years, but this time was different. His cinnamon eyes met my gaze – a mélange of softness and intensity. He put me at ease. We went to a movie with friends a few nights later and a date just the two of us after that. We talked until six in the morning in my bed before I woke up to catch my train back to Virginia for Christmas break. We spent New Year’s together at his farmhouse upstate. He drove me down roads he’d driven all of his life, pointed out townies to watch out for, houses he liked. We shared secrets. We showered together in candlelight. We hugged often. We laughed. We felt right. I felt like we’d loved each other in a past life.

How do we hold fear?

In the second week of March, I watched the corners of my bedroom collapse into itself. I rushed to zip my bag of oversized t-shirts, sweatpants missing drawstrings, and ripped lace trim panties from spilling out. These were my “fleeing New York City” clothes in my “fleeing New York City” suitcase. The rain sprayed my window glass, and the wind rattled my fire escape. I counted the hours. Each one was slower than the next. I’d felt trapped inside this room before. Others were experiencing this for the first time, but I felt I’d been locked inside for months. The light reflecting off the ceiling reminded me of summer. The inside of my rust-colored couch reminded me of the cancer. The shower water hitting the back of my head woke me up to old darkness and I sat waiting until morning staring at the empty vases I could never seem to fill with flowers. COVID-19 had trapped us all, but I wasn’t going to let it make me feel small.

When I arrived to quarantine upstate, V kissed and embraced me in a hug at the train station. No touching! No touching! A woman yelled at us. She was wearing latex gloves and a medical mask. We laughed in the car. We held hands. We promised each other: This will be hard. Let’s try and keep it light. Everyone seemed so anxious, but us.

We cooked stew and poured wine and laughed into the morning until two. I brushed my hair into a perfect part every day, and I wore loungewear that hugged my hips. I tried to keep it light. I posted boomerangs and videos of him cooking and making funny voices online so that everyone would know that just like them, we were doing fine. I was safe and happy. We ran. We biked. We walked through trails in nature and mulled over the temperament of snakes and raccoons. V made me take vitamins and drink smoothies, and he massaged away any aches and pains from the day. He listened to my fears and anxieties while he ran his fingers through my hair. He liked cooking for me, cooking for us. He did push-ups and jumped rope every morning in silence. I liked the way V could sit in silence. He was excited by little things, even the packages he would need to disinfect the moment they would arrive. When we slept, we always touched some part of each other’s body. V ran hot, I ran cold, but we’d tuck a hand under the other’s leg anyway. I felt bad for the woman I was in that other space – in my apartment. I felt sad she couldn’t see how great I was inside these new walls, following someone else’s routines.

By the seventh day of our quarantine, we had a disagreement that turned into a fight. He decided to sleep on the couch, and I was alone in the bed. He became more than cold; he turned bitter. I thought about leaving, I checked tickets to go back to New York City, but then I checked the city’s death toll for March 27th: 365. We can do better. This was just one fight. I thought another home could make me into another woman who was safe from ever being wrong, who was safe from hurt. I thought this new man could make me into the kind of woman who didn’t see the walls closing in.

But in the morning, it was too late. I’d worried he’d uncovered all the darkness I’d slowly been hiding in his shower, in the corners of his couch and his empty coffee cups. In recent days, I consistently asked him if he thought I was sick, and if I was losing my hair. Had I gained weight? Was I being too distant? Did I give him tone when I hadn’t meant to? Were we having great sex, and was it often and enough for him? Was I bringing down his mood?

Was I enough?

Am I enough?

I thought I had escaped her. The woman I left behind in New York City. Her darkness wasn’t something I’d accidentally smuggled upstate where it would fester and grow. There was no escaping her. There was no surviving the collapsing walls. This is who I am.

V pulled my head into his hands as I cried tears and apologized for shaking the image he’d had of me for many years. He laughed, shook his head, and kissed me.

I have a thing for lonely trees, he said, pulling the car over onto flattened hay. He pointed to the lone oak tree across the road. We listened to the song of magpies fill the sky as the sun gently set overhead, skimming the trees on the mountain coloring us a tinge of orange. He placed his warm hand in my lap, and I held it. I stroked the hair on his arms and watched the birds waft from the tops of one tree to another. In the breaks of their song, we remembered together; this is who we are.

I want to touch it, I said. I just want to feel something.

We didn’t need gloves to close his car doors and cross the deserted road. An abandoned barn with a broken window and a modern farmhouse up the hill watched over as we crunched leaves beneath our feet inching closer to the tree. He didn’t need gloves to trace the ridges of the bark with his index fingers while I dug a fingernail into its frozen sap. We leaned against the tree, staring into twilight and wondered how long all of this would be.

Are we supposed to fail?

We didn’t leave the house for the first week. We hadn’t seen another soul for two weeks, to respect the guidelines of the incubation period. By the third week, classes at the university were in full swing and deadlines were mounting. Zoom meetings were starting to feel normal. Wearing V’s baggy sweatpants and hoodies was a newly adopted style because it meant I was warm in his frigid home, not because he liked it. What he didn’t know was that wearing his clothes made me feel close to him. He’d stopped tucking his hand underneath my leg or running his fingers through my hair. He had stopped meeting my gaze when I lovingly glanced over. V was slipping away from me. His work was almost impossible since it required him to travel often, and this was something he couldn’t do. I could see the suspension of work and life and joy peeling away the parts of him I loved and knew. But I had to keep moving forward, and I couldn’t help myself – I couldn’t stop. Why couldn’t I see him?

In the mornings, I’d kiss him, but I began to notice something familiar: sodium hypochlorite. Soon it was everywhere. In his hugs, his bathroom towels, the bedsheets and pillowcases, his boxing bag, his bomber jacket, the interior of his car, his greying facial hair. It was so overpowering, that my lips would leave him as soon as they could. He’d taint my hair and clothes if he touched them, and soon, I was walking around carrying the load of us both.

Am I meant to be kept out?

He’d begun to pick fights, making mountains of molehills. When I’d express my worries from the heaviness of the state of the world, he’d express that he had similar feelings. But his feelings weren’t in response to the world ending; it was from the ending of the image he once had of me. With every small criticism, he’d bruise my heart. I couldn’t be any different or try harder. In the last few days, I decided to plan “date nights” with him to try and reignite the spark. But something felt dead inside, and I was sad I couldn’t resuscitate it. Something cracked, and I’d missed it.

The death toll in New York City on April 7th was at its peak, with 533 people dying in just one day – bringing the total to 6,688. I was afraid to leave, but I knew what I needed to do. A few days later, I returned from a walk. I had been thinking of ways to make him happy, me happy. When I walked into his room, I found him avoiding my gaze again before he flung another criticism that I couldn’t catch. And I knew I didn’t have any more strength to triage this excess pain. So, I left. In the car, I sobbed and, again, his gaze never met mine. I boarded the train in my medical mask, and I wondered if I’d ever see him again. The doors closed, I took my seat, and the smell of trouble left me.

I arrived in New York City at nine pm and stood in Grand Central Station, watching the escalators in motion, devoid of bodies rushing from one place to the next. I looked up towards the constellation mural – Orion, Taurus, and Gemini. I’d missed it here at the train station though I’d rarely come here. But that’s just fitting. I have nostalgia for places I’ve never seen, lives I’ve never lived, and people I’ve never become. I have nostalgia for love I’ve never felt and a love I know they can never give. I hail a cab and tell myself that it will all be okay. Maybe we will realize what we mean to each other and if being together will be worth returning to after some time away. I drive through the city and see the buildings all lit up filled with people trying to keep their calm inside.

We will all be okay.

A month has passed, and his silence screams. My eyelids are from noon to night, wet and heavy. My heart is inflamed. I knew my leaving meant I would be isolated, but I did not expect it to feel like purgatory. The dioxins have escaped my schoolbooks; my bedroom walls are no longer collapsing. The city is still sick, but it’s on the mend. So far, the city has lost over 14,000 lives. At night, I am restless. I toss, and I turn. Thoughts of him keep me awake too. I worry that the darkness I took upstate left me, found him, and stayed there. I worry that in my attempt to avoid exposure and spread of COVID-19, I exposed and spread my darkness to him.

How do we suspend love?

A goldfinch sits on a branch across from me, and together we look out across the Harlem River. The rain begins to soak my face-scarf and sweater, and I think about when our days will get better. I think about when we will all be clean and ready to run free when the butterflies are leading us through a warm grassy field and we can leave the things behind the sun. When we hold hands because we are together again and we decided we could do better: V and me.

#FlashFriday Editor's Pick flash fiction micro fiction short fiction

FISH

by Hannah Grieco • July 10, 2020November 12, 2020

After eight weeks at home, my daughter alternated between lethargy and irritability. Between sleeping and meltdowns, explosions of preadolescent rage that leveled the living room, kitchen, and shared bedroom of our cramped apartment. That ended in tears, from a bottomless well of grief I didn’t know a ten-year-old could even feel. Face-down on the rug, the whimpering dog army-crawling up to lay next to her and rest his chin on her back, tail thumping when her arm snaked around to pull him close.

I found her more exhausting than my own boredom with hour after hour of faculty Zoom meetings. I sat muted, watching her moaning on the floor next to me, forgetting how to divide, how to look up words in a dictionary, how to read a sentence in her science textbook without my help. I tuned out my department chair as my daughter now curled up in a ball and began to whimper.

This drama, I thought, is fucking endless.

My boss droned on as my daughter began to vibrate in her misery, winding herself up, the dog scurrying out from under my desk and racing from the room as she slammed her fist into the floor, grabbed my right ankle and dug in her nails.

“I hate this,” she whispered, looking up at me. “Do you hear me?”

“I hear you. Please let go.”

“No. You don’t. You don’t — OH MY GOD, MOM!” Her eyes grew wide as she pointed at my screen.

I turned back to my boss right as his wife, Joanna, an elegant woman I’d sat next to at several campus events, slammed down on his keyboard what appeared to be an enormous salmon — or was it a trout? I didn’t know fish. It was huge and pink, heavy enough that she had to lug it, that it took both arms, her muscles bulging below her short blouse sleeves. And she smashed it right in front of him, the fish flopping, almost alive, with a wet splat I could practically smell in my bedroom.

“What?” my boss began, but the question died in his mouth as Joanna leaned forward to his computer screen and shrieked, her skin distorted and blurry, her mouth wide and full of tongue and teeth. I grabbed my daughter in a panic, covering her ears as if she was in danger. From the living room, our dog began to howl.

I pulled my daughter’s face into my chest.

“What’s happening?” she cried, muffled against my sweater.

Joanna stopped screaming and began to laugh, whispering and pointing at us. She turned back to her husband and pushed the enormous fish into his lap, taking the keyboard with it and the meeting abruptly ended.

Editor's Pick Essays Photo Essay photography

Interiors

by Allyn Gaestel • July 6, 2020July 6, 2020

You are so beautiful it kills me, I said.
I’m not, love, he said. Perhaps on the inside.
Don’t insult my eyes, I said.

She was making a photo series trying to figure out who we are.
Do you think it is our heartbeat or our face? she asked.
We are dust, I said, we are only change.

He made my heart race when I met him, for so many days I thought I was sick. It happened again when I saw him years later, so much life force I couldn’t sleep. When he looks away, I deaden. My face thickens and I stick needles in my back to realight my flimsy pulse. So, which heartbeat is me?

The body is an endlessly shifting accumulation of experience: every thing we’ve ever eaten, every feeling we’ve inherited or swallowed. Anger lodged in our thighs, terror clenched in our jaws, denial infecting our sinuses. Our emotions also fill the space around us: grief wafts like ribbons of petrol fumes, anxiety shakes the air. “The distinction to be made is not at all between exterior and interior, which are always relative, changing, and reversible, but between different types of multiplicities that coexist, interpenetrate and change places,” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari wrote in A Thousand Plateaus.

Relationships have a texture, entirely specific to each dynamic. I wrote on resonance as something irretreviably interwoven with the physical, but other, supra-rational. This is the nature of bonds, the reason we return to the people we keep in our lives, naturally, something that flows upward if we allow it. Something about the spectrum of feelings we evoke in the other, the way the world looks when we’re connected, how our togetherness renders a space jagged or smooth. External reality cannot be disentangled from our inner state. We are permeable, so our interior is affected by our environs and always by each other.

Portraiture is a relationship. Like every relationship it can take many shapes: consumption, transaction, extraction, or, love. Real love holds you in presence, sees you, frees you, feeds you, makes a safe space to excavate our wounds. In portraiture we are shooting the intangible dynamic between us, it infuses the work. So when photographers are looking for examples or subjects or cliches, a perceptive viewer will notice and contract. Such photographs are violent. Labels dehumanize, constrain, contain, objectify in passing. Identity can feel like shackles, a forced rigidity on something much more fluid.

Photographs carry energy. If we see many realms, then we shoot many realms, and people who can see them, do. Lately, I’m not interested in translation. I came across a photo series by a woman who could not see auras but wished to. The images felt forced and flat, they were photographs of representations of auras. How can you photograph something you can’t see? I wondered. I dislike, lately, the established photographic language for dignity. Why to portray dignity must we take someone out of their normal state, elevate them and splash them with a particular kind of light, white and reflective, or place them in a pose reminiscent of the iconography of historic oppressors? (“How can one, however, dream of power in any other terms than in the symbols of power?” James Baldwin wrote.)

But what if dignity, like love, like resonance, is not created but encountered? Perhaps it is a type of presence, a way of seeing, being, interacting, with reverance. “How can I know that what I term Heaven is not human? Or that what I call human is not Heaven?” the Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu wrote. It is a question that I live and photograph.

A photograph, with its fabricated stillness, should make no claim on reality, with its continual movement. The body is endlessly regenerating. (I have shed every cell that touched you by now, I wrote, in the years in between. But I was still writing on him.) Each human is a universe of their own, or, perhaps each human is the universe itself distilled into a specific, vast and endlessly mutable entity. Portraits, then, are objects we make along the way: fragments of interactions as we love and evolve and dissolve.

Strange Waters

by Sarah Marie Gingerich • July 5, 2020July 5, 2020 • 2 Comments

Mom says her father was an arsonist. She told me when I was eight. I sat next to her on the sofa, my feet sticking out in front of me. My pajamas had a hole in the right knee.

“Do you know what an arsonist is, Claire?”

I told her I did. I read a lot, and I knew all kinds of things.

I’d never met my grandfather, but I could have. He still lived near my grandmother even though she divorced him, up in Milroy, Pennsylvania, where he shared a snug brick house with his second wife. Grandma Louise said the house had a fat crabapple tree and a fishpond in the front yard. But I never saw Milroy. I mostly saw Grandma Louise when she couldn’t pay her electric bill and Mom brought her down to Baltimore to stay with us, sometimes for months. Occasionally, Mom would ask her to move in with us permanently, but she always refused. “I’m not a sick old woman,” she’d say. Grandma Louise lived in a trailer, out in a rocky field where grass struggled up skinny and brown, and she was proud to have her own place, even if she didn’t own much of the land surrounding it. She had her own bathroom, where she could sit in the tub and dye her hair black, and a bedroom that faced away from the highway. That was all she needed, she told my mother.

She would also say, “Claire needs something better.” Grandma Louise always congratulated Mom on marrying my father, who was kind, wore enormous wire-rimmed glasses, and always had time to teach me chess when he got back from the office. She and my mother kept me away from Milroy. They took me ice skating by the Inner Harbor for Christmas and smiled indulgently as I clung to the wall, inching my way around under the tree lights. They took me to the Walters Art Gallery and let me wander as I pleased, until I finally fell asleep on the bench underneath the portrait of Judith beheading Holofernes with her knife. They let me read whatever I wanted as long as I could get the book off the living room shelf, and when I dragged over a chair to give myself a boost they never considered it cheating. They didn’t make much of an effort to keep the challenging books out of reach, anyway.

They did not take me to Milroy. I saw pictures of Grandma’s trailer. The white paint peeled off the side, and wisteria climbed up and around the door. In the distance, mist clung to the mountains like lint, and yellow-brown corn wilted in the cold, damp fields. None of this seemed threatening. But when I told my grandmother this, she always shook her head. “It’s better you stay far away,” she’d say. What she meant was: Your grandfather is there. He’s an arsonist.

Mom finally said it, though. She couldn’t talk around it anymore. “Some stories,” she said, “need telling.” Some stories needed to be let loose the way people spit to ward off bad luck.

Mom’s story went like this: my grandfather, William Everett Minter, sold used cars from a concrete lot towards the edge of town, near the bank of the Susquehanna River. This location was better for the green things than it was for the cars. Grass slipped up through the concrete cracks and there was a constant rust problem, the paint on the cars pruning like skin in the wet air. But William Everett would arrive at the lot early each morning with fresh paint, sleeves rolled to his elbows, and he would redd up the whole place, Mom said. He shined the cars, scrubbed grime off the windows, and dusted the steps to the shed where he kept his cash register. So in the end, the grit would recede, and William Everett would be free to sell what he had polished, and drive back across town at the end of the day, victorious.

“He worked hard,” Mom said. “My dad was good at making things look nice. He had a real knack for rolling back mileage counters.” She paused. “Do you know why people roll back mileage counters, Claire?”

“Yeah.” I didn’t.

William Everett Minter, you see, was a real conman. He even looked the way conmen did in the old movies. He’d wear these large suits, which made his body look like it took up more space than it otherwise would have. He put too much pomade in his hair, and would sneak off to an empty room and smooth in some more if he was nervous. His teeth were almost impossibly straight and white, considering the nearest dentist was a couple towns over. And in the beginning, people trusted him, even though the movies could have warned them not to. His skill with the mileage counters meant that no one usually realized there was anything wrong with their car until they were sufficiently far away. But soon enough, things unraveled. “People didn’t travel very far from home in those days,” Mom explained. “Word got around eventually. Dad couldn’t buy cars and he couldn’t sell them much either. That made things worse at home.”

At no point in this story did Mom say things were bad at home, so I didn’t know what worse meant. I knew there must have been a reason why Grandma Louise got her divorce, but I couldn’t picture their family life clearly. I had some photos from the early seventies to go by. Mom lived with her parents in a small house with thin paneled walls made to look like wood, an orange carpet in the living room, and no TV. There was no way for me to see that there was a hole punched in the wall, since they blocked it with the sofa. They couldn’t afford to fix it, and didn’t want anyone to see it was there. Mom did say once that when she was small, and happened to wake up too early, she would lie under the covers – even if she really had to use the toilet – and wait until she heard her father leave the house. Then, slowly, finally, she’d slip out of bed.

I might have read a lot, and I thought I knew all kinds of things, but I didn’t know how to extract the truth from things people didn’t say.

In the evening, William Everett would pace in the kitchen. In the morning, he’d drive across town and sit at the table in his shed by the lot, and add more pomade to his hair. He would prowl out among the cars, waiting for customers to drift in. But they didn’t. He didn’t allow Grandma Louise to work, even though she’d been a fair typist in high school and offered to try and find a secretarial position. Grandma stayed in and did her best to stretch the food out. Sometimes, all Mom would have for lunch was a slice of bread. Grandma Louise would twist the bread bag closed as if she were wringing a chicken’s neck.

William Everett knew things were getting dire. “He was a proud man,” Mom said. “But he still wasn’t honest. I don’t think he really knew how to be.” This was why, when he announced that he was going to get a fresh start, he didn’t mean he’d change the way he ran his business. He meant he was going to commit insurance fraud. He was going to burn everything.

One hot June evening, he gathered as much gasoline as he could fit in the back of his green Chevy Malibu, great big plastic tanks with their yellow spouts still dripping, and drove them to his lot while the sun cast a faint red glow over the tops of the mountains. He parked his car. He went into his shed, took what little money remained in his cash register, and pocketed his spare tin of pomade. It must have taken a lot of effort to spread the gasoline around as much as he did. In my head, he rolled up his sleeves, peered out into the still dark with his small eyes, and trailed the gas wherever he lurked. But I don’t know the exact details of that night. Not really. And Mom and Grandma Louise don’t know either. This part of the story took place behind the curtain, before the lights went up. William Everett stayed out late, stumbled back into the house, and slipped into bed where Grandma Louise was already asleep, facing away from him. By the time anyone woke up, the entire lot had burned, and the firemen hadn’t arrived in time to salvage any of it.

Grandma Louise added to the story later.

Mom wouldn’t allow her to smoke inside our house, so she insisted on eating supper outside on the iron table that rusted under the maple tree out back. She sat in the shade with her cigarette dangling between her fingers, and I insisted on eating with her. She looked very glamorous with her dyed black curls, red lipstick, and large plastic earrings. “~~You’re~~ Your grandfather was a real dickhead,” she said, smoke drifting from her mouth.

I nodded solemnly, eating the icing from the inside of my Oreo. “I know.”

She laughed, then coughed. “You don’t, though. You think you do, but you don’t. The whole world was on his side.”

“Why?”

“How should I know? Maybe God knows. Maybe the Devil. If that’s the case I’ve got some words for the both of them. Did you ask your mother why nobody caught William Everett?”

I shrugged.

“They should’ve. The damn fool took his cash and his pomade and drove his car back to the house, where any policeman could have seen that there was drippy gas all over the back seat. But nobody got anywhere near his car or his lot.”

“What did he do?”

Grandma Louise laughed. “He didn’t need to do nothing.”

She told me about the hurricane. This, she said, was the part of the story that mattered, because it explained why their lives were the way they were. While all this subterfuge was going on, there was a storm hovering on the horizon. The men on the radio had been warning everyone about Hurricane Agnes for days. It was supposed to flatten most of Allegheny County, but people didn’t pay much attention to it. Floods happened there, Grandma Louise said. There was one when she was a little girl, and another when her mother was young. Each one was known as the Great Flood.

Maybe the police were sensible. Maybe they began investigating William Everett’s fire, but they couldn’t get very far. A day later, as night fell, it started spitting rain. It wasn’t initially obvious when it began to get worse. The storm made it get dark earlier, the kind of dark where you can’t see the drifting clouds but you can’t see the stars either. The air became thick and moist and smelled like river water. This was because, as the rain poured down, the water from the Susquehanna crept up. River water swept into the church, slapping at the ~~stained glass~~stained-glass windows until the Virgin Mary’s face shattered. It slid through the screen doors and window shutters that had been flapping in the wind. It crept down the streets with its cold surge, taking tree branches with it, trailing broken telephone poles and spilled garbage and weeds.

Grandma Louise and my mother sat on the roof, holding the chimney, huddled together for warmth. William Everett stood apart from them. Mom had tried to save her favorite Simon and Garfunkel record, but the sleeve was soaked, and eventually, when she realized it was ruined, she had to let it drop. The two of them watched William Everett stand near the edge of the roof and look out over the half-submerged houses, towards the place where his lot used to be. His hair was in disarray, stuck to his forehead in clumps. He laughed, shaking his head, and sat on the edge of the roof, dangling his feet, letting the water brush the last traces of soot from the bottoms of his shoes.

It happened, Grandma Louise explained, because everybody, even the weather, was on William Everett’s side. That was the way things were. He was sweet on her, so her fiancé died out in the Pacific on a sinking aircraft carrier, struggling to stay afloat in the water, and William Everett showed up on her doorstep with a bouquet and a white, white smile, leaning against the rotted porch railing. He could make ruined old things look better and trick other people into taking them off his hands. And just when it seemed like his luck ran out, water poured from the river and the sky to wash away the evidence of his arson, and it would be three more years before Grandma Louise was brave enough to try for a divorce.

Even though Grandma got her divorce in the end, William Everett still came out on top. He never made a single child support payment, and Grandma Louise couldn’t afford to take him to court. “Would have cost me more than I would have got from him,” she said. “I didn’t want to lose money just to prove a point.” I must have looked shocked, because she let me eat three more Oreos, even though Mom would not have approved. “You’ve got to think practically, Claire, that’s just the way it is. Now pass me my pocketbook, won’t you? I need another cigarette.”

I am telling this story because when the cancer spread to Grandma Louise’s brain, she thought she was in love with William Everett again. Mom tried to keep me out of Grandma’s bedroom, which was at the far end of her trailer and smelled of potpourri and disinfectant, because she knew it was where her mother was going to die.

It was the first time Mom brought me to Milroy, since Grandma Louise insisted on staying in her own house. The trailer was cramped when I walked through the door, with a kitchen to the right and a bedroom to the left. The bathroom was smaller than my closet at home. I could hear the cars speeding past on the highway even though I was indoors.

Although Mom was sitting on the edge of Grandma’s bed, within clear view of the door, I assumed she didn’t notice me slip into the room. Now I wonder if, after all the effort she put into telling me to stay away, she found that she was beyond caring. I slipped into the space between the dresser and the wall and tried to be very quiet.

Grandma Louise told Mom to light her a cigarette and hold it to her mouth. She took a long drag, closing her eyes. “Where is William Everett?” She asked. “Where is he?” She paused, giggling quietly to herself. “I need to get my lipstick. I need to look good if he’s coming around to see me.”

My mother put the cigarette in Grandma Louise’s ashtray. “Dad isn’t coming. He’s a shithead and we don’t like him.”

But Grandma Louise looked girlish in her recliner bed, with her curly wig, and skinny arms resting on top of her blue floral sheets. “I’m going to marry him,” she said.

“You’ve already divorced him.”

Grandma turned to me then. “Are you a cousin of his?” she asked me. “You look an awful lot like him. Whose girl are you?” I stood in the shadowed corner of the room and watched her see my dark hair and small eyes and teeth that would never need braces.

My grandmother died on a Thursday in October, when I was nine years old. Her funeral was small, and the priest said she was a loving wife and mother, like he was supposed to say, even though he was only half right. I watched my mother close the casket. Above, there were spiderweb cracks in the Virgin Mary’s face. I knew that William Everett Minter lived nearby, with his second wife in his nice house. I imagined that the fish in his pond were fat, gold things that swam out from under the rocks whenever he drew near. The fruit on his crabapple tree would be large and red, weighing down the branches and falling to the ground, rotting quietly in the morning sun.

storysunday

Editor's Pick micro fiction short fiction

Can’t You Do Something About This?

by Barry Kitterman • June 28, 2020June 28, 2020

First, let me say of course I’m worried about all of it: the global warming, the cruel virus, the oaf in the white house. Iran and the bomb and North Korea too. The uptick in insanity. Everyone says keep an eye on the big picture, and I do! But I have two eyes, one on the big picture and the other on the littler picture. There are some real issues here.

My neighbor has more guns in his house than I do.
The paint is peeling off my car in great strips.
They no longer throw a newspaper in my driveway.
Bananas will cause heartburn.
The deer are eating the seedlings in the woods across the road.
My fingers have grown too fat for my telephone.
In the bathtub, I can’t keep my knees and my belly in the water at the same time.
People say he graduated high school. They should say he graduated from high school.
My wife has grown more beautiful of late, while I am dowdy.

I can’t understand the voice of the man who comes through the loudspeaker during a tornado warning. (Is he saying take cover now, or take over, pal?)

And they’re asking me to take over ….?

You might have some of these same concerns, and if so, I feel sorry for you. The world is messed up. I don’t think it will get better soon, not all the way better.

I Get Weary

Yesterday, a man came to my door. He had a small child with him, perhaps a girl. I wanted to ask, but that isn’t a question we ask anymore. It was never a great question. I told the man I didn’t want whatever he was selling. He told me he wasn’t selling, just walking through the neighborhood saying hello to people. His child smiled at me. Somebody needed more teeth, but it looked like somebody would get some soon.

“We just think life is good,” said the man. “We want to make sure everyone knows it.”

“You’re entitled,” I said.

“What I say,” said the child. Maybe a boy.

“Say what?” I said.

“What I say,” said the child.

“But what do you say?” I said.

The man smiled at his little girl. That child had thick full hair.

“We’re collecting stories,” said the man.

“I have no stories,” I said.

It isn’t true. I don’t give my stories away, is all.

“Difficult work,” said the man, “collecting stories. It’s like cleaning the air.”

He was right. I have tried cleaning the air. That’s hard work.

“We’d like to come inside your house,” said the man. “We’d like to look around.”

No, I didn’t invite them in. I own nothing of value, but there are people who will steal the words right out of your mouth.

“We could set up a tent in your yard,” said the man.

The boy did a girl thing with his bare foot.

“Do you read your Bible every day?”

I said I did not.

“Me either,” said the man.

“I don’t actually own a Bible.”

“Me either,” said the man.

“Is this a Bible?” said the boy/girl/boy child. She held up an egg. It was brown and boiled already, a little crack in it. None of the yellow stuff was coming out.

“It should be a Bible,” said the man. “It would be a Bible.”

We talked for a while and made an agreement not to meet again. Inside my house, the telephone rang and rang.

“Aren’t you going to answer that?” said the man.

A fox ran down the middle of the road. This was a real fox, not a dream fox.

“You should find a job,” said the man.

“I was thinking the same thing,” I said. “For you.”

“We could work together,” said the man.

“What I say, what I do,” said the young person.

“I get awfully weary,” I said. I’m sure it was me who said it.

When the fox came back up the street, the animal looked at me in a curious way, a red fox, but not a red, red fox. I have never heard a fox speak, at least not clearly. There may be something wrong with my hearing.

“If you don’t leave,” I said to the two (who were not foxes) standing on my doorstep.

“Don’t be that way,” said the man.

“What I do, what I say,” said the small person.

“We can make it rain,” said the man. “We can make it storm.”

I should have believed him.

“Don’t come back this way,” I said. “Don’t come back for my stories.”

“What a day,” said the child person.

They went away from my front door, and I have felt uneasy ever since. They were not angels in disguise. They might have been gods. The young one, something godly there.

I would like to know how many people saw them. I would like to know how many people saw the maple tree sway and fall in my yard that afternoon. It was right after that when my back began to hurt, as if I had lifted a heavy load and held it over my head.

Walter

My neighbor has more guns in his house than I do. I know this for a fact.

I have no guns in my house.

It is hard to tell a story about guns and not give everything away. Will it be a true story, a funny story? Is there anything funny about guns? Will it be a tragedy? What a question.

My neighbor Walter is a good man, semiretired, at home some days and not at home some other days. He owns guns that can kill a person permanently, but he loves all the animals that make a home in our woods. Sometimes he puts out food for the red fox. Walter also owns a big truck, and anyone with a big truck makes an excellent neighbor. His truck has a bright Confederate flag where the front license plate might be. I have a real front license plate, one with a rainbow that says support the arts. Walter and I don’t talk about this.

The other evening I made arrangements with my pizza man. That young man arrived with the goods and I got out my secret money, but before we did our deal, he wanted to turn his car around and point it in the right direction on the street in front of my house. The sky was raining, steady and dark, and here’s a sad part: the pizza man couldn’t see the ditch across the street, a chasm into which several pizza deliverymen have disappeared over the years not to be seen or heard from again. I rarely order pizza. The disappointment is too great when the delivery person can’t make it to the front door.

That is what is called an exaggeration, as a cautious reader will have noted. The pizza man did not disappear; he got stuck and he spun his wheels and he got out of his small gray car and stood in the rain somewhat pathetically looking up the driveway at my house as if I was Mr. AAA himself. I am not Mr. AAA. I do not own a big truck or a winch or any kind of heavy tool with which to help a pizza man.

But there was my neighbor Walter, who was always willing to start up his big truck and grab his tools and drive to the aid of a befuddled pizza man. Walter raced his engine and he gunned his engine and he encouraged his engine, and he drove around from where he parks his truck in the back of his house and called out heartily to the pizza man, somewhat less heartily to me. (Walter secretly believes I should have my own big truck for emergencies). In the back of his truck, Walter keeps a chain he bought from the antique store, a huge and heavy chain that – believe it or not, and I believe it – once belonged to the owners of the Pequod. That chain wrestled whales before Walter bought it and used it to wrestle pizza men.

Ah, that too is an exaggeration, a cautious reader will have noted. A cautious reader will think I am brimming with exaggeration. With a story like this one, you can’t be too cautious.

Walter startled my pizza man, a young person who had been stuck in a ditch before and worse, had been robbed and beaten and kidnapped and dismissed by the kind of people who take out their disappointments on pizza men. (Hardly any of that part is exaggerated). When my pizza man saw Walter approach headlong out of nowhere in a very big truck with an historic chain in the back and a bright Confederate flag in the front, my man let himself be frightened. And since the state I live in allows this sort of thing, my pizza man opened his glove box and took out a large black handgun, pointing it at my neighbor.

“Don’t come any closer,” said the pizza man.

Walter had arrived with an eager smile on his face, a smile the size of a pizza, a small one. (Okay, exaggeration.) He was greatly disappointed when he saw the pizza man’s gun. I sensed Walter’s sadness in the slump of his powerful shoulders.

“Now,” said Walter.

That was all he said at first.

“Now, now.”

I watched this story unfold from my front steps, trying to stay out of the worst of the rain. I was not close enough to tell you what kind of gun the pizza man pointed at my neighbor. I don’t know one gun from the next. Perhaps it was a Glock. It could have been a Nikon or a Sunbeam. A Honda. They would make a good gun.

At that moment, the gun went off and my neighbor Walter sat down hard in my driveway.

At that moment, the pizza man began to cry.

At that moment, Walter’s wife came running across the yard with one of Walter’s many guns, holding it close to her shirt to keep it from getting wet in the uncaring rain.

At that moment, the real and actual AAA guy showed up, driving a truck much bigger than Walter’s.

I tell you, it was a bad night. It is a story that is hard to tell. Some of these things happened.

Paint

Paint is coming off my car in great strips. The paint is peeling like never before in the history of our country.

It started when I took a trip to Knoxville. Knoxville is a medium sized city in Eastern Tennessee. I live near Nashville, which is a somewhat bigger city in Middle Tennessee. Memphis, on the other hand, is a rather large city in West Tennessee.

That’s what we call geography.

My friend Walter had a cat named Geography. Something to do with time and place, a cat’s time, a cat’s place, the sands of the desert, the way the temperature there will go from hot to cold and back again.

“At noon,” said Walter, “we were sweating, but at night we wanted to hug the stove.”

Does geography matter anymore?

A little boy saw my car at the gas station. He was there with his mother, watching her pump the gas.

“She’s doing it wrong,” he said.

“How can you do it wrong?” I said. “It’s pumping gas.”

The boy looked at me with pity in his eyes.

“If you don’t know, it’s best to keep on just like you have been,” he said.

I was flummoxed by this boy.

“What’s wrong with your car?” he asked. “Why is the paint coming off?”

I could tell he thought poorly of me. I wanted to impress him.

“It’s geography,” I said.

Only I said the word like a question. He was not impressed.

“Look, look,” I said, “there’s a red fox behind you.”

He turned around, but he didn’t see it.

“That’s too bad,” I said. “It was a red one.”

“You aren’t a good person,” he said.

I shouldn’t have done that to the boy. Children are our future.

They no longer throw a newspaper in my driveway.

I remember those days fondly. I remember walking out my front door and there the newspaper would be, a small present from a reluctant world. I read that newspaper. I read the front page and the back page, the sports page and the advice page. I read the comics. I read the bridge column. We all did. It’s how we lived then. We trusted each other.

I saved the funny pages and used them to wrap presents at Christmas. I am not a good shopper, and my Christmas presents were more like Xmas presents. But my wrapping paper was a hit.

One year, my family asked me what I wanted for Christmas.

“Oh,” I said, “don’t worry about me. I don’t need anything really.”

“Come now,” said my wife.

“Come now,” said my daughter.

“Give it up,” said my son.

“Really,” I said.

For a moment, my heart was full of laughter. It was Christmas.

Out my window, I saw three things: Walter’s wife carrying a large bag of presents from her door to her car. A red fox looking left, then right, then crossing into the woods. A newspaper lying in the street, an old one.

That was a sad Christmas, and not simply because nobody bought me a present. It was the Christmas of Walter. That’s what we call it.

Bananas will cause heartburn

If you think about it, a lot of good things aren’t so good anymore. Take Bill Cosby. Woody Allen. The Republican party. It’s the same with Cadillacs. Or Tonto.

We used to watch the Olympics on television. We watched people run fast and throw things through the air and skate in circles and swim back and forth. It was easy to believe in the goodness of those people; they were doing things none of us could do.

Faster, higher, stronger.

I wanted to go to the Olympics. I made a solemn oath at myself that I would get there. I planned to devote my life to a serious regimen of training. I wrote out the script they could read when they did a profile on me:

… born to parents who never dreamed their son would one day, from a humble beginning, reach for the highest star in the firmament of sport…

Someone needed to invent a new Olympic game for me to excel at, but people were filled with ingenuity, and there was time. I was young then. A boy.

My wife didn’t dream about the Olympics. She dreamed about the ballet, a serious kind of dancing. I’ll say this for her: she got closer to the ballet than I got to the Olympics.

Much of my life feels like a disappointment. I wanted to go to the Olympics, but I also wanted to be Perry Mason. You couldn’t beat Perry Mason. And I wanted to go on a date, many dates actually, with the woman from Star Trek, you know which one. The one who could read your mind, and it would be all right, she wouldn’t care if what you were thinking was a little questionable.

None of these things happened.

The new games they invented for the Olympics weren’t right for me. And Perry Mason stopped being Perry Mason and became that guy in a wheelchair. The American courtroom has never been the same. I grew up and came to live on this street with my wife, and these days our joy is to look out the window at the woods where the deer live peacefully with the red fox.

My wife is a good wife even if she can’t read my mind. It’s probably for the best.

The deer are eating the seedlings in the woods across the road.

I was talking to a friend of mine who is famous. I find it is hard to talk to famous people, though if you want to listen, that’s a completely different story.

I thought I was aware of all the problems with our planet earth: the increase in temperature, the loss of the butterflies, the fracking. Which sounds like a pious man’s obscenity.

“It’s the fracking Republicans,” I told my famous friend. “They are fracking everything up. They fracking didn’t used to be like that.”

My friend wasn’t able to listen to my observations. She was too worried. Famous people get awfully worried.

I wanted to reassure her.

“At least,” I told her, “there are still deer in the woods. They are living with us right here in town. I see them every day.”

I wanted to say more. I wanted to say, If I am the lion, they are the lambs. I wanted to say, Now is the time for the quick red fox to come to the aid of the country. I thought saying so would help.

“About those deer,” said my famous friend. “It’s a shame.”

“Oh no,” I said, remembering the butterflies, remembering the frogs. “The deer too?” I said.

My famous friend did an uncharacteristic thing. She looked at me.

“You,” said my famous friend.

“Me?” I said.

This alone, this sudden recognition, made me sad. Yes, it was me. It had been me all day. Who else could it be?

“About those deer,” said my friend, shaking her famous head. She sighed, famously. “Deer are not good. They’re not good at all.”

“When did the deer go bad?” I said.

“Don’t you know?” she said. “They are eating the seedlings in the woods. The woods are dying because of the deer.”

“I didn’t know,” I said.

I was sick at heart. The deer! Those little frackers.

“We need more predators,” said my friend. “Men with guns. You’ll have to get used to it.”

Her words made me see everything in a new light.

Her words made me realize, she was never my friend.

My fingers have grown too fat for my telephone

This I found out the other day, trying to call 911. I was worried about my neighbor lying in my driveway, his truck idling at the side of the road. The Stars and Bars watched over him.

I dialed again and again, and I couldn’t get these fingers to work right. I dialed a wrong number. I dialed the pizzeria! I found it difficult to understand why the entire 911 staff was down at Papa Papa’s World of Pizza.

“Do you want to hear about our special?” said a woman. A teenaged woman.

“It’s about Walter,” I said.

“Bottled water?”

“Not water,” I said. “Walter.”

“I’ll get the manager,” she said. “He will deal with you.”

Meanwhile, Walter’s wife was pointing Walter’s gun at the stuck-in-the-ditch pizza man. Meanwhile again, she fired the gun, but she was not a good shot. The gun made a loud sound, and the bullet went off into the woods and the deer leapt about, showing their white tails. A red fox crossed the road in a great hurry.

A reassuring voice came over the phone. It was the voice of someone who had spoken to me many times before, often late at night, reaching out to me from the darkness beyond my door.

“Attention,” said the voice. “A tornado warning has been issued for all of Middle Tennessee.”

Or it might have said, “Attention something something … for Papa Papa’s will be sued for all eternity.”

It’s difficult to understand that kind of voice. It was a man’s voice, I was fairly certain of that.

“Help me,” I said. “Help Walter,” I said.

“Look, buddy,” said the voice.

Cook muddy? Rook Ruddy?

“Isn’t there someone else I can talk to?” I asked that voice.

“Not here,” said the voice. “There is no one presently here who is above me.”

That night proved something to me once and for all.

I … these fingers … we are just not good with technology.

In the bathtub, I can’t get my knees and my belly in the water at the same time.

Have you noticed, most people don’t know when to say lie and when to say lay. I blame Bob Dylan. It might have been a mistake to give him the Nobel Prize.

The night Walter died, I wanted nothing so much as to lie in my bathtub with the water up to my ears, the way I used to when I was a boy. I was a boy with a lot of promise. As a boy, I knew better than to lay in the bathtub. This was many years before I ever got laid in a bathtub, and that has been many years now too. I will lie in the bathtub but I won’t lie about lying in the bathtub.

But when I crawled into that bathtub, wanting just to lie there, to lay me down to listen to Bob Dylan’s lay, “Lay lady lay,” I discovered my predicament, which lay at the heart of living in the modern world. Because bathtubs used to be bigger. They used to wash all our sins away, not just the little sins like using the wrong verb in the bathtub. They used to wash away the sins of disobeying the father and the mother, of disagreeing with the teacher, of disentangling the dead metaphor, of disapprobating the disapproval. A bathtub could do that. And now, all a bathtub can do is lie there uselessly, not even covering with its warm water the wounded man’s belly, the weak man’s knees, the boy’s ears, the boy’s ears, the boy’s ears.

People use the phrase he graduated high school when they should say he graduated from high school.

They will say all sorts of things.

They will say lightening struck that night in my driveway.

They will say all the sudden it started to rain.

They will say this is the most unique day a man never managed to live through. And in the boring rain.

They will say the events of that night were all in God’s plans when it’s pretty clear God doesn’t make plans.

They will say into each life some rain must fall like they think they’re fucking Shakespeare.

They will say that man has a butt load of worries. Somebody help him.

I have even heard them say I could care less, when what they mean, what they really mean is

you know

Let me get this one thing straight. You cannot graduate high school.

I won’t let you.

My wife has grown more beautiful of late, while I am dowdy.

Oh, you can ask anyone about this. Ask the child who comes to my door, or the man who wants my stories. Ask the policeman who drove his car slowly down my road that night (and why slowly, ask him that). Ask Bob Dylan, but don’t ask Bill Cosby. He wouldn’t know. Bill Cosby didn’t watch my wife on the television all those years ago and he isn’t watching her now or reading about her in the paper or wondering, how could this have ever happened?

You may ask the deer about my wife, and if they are done destroying our planet one small tree at a time, they will tell you. They sometimes watch her from the woods. They hide behind rocks or stumps and study her. I know what they are thinking. Why is she with him? Doesn’t she see what has become of him? Can’t she get him to buy some new pants?

We were walking down the lane that weaves through our woods. We were walking our old dog, and we were not thinking about Walter and the pizza man, at least two of us were not thinking about them. We were not thinking about Iran. What were we thinking of? That is a good question.

I saw a patch of brown lying beside the road, and I wondered if it was a piece of cardboard or an old shirt. Thoughtless people drive their cars through our woods and throw their waste objects into the tall grass. I pick those things up. I catalogue them. I am conscious of all that lies beside the road, especially when it is raining.

I looked closely into the weeds, and what I saw was a deer. A baby deer. A fracking baby deer just hours old. That deer’s mother had left it there beside the road, thinking it was safe, while she went off and murdered some seedlings.

I thought, what should I do? I could call someone, use my thick fingers, tell the voice at Papa Papa’s Pizza World to jump in a car and drive over here and help me figure out a plan. Or should I call a neighbor? I began to weep thinking I could not call Walter, who would have known the geographically correct thing to do in a situation like this, though he might have said a word or two wrong. Walter really did graduate high school. He graduated the shit out of that high school.

I found out later the deer mother was only doing her thing. That baby deer was safe. It didn’t have any smell yet. My old dog didn’t know the baby was there at all. My old dog tugged gently at the leash, dreaming of his dinner, a warm corner of the sofa.

I can’t understand the voice of the man who comes through the loudspeaker during a tornado warning.

I have been given fair warning in my lifetime about matters great and small.

Don’t throw that can of hairspray into the burn barrel.
Don’t linger in the paint locker.
Don’t let the foreman see you doing that.
Don’t talk back to me.
Don’t buy that car if your uncle can’t find the title.
Don’t toss your phone across the room like that.
Don’t make friends with a guy like Walter.

I will tell you this one last thing. It’s guys like Walter. It’s guys like him every time. They will do it, and the rest of us will never be the same. Maybe we weren’t the same to begin with. All I know is it’s raining outside and there is still a ditch across the road. Walter’s wife sold those guns.

“They belonged to Walter,” she said.

She is moving to another state. She sold Walter’s truck. I asked about the chain.

“I’ve got bigger fish to fry,” she said.

I wanted to tell her this. You don’t. You don’t have a bigger fish than Walter. The deer know I am right. The red fox knows.

I would tell her, we would do it all again. Me and you and Walter and the pizza man. We would do our part. I am sorry to say it.

Take cover now.

Take over pal.

I am finished with this story.

IT WASN’T FOR ME

by Katy Ward • June 26, 2020November 12, 2020

It’s the kind of intimacy usually shared by people who are fucking. Not mother and daughter.

That thought made her smile when she decided to make this garden their place: special, intimate. They could be themselves.

Cemeteries were sombre, gothic, but it was beautiful here: ripe, full of life.

What was the word her English teacher had loved? Fecund?

Anything felt possible here, even when it wasn’t.

*******************************************************

“I know you can’t stand anything corny. Most mums love emotional chats, but you just tell people to fuck off if they get too mushy so I’ll keep this brief . . .

Stop hating yourself for the choices you made and the existence you brought me into.

Things could have been far worse for me. I was never neglected or mistreated and didn’t end up in care like half the kids from our estate.

I wasn’t raped on my way home from a club and didn’t end up in hospital after overdosing on cocaine.

If it weren’t for you, I could have married a man who cheated on me with my best friend or pushed me down the stairs for not laughing at his jokes.

Life can be full of pain. It wasn’t for me.”

*******************************************************

The portrait of the Cornish seascape on the wall at the grief centre is intended to put patients at ease. Or so the interior decorator had told the practice manager.

“I’m glad you came,” says Rebecca, a counsellor in her mid-thirties seeing her third patient of the day. “You’ve been through a major loss.”

“I thought I was OK, but everything hit me the other day. They gave me this number and I thought it couldn’t hurt to call.”

Rebecca says nothing.

“As soon as I found out I was pregnant, I saw my baby’s life mapped out. Just like mine.”

Silence.

“I didn’t have the best start in life, you see. In my family, we all get knocked up by the wrong blokes. Me, my mam, my gran, my sister. It’s a rite of passage. Great at getting pregnant, bad at mothering.”

Still no response.

“Then we spend the rest of our lives in shitty marriages and dead-end jobs.”

Silence eats the room.

“When I was a kid, I used to wish I’d never been born. I didn’t want that for my daughter.”

Finally, a reply: “Your daughter? You can’t tell that at six weeks . . .”

“I knew it was a girl as soon as I missed my period. All I wanted was to protect her.”

Straight from the counsellor’s handbook: “That seems like a perfectly reasonable way to feel.”

“Before I came here, I sat in the botanical gardens over the road and talked to her, the baby. I even imagined her answering me. Is that ‘perfectly reasonable’ too?”

“There’s no right or wrong way to feel after an abortion if it helps to know that.”

It doesn’t.

Finish.

Editor's Pick fiction short stories storysunday

When Blankoids Sing They Sound Like Elvis

by Garth Miró • June 21, 2020June 21, 2020 • 1 Comment

During the winter of ’98, I think I was in love or obsessed with Mother Teresa. This version had pierced nipples and a coke problem and an oversized Cramps T-shirt she wore on Fridays. I bought a motorcycle to impress her. I crashed that motorcycle into someone’s BMW. And by Christmas, Mother Teresa was Cleopatra and I had no shot.

The last time I saw Lita, who is the actress in mention, we were at a party on the Lower East Side. Connor Feinstein’s apartment was two floors and had a grand piano. That night there were producers and artists and lesbians and wall-street guys who supplied the drugs and not much else. I did my best to not nod out from all the Percocet I’d taken, but the open bar wasn’t helping.

“Hey,” Texas said swirling her glass of wine, “did you hear what happened to CC?”

“Yea, she got thrown in the psych ward.” And there she was, Lita had appeared beside me. She pushed her long brown hair behind her ears. “It’s fucked up. They aren’t gonna do anything but pump her full of downers.”

“Can I talk to you?” I whispered to Lita.

She glanced at me for a moment, but pretended not to hear.

“I’m gonna get another drink,” she announced. “Anybody want one?”

She left and I followed. I peeked around corners and watched for a moment I could speak with her alone. The blankoids did a jig above my head, making fun of me for being so pathetic. I swatted them away.

“I told you we are done,” Lita said when she noticed I was staring from behind a bowl of plastic fruit.

“I think I miss you,” I said.

Her face slacked. “We went on two dates. You barely know me. And I don’t even have time to be one person right now.”

How she spoke was confusing. This whole world of acting – what was real and what was not – really gave the blankoids a lot of leverage. One was on her shoulder now. It was pointing down, telling me to grab the knife from the kitchen table to cut out her lungs. Here, it pointed.I closed my eyes tight.

A clinking came through the air. I opened my eyes and everything was normal and I could breathe normal again.

“Everyone! I have a toast!” Connor was far away, standing on top of his pool table. Out the windows below us cars honked and people mugged and bums masturbated in dumpsters.

“Hope it’s not gonna be another long one,” Lita whispered to me.

We stood there in the kitchen watching everyone watching Connor. He rattled on like a pleasant dictator getting his army ready for mass suicide. It was still a week away from actual Christmas, and everyone who hadn’t gone back yet for break was here.

“And remember,” Connor said, “it can all vaporize in an instant.”

Vaporize? Is that what people did at Christmas? I worried about when everyone was gone and I was in my apartment alone with nothing but books on Cioran and functional neurosurgery. Things I hated to read, much less be alone with. I knew between the pages, and between the words – and in between that – were where the blankoids lived. I had gone deep one night and they looked up and saw that I could see them. They had crawled out onto me.

“Please,” I said to Lita once Connor was done and everyone had resumed vibrating again. “Can we just go upstairs and talk at least?”

She looked me up and down. “OK.”

People were doing coke in the small room upstairs, so Lita did a few lines and then we kicked them out. I think I might have screamed at them, but I can’t remember.

Up on the wall there was a framed Cy Twombly print. The one with the big “Apollo” in blue. It glared down at me and I could see violent things in its blue strokes. Jagged thoughts and lust and pits of shame. My whole life felt like shame right then and I couldn’t seem to just get the words out from my throat. I needed to tell Lita.

“You’ve been acting crazy ever since you crashed the motorcycle,” she said putting her hand on mine. “I told you not to drive. You were so drunk. I really liked you.”

“I know. I think it’s true, though.” I could feel my eyes welling up, but I sucked the ultra-clear humiliation safely back inside. Maybe they helped me do it. “I think I have a problem. Like CC, but worse.”

“What? You think you’re actually crazy?” She was almost laughing and the cruel waves cut into the flesh of my mind.

“I’m serious. I—”

And then I saw it. In the corner above the Twombly, the blankoids were going to work. They were eating and screwing. Eating up all my courage and focus. Some were messing with the plants on the shelf.

A group of them lifted up a cactus and threw it across the room. It smashed against the wall. Dirt.

“What are you doing!” Lita screamed. She looked at me as if it were all my fault.

“You don’t see? They’re right there.” I pointed to a group of them singing. Words came out of their mouths like smoke and the smoke was blue.

Then a ficus went flying and destroyed a large mirror. A million worlds looked up at me from the ground.

“Fucking psycho! I was trying to be nice!” She ran out of the room crying.

It was December 15. All the things in the city were still clean and nice and were trying their best to stay that way.

The next week the city was empty. People had gone home for Christmas to their families and I was nothing but sinew. The streets were flat and cold and a sort of grease was left behind to slick over in the ice-cold.

A puddle below my feet was hard. I stood on it for five minutes waiting for the little electric man to let me know it was safe to cross before I realized no cars were on the roads here Chinatown. I needed to buy leeks. The blankoids told me I needed to make leek omelets or I’d die.

By Doyers Street most of my thoughts were strained to the point of collapse. I didn’t care. I only had to last for two more weeks and then people would come back and their hooting and spitting would again drown everything out. They would itch their bleached heads and snort up drugs and I wouldn’t have to think so much then. I could get rid of the dripping red pulp of my thoughts. Fate would melt and release a perfume. Like ammonia.

I got back to my apartment and decided to do some cleaning. The air conditioner was furry with mold and dust. I put on some Elvis Presley record but it made me feel sick so I turned it off. I got out my pills and crushed them up and snorted them. This made me feel a bit better. Though it was a annoying that I could now hear the man upstairs beating his wife more clearly. I thought about things to get rid of the image in my head. Hernias. Black peaches. Junk DNA. Junkies. Rotting. I wanted them to shut up.

I went to look out my window to remind myself that this apartment building had not been lopped of from the rest of reality. Down on the street a few people darted back and forth like cockroach automatons. I had been drunk for days and it worked to speed up this lonely stretch but I was running out of money.

On Thursday I felt a pang in my stomach. I’d forgotten to eat. The blankoids were in the other room singing along with one of my Elvis records and every time they did they added little extras to the words. They snuck in things like “they all know” and “cut it off” and “don’t you dare fall asleep”.

I went to the kitchen and tried to make an omelet but the eggs smelled bad. I saw the blankoids had taken it upon themselves to carve crosses into all the window jambs. They must have known something I didn’t.

After a glass of water I arranged all my clothes by color. I had a lot of clothes and was proud of that. Someone kept ringing my doorbell but I was afraid to answer so I just turned the music up louder. I had a plan. I would see Lita again. It was a risky idea but I saw no other way at that point. Pushing myself past the brink was the only assured way I’d get to be com-for-table again. Lita liked when I was com-for-table.

Cracking open the Temptation to Exist I got to my dog-eared page. I got very close until my nose was touching the paper. If I squinted I could see behind the letters. Mostly O’s and V’s were where the blankoids liked to peek out from. I plucked them up and threw them down my throat. I had a plan. They would be safe in my stomach until I could get someone to look at them. I’d just need to be convincing enough to get someone qualified to look.

In the bathroom I looked in the mirror at my face. My skin was gray. I practiced my insanity. The look of it. When I admitted myself later today I wanted to make sure I got a good bed. I needed a long good rest.

euphoria

by Cory Huston • June 21, 2020June 21, 2020

Showers of your crimson blood
Seep into a nation calling up a flood
—“Scarecrow” by Melissa Etheridge

The wind blows me like a flute and I am playing pure tonight. I tear off my nice blue suit, lay it on the lawn chair gently, and jump into the pool naked, all but. My body blends itself into a pale smear, my boxers and my binder sealing to my skin as my heaviness hit the water. Jude comments on my body.

“You look so masculine,” they say.

I think I blush, but I’m feeling confident. I do an underwater flip. I remember that as a child, I made a rule for myself: I had to build my flips like pyramids. I would do one. Then, I would do two. And then three. I would finish by going back down to two and then back to one.

If I ever attempted three right off the bat, I ran out of air, every time. My flips would be off for the rest of my venture in the pool. It made sense, to me at least. It allowed me to break records – I used to be able to build up to five flips in a row without coming up for air. These rules allow me to succeed.

One. One, two. One, two, three. One, two. One. Breathe. I let my head break the still surface of the pool; Jude and I make eye contact and we understand each other exactly.

Of narrow minds who legislate
Thinly veiled intolerance
Bigotry and hate

I am sitting in Bardo coffeehouse in Wheatridge with my girlfriend; we are doing homework in preparation for midterms. I am cranking away in desperation on my thesis, headphones in and noise cancelled, when my partner catches my eye and flicks her eyes to my left. Not understanding, I crinkle my eyebrows. She jerks her head a little bit, again to my left. I glance left and see a young couple, both blonde and tiny and chatty, leaning in, staring at each other with a fascination that only occurs on a first date. Beginning to understand, I remove the headphone covering my right ear, on the side facing away from them so that I can listen in on their conversation with her.

“Did you know that in New York if you misgender someone you can be fined $100,000?” says the blonde woman. She looks like a blonde, pale, scene kid who grew up but never grew out of her dedication to scene fashion.

“That’s unconstitutional,” the military man she sits across from says, his voice coated in disdain and incredulity. He leans back and away from her a little bit.

“No, really, it’s true. Isn’t that just terrible?” the gleam in her voice is palpable and I hate it. I think I might hate her.

There is a pause. I can practically hear them shaking their heads at each other in disgust at the state of the world.

My eyes are fixed straight ahead, on the saggy green couch that holds the butt of a tall bald man. I pray he stays entrenched in the pages of his book so that he won’t look up and see me boring holes in the spot above his head.

“You know, it’s reasons like that that are the reason I check the ‘prefer not to answer’ box on job applications,” he says, self-satisfaction oozing from his tiny mouth.

“What, for your sex?” She asks, her poor little face confused.

“Yep,” he says, so proud of how he has played – nay, bamboozled – the system. Yes, the big “gotcha!” of marking the “prefer not to say” box! I wonder briefly if he knows that, by human resource standards, he and I one and the same.

I close my eyes, not tuning them out but trying not to internalize what they are spewing; as I do so, I revisit the fear I felt coursing through my body when I entered a men’s restroom for the first time. I am feeling how much I hate my body at the end of every night and the start of every morning. I am re-living the, “What the hell is that?” behind my mother’s eyes when she saw me for the first time after I shaved my head. I feel the red and raw spots all over my soul from the times that I have been less than a person. The times that I have feared for my and my partner’s lives in public places. Then, I swallow. I open my eyes and I put my earphone back over my right ear. I begin to type.

But they tortured and burned you
They beat you and they tied you
They left you cold and breathing

My favorite song all through middle school and early high school was “Scarecrow”by Melissa Etheridge. A queer icon, though I had no idea at the time, Etheridge was eulogizing the life and death of Matthew Shepard, a young, white, handsome gay boy murdered in Laramie, Wyoming in 1998.

They lured him into one of their pick-up trucks and beat him; when he fell unconscious, they took his wallet and stole all the money he had. All $20.

They drove him down a dirt path where they then tied him, Christ-like, to a fence using a clothesline. They then pistol-whipped him 21 times. They stole his shoes and left. Shepard hung there for 18 hours before being found. The people who found him thought he was a scarecrow in the distance. They had strung him up, like Jesus, to a fence. They say that when he was found, there were two clear streaks, through the blood that coated him, down his face from his tears.

One of Shepard’s murderers, Aaron McKinney, claimed that he had no choice but to murder Shepard after he allegedly approached McKinney with an unprovoked, non-violent sexual advance. McKinney’s defense became known as the Gay Panic Defense.

McKinney’s defense strategy was later termed “Gay Panic Defense,” and today it’s still used often, and, used even more so, the “Trans Panic Defense.”

We all gasp this can’t happen here
We’re all much too civilized
Where can these monsters hide?

“Are you a boy?” I ask. I know the answer, but perhaps if I goad them into honesty, my truth will not feel so shadowed.

“No,” Jude responds, not fully present in the conversation, yet. We are sitting on the floor of a hotel hallway, watching as passersby go to retrieve their nightly dose of ice. The carpet is a terrible, movie-theatre pattern; a gaudy combination of maroon and forest green. Sort of like us.

Jude has their shield up. I know that; I’ve seen them hurting before – seen them curled up in the protective, spikey exterior they love so much. Jude can be a lizard; harmless but inaccessible. I am the same, in many ways. Right now, though, I want to be vulnerable with someone. I crave it.

“I see,” I say and then pause. I have to time this next question correctly, or else I might scare them out of the conversation. In a vocal setting that is more hum than voice, I tentatively ask them, “Are you a girl?”

There is another pause. Not a planned one, this time. “I don’t know. Maybe,” they answer. I nod. That makes sense.

“Do you think you might be neither?” My voice remains, through maximum efforts, low and unassuming.

“I’m not sure.” Their voice seems to counter mine; it is higher than one might expect, though not from nerves. From the confidence that if here, in this place, they speak femininely, we will not be in danger.

I pause. I have an admission to make but I don’t want to make it unprompted. Sensing this, Jude inhales, bites their lip, and, without turning, asks, “Are you?”

“Am I what?” I know exactly what they’re asking.

“Are you a boy?” I pause. I wanted them to ask but now that they have, I don’t know what to say. “Or a man?” they add, almost hopefully.

“I think so,” I answer, my voice steady, a dissociative calm washing over me. My answer feels monosyllabic; perhaps if I don’t complicate my words my experience can maintain a simplicity about it, too.

One. One, two. One, two, three. One, two. One. Breathe.

For love they crucified you
I can’t forget hard as I try

Trans panic: a legal defense that excuses a perpetrator from the murder of a transgender individual [for one or more of the reasons listed below].

a. The transgender individual’s visual presence has caused the perpetrator to have a mental break down, rendering the perpetrator insane. The perpetrator is therefore not liable for the violence they inflicted upon the transgender individual.

b. The transgender individual propositions the perpetrator sexually, in a non-violent way; the perpetrator is left with no choice but to murder the transgender individual.

c. Due to the individual being transgender, the perpetrator, upon seeing the individual, feels that the individual was about to initiate serious bodily harm against the them; therefore, the perpetrator had to act first. It was self-defense.

This silhouette against the sky
Scarecrow crying
Waiting to die wondering why

I have never been seen in the world before today, not really. My throat begins to well and so I clear it roughly. But then I sweep up his soft and beautifully lumped body, and I become one with the languid waterfall of him. I am awestruck by his softness, by his palpable masculinity. By the feminine curve of his belly, and the soft prominence of his arms. I see the gentleness behind his melted brown eyes. I see the temporary, uninformed love for what I am and suddenly, I am shattered whole by a stranger.

“…sounds like that may have been gender euphoria,” Rafi says, almost hopeful that I will agree that this is what I am describing. I am familiar with the term and it terrifies me that both my therapist and I have, separately, identified it as what I am experiencing.

Am I manifesting this? Have I just been thinking about trans issues so much that I have made myself trans? I do a lot of work in the queer community; could that have caused this fixation? Why does it feel so good when I wear my binder?

“I’m not saying you necessarily are transmale, just that it’s a possibility and I think, maybe, if you would like to, we could explore that,” my therapist says, his voice laced with kindness. “Are you worried about your partner or your family not accepting you?”

I flinch at his word choice. Transmale. It’s so clinical and it is so wrong. I am an expert in words that don’t fit me.

“Yeah. Of course,” I pause. He is silent. “I mean, what’s the point in being myself if I have no one to share it with?”

Transmale. That’s not right. It’s not my box. Trans man? Perhaps. I don’t feel certain of any of this. I should feel certain. Shouldn’t I?

“When I was first coming out,” he starts and then pauses. Rafi is a trans man and his usual eloquence has been faltering slightly throughout this conversation. “When I was first coming out, I said something similar. Someone asked me if I was alone on a desert island, who would I want to be and what would that look like? That, for me, was when I knew for sure.”

Scarecrow trying
Angels will hold carry your soul away
This was our sibling

Of his fiancé, Ashanti Carmon, Philip Williams says, “She was the type of lady that wanted something out of her life. She could have made it. She could have made it.”

Ashanti Carmon was a Christian, employee of the month at Dunkin Donuts, and a transgender woman who was shot multiple times and left dead on the street.

Williams was asked what he would like to say to the yet-unknown perpetrators and answered, saying, “Listen to my voice. You can tell I’m in pain… She’s gone and she don’t deserve it. She was [my] perfect woman.”

When asked what Williams would say to Carmon if she were still alive, Williams said, “I will love you forever. Love of my life, for sure.”

This was our child
This shepherd young and mild
This unassuming one

“You bet I’m going to go and shoot him,” was the last thing that Alexa Negron Ruiz heard in this world, before she was shot ten times.

Driving by in the dead of night, three eighteen-year-olds spotted Alexa and realized that she was not only transgender but that her picture had recently been circulating on Facebook. The local community wanted her dead for allegedly holding a mirror under a bathroom stall in a McDonald’s women’s restroom.

The boys jokingly solicited Alexa for sex, shouting, “Hey, can you give me some of that ass?” at her as they rolled up. Then, laughing, they pulled out a gun and shot it ten times.

Police believe those boys left and returned the scene later to shoot her again.

Her body was found alongside the road where the video was taken, in a ditch, with twelve bullets in her. Her family has yet to come forward and claim the body.

Denied in life by her family, one can safely assume that Alexa’s body will remain unclaimed.

Imagine leaving Jesus’ body in a ditch.

But they are knocking on our front door
They’re rocking in our cradles

A few months ago, I was visiting Sammamish, Washington and my father informed me that several weeks prior my mother, who had never really seemed that interested in motherhood, had turned to him and asked, “Do you ever wish we’d had another kid? A boy?”

My father, apparently not knowing what to say, had startled out a “Yes. I do.”

My mother then followed up her question, saying, “I think a boy would have been a lot of fun.”

They’re preaching in our churches
And eating at our tables

Dear Professor Knorr,
I am genderqueer
Many thanks,
Cory

I feel the eyes hot on my back, my left shoulder burning from the gaze. I whip around and see my partner reading what I’m writing on my favorite professors’ desk late on Halloween Tuesday.

“Hey!” I almost shout at her. I knew she would hate that I was saying anything. I knew she wouldn’t understand, she doesn’t get why I need to say it, to sing it, to be it with all of my person. When we are alone, she sings the praise of “No, baby, I think your gender is beautiful. It just scares me,” and then wonders why I won’t share with her the deepest secrets of who I wish the world could see.

I crumple the note in my pocket and glare at her. She quirks an eyebrow and leaves for the cold night air. I corner my professors. She is the first adult in a position of authority that I tell. And I tell her with my words, out loud, the crumpled note sitting heavy in my pocket.

In return, I get a parental hug from Knorr, jumps up and down, cheering. She embodies the type of excitement that I have craved since I realized that this body and this mind do not match, because it’s the excitement I feel on the inside whenever I think about who I am and who I could be. Her reaction feels so good. Euphoric, some might say.

I keep the crumpled note in my pocket for a week or so, until it is waterlogged and the words washed away by the laundry machine.

I search my soul
My heart and in my mind
To try and find forgiveness
I can forgive But I will not forget

“Could you still love me if I was a man?” I ask, somewhat drunk off the red wine, with a loose smile on my purpled lips. My face is smoothed over with makeup and I am a Pretty Boy tonight. A faerie boy, I like to tell people who have a basic understanding of gender, or a basic understanding of me.

“I love you. But it would be difficult. I mean, you know,” she says. Her eyes are already almost guilty at what she’s saying. It’s one thing to be a good, trans-inclusive member of the queer community and another to be a good partner to a trans person. My hoop earrings brush the pillow that I’m leaning on, and she glances at the light they reflect. A small smile plays upon her dark lips and I am encompassed.

I exhale. Her words sting in my ears and sear through my soul. There is a hole burnt through the top left corner of what makes me, me and I know that there is now a small wall between our two honesties.

Don’t ask questions you don’t want to know the answer to, my mother’s voice rings through my head. The green eyes in front of my hold my blues captive.

Scarecrow crying
Waiting to die wondering why

I lie awake. It is 7:55am on Monday, April 27^th. I am staring, straight ahead. I lay on my left side and I breath inwards. I’ve been forgetting to do that lately, to take in air. One. One, two. One, two, three. One, two. One. Breathe. I try my old trick, making myself wait for breath, trying to make myself hungry for it. It falls flat. Since COVID-19 hit and I can no longer frequent my favorite drag bars or, with a giggle, compliment the scantily clad boys in Charlie’s, my lungs have forgotten how to laugh. They sit idly and without thought forget to feed me the air I need.

I am staring at my Boy Juice. It sits, in a large prescription box shrouded in crinkly paper, in my bedside medicine holder. The box is big enough that it protrudes above the edge of the mattress and holds my eye.

“We’ll just start you off on half a dose,” my GP says. Her voice is kind and gentle. My eyes shrink and re-open.

“Okay. Yeah, that sounds good to me,” I say completely unsure of what sounds good to me.

“It’s called micro-dosing. You can try it out and see if this is realty something you want.”

The unplanned crinkle of the bag holding my testosterone startles me; my partner has shifted in bed and so shifts the whole mattress. My eyes shoot open. I breath again. My lids relax, my memory taking me to a different conversation.

“It freaks me out how easy it is to get testosterone,” my partner says, looking at me with pleading eyes. She doesn’t want me to hate her. “It got very real today when you picked up the prescription.” For me, too, I think but don’t say. For me too.

Was it easy? I don’t think it was. A lot of pain came. A lot of fights between me and mirror-me. A lot of internal, “Is it worth being myself if I have to be that person alone? Have I felt that type of acute aloneness before?”

The answer is no. “Nothing is as alone as choosing your true self for the first time. Ask Alexa Ruiz,” the vengeful voice inside my head croaks. It comes from a dead place.

Rafi’s words echo in my mind, “I picture myself … alone on the desert island … that’s when I knew for sure.”

“I mean, what’s it been? Two weeks? Were you even considering testosterone before two weeks ago?” she says, a knife cut in her voice. Yes, I want to scream. Yes, yes, yes.

But I am caught: to admit my yes is to admit to not bringing my partner in on this conversation. To lie and say no is to deny myself. Is this how Peter felt when asked about Jesus?

Did I just align testosterone with Jesus?

Closing my eyes so hard that I see stars, I ask myself why I don’t know for sure. What if I’m wrong? What is it, to be a failed, ugly woman? I would never look like any of the pretty twinks that I envy. What is it to try to find the body meant for you and in doing so to sacrifice any palatability your body and identity might have ever had? Do I choose privilege or honesty?

The stars behind my eyes lecture me, hissing:

Who are you to deny this ancestorship?
Who are you to think you know?
Who are you to say no?
Who are you to suffer?
Who are you?

I open my eyes. The stars behind my eyelids are too harsh.

“I don’t understand why you need to take T,” she says, her voice reasonable. I don’t think it’s reasonable. But what do I know? I am impressionable. “I’ll always see you as the beautiful, twinky, gay boy you are.”

“You’re afraid of the world seeing it, too,” I say, my statement not a question but a sentence formed out of calcified sadness, tinged with anger, and seasoned with a pinch of resentment.

“I mean… Yeah. I am.”

Looking at the crinkly bag holding the fragile box of Boy Juice, I know that it is not as simple as a yes or a no. There’s other people’s pain to bear in mind.

Scarecrow trying
Rising above all in the name of love

I breathe deeply, trying to steady my chest flutter. I am going to talk to him. I adjust my button-down frog shirt and feel the ugly lumps of my chest wiggle their way to prominence. I readjust, hoping to hide them in the lost crevices of my boy bones. We make eye contact and the journalist leans his body towards mine, still in conversation with a different queer. I feel tiny by comparison. The person talking to him asks another inane question and his eyes flutter between social obligation and myself. The lean turns into a full-body tear away and then a head-first dive towards me, a smile gracing his full lips. Men are beautiful. How have I never noticed that before?

“Hello,” he greets, sizing my littleness up. His voice seems to drip forward, like a waterfall, unperturbed by gravity or timeliness. I will wait for his words to come forth.

“Hey, my name is Cory,” I respond too quickly, my voice too high pitched. I have jumped four steps ahead in the conversation; too far, too fast, as always. I stick my hand out and smile. I am nervous. Names, so far, have come first in this place. Many of us picked them ourselves and they will be our only progeny.

“I saw you watching.” My smile tightens; I am caught off guard. He puts out his hand, encircling my much smaller, much paler one, again with a relaxed slowness that my anxiety-ridden rabbit heart has never had before. I think I may have gulped. I worry that my lack of an Adams apple has just become prominent, so I put my shoulders back and flex my biceps inside of my dress shirt. My dress shirt that is covered in tiny frog print. I am a child. Jesus, take the wheel.

“With most people, you can’t see if they’re listening. But I could see how deeply you were listening to the panel. You were interacting with everything that we were saying. I like that.” His voice is caramel. My body is a vat, ready to absorb each droplet.

I blink and realize, too late, that he has seen me exactly as I am seen by God. It is breathtaking.

flash fiction friday flash micro fiction short fiction

CUTTING TREES

by Jack Wildern • June 20, 2020November 12, 2020

Photo by Dana Sibera (copied from Flickr)

My brother and I are surgeons. We spend our days in the woods by our home, slicing the limbs from eighty-year-old relics, listening to the sounds of splitting wood and retreating birds. Our father did this before us and his father before him.

By our house, at the edge of a lake, we wait until the evening mists rise above the water. We wait until the green and blue pines on the opposite side turn black under the canopy of midnight sky. We wait until we can hear the severed branches of the oaks or the thin fingers of the elms calling. Our father told us that we heard voices because our family is cursed. The old man was mad. And yet still we hear the voices.

My brother pulls a raft to the water’s edge. On it we place the trunks and fleshy leaves that we took earlier in the day. They wail at us, demanding to be returned to the bodies that we left naked and weeping in the woods. He ties them down with rope and cries out in disgust when a gnarled hand touches his own.

Our father told us that on the opposite side of the lake, where the trees give way to rock, a house made of sticks simmers with an ancient need. He told us this when we were young. We have seen it in our dreams ever since.

My brother pushes the raft. We watch as the shape floats away and the water ripples gently beneath its weight.

“Light it,” he says.

I dip the arrow into the fire and aim high. It rises in a sweeping arc, briefly lost amongst the descending fog. As it falls we hold our breath. The raft burns after the arrow lands. A beacon lights up the night sky and turns the water a blood red. Our father told us that if we looked hard enough we would see smoke from the wood make its way through the trees, to the house of sticks.

“I don’t see nothin.”

We drag what we did not use from the back of the pickup and start the chipper. The noise it makes as it crunches and grinds the wood is deafening in the night. But our father told us that we must always tidy up after ourselves. We scoop the remains into sacks bound with string, ready to be sold at the market. It’s good for your garden. We will say this to passersby.

Sack after sack gets filled and when we turn the machine off the silence is huge. Our father told us to be quiet. To never talk of our sacrifices.

“We missed a load.”

The chipper goes back on and eats up the rest with ease. It will go through any type of wood. It will even go through bone. At least, that’s what our father told us.

Blood

by Derek Pfeffer • June 14, 2020June 14, 2020

The mosquitoes were bad along the river. They clouded around him and stuck to his bare legs and claimed their meager allotments of his blood and though he would smash their little bodies on his neck and arms the rest of him was too much property to manage. So he allowed them their blood and he was used to them.

He lived under a tarp along the river. The tarp was tied from two beech trees into whose smooth gray hides the names of lovers were carved. He had read every name and at first he had despised these people, this intrusion of the town he’d left behind, but now in his fourth year on the river he had come to accept them and even to forgive them their misguided ruination of a beautiful thing with something so ugly as a name, or the illusion of lasting love.

He spent his days wandering the river or the nearby trails and sometimes he would go into the town for food. He was not above stealing something if he needed it. He had no philosophy about that; there was nothing to consider.

He was on his way to town now. It was late summer and the river stunk. He walked the riverbank studying the new prints in the mud from the night, the miniature human handprints of raccoons, the split hearts of deer. He left the river at a twisted piece of driftwood and climbed the bank and then he was at the road. He walked it not minding the few cars that passed, a little delirious with hunger, counting the mileposts of this a way he’d taken countless times. Mostly he noted the houses, each of them known to him and imbued with some character though he knew but few of the souls who peopled them.

He came upon an orange traffic sign. It had been dropped in his path on the side of the road. He stood beside it a moment scratching his head and listening to it clicking as the words changed. He stepped around and past it and turned to read the words. They said:

EEE SPRAYING 9/10 – 9/16 DUSK TO DAWN

He had no watch nor any clear sense for what day it was but he was sure it could be September. He walked along. The town rose up ahead and he could see the big brick buildings of the center. Not that it was a big town. But it had a grocery and a hardware store and each time he saw them after weeks in the woods they seemed like something bigger than the town he had grown up in.

The people of the grocery watched him as he entered. They looked away. He was known well, both in his current condition and in his former, and those who knew him in both shook their heads and wondered how to reconcile the two. Nor could they, nor should they try. He walked on into the aisles. His diet was one of packaged foods, of expirations one and two years distant. He put these into a sack he had brought with him. He got himself one luxury, as he always did, and this was a jar of chocolate milk from the dairy aisle. Then he walked out the door and into the parking lot.

Someone called to him. He kept walking. She spoke again: “Lowell, is that you?”

Now he turned and looked at her. She was older, she was wearing the black uniform of the store. He recognized her as one of his mother’s friends though he did not know her name. “I don’t have any money and I’m not returning the food,” he said.

“I know you don’t,” she said. “And I’m not asking you to.”

“Fine,” he said. And he turned to keep walking.

She followed behind him. The sack was getting heavy for him and he put it down. It had been two days since he’d last eaten. He waited for what was coming.

“I’m sorry to follow you like this,” she said. “I don’t want to make you uncomfortable. I just thought someone ought to tell you to protect yourself. Being out there in the woods like that. Don’t you even have a tent?”

“Protect myself,” he repeated. He meant it as a question but he had forgotten the intonation, it had been so long since he had spoken to someone.

“You know. From the mosquitoes. From the EEE.”

“The EEE,” he said.

“Yeah. The EEE. I figured you hadn’t heard about it, being all alone out there.”

“EEE’s been around for a long time.”

“Not like this it hasn’t. It’s a big year for it. They found it right here in town. A little girl got it and she’s in the hospital. Another lady already died from it.”

“You can die from it,” he said.

“Oh, yes. You really didn’t know?”

“No,” he said. Though he had heard of EEE in years past he had thought of it like a passing cold, or perhaps like bird flu. He had not known it was so serious.

“Don’t you have a tent or anything?”

“No.”

“I’d give you some bug spray but there’s none left in the store. All cleared out across the county. That’s how worried everyone is. I wish I could give you some.”

“That’s alright.”

The woman looked at him morosely. “Well,” she said. “Take care of yourself.”

“Alright.”

He picked up his sack and started again for the road. The whole way back to his camp he thought about what the woman had told him. He tried not to think about it but the mosquitoes were after him all the time and now they had more meaning. They got worse at the river and he slapped at all of them now. When he got to his tarp he set the food sack down and rummaged through a plastic box that held his clothes and found a pair of pants and a thin sweater. He put these on though it was very hot. He swatted the mosquitoes from his head and the long clothing protected the rest of him. Then he took a can of beans from the sack and opened it and sat on an overturned milk crate. He ate greedily, tilting the can to his mouth, scooping the beans out with his hands. He put the empty can away and got the chocolate milk and drank it slowly and watched the river ooze by.

At night the mosquitoes hummed in his ears and he felt them all over him, even in places they could not be: under his sleeping bag, inside his socks. They had a hold of him; they had re-opened the door to philosophy. His mind unaccustomed to thought began to churn and struggle. He knew the risk was small; likely he would be fine. But to refuse to protect yourself, to put yourself intentionally in harm’s way? He could not do it. Even an unloaded pistol is too heavy to lift to your temple, so long as you have a use for your life. And this he knew well.

So he stayed up all night swatting at the little bodies and he got no sleep. Nor was there any relief in the morning. The only true relief would be to leave the river but he would not do that.

After a breakfast of canned peaches he went down to the riverbank. He stood there looking down at the stinking mud. A dead heron had washed ashore and it lay broken-necked and foul with its black intestines spilling from its body. He walked upriver a ways from the bird and crouched down and plunged both hands into the mud. He wiped the gray glopping mud onto the tops of his feet and then he proceeded to cover his head and neck with it. When the mud dried he felt it pulling at the wrinkles of his face.

So protected he slept in the shade of the tarp. He slept all morning. At midday he rose and relieved himself and went again down to the riverbank to reapply the mud. He had just crouched down when he saw a fisherman in a boat midriver.

“Aren’t you a sight,” the man said.

“I don’t doubt it.”

“You ought to get yourself some proper repellant.”

He repeated what the woman had told him, his mother’s friend. “Stores are all out.”

“Stores may be,” the man said. “Amazon is not.”

“Amazon,” he repeated.

Now the man looked beyond him, to the tarp between the beech trees, the various sundry possessions piled not unneatly about the camp.

“Say,” he said. “You’re that homeless feller lives by the river, aren’t you.”

He said nothing.

“I heard about you.”

“Oh.”

“I ought not to take pity on you,” the man said. “With where you came from and everything.”

Then don’t, Lowell thought. But he knew the man would try to help him and he waited for it. Sure enough the man sighed, reached into his boat, and tossed a white spray bottle to him there on the shore. Lowell read the label on the bottle. It was 98% DEET bug repellant. He sprayed himself all over, his clothes and his hair and his mud-caked skin.

“Come closer so I can give it back to you,” he said. “I don’t want to miss and get it in the water.”

“No, son. You keep it.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Course you can.”

He looked down at the bottle in his hand. He shook his head. He threw the bottle to the man, and missed, and the bottle splashed into the water.

“You crazy son of a bitch,” the man said. “I’m trying to help you.”

“Sorry,” he said.

“You’re sorry alright. You’re a sad son of a bitch.”

He shrugged. He went back to his camp and sat on his milk crate and watched the river. The man went away. He could just make out the white shape of the bottle bobbing in the water. He looked at it a long time. Finally he rose and went down to the river again. He undressed and waded into the tea-colored water to retrieve it.

He came back to shore where the heron lay. The mosquitoes started sticking to him as his skin dried and he uncapped the bottle and sprayed himself again. Then he put his long clothes back on and lay down under the tarp and he slept the rest of the afternoon.

So he was awake in the evening when they sprayed. He heard the plane coming and then he saw it; it was not quite dark. It was a twin propeller plane and the mist dropped like a curtain from the wings. It seemed impossibly low to the ground. The plane flew past and he hid under the tarp and waited for the mist to hit his camp. He did not know at all what to expect. He imagined droplets falling on his tarp like rain. But nothing of the sort happened. He did smell something like mineral oil, and he saw the failing orange light from the sunset refracted in the mist, but then it dissipated and it was gone.

They sprayed again two nights later, and from the road the night after he heard them spraying from trucks. Still there were mosquitoes. He applied the repellant every time he ate a meal, which was sometimes twice and sometimes three times a day. The bottle was only part full when the man gave it to him and after four days it was empty. He unscrewed the spray cap and filled the bottle with river water and sprayed himself with the dilute solution but it did very little for the mosquitoes. He went back to mud. There seemed to be no break from the heat nor sign of coming frost and he foresaw at least a month of this, sleeping in mud, waking in mud, being always covered in mud in varying states of drying and stinking and he felt desperate and alone and very sad.

A week later he dug out from his clothing box an outfit he had worn not once since coming to the river. It was a nice clean shirt and wool dress pants, still with the pleats pressed into them. He set them atop the box and went down to the river to bathe and then he put them on. He had not thought about the weight he’d lost; the pants fell from his hips and the shirt was boxy and loose about his midsection. He had no belt and so he tied through the beltloops of the pants a length of rope. The shirt he would have to live with. He tucked it into the pants and walked out to the road.

It was afternoon when he reached the house. He knocked on the door and waited. He swatted at the mosquitoes around him. He knocked again. At last he heard the heavy footsteps from inside and then the door opened. The man inside was grayed and tired-looking and this was his father. He looked at his son as if he did not know him.

“Dad,” Lowell said.

“Son.”

“Can I come in.”

The old man looked him over.

“Please.”

“Alright,” his father said. “Come in.”

They sat at the kitchen table. His father sat where he’d always sat; Lowell took the chair that once was his. His mother’s chair was piled with books. His father said nothing for a long time and Lowell read the titles of the books as if that were what he’d come to the house to do. They were books on astronomy, the universe.

At last his father said: “Son, this is very upsetting.”

“To see me you mean.”

“Yes. It is easier not to.”

“I had nowhere else to go. The mosquitoes.”

“Ah,” his father said. “Yes. You must take precautions.”

Lowell nodded. He didn’t know where to go from here. He looked again at the pile of books. “Do you see Mom,” he said.

“Every day.”

“How is she.”

His father didn’t answer.

“Is she alright?”

He did not answer. He said: “I thought a lot about what I would say to you if you came back. Now I don’t want to say any of it. It’s been too long.”

“Oh.”

His father’s eyes were wet and red. “It’s too much. You have to leave.”

“Can I stay just for a night.”

“You cannot.”

“Not even in the garage.”

“No, son. I couldn’t bear it.”

“I understand.” And he did. His father had lost his only son and then, by his son’s leaving, his only wife. And yet both were alive and could be faced and he could not face both. He pushed his chair back and rose from the table. He walked to the door he’d come through.

“Do you have any bug repellant,” he asked.

His father had not followed him. And though he was sure his father heard him he got no answer. So that is all over, he thought. He let himself out and walked back to the river.

It was late when he got to the camp. He was very tired. He lay on his back in his good clothes under the tarp. The mosquitoes hummed around him and landed on him and he swatted them away and then they landed again. Turning his head he saw the moonlight on the river. Even the bones of the heron shone in the moonlight; they had yet to be taken away by raccoons. He knew he should get up, take off his good clothes, and cover himself with the foul stinking mud. And yet what was the point. He fell asleep as he was.

He woke to the morning sunlight, the singing of birds. Down at the river he washed his face. He saw himself reflected in the water: his dress pants, his good shirt. He raised his hand to his forehead to feel the welts that had risen overnight. He cupped his hands into the water and drank, and drank.

For the first time the air was chilly and there were no mosquitoes. Perhaps the frost was coming after all. And with it relief. He spent the day walking along the riverbank and taking little rests and walking again. The mosquitoes came out as the air warmed but he did not bother to slap at them. They landed all over him, stabbing at him with their awful straws. Soon every inch of his skin was covered in the small itching welts.

As the day passed he thought of his four years on the river and what they amounted to. And what they cost. He thought of his father the day before and of his mother unseen in the asylum. His father, his mother, to whom he was flesh and blood, who had abandoned him now these years after he abandoned them. His mother by no doing of her own. And why had he, Lowell, done it. Why was he here. To choose a different fate from the one he’d been given, which was just a fate and could be no worse than any other. And which could not in fact be changed. Fate. Well. If this was his fate then he might as well accept it. Why put yourself at god’s mercy only to slap at his mosquitoes.

That evening he lay motionless beneath the tarp. The two trees held him like parentheses. The mosquitoes stabbed at him and took their blood and he gave it to them, he gave it readily, and We will see, he thought, if the frost comes or it doesn’t.

I Want You to Know That I Was Hot Too

by Ansa Khan • June 13, 2020June 13, 2020

While watching the #MeAt20 avalanche on Twitter last month, I was really tempted to post a photo of myself at that age. I didn’t – inhibited, maybe, by the comments from some that it was actually a massive act of narcissism to go to the trouble of digging up a photo of oneself at twenty, then posting it on a public forum (also: doesn’t Twitter have a clause that means that they then own the rights to any image you post? Shouldn’t we definitely be, you know, really worried about that?). I just wanted to say, though, before the cultural moment moves on and I lose the chance, that I was hot too. Bright eyes, bright skin, shiny hair, a fringe that won’t quit. Maybe hot is the wrong word – beautiful is more like it, I guess. Beautiful enough that I don’t know what the hell I was thinking – when I would look at parts of myself and wish they weren’t there. Seriously, I’m looking at a photo of me at twenty-one – I’m looking in the mirror of a thirty-two-person capacity hostel room in Rio, applying eyeshadow with my finger. More striking than the fact that I used to wear eyeshadow, is the fact that I really do look great.

But, reader, I have to tell you, I was also fucking miserable, and that’s just really hard to capture on camera. So the reason I didn’t post the photo is less down to my ongoing commitment to keeping my own firmly rooted narcissism under wraps, and more an unwillingness to mislead the many tens of people who would have seen it. Posting a photo of myself – and trust me, I did have really great hair – would be a bit like handing you a packet of Jaffa Cakes and telling you there were biscuits inside: it’d only be half of the story, you know?

And I know, I know, some people managed to be young and happy at the same time. I mean, no one I know, but I’m willing to believe that some people were having a good time. I don’t want to use this as an excuse to engage in a kind of retrospective therapy, a letter to my younger self (“Dear Ansa, soon you will discover that you can bleach your top lip. Don’t be scared…”). I would, however, like to suggest that as well as engaging in collective nostalgia for how marvellous it was to be young and so much hotter than we remember, it’s also nice to remember, or say out loud at least, that young doesn’t always mean better.

By saying that society’s obsession with youth worries me, I am not, I’m aware, breaking new ground. The #MeAt20 post-along was taking place at the same time as my ongoing participation in an online readathon for War and Peace which is bringing me great joy. It’s being organized by A Public Space in the US, calling it #TolstoyTogether. It was indescribably comforting, during those first few days of lockdown, to have the collective feeling that came from taking on such a monumental, admittedly slightly ridiculous project. I didn’t think this at the time, but it is a real fuck you to the view that you really shouldn’t be putting yourself under any pressure to take on any grand projects at the moment (a view to which I subscribe, I would add). I’d like to say I went into it ironically, but I’m not sure how exactly does one read a novel ironically.

One thing that has become apparent, though, from the half of the book that I have read, is that Tolstoy had quite the male gaze. Oh, yes. And you know what fared particularly badly under that male gaze? Women who are no longer what passes for young.

Consider “maid of honor and favorite of the Empress”, hostess extraordinaire, Anna Pavlovna Scherer, who “despite her forty years, overflowed with animation and impulsiveness … The subdued smile which, though it did not suit her faded features, always played around her lips expressed, as in a spoiled child, a continual consciousness of her charming defect, which she nether wished, nor could, nor considered it necessary to correct.”

The party at this point is literally just getting started. We also have Anna Mikhaylovna, or, the “elderly lady, who with her thin careworn face was rather out of place in this brilliant society.” Ladies: might I ask you to consider how careworn your face is, relative to the brilliance of the society in which you plan to move?

More embarrassing than leaving the house with that care-worn face, is Anna Mikhaylovna’s failure to constantly bear in mind that she is no longer young:

“ ‘Do promise, do promise, Vasili!’ cried Anna Mikhaylovna as he went, with the smile of a coquettish girl, which at one time probably came naturally to her, but was not very ill-suited to her careworn face. Apparently she had forgotten her age and by force of habit employed all the old feminine arts.”

Now, I would never presume to edit Tolstoy, but does this passage not contain a lapse in logic? Why, just because it no longer becomes her, should this smile no longer come naturally to her? Tolstoy seems convinced that something fundamental separates careworn Anna Mikhaylovna and coquettish Anna Mikhaylovna. That she should forget this is, to our male observer, clearly offensive.

The category of “woman grown plain with age” features heavily in the novel: women who had once been beautiful, but who were now – to use his words – plain.

I give you, Julie Karagina:

“She was twenty-seven. After the death of her brothers she had become very wealthy. She was by now decidedly plain, but thought herself not merely as good-looking as before but even far more attractive. She was confirmed in this delusion by the fact that she had become a very wealthy heiress and also by the fact that the older she grew the less dangerous she became to men.”

Now, Julie is clearly feeling pretty good about herself. She’s come into some money and is, in modern parlance, feeling herself. But Tolstoy wants you to know that she’s wrong, that – thankfully – he’s here to tell us that she is in fact “decidedly plain”. What a delusion! Young woman gets to the end of her twenties and feels good about herself! I wonder about presumably more attractive twenty-year-old Julie Karagina – did she ever find herself applying eyeshadow in the mirror of a hostel in Rio, all the time wondering how she could be so hot but oh-so-miserable?

Even worse (or better for the purposes of my writing this piece) plainness also appears – terrifyingly – to be something one can slip into by being unhappy, or simply by failing to arrange one’s face in a particular way. Consider “the little princess”, Prince Andrew Bolkonsky’s wife, in the midst of having a bad evening: “She was much altered. She was now plain rather than pretty.”

I know, I know: here I am bringing my modern sensibility to a novel set in 19th-century Russia. Serfs are only ever referred to in an anonymous plural – something to be sold off, or moved from one estate to another. In field hospitals, wounded soldiers who are not officers are left to die on the floor. Taking issue with society women being described as plain feels … precious? But somehow it’s very painful to read. Perhaps the most depressing thing about these references to sadly deluded older women peppered throughout the prose is that I’m fairly sure that they’re beside the point. The narrative voice inflicts these blows on these women while barging past them to get to more interesting things (just how lovely are Helene’s shoulders? Please, tell me again.).

So you see this is the context in which I was watching many women I know post photos of themselves at twenty, photos where they looked happy, or cool, or had great haircuts, and perhaps explains why I slightly went off the deep end about it. If the valorization of youth is emphatically not new (cf. your man Tolstoy) what is new is the ease with which I can find a photo of my twenty- or twenty-one-year-old self and marvel at how little it says about me at that age. Looking at that photo creates an unhelpful dissonance: I look like I’m young and having a good time, but only one of those things is true. At thirty-four, I’ve worked out that the best strategy for photos is to try to look like myself, which mainly means smiling like I normally do, and avoiding the temptation to tilt anything in a direction it’s not meant to go. I appear less hot, but it’s nice to look at the photo someone has just taken of you on their phone, recognize yourself, and then never think of it again. My twenty-year-old self was a painful fourteen years away from this realization.

I’d like to end, if I may, in the classic way, with a quote from a well-known television program from the late 2000s. There is an episode of Mad Men where upon finding themselves sitting at a bar just along from two attractive young women, Roger Stirling remarks to Don Draper that when it comes to what they might refer to as the fairer sex: “Once they hit thirty, it’s like someone turns off a light.”

I would like to counter that it’s around thirty – though for many of my friends who are much smarter than me, it happened much earlier – that a light goes on. This light is the one signals that the detector for all the bullshit in the world that gets flung at women about how important it is to be young, and then once you aren’t, how you must do the decent thing and disappear, is firmly switched on. I for one would not be without it.

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THE “JESUS LOVES ME” PAWN SHOP STORIES

by Deborah Johnstone • June 12, 2020November 12, 2020

“I can give ya 30 bucks . . .”

Fuck, we’re worth more than that. Do you remember when that prick ripped us off her neck, and we scattered all over the motel room and got lost under the bed? She got down on her hands and knees, on that filthy, fluid-soaked carpet, and picked every one of us up . . .

The pearls had already seen much catastrophe. They were happy in the Jesus Loves Me pawn shop, reclining on navy velvet. Serene. No pressure to perform. Their previous owner navigated her life rather tragically. Some nights, the pearls would discuss how they accompanied her through blasphemous stumbles and countless down-and-out troubadours.

“You, goddamn son-of-a-bitch . . . You never loved me . . .”

Seagrams 7 and 7 smoothed her squalid edges. No ice. Plates flung across the kitchen. Everything shatters eventually.

It was true, the pearls observed. He never did love her. None of them ever would. Her small bedroom reeked of the detritus of extravagant hope – hope for tenderness, love, redemption, joy. None of it came. The pearls remained bystanders, en route to a frenzied dissolution. They watched their owner’s life unravel under the hiss of neon and the orchid skyline of dusk, night after night, dawn after dawn. Extended trips to Niagara Falls – where leather-covered bibles lay interred in drawers – never to be read. Lots of cheap motels with dilapidated roofs and shoddy tilework. Cash and carry. She’d squint at the liquid daylight assaulting her skin, her eyes. Another John placated. The Blue Moon, The Rex, The Travelodge – all different yet all the same. No matter how hard the pearls tried to lend their owner a sense of refinement, she ravaged all their hope. Yellowed with age but still iridescent, their antique sheen is still visible as a potential new owner looms.

“Nah. These are cultured . . . I can’t let them go for less than 30.”

Yeah . . . fuck, man, we’re cultured as shit. Remember that time she was thrown out of her apartment and had to find a new place? We got that place for her . . .

Stubby fingers hold up the yellowed strand. Rancid breath make the pearls nauseous. Dangling – panicked they’ll be dropped and separated again – they resist. The pearls cling to the cheap velvet. It doesn’t work. They’re hanging mid-air. The pearls hated the touch of men. It always ended badly.

We command respect. We can make you worthy. This guy is not worthy.

“They ain’t worth 30 . . .”

“South Sea pearls are hard to come by. If you want ’em, I can go to 25. That’s it.”

Oh, Christ, he’s going down . . . Not this prick, not him, not him, not him . . .

The pawn shop owner waits. He’s good at waiting. He knows he’s got something for everyone. It’s just a matter of who and when. The pearls brace for departure. It’s not what they hoped for.

Hey, remember when she got rid of the kid?

She couldn’t afford a kid. Too much responsibility.

It was a mistake.

It was the right thing to do.

It was wrong.

Fuck you.

The aborted pregnancy was always a point of contention for the pearls. They’d argue about it, sometimes for days. Eventually, they’d come to the same conclusion: We had to watch her cry for two weeks straight. Where was anybody then? All she had was us . . .

“Nah, I’ll pass . . . Ya got any diamonds?”

Relieved, the pearls go back into the dusty glass case. They huddle in the navy velvet, still hopeful the right person will come along. The pawn shop owner opens the diamond case. The diamonds are another story.

In the Event You Find Yourself in this Situation

by Lydia Renfro • June 7, 2020June 7, 2020

She should call someone, that seemed obvious. There were probably still some quarters rolling around at the bottom of her olive handbag, though it occurred to her as she slipped a pudgy hand between the rusted teeth of the purse that payphones were a thing of the past. Not unlike herself. It should be easy enough to find a body – no pun intended – to help her navigate this bizarre situation that she was pretty sure no one had been taught how to navigate. But looking up and down the long sidewalk, because it was an east–west street and not a north–south avenue, the windows and stoops and doorways all seemed obstinately sunny and vacant of people. No noises of children playing or people arguing at all, which really seemed absurd when you stopped to realize that John Jay Park was just two streets over and one avenue down.

Maybe it would be sensible to check if the man lying there, round belly unmoving in that dark blue jumpsuit, really was dead. He could just have fainted, or was perhaps one of those grunge, local-line artists making endless statements about society or class, which always left her feeling confused and somehow on the hook, though she doubted her cash-under-the-table work was really the type they sought to crucify. He, the man lying there, wasn’t especially attractive, with orange-white hair sprouting up all over his body and a nose as pockmarked as the asphalt on which he partially laid. His middle-age body so still, or maybe just the jumpsuit over that body, lifted up a pitiful song of solidarity to her wearing-down-but-not-quite-spent self. It did seem he was dead, and it was more relevant for her than someone with Armani shoes.

She mostly hated that this happened to her on the Upper East Side, when she’d successfully lived her first twenty-five years in Dallas. It felt like a betrayal. Movies and books were always about New York City, as if the rest of the country didn’t exist, as if entire worlds didn’t operate independent of the coasts. She’d spent her prettiest and thinnest years in Texas, and was now regretting again the impulsive move to this city for the promise of a marriage proposal from the insurance salesman. Back then, he gave her Hershey’s kisses for long car rides, and talked about getting married until he stopped talking about it. Finding dead men seemed something worthy of that before-girl: the Texas one, before big-city clichés and before Allstate men. It was really silly and unfair that at fifty-six years old, with lumps on her thighs and sagging elastic in her waistband, she should be on her way to clean an apartment of which she could otherwise never conceive and stumble on the body of a man dropped down on 79th.

She knew she could put her ear down close and tell if he was breathing, but though it seemed right, it also just seemed silly and so she stood holding her olive bag and waiting for a different idea to come to her. Maybe someone was watching her from the windows, waiting to see if the chubby lady would take the bait. She would end up a joke on one of those cellphone videos that always wind up on YouTube. And some chauvinistic asshole with a handle like LokiKing204 would make fat jokes and laugh at her stupidity, believing the clearly alive man on the street clearly playing a practical joke was actually dead. Her cheeks blushed pink and she tightened her grip on the handle. Wouldn’t that be awful, she didn’t think she could stand it.

Adjusting the handle of her bag over her sleeve, she stepped around the man and started walking on. Not being able to help herself, she glanced at the nearest window and set her mouth, showing whomever might be watching her that she didn’t fall for their trick: she wasn’t one of the saps that don’t understand this city is strange, don’t understand how real New Yorkers ignore obvious, outlandish stunts. When there continued to be no commotion, even as she made it halfway down the sidewalk and past a silver sedan, she began to doubt what she had doubted in the first place. A glance over her shoulder revealed no hidden cameramen, no teens giggling behind a dumpster or from a balcony above. In fact, the only non-hidden thing continued to be that man lying just as he had before, head and right shoulder dipped uncomfortably over the curb and onto the asphalt: like an athletic bag unzipped and thrown down the first step of a dugout.

What is the pedestrian version of a hit-and-run? Well, except she wasn’t the one that did the hitting, just the observing. She began to feel pity again, thinking he perhaps wasn’t fooling her with pretend death, and she repented each step as she retraced them one by one until she arrived back at the orange-white fuzzy man. Standing over him, she wanted to say something. Sir, do you need help? seemed logical, though she was shy of her own voice on the street. Stretching out her hand, she quickly snapped it back again. Should she feel for a heartbeat? What if he woke up and she was pressing her fingers against his neck? He would think she was a desperate old thing with nothing better to do than harass strangers. She couldn’t bear that.

And what if he really was dead? She didn’t want to touch a dead body. She felt a familiar sting at the back of her throat, the sudden taste of sinus drainage, when she didn’t know what to do. What if he woke up and this stranger was crying over his body? The whole thing was just impossible.

Just when she knew she was never going to be able to leave this spot, a taxi turned down at the west end of the street. Breathing quickly, she stood holding her bag and waited for the driver to get close. She couldn’t bring herself to say something, and especially not wave him over, the feeling of being watched still heavy on the scene. But she thought he would stop when he saw her, and the man, and she was right.

“Everything okay?” Oh good, an older man in a wool sweater-vest, not one of those young guys with edgy haircuts who smelled like the duty-free shops at La Guardia. Older taxi drivers were usually more patient with her. She recalled the frown her mother used to make, and felt anxious about what her mother might say at others’ annoyances. This nice-seeming taxi man was leaning towards the passenger side, coasting but not fully stopping.

“Well, um,” was all she said, as she gestured to the body lying there. If this was still a joke and they were just waiting to deliver the punch line, she wouldn’t be giving herself away with that. If she didn’t get hysterical and launch into what she thought happened, they couldn’t blame her for being a sucker.

“Christ, is he okay? What happened?” The driver, upon assessing the situation, had braked hard, just like the movies, and thrown open his door. Seeing his reaction gave her a little more faith in the pity she initially felt for the as-of-yet-undetermined dead man. It also put the heat on the driver if this was a joke, and so she felt more willing to get involved.

“I don’t know. I just found him like this. I was walking to work,” she pointed in the same direction from which he just came and motioned down to the other end of the walk, “and he was lying here, just like this.” The driver by this time was kneeling down and listening for a heartbeat.

“Can you hear me, man? Are you okay?” He was putting his hands all over, looking for a heartbeat she thought. He was touching the dead body. “Sir? Well did you call anyone?”

It took her a minute to realize that last question was meant for her. “Well I just got here.”

The man was already pulling his phone out of his pocket. Now that she had broken her own silence, she decided to keep going. “I don’t have a cellphone.” He didn’t seem to care, and was busy looking for a pulse again. She pictured an episode of CSI: NY and what happened at the crime scenes. “I don’t think you’re supposed to touch things. The authorities are supposed to do that.” He was ignoring her, talking into his phone.

“Yeah, I’m 79th and York, there’s a man lying on the ground here. I can’t feel a pulse, I think he’s gone. Don’t see any blood, maybe a heart attack? No, no I just drove up. Ramon Gutierrez. Yes, that’s right.” He continued to talk and she began to resent Ramon a little, coming in and just taking over the situation like that. She was the one who found the poor man, after all.

He, Ramon, that is, kept moving frantically, hovering over the man and checking nothing in particular, just a general checking-over. By this time, several more people had materialized and though she was first angry that none of them had shown up a few minutes earlier, the feeling was quickly replaced with that terrible sense of on display. The slender, European-looking couple in camel-colored jackets caused her to suck in her gut of which she was suddenly conscious, pushing against the zippered inner lining of her Kmart coat. They looked so handsome with such worried expressions. More and more people began to buzz about the situation and Ramon, damn him, was clearly enjoying playing the hero, telling people to back up and give space.

How was this fair, exactly? No one was here to sympathize when she, on foot along the deserted sidewalk, experienced the shock of a sudden middle-aged person stretched out horizontally on the street. She realized jealously that the crowd was assuming all sorts of things about Ramon, sending all their woeful glances and hand-to-heart gestures in his direction, while none of the distinction she was owed was being given.

The woman next to her interrupted these quiet observations with a What do you suppose happened?,as if she was part of the crowd of onlookers. She wanted to scream at the woman, to yank that stupid kerchief off her neck. Really put her in her place. Of all the inequitable things to say! But she pictured herself stumbling over her would-be retort, saying novice instead of notice or make a weird noise instead because she was too upset to articulate the words. Like that time she was arguing with Edgar, the boyfriend of ’88–’91, who laughed when she couldn’t find the curse word she wanted and could only manage ffffrrrrugh! It was so shameful, her face still red because the message on the answering machine was definitely not his niece, but instead of righteous anger, think more toddler-throwing-fit. He laughed so ungraciously at her, standing in her socks in the living room, unable to tell him off even though they both knew he was in the wrong.

What if as she was trying to defend herself to this stranger, the woman took out her phone and starting videoing her? She’d be another viral news story with the crappy video coverage playing on Fox31 at ten: Angry, fat woman yells at innocent bystander, growls because she can’t speak. And Edgar would undoubtedly see it from wherever he was, some basement sublet in Queens, most likely. Best to keep quiet.

The noise level continued to gain as the crowd grew in size and comment, even more as an emergency response vehicle rounded the corner with lights and a quick blast of siren. You could really feel the energy pick up then, like the news stories venerating NY’s finest that she left playing in the background as she cleaned. Uniforms were on the scene now, the stakes officially heightened. Ramon stepped back to allow the paramedics access, firefighters stepped forward to … well actually she wasn’t sure what for. The assumption was that there is an on-the-scene protocol but they didn’t usually show the setting-up part on Criminal Minds or CSI, so she didn’t know what to expect. Itching to be a part of it, the sibilant mass pushed forward, anxious to say what they were doing and what they saw and how they felt about the situation, and say this to an official-looking person as quickly as possible.

They pushed her aside, rudely, vying to get to the front, and she funneled backwards, towards the brick building and the back of group. The injustice of it swelled in her throat; just like New Yorkers. Never, ever would this fly in Texas. If she looked like the camel-coated woman, she doubted this would have happened. They would hold out arms and make a pathway for her well-groomed person to head straight to the front. Pitching and ducking her head, she could see Ramon in spurts, gesturing widely with his hands, pointing to his taxi, speaking loudly but incoherently underneath all this excess noise. He would come through. He’s a stand-up guy. He’d let them know about the poor, brave woman who fielded this horrible dead-person – he most certainly was dead by now – situation with such modesty.

She waited, watching the mad scrabble toward action, patient for her turn to speak. They would probably ask her what time she found him: she quickly glanced down at the two-tone Timex on her wrist and did some mental calculations. They would ask if she moved or touched the body. No sir, not her, she knew to leave it alone. Probably they would ask about where she was going and why, and she’d have to explain about how she got the cleaning job from a Craigslist ad because the Manhattan woman didn’t want to pay taxes. Mrs. Barnes. Mrs. Barnes who wasn’t home until evening, who subtly eyed her clothes with obvious classist judgment but would also give her an extra $20 every other Friday or so. Did she like her job? Was there any reason she would be angry or upset with Mrs. Barnes?

Oh hell. They were going to blame her. Suspicious isn’t it? An angry, middle-aged woman who just happened to find a body on a street where nobody magically was, even though it was only two blocks from John Jay? How come she was alone? Why didn’t she call the police, never mind about no cellphone? This was bad. She was a suspect. They were going to take her downtown, take away her purse, make her sit in a holding cell somewhere. Who would she even call? All the possible faces flashed by, each one as unhelpful as the next, and she realized she’d have to call Mrs. Barnes to let her know she wouldn’t be able to come into work today. Panicking, she began reverse shuffling, slowly and blindly, so she could watch the crowd and see if someone would come towards her. So far, so good. She felt more confident taking bigger backwards steps, and as more bodies were attracted to the scene, she saw the moment for escape, turned, and jog-walked the rest of the sidewalk, rounding the corner as quickly as she could.

She didn’t dare turn to look behind her, tried to slow and blend in with the sidewalk traffic. The last few steps to the bus stop, then she slipped under protective cover at the stop and sat on the bench, safe. Never mind it was glass and completely see-through, she still felt secure because she was just another New Yorker waiting for a bus in a perfectly normal way. Checking the board, she only had three minutes to wait until the M86 would arrive and carry her away from all of this. And if it didn’t make too many stops, she would still be on time for the Barnes’. The horrible thought that someone could this very minute be running toward her to force a return to the scene made her whip her head around to check. Her stomach jolted as, expecting someone to be there, she saw no one. Tapping her loafered foot on the pavement, she finally saw the glorious orange blinking of the bus she needed and stood to take her place on the sidewalk.

When the doors opened, she briefly thought how humiliating it would be to fall face forward on the steps and almost forgot to insert her recently reloaded MetroCard into the slot. Making her way towards the back of the bus, she saw two side-by-side empty seats and made for the one nearest the window, the blue carpet-like material faded from sun exposure. Checking the contents of her purse for no reason other than to keep busy, she looked up and saw a woman holding onto a pole, waiting in front of the doors. The pinstripe trousers fit slimly and cleanly on the woman and she was jealous. She never wore pants anymore, they were too uncomfortable and pushed up all of her middle so that she spilled over on all sides. Back in the day, her mom would make snorting noises when she would reach for the pecan pie, always had some comment about what southern girls ought to be. Conscious again of her stomach, picturing it lying in a lump over the nonexistent seatbelt, she sucked it in. Unbidden, the image of the jumpsuit belly came roaring back, bulbous and so ludicrously vulnerable. Resentment at being attached to him in such an embarrassing way, pity the machine of his life wound down to stopped in such an inglorious state – these sloshed around her insides, gave her that car-sick feeling. Practicing the visualization technique her therapist taught her, she pictured herself from above, watching her bus drive away from the bizarre circle moving around the unmoving jumpsuit. Nothing to do with her, not part of her experience. Just one of the many sad pieces that were bound to surface at one time or another in the rolling, boiling pot of New York.

Readjusting herself to the present, she reached up to pull the yellow cord and realized in horror when the voice said 61st street that she’d requested a stop three stops too soon. Quickly looking about the interior, she tried to count how many people were watching or if anyone else had pulled the cord. It was too late. They had seen. What would they think if she pulled the thing and then just sat there, letting the driver make a needless stop and inconveniencing the entire passenger pool? It wouldn’t be too bad, really, just getting off here and walking the rest of the way. It was only a five or so more blocks, she pep-talked herself as she hoisted the Kmart coat and olive handbag off the seat, shuffled to the back bus double-doors. Best get off here.

Dear Rap Music (from the Dystopian Letters)

by AUDREY SHIPP • June 7, 2020June 7, 2020

In your incessant scrounging and scavenging, you manage to find the best talent. You started surveying in New York amongst poor Blacks who brought their blues, jazz, and spirituals to the city of rectangular skyscrapers. You realized the country’s deindustrialization would leave excessive numbers of Black Folk, especially young men, unemployed, who in their idleness began to draw on the West African griots, spoken word, and call and response. Add to the mix immigrants from the West Indies and Latin America’s Caribe with their distinct takes on African drumming plus the need for a new generation to create an identity other than mainstream pop, and hip hop was born.

Yet you were not content. This was New York, USA, and profits had to be extracted. You reckoned hip hop was cute, but you speculated it was mere dalliance, a ride in Central Park. And hip hop, with its cultural linkage to Slave Songs and Civil Rights chants, with its critique of both material wealth and the colonization of Blacks in America, with its sprinkling of young women trying to test their talents in its hypermasculine verbal boxing ring, didn’t sit right with the money makers ready to scavenge the talents of disaffected young men being sidelined by an economy that increasingly had no need for muscular brawn.

As corporate rap, you aligned yourself with white supremacy and patriarchy, and in the contract, you specifically stated that the addition of funk, rhythm & blues, soul, and rock & roll were acceptable only if the old tradition of the minstrel shows hovered in the wings. Minstrelsy, which started historically with whites in Black face, was opened up to Blacks who were compensated for entertaining bespectacled whites who sat and marveled at the talents, constant innovation, and buffoonery of Black people. The catch: the lyrics, imagery, and lifestyle of the rap artists had to subtly communicate that the neoliberal project of rugged individualism in a deindustrialized service economy was really o.k. Sex and partying had to be emphasized so the music could be used to release the pressure valve of constant work for little return that was being imposed on the entire nation. If the message was on point, the economic rewards to Black artists (as well as non-Black hangers-on) who crossed over and went pop would be unlimited.

You scoured and rummaged. Philadelphia. Chicago. Detroit. The Dirty South. Los Angeles was the gem. Not only was L.A. enlisted to create a notorious rivalry with New York, it was also linked to the Feds’ desire to plant Central American cocaine in the hood using gangsters already on the ground. It was the Fed’s scheme of killing two birds with one stone – fund counterrevolutionaries in Central America while wrecking hellish havoc on Black life in L.A. All to the beat of a drum.

You’ve left no stone unturned in your intention to commodify Black culture. Clutching with one hand speculative capitalism and with the other gentrification, you’ve extracted talent and heritage from geographical regions and Black neighborhoods while simultaneously demanding that both disappear.

P.S. – Say sunthin. You wanna say sunthin. Get sunthin. You tryne to get sunthin. Shake sunthin. You tryne to shake sunthin. Cuz the stripper that set the beat said you trippin on yo feet if you tryne to take sunthin. All the whips at the crib, all the commas in the bank, all the Benjis in yo face gone make you do sunthin.

Elevtheria!

by John Kaufmann • June 6, 2020June 6, 2020 • 1 Comment

1981 The time in my life when I was most free was a time when the scope of my activities was tightly restrained. I slept on the bottom bunk of a bed in a room with six other seventeen-year-old boys. I woke at 6:30, ate a crust of bread, drank some foul-tasting water, worked for five hours on a building site, ate lunch, came home, took classes and spent the evenings reading and writing papers. I had no freedom to vary that routine.

Once, I wrote a paper about a topic other than what was assigned. I got a tongue-lashing, in writing. “That would be like writing, ‘Cabbages can sing, if they eat pumpkins’, if I asked you a math question.” That came from the crazy old teacher who ran the school. Keep to the task. That’s why it’s there.

The school was on an island in the Dodecanese. Twelve major islands that lie along the coast of Turkey. Seized by Italy from the Ottoman empire in 1912. Transferred to Greece after the Second World War. They retain special status within the Republic of Greece still.

Dhodheka – twelve (dodecahedron; duo+deka)

Rhodes – popular tourist destination. Site of big Crusader colony back in the day.

Leros – biggest insane asylum in the Balkans.

Patmos – where John drafted Revelation.

Kos – drunken Brits, drunken Swedes.

Karpathos – rednecks and sheep thieves.

I was on Kalymnos. Between Kos and Leros. Mentioned in the Catalog of Ships in Iliad 2, but very briefly. Rocks, mountains, sun, sea, sponge boats, white-washed houses, motorbikes, old women in black sitting on stoops, old men in black walking with canes or sitting in kafeneia, playing with worry beads. In the early mornings, sometimes the thwack-thwack-thwack of a local kid standing knee-deep in the sea next to the harbor, throwing a freshly-caught octopus against a rock.

The school was a one-off, the creation of the crazy old teacher, Nick. Word was that he had been expelled from Oxford, for being obstreperous. He hadn’t fit in with the literary crowd in Athens or London. So much better to found a school, form a small pond in his own image. An eccentric old lady from the States provided the money. Nick provided the vision and labor. When Nick retired – long after I left – the school shut down.

Nick said that the term “freedom” means nothing, unless the term was modified. Free from what? British taxes? German occupation? Gun laws? Sexual mores? Cockroaches? Nagging wives? Abusive husbands? STDs?

The term in Greek was Elevtheria. Although – Nick said – Greeks did not have much freedom. Their lives were consumed with family obligations, hard work, and the unforgiving gaze of the community. They couldn’t let their freak flag fly.

My parents sent me to the school because they were at their wit’s end. I had been kicked out of prep school. I didn’t talk to them, and I broke things around the house. Wilderness schools for crazy kids did not exist yet. They didn’t want to send me to jail, or the bughouse. It seemed like a fit. Illusions of classical greatness for me. Out of sight, out of mind for them.

Classes were in modern Greek language, history and literature. The work was with a family-owned residential construction company. Father, older son, younger son. Vasilis was twenty-five. Pantalis was eighteen, a year older than me. The old man was a gheros – what one would expect of a patriarch.

Gheros – old man (geriatrics, genronology, genrontocracy, Geritol^tm)

My job at the building site was to carry bricks, cement, wood for cement forms, and modified olive oil tins full of gravel and mortar. Sometimes I did this at the site, and sometimes I did this on the back of a motorcycle, while Vasilis or Pantalis drove. I did not have any choice in the matter. Heavy shit wasn’t going to move itself.

The houses we built were cement boxes. No basement. Cement slab foundation. Poured cement columns at each corner, and cinderblock walls. Everything plastered over and whitewashed once we were done. Many houses on the island had columns extending a meter or so above the roof, with a tangle of rebar poking out from the cement. Nick said that is because customers could only pay for one story at a time. Nobody borrowed money. They bought the second or third story after they had saved up another few years.

Like the joke about the pig with a peg leg – but in reverse.

Greek women come with a house as a dowry. We built those houses. Nick said that Greek men curse the day their wives give birth to a girl, because each daughter is another decade of work. Although – they say – the better-looking the daughter, the smaller the house. As time went on, I would sometimes pass houses that we had built, as I walked through the streets of the town. Daughter. Dowry. Marriage. Living space. Grandbabies. The circle of life.

Despite my daily activities being closely circumscribed, I was freer than I had ever been. That was because I was free from my origins, and from my language. I hated both.

Home had been a sterile, isolated house in the New York suburbs. It had been please-and-thank-you-clink-of-silverware-on-china-plates. It had been someone evaluating me always, even when I slept. It had been clothes-make-the-man, be decorous, play football and baseball because that’s what the father had liked when he was your age. It had been do things to put them on your college application and, later, your resume. School had been junior boot camp for the investment banks. The summer before I went to Kalymnos, I had had a job shoveling dog shit. When I pedaled my bike up hill, past the women’s correctional facility, between home and the kennel, I had cried bitterly and said to myself, “Fucking life. Fucking life.” My vehemence had surprised even me.

Because of all that, I didn’t speak much – not to other people, at least. I spoke plenty to myself. Swear words, disquisitions, philippics, rhyming couplets, jeremiads, songs, poems, things I was too shy, or too slow, to come out with when the time was right. But I never spoke much, or well, with other people. My parents accused me of “staring at my shoes” when I had trouble speaking. My father straightened my spine by putting his hands on my shoulders and twisting with his thumbs when I slumped. I spoke in ellipses, inside jokes that only I got, and a few swear-eruptions. I made a lot of noise when I got angry, but I did not say much. I felt awkward because I was harshly judged. But I was harshly judged because I was awkward.

Things would have been easier if I had been born Finnish, or an accountant.

But – I found that I wasn’t shy in Greek. To my surprise, I became a blabbermouth. Maybe it was because I was too focused on morphology to worry about what I said. Maybe it was because the guys I worked with were, well, decent guys, who didn’t judge on a chickenshit scale. Maybe it was because as a foreigner, I had a ghetto pass. Whatever it was – it worked.

Lift heavy objects? Memorize vocab, decline nouns, conjugate verbs? Check, check, check, check. Extra points for shouting swear words? Check. Finally, something I liked and could do well.

I found that there were certain words that provided mnemonic hooks from English. Those were easy to learn. I could associate new words with them, and the new words would form a chain, linked to the hooks. The process was accelerated if I spoke to myself in Greek as I lifted the bags of cement and filled tins with mortar and gravel. Sentences I muttered to myself formed creases in my mind that were easy to recall when I needed them. Sometimes I would utter a word or an expression when I lifted a bag of cement or a bunch of cinder blocks, and the feeling of exertion or pain, or the view of a boat leaving the harbor, the sun or wind on the sea, or a goat on the mountain that abutted the town that I noticed when the building material bit into my shoulder would be associated with the word. That would form another hook:

Podho – foot (podiatrist)

Podhosfairo – football (foot, sphere).

Sarantapodharousa – Millipede (the “forty-legged-one”).

Pithikos – Monkey (Austrolopithicus).

Skyli – Dog (cynic, Kenoskephali).

Ghata – Cat.

Ti kanei i ghata? Miao, miao.

Ti kanei to skyli? Bow-wow.

Ti kanei o pithikos? Oooh, ohh, ahh, ahh AHHHHH!

Ti kanei i sarantapodarousa? —————.

I learned the names for some of the tools and materials in Greek before I learned them in English. Beron – wet cement; tsimento: bag of dry, Portland cement; laspi; wet mortar; zighi: plumb line; sfiri: mallet; skerpani: claw hammer; mistri: mason’s trowel; sidhero: rebar.

I found that you could use the hook-and-chain method to learn how to swear, too. If I shouted what I learned while standing on a pile of cinder blocks, or riding on the back of a motorbike, all the better:

GamO – F-word (gamete, polygamy, monogamy).

Skata – Shit (scatology, scatological, bear scat).

GamO-to – Fuck it.

GamO-to Panagheia – Fuck it by the virgin Mary (Pan – all; agheia – holy – hagiography).

GamO-to Panagheia kai Christo ollous tous aghious – Fuck it by the Virgin Mary, Jesus Christ and all of the saints (ollous – all; aghious – see above).

GAmo – marry – see above.

Archidhi – testicle (orchid; monorchid – “Hitler – has only got one ball…”).

Grafo – Write (telegraph, graphic, graphite).

Mitera – mother (Big Mamma morpheme; Lat. “mater”, Eng. “mother”, Skt. “matha”, Cz “matka”).

To grafo pano st’archidia tis miteras sou – I write it across your mother’s balls.

The last one got me a handshake from all of the guys, as well as a laugh.

Ypno – sleep (hypnosis, hypnotic).

Exypnos – smart (away from sleep).

Orthos – straight (orthodontist, orthotic).

Orthodhoxos – Orthodox Christian (straight doctrine).

Evraios – Jewish (Hebrew).

Tassoula – Daughter of the family. Twenty-three years old, stout, brown hair, brown eyes, large lips, large nose.

As we were building one very large house, Vasilis told me that it was for Tassoula, when she married. He looked at me meaningfully, and told me it could be mine. Then he asked, “Eis’ Orthodhoxos?”and I said, “Ochi. Evraios.” He was quiet for a bit, and then said, “I Evraii einai poli … exypni.” He did not seem to mind that I was a Heathen. But he never mentioned Tassoula and the house again.

Sometimes I would sing, while I was carrying wood or tsimenta on the back of a motorbike or a trikyklo. “KrAAAAAtisa tin zoIIIIIIII mou”became “KrAAAAAtisa to psolIIIIIIII mou”. “I have kept a hold on my life” in the original; “I have kept a hold on my dick” in my version. That made Vasilis almost crash the motorbike.

Kratisa – I have held (aristocracy, gerontocracy).

Zoi – life (zoo; zoology).

Mou – my (my).

Psoli – penis (vulgar). No etymological hook, but mnemonic provided by mental imagery.

Around noon, we would knock off for lunch. One of the sons, or occasionally, Tassoula, would show up with bags of fresh-baked bread, cheese, tomatoes, hard-boiled eggs, oranges, and occasionally pomegranates. We would climb to the highest point that we could find before we started to eat. Maybe a pile of bricks; maybe some planks laid on top of a series of exposed ceiling-joists overlooking the harbor. I learned to tear off a chunk of bread, hold it in my left hand, take a ntomata in my right hand, bite into the tomato, and smear the juice from the open tomato-wound on the bread. Then, I would continue to eat, alternating bites between the juice-stained bread in my left hand and the now half-drained tomato in my right.

Psomi – bread. From the ancient verb “psao”, meaning to “rub” (palimpsest, e.g.). Easy to remember because it forms a minimal pair with psoli.

Avgo – egg (ovum; ovary; ovulate).

Tyri – cheese (tyromancy).

Ladhi – (olive) oil. No mnemonic hook.

Ntomata – Tomato.

Fae!– Eat!

Elections were going on while I was there. The two largest parties were Nea Dhimokratia on the center-right, and Pasok on the center-left. But the KKE – the Kommunistika Koma tis Elladhas – was quite vocal. Their rallying chant was Psomi! Paidheia! Elevtheria!

Psomi – bread. See above.

Paidheia – education (Paideia, Pedagogy).

Elevtheria – freedom.

Bread! Education! Freedom!

The sons supported Pasok, but the Gheros supported Nea Dhimokratia. Even the boys respected the leader of Nea Dhimokratia, Constantine Karamanlis. He had helped lead the country out of the Chunta in the early seventies, and devotion to him seemed to transcend party politics.

But the communists had the best chant. We would shout it from the roofs of buildings, motorbikes, wherever. The guys weren’t really communists, so we would usually change it to Psomi! Paidheia! Malaikkeia!

Malaikkeia – self-abuse.

Malakkas – self-abuser. A common insult between men, sometimes used affectionately. See, e.g. Am. Eng. “idiot”, “imbecile”, “moron”, “schmuck”, “motherfucker”, “asshole”, “dick”, “jerk”, “shit-for-brains”, “putz”; Ire. Eng. “cunt”; Brt. Eng. “wanker”; Fr. “con”; Span. “carbon”; Cz, Pol. “z’kurvy syn”; Chin. “wang ba dan”.[1]

Psomi! Paidheia! Malaikkeia!

I am sure that I looked ridiculous while I shouted it. I was, after all, a tall, uncoordinated, skinny, middle-class seventeen-year-old American kid with long hair and round glasses wearing ripped corduroy pants, an olive drab tank top, and, on my head, a red bandana that was knotted at each of its four corners. And I was ridiculous. I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up. I had been born into privilege and I wasn’t stupid, but I had failed at school. I had never so much as made a joke with a girl. I couldn’t get along with my own kind. My father was a gastroenterologist from Westchester. The trip had been paid for with the proceeds of colonoscopies administered to the good citizens of please-and-thank-you. I bit the hand that fed me. I would be gone at the end of the semester. Who was I to stand on the roof of a building overlooking Pothea harbor shouting ersatz communist slogans in a language I barely knew with a bunch of uncircumcised heathens? But it didn’t matter. That was the freest I have ever been, or felt.

[1] Note that only the British English term shares both the denotative meaning and the pragmatic force with the Greek.

Editor's Pick flash friday micro fiction short fiction

GOING TO THE OWLS

by Maria Bell • June 5, 2020November 12, 2020 • 1 Comment

If they’re not careful, they’ll lose her to the owls.

We all know the words, the warning.

Nearly lost him to the owls.

Whispers coat the air we breathe.

Going to the owls.

Catch-phrase, catch-all. It’s a truth to live by. We know the story.

It starts with a girl— like you and me she walked these streets once. Right here, among fallen leaves and twisted roots, she found him. She held the owl orphan in the palm of her hand. She loved him back to life.

What we are is what we know.

The owl orphan sang as she did, danced as she did, woke as she did. Blinking owl eyes, he could not recognize his own reflection.

He’ll never be an owl now. He’ll never know how.

When the owls came to take him back, the owl orphan would not go.

He could not go anyway. Look at him— he cannot fly, he cannot speak his language.

With every passing day, the owl orphan faded, flickered, wings to arms and beak to lips. Owl boy into human boy, resembling her more and more every day. Blinking human eyes, the owl boy cried out. He could not recognize his own reflection.

The girl went out into the woods

and listened. She taught her lips the shapes of guttural whirrs, honed high-pitched whistles and mastered hoots like muffled foghorns. She gave them all to the owl orphan.

The girl went out into the woods

and dragged back sticks she threaded into nests. Cocooned within, she showed him how to preen.

The girl went out into the woods

and gathered all the molted feathers she could find. She worked them into wings that fluttered from her arms, and so taught the owl orphan how to trust the air. Together, they stalked mice through meadow grass, slept in the sun and woke with the moon.

Remember to whom you belong.

The night she let him go, she traced her eyebrows, nose, lips, in the mirror, and could not recognize her own reflection.

The girl answered greetings with whistles, traded bedposts for nesting supplies. Only a second— coming around the door, bending to tie a shoe— her arms to wings, lips to beak, then back. Freckled face and tangled hair once more.

Stay here. You are us, not them.

Longer now, minutes, hours. She’d flicker, fading in and out, fingers into talons. Soon days on end they’d spot her on a branch above.

Come back, come back. Remember to whom you belong. Come back.

And so she did for days, all arms and legs, hellos, goodbyes, up with the sun and down with it.

They all could see it, in her eyes with lids half closed. The way she turned her head all the way round, tested the wind on her palms. She did not want to recognize her own reflection.

The night the owl orphan came for her, she waited on the windowsill, toes curled, face to the sky. She spread her arms as if stretching wings. Below in the street, they watched her falling forward, flipping into freefall, feeling into feathers.

The girl went out into the woods and neither girl nor owl ever came back.

Grafted

by Walter Burrell • May 31, 2020May 31, 2020

Farm.
Wind whips through rain.
Footsteps on gravel. They stop.
The knife unsheathed.

Dad with his knife goes cut cut cut cut and then stab in the neck. My turn. Dad shows me how to do it properly. I don’t cry because I’m a big lad to be using a knife. I hold the knife and Dad holds my hand and we cut the skin from the neck down to the private parts. We cut the skin up the legs but I cut around the neck all by myself and Dad doesn’t even need to help me much. I put the knife down careful because a knife’s not a toy. I don’t cry because there’s nothing we can do about it now. We sometimes eat them up for our tea because that’s the circle of life. This time we just need the skin. We both pull the skin off the body.

Rips, clicks, Velcro sounds.
Skin torn from flesh.

It’s not a bad thing. He can’t feel anything because he’s dead and that means you go to sleep and don’t wake up. Anyways, I’m a dragon and dragons don’t cry.

Farmhouse.
An alarm clock buzzes, bedcovers rustle.
The man turns off the alarm and kisses the woman.
Bedsprings squeak as the man gets out of bed.

Maggie thinks he’s too young. We got into a shouting match about that last night. But the lad’s asking questions. He needs to know how things are. This is us, our way. And he loves the animals. He likes to learn from them.

The bedroom door opens and closes softly.
Footsteps on creaky floorboards.
The man opens the boy’s bedroom door.

At first the lad doesn’t understand what’s happening. I touch the skin on his face. I feel his hair. His eyes aren’t open but I lift him out of bed. I dress him, put on his waterproofs, his big jumper. He’ll soon come round.

The boy yawns.
The boy stretches.
The boy opens his eyes.

He wraps his arms around my neck. I carry him into the kitchen, sit him down at the table. He stares into space. He blinks. Maybe that’s something he’s picked up from me, subconscious like. I never want to get out of my nice warm bed on a morning. But with me, it’s like a ritual.

Coffee grinds.
Kettle boils.
Cups clink and the man lays them on the table.

The coffee’s hot, nice and strong. I’m awake now. I drink another. I’m happy to be up. It’s a ritual and the lad doesn’t take his eyes off me. He’s always been fascinated by the little stovetop coffeemaker. Got a good mind, not like his dad. Inquisitive like. He drinks his pretend coffee, mostly milk. This lad doesn’t just want to know the hows. He wants to know the whys.

The door opens and closes.
Dogs bark.
Paws tap-dance on floorboards.

Used to be I’d smoke a few fags with my morning coffee. That was breakfast. The lad tells me about a hippo that sweats sun cream so it doesn’t get sunburn. He watches all them nature programmes. He tells me about an octopus that’s like a real Transformer. It turns into a flatfish or a water snake. Mimics the other animals. Fits in with its surroundings.

Farm.
A storm now.
The quad bike motors up a bumpy road.
The quad breaks. The breaks squeak and brake lights shine.
Engine off.

Dad shines his torch and I shine my torch. In the field the mammy sheep stands next to a little tiny baby sheep. The proper name for a mammy sheep is a ewe and the proper name for a baby sheep is a lamb. Another lamb sticks out of the ewe’s private parts. I see the lamb’s head and two legs popping out. Dad walks closer and I walk closer. The legs are all the way out now and so are the other legs and the lamb plops out onto the grass like Splaaat! Dad says it’s a big one. With her tongue the ewe licks off all the sticky stuff. First she licks off the sticky stuff on the big lamb’s mouth so it can breathe. She’s a very clever ewe. She’s clever but Dad says she’s not looking after the other lamb, the little tiny one. Dad picks up the little tiny lamb and puts it down near the ewe’s nose. The ewe turns away.

Loud whistle.
Smoke from the mouths of running sheepdogs.

Dad tells Bunk and McNulty to scare the ewe. Dad says it might make her look after the little tiny lamb. The dogs bark. The mammy sheep stands in front of the big lamb but not the little tiny one. Dad tells the dogs to stop. I tell the dogs to stop. I run fast as I can to the bike and get Dad’s bag from the trailer. From his bag Dad gets some of the coffee mush from breakfast and rubs it on the little tiny sheep’s bum. I rub it on the little tiny sheep’s bum. Then we rub some of the coffee mush right up the ewe’s nose and she sneezes and it’s so funny. I laugh lots but Dad only laughs a little bit. Dad’s beard is itchy and that means he’s trying to get an idea. The big lamb walks funny because it’s just a baby and it’s still learning and it keeps falling down. It falls falls falls but gets up and tries again. It can walk better now. It walks to the mammy sheep because it wants to drink the milk out of her tummy. It drinks the ewe’s milk fast because its belly goes in and out, in and out. The little tiny lamb stands by itself. It’s shaking all over. Dad’s beard is really itchy now.

The quad bike motors down a bumpy road.
Wind and rain, wild.

The lad sits between my legs, holds onto the handlebars, pretends he’s driving. The new-born lamb sits tucked away in my coat, zipped right up, so just his little head peeps out. The dogs sit in the trailer attached to the back. We motor across the fields and down the track. Wind whooshes my ears. Eyes streaming down my cheeks. I ride with one hand and with my other hand shield the lad’s eyes. He swots my hand out the way.

The quad bike breaks.
Stops.
Engine off.

An orphan lamb’s only got a couple of hours. I don’t like raising them by hand, away from the flock. I take the lamb to the farmhouse and hand him over to Maggie. I tell her if we’re not back in two hours give the lamb the bottle. Maggie takes the lamb in her arms. She fusses about the boy. She wants to know if his skin’s getting dry or if he needs to put another jumper on. She tells me in a stern whisper that he’s not ready. I tell him he can go back inside if he wants.

Wind and rain.
Sheep bleat.

I tell Dad I don’t think we should have taken the lamb away from the ewe. Dad says we had to do it. I think maybe it was because the ewe didn’t want the lamb. Dad says it doesn’t mean that. It just means that sometimes the ewe can’t look after all her lambs because she hasn’t got enough milk in her tummy. Dad says that doesn’t mean she’s a bad ewe. It’s not her fault she doesn’t have enough milk in her tummy. I feel a bit upset but I don’t let Dad see because I’m a big lad to be out working with Dad and the dogs.

We’re in a different field now. Dad shines his torch to shows me another ewe. With her tongue this ewe cleans her lamb but the lamb won’t wake up. Dad cuddles me and says it’s okay to get upset. Dad says I can go back home if I want. Now Dad’s being really daft and I’m still crying but I’m laughing as well because with his hand Dad picks up the ewe’s poo and he chases me pretending he’s going to splat it on my head. He puts the poo and other sticky stuff in a bucket and I help even though it stinks worse than when Dad’s been to the toilet after Sunday dinner.

The man throws the dead lamb onto the trailer.
The lamb lands like a sack.
The trailer shudders.

I shout at Dad for chucking the lamb. He tells me the lamb can’t get hurt now. So what? That’s not nice. That’s really not nice. Dad says sorry and that he should’ve been more gentle.

The quad bike motors along a bumpy road.
Slower this time.
The wind blows harder and rain comes down heavier.
The ewe bleats.

On the quad I ride slowly down the track in the dark before dawn, looking back over my shoulder. The ewe walks behind the trailer. I shout the dogs to follow behind the ewe. The boy shouts the same. I don’t let the dogs get too close to the ewe. I don’t want them to make her more upset. She wants to come. She wants to follow the lamb. She doesn’t know the little bugger’s dead.

Barn.
The engine idles, is turned off.
The gate creaks.

I lead the ewe to a drystone pen. The dogs do the rest.

Wind howls through heavy rain.
Footsteps on gravel. They stop.
The knife unsheathed.

I kneel down, hold the lad by the shoulder. I tell him that what we’re going to do might seem like we’re hurting the lamb, like we’re doing a bad thing, but we’re not. I tell him we’re doing a good thing and if he’s brave, he can help, he can use Dad’s knife. I ask the boy again if he wants to stop. He says no. He says he’s a dragon and dragons don’t cry.

I pin the dead lamb down flat on its back, legs in the air. I get to work skinning it. Around all four legs I knife circles skindeep, cut cut cut cut. I pinch the skin under the lamb’s throat and stab into it. I pass the knife to the boy. He takes it. His hand is steady.

The lamb bleats.
Man and boy turn.

My mam brings the little tiny lamb back out of the house. Dad says we’ve still got enough time because it hasn’t been two hours yet. The lamb is shaking, shaking. I talk to it. I say it’s okay, don’t be scared, pretend like you’re a dragon. Dad holds the skin we cut off the dead lamb.

The lamb bleats.
It cries.

Dad tells the little tiny lamb everything is going to be alright. He calls it bonny lad. Dad says the skin’s like a big jumper. He puts the big jumper on the little tiny lamb. He says to the little tiny lamb that we’re nearly done, bonny lad. I say we’re nearly done, bonny lad. Dad ties a string around the little tiny lamb’s belly so the big jumper doesn’t fall off. Dad says perfect, why aye. I say why aye! Then Dad gets the bucket with the poo and other sticky stuff and he pretends he’s going to slop it all on my head. He’s just pretending again. He’s just so daft. With his hand Dad scoops up the poo and sticky stuff and puts it on the lamb’s head. I do the same.

The ewe bleats.
The lamb bleats.
They cry.

In the barn, in a pen: the ewe whose lamb died and the lamb whose mother rejected him. The orphan’s wearing the dead lamb’s skin. The ewe sniffs the lamb, really sniffs her head. The lad says he’s hot now. I help him take his big jumper off. Maggie walks from the farmhouse to the barn. On a tray she carries the stovetop coffeemaker and cups. She pours us each a cup, a pretend coffee for the boy, mostly milk. The dogs sit at our feet. The ewe sniffs the lamb and looks at me and sniffs the lamb. The lamb tries to reach her teat. This little orphan smells like her lamb, but still she walks away, leaves the lamb to tremble and bleat by itself in the corner of the pen. I open the gate and go into the pen and pick up the lamb and put her under the ewe’s nose. The ewe turns her head to sniff the lamb again. She sniffs and sniffs…

…The mammy sheep doesn’t want the little tiny lamb with the big jumper on to drink the milk out of her tummy…

…The lamb takes a few wobbly steps towards the ewe’s teat. The ewe’s still not sure. She could butt the lamb or kick the lamb and that’d be that. One kick and she’d shatter every bone in the poor little bugger’s body. The ewe steps away…

…It’s going to work, son. If we want it to, it will work…

…Okay, Dad. Mam says, It will work. Just you watch. Okay, Mam…

…Do you trust me, son?…

…Yes, Dad…

The gate creaks.
Footsteps.
The ewe bleats.

I’m with the boy in the pen. I’m on my knees, my arm around his waist. The ewe turns her head to sniff the lamb some more. The lamb tries again for the teat. The ewe sniffs and she sniffs and you fucker does she sniff. The lamb teeters and falls and totters and falls and finally, finally, it finds the ewe’s teat with its mouth.

Wind hushes.
Rain hushes.
Noise of wind and rain noticeable by absence.

The lamb’s belly goes in and out, in and out. Dad picks me up and lifts me upside down and we run around like when you score a goal like Yerrrsss!

It’s quiet outside now.
Nearly silent.
But not.

Dad puts me down. Mam’s crying and I think it’s happy crying. But then Dad looks at Mam and his beard is very, very, very itchy. He picks me up and cuddles me and cuddles Mam at the same time. Dad touches the skin on my face and feels my hair. Dad says he and Mam need to tell me something that might be hard to understand.

We all look up to the sky.
We all hear the birds sing.

Rawhead and Bloody Bones

by Caroline McTeer • May 30, 2020May 30, 2020

We’d usually get to my grandparents’ trailer around dusk. Outside, there was the taste of mountain air, a taste that makes my jaw ache with longing as I imagine it and try to describe it. The smell is earthy, like the hammered iron and shining sediment that form stairs in the area’s steep banks (magical, vertical paths on which locals nonchalantly ascend to and descend from their homes, reminding me of the angels in Jacob’s dream). The smell of the air is nourishing and full and bursting with flavor, like the taste that would greet us when we went inside: carrots and potatoes swimming in the broth of a venison roast. But mostly, it is refreshing and clean and necessary, like water.

And as with water, I am sometimes only aware of my thirst for it after I’ve begun to drink. On the nights we spent in the mountains, I would often open the door of the trailer for a few seconds at a time, even after Mom and Meme started making up the cot and pull-out sofa, a signal that we were winding down.

“You better watch out,” my brother Evans said one time, as I stuck my neck out for a gulp of that air. “Rawhead and Bloody Bones might get you.”

“Who is Rawhead and Bloody Bones?” I said. I was probably six or seven. These trips to my grandparents’ place were the closest thing to a vacation my family ever did. We lived in South Carolina’s Lowcountry; they lived in western North Carolina. The states seemed like different worlds to me then. They were the two worlds I knew.

“A monster that lives in a cave up the road,” Evans said. “He looks in the windows of houses at night, and if he sees a kid who’s not asleep, he reaches in and grabs them.”

“Oh,” I said. That night, I prayed for God to protect all local children from Rawhead and Bloody Bones, on the off-chance that the creature was real. Later on that same trip, Evans pointed out Rawhead’s cave to me, a sad-looking mine on the side of the road with a black garbage bag for a door. It was the perfect spot for Bloody Bones! He lived on the Pennywinkle, a labyrinth of a road with sharp hairpin turns. That street stayed dark from a tangle of trees and moss and created for me the layered mood of a good horror story: romantic, mysterious, frightening in a delicious way.

The garbage bag was the right touch, for it captured the contrast of the area’s natural beauty with the squalor of many local homes, and the sadness of some who inhabited them. There was Mom’s uncle, Jay, who lived about a tenth of a mile from Meme and Bobby, with his mother in her home. There were two places he might be: in his back bedroom, behind a door of warped, cheap wood that smelled like cigars and stayed locked, or in a scratchy chair in front of the scratchy TV, drinking can after can of light beer and ignoring his guests.

By day, he shared that room with his mother, Mama Pansy. She didn’t talk very much by the time I was old enough to know her. I can only remember her clutching her handkerchief and staring very hard at my mom, either trying to place her or figure out how she’d pretend she could. Mom would talk to Mama Pansy louder and louder, and Jay kept turning up the television volume.

Then was there was Mom’s Uncle Donny, who lived in the red house across the street from Jay and Mama Pansy. This is a house that’s still standing; I can see it through the trees from my grandparents’ yard. The house was pretty on the outside, dim, dirty, and bare on the inside, except for some dusty stuffed animals that lined a window in a back room. Donny smoked cigarettes and drank dark liquor from the handle in front of his own scratchy TV. He was missing a leg, like his dog. Like Jay, he seemed to have no interest in leaving his post, though he had a wife and children and grandchildren who all lived with him on and off. Unlike Jay, he seemed happy to see my mom on her visits, or at least happy to oblige her. Mom’s told me a few times about the night Donny came home from Vietnam. The whole family went to see him. They stood around in the yard of Mama Pansy’s house; he played Bob Dylan from his truck.

There was also Mom’s Uncle Harry, who I remember seeing only once, as a child back in the days before Meme and Bobby had built the trailer and moved back to North Carolina to take care of Mama Pansy. He was hoeing the yard, and he raised his gloved hand in a wave and smiled without parting his lips. In that liminal time, after I was born but before Meme and Bobby had a place again, I stayed in Uncle Harry’s room a few times, I think after he died. That itself was like staying in a cave. To reach it, you crawled through the dark tunnel of the living room, then Mama Pansy’s room, and then you were in a windowless pit that had nothing beyond it, except Uncle Jay’s room, which was forbidden, like Bluebeard’s quarters. Even as a child, I knew that if I could peek behind the door, I would find guns, not the heads of gorgeous women, and filth, not treasure. But these things held their own terror and curiosity; I felt I was in a world of dark fairy tales.

I would ask Meme to tell me stories to put me to sleep. Having never found a use for fiction or even reading, she was bad at this. She told me about being cold and hungry as a child, but didn’t know to add an element of magic or humor, or any twist at all, any beginning or any end. Once, she described a beautiful, colorful dress she’d had.

Now we’re getting somewhere, I thought, impressed by her lavish description and the lilt of hope in her voice. This story did have a twist: on the first time it was worn, the tail was caught beneath the wheels of a train and was ruined. That was that, as times were lean and the dress couldn’t be replaced. When I realized this was the conclusion, I wailed with shock and disappointment.

“Oh!” Meme said, and jumped back, startled, as if she’d had no idea that the story was a downer. “Deborah!” she called, and my mom came in to comfort me. Later, I’d learn there was a little more to the narrative. Mama Pansy saw Meme playing on the track just a moment before she disappeared behind a train. Mama Pansy had to wait until the train had passed to see if her daughter was killed or not – minutes that must have seemed like eons, minutes that must have changed her, but came with relief at the end. A proper story.

My grandparents had little in common, but I suppose they had that: an unwillingness to dress up a true story or even tell the good parts of it, and a scornful disinterest in tales that weren’t real.

“What does Rawhead and Bloody Bones look like?” I asked Evans on one of our later visits. Evans started to say something about a pile of bones assembling themselves under a skinless, dripping skull, whatever he’d heard or imagined about this local legend whose roots were in English and Scots-Irish folklore, but Bobby interrupted him.

“I’ll show you what Rawhead and Bloody Bones looks like,” he said. Bobby spoke slow and haltingly. Each word took him about a full second to say, and the space between each word was just as long. He stood up from the sofa and walked over to his little bookshelf. He was wearing a blue shirt and tan pants, like always. He wagged his finger over his set of encyclopedias and I waited with bated breath for him to pull out the one labeled “R.” Instead, he pulled out the one labeled “S,” and turned very slowly to a picture of a skeleton. “This here,” he said, “is Rawhead and Bloody Bones.” We smiled at each other.

It was quite the picture: all the organs bright red and orange, bones the color of light, lots of tiny labels where the ink was black-purple like a raven. The picture combined the technical precision and artistry of a blueprint. On top of it, there was a thick sheet of film that gave more detail, but also fodder for the imagination. It made me think of all the objects that offer a more intense look at reality as well as an escape from it: cameras, kaleidoscopes, the stereoscope of the Victorian age. Books were no different, especially books that chose to gratuitously offer something even beyond the great gift of words and pictures, books that had pockets with ribbon, like the pop-up tome Meme got me at a yard sale, or books like this one, with its sheet of film and pages thinner than the slightest sugar glaze: books that had, marvelously, texture and dimension as well as ideas, a feast for the hands as well as the mind. Looking at that skeleton, I felt a thousand little worlds had opened for me.

I like to imagine what Bobby was trying to say with that picture. Maybe he was trying to show me that science holds as much interest as fantasy. Maybe he was trying to save me from nightmares. Probably he was trying, gently and with humor, to quell my indulgence in made-up horrors, when life offered such a bounty.

When he was a child, his brother walked out of the schoolhouse to get a drink of water from the barrel on the porch. Two teenagers drove by while he drank, and one dared the other to shoot the gourd out of his hand. The boy took the dare, and killed my great-uncle. The children ran out of the schoolhouse screaming, toward home, only Bobby and his siblings left to hold their dying brother’s head. The boy who shot him was related to us somehow, as everyone around there seems to be.

As a kid, I hadn’t heard that story yet, and I didn’t ask for Bobby to clarify why he had taken the encyclopedia down. I had one last theory as to why he had done it, and though I knew it was unlikely, I wanted to keep the possibility of it in my mind. Maybe he was playing along, indulging me as other grandfathers would do. Maybe he was saying, “This is the monster that has captured your fantasies. Now you know what he looks like.”

A Dream

by Geoffrey Waring • May 25, 2020May 25, 2020 • 1 Comment

ZZZZZOOOOooooOO… XXXXsssssHhh… MMMmmmmMMM. MMMmmmmMMM… XXXXsssssHhh… ZZZZZOOOOooooOO.

MMMmmmmMMM… XXXXsssssHhh… ZZZZZOOOOooooOO.

(Pop, pop.) (Pop.)

ZZZZZOOOOooooOO… XXXXsssssHhh… MMMmmmmMMM.

(Crackle.)

ZZZZZOOOOooooOO… XXXXsssssHhh… MMMmmmmMMM.

(Pop.)

The internet fizzled through ancient speakers in Lady Biwa-no-obi’s bedchamber, a perpetual dribble of noise emptying into a deep and growing pool. The pool hung over her head like a pendulum. The pendulum was still but present, threatening, growing. It was something she had learned to live with, practically an extension of her body, another part of being summoned to court. Lady Biwa-no-obi, known also as O-gin, felt a shiver creep down her ribcage like falling water. The unseasonable chill in the air seemed to snake its way into the folds of her kimono and puffify gravity, making it thick like dough, and consequently heavier; the fine silk dripped off her arms with special weight.

MMMmmmmMMM. MMMmmmmMMM. MMMmmmmMMM. (Pop.)

O-gin shuffled about her room, ran her fingers across the strings of her floor harp, but the sound was rough and bristling with secret energy. Frightened, she walked back across the room and sat in her chair. MMMmmmmMMM. With a click of the remote control, a vivid blue-and-pink technicolor image of a sakura, its blossoms fragile and high-def and dancing in an artificial breeze, flickered across the projector on the far wall.

It was Tuesday, boring Tuesday, and the Emperor was not at court.

“The devils are going to bomb the capital any day now,” Prince Kuni-no-kara-e said over the telephone. “I can smell it on the air. Gunpowder.”

O-gin waited for him to continue, to put an end to the buzzy static that filled her receiver like an angry swarm of bees, and then:

“What devils?” O-gin said. “Which devils?”

XXXXsssssHhh. (!!!) (Pop.)

“Lady Obi, the devils that would do us harm.” Prince Kuni-no-kara-e’s voice was condensed by hundreds of miles of telephone wire. O-gin thought she could hear him typing over the phone, a clattering sound that carried particularly well through the tinny receiver; which in fact carried better than their voices. She could picture the look of abject boredom in the prince’s eyes. It was his defining quality, a mark of nobility. O-gin waited for him to stop typing, but the sound continued; and, as O-gin had nothing more to say on the matter, the subject was dropped. (Snap.)(Pop.)MMMmmmmMMM.

“Tell me a story,” the prince said after the hum became oppressive. “A true story. One that has not been heard at court.”

“What kind of story?” asked O-gin.

“A story about love, and courage, and science,” the prince replied, predictably.

Though Lady Biwa-no-obi was famed in the Emperor’s court for her storytelling, at the moment, she had no mood for it. Besides, Prince Kuni-no-kara-e already knew everything he had any desire to know; and the secrets she carried, the fine details that made up her days, were of no interest to someone like him. But the prince had made the request, and she dared not refuse. She’d have to invent something: an interesting challenge, not without its dangers.

ZZZZZOOOOooooOO. MMMmmmmMMM.

O-gin cleared her throat, and in a rich, honeyed voice, a childhood habit wasted in the crush of telephone wires, she pressed her lips to the freckled black plastic and began:

“Billions of years ago, when there was nothing but a hard, compact point of energy at the center of the universe. A flame was ignited and everything that was or would be exploded like a kernel of popcorn. You were there. I was there. Japan was there, and the other countries, and the warriors and the devils, too. The future was there, and the past. The dinosaurs and my floor harp and the steel in your Maserati. They were all there, condensed and bubbling and raw.”

The prince yawned. “And then?”

“The scraps of energy and matter raced outwards, screaming bullets, filling the empty space with fire and lava flying through the vacuum like strings of god’s spittle. Some parts cooled and hardened into planets and moons and great balls of ice; others burned bright with pure, holy energy and became stars. Some bits slowed down, but nothing stopped – there was nothing to stop it, nothing to make it stop! Everything stretched and twisted, expanding outward as fast as anything is allowed to go. The cold, stony bits at the edges are still there, moving outward, fast as a fox spirit, faster even, pushing into empty space where nothing has ever been before.”

“Space was there,” the prince interrupted.

“Space is nothing,” O-gin spoke softly, so as not to upset the prince.

“Then nothing was there too,” the prince quipped, and gave a snort. “But go on.”

“The stones are there now, alone at the peripheries of existence, all by themselves, and they’re moving so fast that not even light will catch up to them. They all share the same fate, but they have no knowledge of each other, no memory. As far as they know, they are alone in creation. They have no knowledge of us, either – of Japan, of the Earth, the universe, humanity, outside of a vague, distant memory of that first moment when everything was still unformed. We are perpetually behind them, they have no way of knowing we exist. They will never come into contact with each other, or anything else, ever again.”

There was a long silence, and for a moment, O-gin worried she had revealed the depth of her loneliness. The digital cherry blossoms faded, replaced by an aerial shot, taken from a jackhammering helicopter, of Kinkakuji, the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto. They had reconstructed the spots that had been burned in the fire with a computer, recreating an approximation of how the temple would have looked had history been kinder. O-gin fumbled with the remote, trying to turn down the noise of the helicopter blades, but the volume button had been jammed for more than a week. The sound tumbled in with the rest, into the dread of the growing pool. She gave up and threw the remote down on her pillow.

“Everybody knows that,” the prince’s voice finally pierced the holes in O-gin’s receiver. Lady Biwa-no-obi tucked the folds of her kimono under her bruised, pale knees, and took a sip of tea to soothe her throat. Suddenly she felt cold and exhausted, and wanted to sleep. She had no mood for storytelling.

The prince cleared his throat. “How does it end?’

“My prince, it is not possible for this story to have an ending. Those pieces of rock and scrap are destined to fly outward forever, surfing the crest of total silence. You and I will die, the palace will crumble into the Biwa canal, Lake Biwa will rise and swallow the land, and even the Emperor will someday take his final breath. But those stones are immortals. They will outlast the gods.”

O-gin could picture the prince’s eyes glazed over in boredom. It was just as she suspected – his mind was full. These trivial matters did not concern him.

Suddenly the ground began to shake, and she knew that the first bombs had been dropped; but in another moment the rumbling stopped, leaving O-gin to wonder if she’d imagined it. Perhaps her sash was only a little too tight. She loosened it. The whir of the ceiling fan filled the room completely. Or was it the helicopter? (Crackle.) (Zig-zag, pop.) Her head buzzed, her blackened teeth ground down to powder. The pool above her head was growing. Her breath, visible in the snowy air, rose like a chain of crystals. She was transfixed by the silence, throbbing somewhere beneath the internet crackle and the helicopter blades. Or was that the ceiling fan? (Pop, pop.) She couldn’t say. Oh, and the silence, humming whitely beneath the many layers of noise. Even the silence was adding to the pool. The ceiling fan, the helicopter blades, the dull, chattering prince. The relentless hum of technology – an endless loop of patchwork, a single, intricate wall of noise. Look! There was already snow dusting her pillows, and it was barely August. Look! The television! The ceiling fan!(Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop.) MMMmmmmMMM.

The prince babbled on about politics. O-gin struggled to pay attention.

And then she thought: If only I were a bit taller, or if I had a chair to stand on, or if the ceiling were a bit lower, or if the glare of the projector wasn’t in my eyes; or if my shoes weren’t so awkward and small, or if I knew just a bit more about the mechanics of electricity. Or if the devils really did bomb the capital, if space and time were fixed and bounded, if someone would take the time to tell me stories, if I could gaze into the past and future, if death was mortal and didn’t loom so impolitely on the horizon, if the bombs came down like falling pieces of candy, or if – she took a deep breath and composed herself. The prince’s babbling continued; his words were little shapes of sound, spread too thin for meaning, dropping like lollipop bombs in the distance, shivering stars, drip-dropping one by one into the humming pool.

If only – well. It was pointless to think about. But if only – well, perhaps then she could reach up to the ceiling and shut the fan off. Perhaps then she could turn down the volume on the projector. Maybe then she could reach up with her shamisen and bash the living hell out of the ceiling fan until it was shapeless and quivering, put her umbrella spike-first into the TV. Maybe then she could stand on her tippy-toes and pull down the cables with both hands, fill the room with electricity, set fire to her stack of kimonos, set the whole goddamn palace ablaze.

Maybe then she could finally have some peace and quiet.

The Journey into Sacred Profanity: A Colorado Dance Troupe’s Mission of Empowerment

by Anthony Galliano • May 24, 2020November 12, 2020

Photography by Brice Jackson.

On Valentine’s night the attic of CU Boulder’s Wesley Chapel, a humble A-frame building tucked away from the bustle of campus and adorned with exterior murals of Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi, is swarmed with lingeried burlesquers, wandering, greeting attendees, peering out and chatting riotously behind a dressing screen in the back corner. Beneath the planks and beams slanting down from the roof, the pews are filled, the narrow aisle stitched with mingling people. The chancel is shined over with light. This is Boulder Burlesque’s penultimate “Let This Be a Love Letter: A Valentine’s Burlesque Show.” The troupe hosts it annually. Each act is a “metaphysical love letter.” The letter may be to another person or to oneself, to anything, but it unfolds through flesh and movement, through the fluttering of arms or the way a neck curves back, braced like this for a moment in the onrush of stage light, before swiftly straightening out again when the beat of a song demands it. A concessions table offers up complimentary cupcakes, sparkling water, tea and hot chocolate. Condoms and lube packets, CBD chocolate, are on sale at the merchandise table. Before the show begins, though, it’s those stage kittens capturing glimpses and interest with their furrycat-ear headbands and cat-eye sunglasses, strutting across the stage or down the aisle with gaudy indifference, sucking on lollipops as they preen and make ready. And when the performers or some of the initiate people in the audience see them, they meow, meow, and meow to the stage kittens, who only go on completing their tasks with gaudy indifference.

At first blush, a chapel might seem like an odd venue for a scene like this. But the members of Boulder Burlesque – “where the profane is sacred” – regard their work as a mission, one that they fulfill with passion and the aim of spiritual revelation. Their shows are composed of narrative dances, each piece authored by the individual performer based on a collective theme. The troupe, steeped in burlesque’s history of political satire, looks to work with themes that engage audiences with contemporary issues of gender and sexuality. This was most overt in their “Pussy Grabs Back” event following the 2016 presidential election: attendees were situated in an alternative universe helmed by a Madame President delivering a State of the Pussy address. They’ve also established consent education as a cornerstone of their work, picking up the slack for a culture that seems unequipped to teach it. Events are intended to be a safe space for people to learn about their desires and talk about sexuality openly, such as the kink parties, which combine something of a hands-on sex ed course with an introduction to BDSM for curious newcomers. Attendees are instructed by performers in experiential consent education, the way to ask for consent and grant it, how to request what they’re interested in, how to accept a no, before everyone frequents stations of flogging, ice play, nipple torture, shibari rope, touch and tickling. The troupe’s members discuss burlesque philosophically, as both advocacy and art. They’ll tell you that their work is not about enticing an audience with skin and glitter, or projecting conventional displays of beauty, as more traditional burlesque shows are often prone to do. Each member is asked to produce a performance art piece that tells something of who they are, that’s enacted and revealed with their body the way it is, conveying a perspective on the world through an expression that is singularly their own.

The troupe was founded in 2011 by Jenna Noah when she was a graduate student in the therapy program at Naropa University, a private liberal arts school in Boulder. Noah, shy, self-doubting and anxious about her body image at the time, felt that her therapy program lacked a way for her and the “young group of libidinal people” in her graduate cohort to explore and learn about their sexuality. She contemplated something she could create on her own to address this aspect of her life, and on a class meditation retreat thought of a burlesque troupe. “I really wanted to have a space where we could openly discuss and dialogue our own sexuality, our hang-ups around sexuality, the things that really excite us and turn us on, and the things that make sexuality difficult to talk about,” Noah says. “I wanted to create dance pieces that were based on the human relationship with sexuality in general, and not just tassels and glimmer and glam.” The idea was that those personal experiences that were neglected in her therapy program could be dramatized, reembodied, and shared between a group of people through dance. Many of the first members of Boulder Burlesque were Noah’s fellow graduate students, instilling a guiding therapeutic ideal in the troupe, and their pieces portrayed experiences ranging from trauma to awkwardness and even rape, exhibiting a “full picture and a full array of the different stories that people have about sexuality.”

Noah called the modality of burlesque she created “Conscious Burlesque,” and founded a workshop program independent of the troupe for the general public. According to the modality, people create characters based on an unconscious desire or fantasy – something they want to be, or some way they see themselves that isn’t accessible in their life, and they develop a story with this character. Their work is to play, toying with boundaries and subverting cultural patterns, stepping out of real life to grasp some less known part of themselves. Noah saw stories rooted in different historical epochs, myths, goddesses, childhood fables, questions of gender identity, imaginative figments. People came fresh out of divorces, in spells of celibacy, to reconnect with sexuality. Others wanted to channel fantasies of a more dynamic sex life they didn’t have. Some came to heal trauma. In a model of constructed fantasy, there wasn’t fear or hesitation to make people shy away from being honest, as Noah had often observed in more conventional therapeutic modes. “It’s almost like you get to override a lot of the more linear, logical ways that we heal and work,” she says. “And it actually creates a sense of almost infinite possibilities.”

Noah’s character was “Madame Mercy Chaos,” dominant and courageous, fierce and confident, and as she performed the character, she gradually felt herself imbued with the imagined qualities, overcoming the anxiety that inspired the troupe. She saw the same effect in other people. “Part of the catharsis is allowing someone’s unconscious mind to develop the medicine that’s meant for them, that no one else can ever create for you,” Noah says. The characters that were created weren’t burdened by people’s anxieties or upbringings, whatever it was that stopped them from taking control of their lives.They were vital, impressive, undaunted. They were part of a new story, a new reality that could conquer the old one.In Noah’s workshop, people invited loved ones and friends to a performance at the end of the program to debut their characters in solo pieces. In a way, it was like a rite of passage marking the achievement of an unexpected new power that the individual had to discover on their own, rather than one enshrined in culture. Some people signed up for another workshop afterwards. Some went straight back into the world. “People can live into their imagination and grow in really cool ways because it’s a fantasy they’re embodying,” Noah says. “But it’s going to become the reality, which is part of the magic of it.”

Noah passed Boulder Burlesque on to its present director, Mademoiselle Tangerine, in 2019. Tangerine had been performing with the troupe for about four years at the time, assuming more responsibilities as Noah devoted time to her doctoral studies. The transition of leadership was celebrated by the troupe. They speak with admiration of Tangerine’s kinetic spirit, her organizational savvy and meticulous vision. Noah still retains the workshop program, a requirement for anyone interested in auditioning for the troupe. She has also refashioned her nom de guerre to the more benevolent Madame Merci, perhaps because the original Mercy character is not as remote as it once was. And today Noah is a practicing psychotherapist and mother to her first newborn. “It’s with great reverence and respect for what Madame Merci has built that I carry on the torch of sacred profanity into this new decade,” Tangerine says.

Boulder Burlesque shows are presided over by a master of ceremonies, and on Valentine’s night “Darlene” welcomes the audience. Played by Agent Always, one of the troupe’s leading members, Darlene is a “love letter-hoarding postal worker.” She traipses onto stage in shocking pink lace-up boots and denim shorts, her long dark hair disappeared under a blond wig, choppy and layered, and embroidered over the front of her jacket is Darlene. On the back: Western Mailers. She speaks with a put-on Southern accent and opens with jokes, some of them keen and clever, others deliberately cornball. Darlene is one of many personas stocked in Always’ MC repertoire, and she charms and delights the audience. Always says the character spontaneously occurred to her in the shower one day. She already had the jacket in her closet, an old thrift store purchase, and all she really needed was the right wig.

“These letters and fragments,” Darlene says, “they mean something to somebody, and I hope they’ll mean something to you too.” She sits down and waxes romantic about the love letter as Tangerine’s brother, a chemical and biological engineer who contributes his musical talents to the troupe, plays a grand piano offstage. To make her point, Darlene quotes what James Joyce once wrote to his wife Nora Barnacle in a sign-off, “Goodnight, my little farting Nora, my dirty little fuckbird!” Darlene stops, fans off with her clipboard, and declares, “My goodness, if there isn’t anything more romantic than that.” In her life outside the troupe, Always works as both an adjunct English professor and stripper. She joined Boulder Burlesque about three years ago after encountering the troupe by chance at the Boulder International Fringe Festival, and first MCed as a stand-in. She soon developed characters for the MC role which had previously been played much straighter. As Darlene, she introduces each Valentine’s piece by reading a written love letter to the audience in her sugary cadence, a prologue suggesting the scenario or backstory of an act.

The performances go by like a reeling succession of universes: Paisley Peach is a prisoner, fitted out in an orange inmate costume, tormented by the lover she can’t have in the non-incarcerated world, and begging, “release your grip on my heart…”; Queen Serpentine whips around in front of a standing mirror reflecting her back to the audience, lacerating the stage with whirling hair, “a viper ready to strike all of the naysayers in the world and spitting venom to any who would poison her sweet, sweet self-love,” stripping down to garter and pasties, then she flourishes a single rose stem in front of the mirror, red and swirled with light, and licks the flower, gazing at herself licking the flower, gazing eternally at her gaze; Rouge Roma meditates the intersection of a non-binary and Romani identity, saying, “please hear me when I ask you not to say the words gypsy or gypped” … and … “let this be a love letter to all who have ever felt stolen from, disrespected, or silenced,” waving the Romani and non-binary flag, a coin skirt, conjuring history and ancestry; and Mademoiselle Tangerine, in her “love letter to unrequited want, to lover’s skin, to the imagined recipient,” is hailed like an empress as she walks down the aisle in a wedding dress, all of her completely white except for the black opera gloves slipped up her forearms, and the apple taffy color of hair beneath a black bowler hat – she flashes two white folding fans, and she can’t be seen, the fans collapsing and unfurling again, blurring – then flat on her chest, freeze-framed, staring down the rows and rows of pews, on her back tearing the stockings from her legs in the noir stage light, yanking them until they’re gone, kicking her legs up, her head tensed all the way back in a fantastic mirage, and then she’s posed upright with the wedding dress heaped around her feet, applause surging through the chapel.

The Valentine’s lineup details the variety of body shapes, gender identities, and personalities within the troupe, exemplifying the community of authentic sexuality originated by Madame Merci nine years ago. Some members are students or waiters or nine-to-fivers. Many join without any prior dance experience, never dreaming that they would perform on a stage like this. Some want the experience of being in a troupe for a time, while others make longer commitments. Whatever their reason for joining, beginner members are trained in choreography and performative technique by an attentive team of advanced members. “They go through different exercises to develop and identify this burlesque character: What is an aspect of yourself and your sexuality that you want to amplify, or one you have been ashamed of in the past that you want to explore through a character?” Always explains. “People come to practice with whatever is alive for them. We don’t say, ‘We’re going to show up and create these pieces, and we expect technical perfection, or a certain body type.’ It’s not that way at all. It’s like, come as you are and express yourself how you see fit. And I think that’s what makes us distinct.” Tangerine says that audiences have given feedback to the troupe, admitting that they had expected a glamorous and intimidating production, but were actually heartened by “versions of their own lives or their own stories played out in those pieces,” and felt the possibility that they could be that bold, too.

“The thing I love about this particular group and the show is all the different types of bodies that are happening. As I get into design work with them, we’re focusing on what’s truly beautiful about that individual as opposed to trying to fit them into a box,” says David Ortolano, the troupe’s technical manager. “An audience can come and watch this and feel like that’s beautiful. They can get emotionally moved by someone just taking it on even though they don’t fit the mold of what would typically be beautiful. Some of them are flat-chested, some of them are overweight in different ways, and they’re all just kind of living in it and inhabiting it beautifully.” This kind of beauty may be so evocative because it isn’t repeated or mimicked, engineered from a cultural example with makeup and piled-on glam. Determined by what can be concealed or adjusted, standardized, and only called perfect once the example is attained. The kind of beauty that could get someone on TV, cloned through magazine ads and commercials. It’s special because the person is embracing the ways they’re already beautiful, and this makes them more innately, uniquely perfect than another imitation of the example will be.

Ortolano, also executive director of the Boulder International Fringe Festival and co-founder of Band of Toughs: a theatre collaboratory, is involved with myriad creative projects. He has worked on burlesque shows as a production person or creative director for 25 years, including in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Madrid and London. A certain swath of the burlesque world, as he describes it, is something like a fire-and-brimstone agony of “entertainment, ego, diva.” There was a time, after a stint working with burlesque dancers as creative director and choreographer at Boulder’s Exotic Erotic Ball, that he became completely dismayed with the genre. “It was pure fluff,” he says. “When I got out of that project after four years, I was like, ‘I never want to work with fucking burlesque dancers again.’ Because it was just all like, ‘I like this song and I want to show everybody my tits.’ It was pretty shallow.” But he chooses to work with Boulder Burlesque, and justifies making less money to himself, he says, because of their “deep heart and soul.” He wants to be a part of art that will transform culture, and is contented with modest pay and some of the unpredictability of burlesque productions to be able to do that.

This culture that Boulder Burlesque confronts in their work is one that commands the body as much as the mind. Its power is sustained not only in the ideas and beliefs it produces – in the intangible reality of concepts – but also the tangible reality of the body, alive in consciousness as much as flesh. “In our mission to empower sexuality,” Tangerine says, “one of the roadblocks we come up against are the societal and political structures that prevent us from being in our bodies, being in our sexual identities, in a way that feels safe.” Burlesque, as a physical medium, exposes those structures and their relationship to the body, in the same way that an essay might deconstruct an ideological system. But words can only apprehend the intangible world. They’re too cut off from tangible experience, which they look at and interpret but never truly describe. Instead, the body has to realize its own reality, all of its deceptions and desires, the structures that claim it, through an immediate awareness of itself that words would only obscure.

“Burlesque by nature is about satire, it’s about revealing a deeper truth. It’s about poking at societal norms and conventions. Since it began with moments of accidental clothing slips and inverting gender, even back into the mid-1800s, burlesquers have always been finding the next layer to pull off,” Tangerine says. “In our contemporary setting, when showing off some skin is still an issue, but is something that has come to be more conventional, we get to decide, by pulling down that layer, what truth we are revealing, and the story we really want to tell. That’s what excites me about burlesque as a genre. We can be constantly reacting and constantly pulling down the veil that’s over society, over our sexuality, over the way we’re allowed to be present in our own bodies, and really show our audience and the public what it means to step forward in confidence, in our own truth, and in our own power.”

On closing night of “Let This Be a Love Letter,” Madame Merci, eight months pregnant at the time, took the stage again. Now that she’s letting go of this part of her life and creating a new one, a new story, she wanted to perform an exit piece. It was challenging to dance in her condition, surely, but back when she led the troupe, Noah always wanted to see a pregnant woman grace the stage, representing this phase of womanhood. Now she’s done it herself. Her husband, who had never performed before, joined her. It was exhilarating, exhausting, and she loved being with the troupe again. “I have felt so much gratitude and aliveness in having this be a part of my life,” she says. “To see that legacy live on through other people is very meaningful, and it brings me a lot of joy to watch it continue to grow.” You don’t think about it, Noah says, when you’re not a performer or when performance isn’t a part of your life, but it’s so enriching to do. And it’s all on tape as well. “I have this memento now for my baby,” Noah says, “who can look back one day and say, ‘My crazy parents.’”

Situation

by Michael Onofrey • May 17, 2020May 18, 2020

He steps through a doorway, glass door swinging shut behind him, and he looks out at a huge garden, nine thirty in the morning, caffe latte in hand. Afar are a dozen pink flamingos standing in shallow water. A few of the birds are on one leg, head tucked under a pink wing, and he thinks: They are sleeping. Several adults with children are on a paved walkway near the flamingos, looking at the birds and taking photos with cellphones. A few other large birds are near the flamingos, colorful fowl, but not pink.

“I liked your reading at the bookstore last night.”

This comes from his left. He turns.

She’s seated at a table that’s tucked unobtrusively next to the door he’s just come through. The area is in shadow, high-rise building accounting for this. He understands she is smiling, and he understands her hair is black and short, but what he doesn’t understand is…

“My reading?”

“Why yes. At the bookstore.”

He begins a half-smile. His cup of coffee, which he now raises to his lips, allows for a pause that’ll give himself time to formulate a response that won’t be offensive or stupid, for the woman sitting at the patio table represents opportunity. As it is, she has a paper cup too, and it’s identical to his paper cup, and, like him, she now raises that cup to her lips. He assumes she is doing what he is doing, which means they are joined in an exchange of evaluation, for she’s looking at him like he’s looking at her, but in his case there is the added burden of composing a response to the subject of: “reading at the bookstore.”

It’d be easy to say she’s not bad looking, yet it would be just as easy to say she’s not good looking. This, in turn, gives rise to other assessments, such as age – late thirties. How coincidental, for that’s his age. Also, he thinks of himself as not good looking and not bad looking. He’d be lost in a crowd, and so would she. But they’re not in a crowd right now.

He doesn’t see any rings on her fingers, and she couldn’t possibly see any rings on his fingers. His current thought has him wondering about commonality, for if he and the woman have things in common, shared interests in particular, then they could pursue a course of consensus which might lead to extremely pleasurable activities.

He swallows the coffee in his mouth and he says, “Well, yeah, the bookstore.” He adds a smile.

“Why don’t you sit down and we can discuss the story you read?”

“Okay.”

He sits down on one end of a half circle of a bench that’s shaped to match the curvature of the table, table and bench made of artificial marble. The woman is seated at the other end of the half-circle bench, and the reason he chose to sit on the same side of the table as her, as opposed to sitting directly across from her, is that the bench she is on affords a view of the garden, whereas if he were opposite her, his back would be toward the garden. Adding to this is a suggestion of intimacy that comes with sitting on the same bench as the woman even though they aren’t elbow-to-elbow.

“The woman you had in the story, was she someone you knew, or know?”

“No, she’s just a character.”

“So you made her up?”

“That is correct. By the way, are you here with a friend or someone?”

“Yes. How did you know? I’m here with Pam. She’s up in the room sleeping.”

He smiles more vigorously and says, “I see.”

“She has this opioid situation, you see.”

His smile takes a step backwards. His verbal response, though, remains the same: “I see.”

“I don’t have that situation. That’s why I’m down here.”

“Of course.”

“I guess that’s why you’re down here, too.”

“Yes.”

She raises her cup and sips. He raises his cup and sips.

“Where are you from?” he asks.

“New Mexico.”

“I’d rather not say.”

“You’d rather not say what?”

“Where in New Mexico.”

“Okay. New Mexico is fine with me. I can live with that.”

“Live with what?”

“Live with your living in New Mexico.”

“Where are you from?”

“California.”

“Really? Are you from Hollywood?”

“You could say that.”

A crow, or maybe a raven, caws, a ratcheting sound that is soon answered by another bird of the same species.

“When we arrived yesterday, and were going up to our room, there was this man in the elevator who must have weighed three hundred pounds, and he turns to Pam and he says, ‘How’s your luck holding?’ And Pam looks at him with her big lazy eyes and says, ‘We just arrived.’ So then the man says, ‘I wish I’d just arrived.’”

He smiles at this and says, “I have to remember that.”

“Why?”

“For when my luck goes bad. Last night it was pretty good.”

“Oh?”

“But I have a question.”

“A question?”

“Yeah. Couldn’t the man see that you and Pam had bags? You know, you’d just arrived and were going up to your room.”

“No, he couldn’t see that because we didn’t have bags. And we still don’t.”

“No bags, huh?”

“That is correct. We started driving. We were going to stop off at the Grand Canyon but we missed it. Maybe we’ll catch it on the way back. Have you been there, the Grand Canyon?”

“Yes, I have.”

“How was it?”

“Real nice.”

“That’s exactly why we want to stop there.”

He sips his coffee. She sips her coffee.

“By the way, what’s your name?”

“Leslie.”

“Leslie. I’m Kenny.”

“Oh?”

A man and a woman come out of the door that’s to their right. The man is pushing a dual baby stroller. In each stroller is a baby, four blue eyes like birds’ eggs looking skyward. The woman pulls a canopy halfway down on each stroller, direct sunshine probably a concern. The building’s shadow ends in about ten feet.

“Are those twins?” Leslie asks.

“Yes, they are,” the man says and smiles enthusiastically, complexion plump and reddish. “Two boys!”

“I was going to have a baby, or two, who knows, but I had an abortion instead.”

Kenny looks at Leslie. Leslie is smiling pleasantly. Kenny looks at the man. The man’s smile is diminishing. Shifting his view to the woman, who sports a pageboy-like hairstyle and blue eyes, Kenny sees dismay. The twins, though, are unfazed.

“Well…” the man begins, but trails off.

“What are their names?” Leslie asks.

“Robert and Thomas,” the man says. “But we call them Bobby and Tommy.”

“Are they circumcised?”

The man’s expression falters. The woman next to him, presumably his wife, places a hand on her hip.

“Can I hold them?” Leslie asks. “I’ve never held twins before.”

The woman, whose voice dents the air with a wedge of authority, says, “We don’t want to disturb them.” She gives a dismissive smile and begins walking. The man picks up on this and starts walking too, but in his case he’s strolling the baby strollers that are fastened together. The couple and their tandem baby stroller proceed down the concrete walkway.

“I bet they’re going to show Bobby and Tommy those pink flamingos,” Leslie says.

“Yeah, but they’ll have to lift those babies up to see the birds,” Kenny says.

“Pam and I were down there last night, and at first I didn’t think those birds were real. I thought they were phony, you know, imitation flamingos. They were standing on one leg and they weren’t moving. So I said to Pam, ‘They’re fake,’ and Pam said, ‘Do you think so?’ So I stepped in the water, that shallow water, and reached out because I was going to pick one of them up, but then, it was so surprising how they know things, the bird and some other ones nearby brought their heads out from under their wings and set their other leg down and started squawking and lifting their wings, like they were going to bite me. Scared the shit out of me. I jumped back, and my shoes were wet and I stumbled and Pam was laughing and—”

Leslie breaks her colloquial to look at Kenny, who’s laughing.

“You think that’s funny, huh? Well, listen to this. There was this man nearby, a big guy, and he says, ‘Careful with the birds, honey.’ So Pam and I look at him. I didn’t know he was there until he said that. And then he said, ‘I’m going to show you gals how to handle birds,’ and it’s obvious he’s from Texas because of his voice. So he turns, and, you know, over there on the other side of the path from the flamingos they got those little penguins, and so this jerk unzipped his fly and got out his wanger and started pissing on those little penguins. The flamingos by then had settled down, but now the penguins started up, but not real bad, just kind of splashing a bit in the water. They got shallow water too. So Pam says to the guy, ‘I got this knife in my purse and I’m thinking about putting a hole in your neck.’ And the guy turns his head and looks at us, but then suddenly he changes, his posture I mean, and he zips up. Pam and I turn, and sure enough, here come a couple of security guards, which turned out to be a guy and a gal, down the path from the automatic door where the casino is, and Pam says to me, ‘Walk toward them, real easy.’ And that’s what we did, and they passed us by and started after the man who pissed on the penguins, and who was now hurrying away.”

Leslie brings her cup up and sips. Kenny watches this and thinks about how articulate Leslie can be.

“When we were at a bar in the casino having a drink,” Leslie resumes, “I suggested to Pam that maybe we should go out there and give the leftover ice in our drinks to the penguins. I mean – penguins in the desert? They must be missing cooler climes. But Pam said no, and went on to say that the water that was trickling where the penguins are is probably refrigerated because how else could they survive? I had to agree with that.”

Leslie looks at Kenny. Kenny moistens his lips with his tongue.

“Well, you and Pam had quite a night – bookstore, casino, and the events in the garden here.”

“Bookstore?”

“Yeah.”

“What bookstore?”

Leslie has a serious question mark on her face.

Kenny, sweeping away quandary, says, “Yeah. What bookstore? Okay, the casino and the garden and the flamingos and the little penguins.”

“And that’s not all.”

“Of course not.”

“Pam doesn’t take any shit from anybody. We were at this gas station in Arizona, and it’s night, and Pam’s at the pump, going to put gas in the truck, my pickup truck, and this fellow comes over and says, ‘Let me give you a hand with that, little lady.’ And Pam says, ‘Stand back.’ But this guy keeps coming. So Pam turns with the nozzle and shoots gas all over his Levi’s. While the guy was dealing with that, Pam says, ‘Leslie, I want to smoke a cigarette. Give me a match.’ The guy’s trying to brush the gas off his pants with his hands, and he’s saying things like, ‘You fucking cunt.’ So Pam steps more towards him with that nozzle and says, ‘You better be on your way, pal.’ So the guy runs over to the booth where you pay, you know, if you don’t got a credit card, and he’s waving his arms and pointing, and there’s this guy behind that thick glass in there, looking at him.”

“Right.”

“Pam finished putting gas in the truck and off we went. Last I saw, that guy with gasoline on his pants was fooling with a cellphone.”

Kenny searches for a rejoinder.

Leslie looks out over the garden and muses, “It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yeah. Absolutely beautiful. They say it’s going to be a hundred-and-six-degrees beautiful this afternoon.”

“They have a pool here, don’t they?”

“Yeah. I think it’s on the other side of the garden, over there.” Kenny points. “If I’m not mistaken, they call it a ‘pool area.’”

“So then, maybe there’s more than one pool.”

“Quite possibly.”

“Is that a clothing-optional situation?”

“I don’t know. You might want to check with the concierge about that.”

“Good idea,” Leslie says.

Kenny sips his coffee.

“I went to college for a little while,” Leslie relates.

Kenny waits.

“Did you go to college?”

Kenny, stuck between realities, says, “Yes and no.”

Leslie says, “That’s what I thought.”

Leslie sips her coffee. Kenny looks at this and sees chapped lips with a coating of lipstick, pinkish red. As with Kenny’s arms, Leslie’s thin arms display no tattoos.

“So he comes up to me at the bar in the Broken Coyote. I’m standing, not sitting. And he says, ‘Leslie, I’m real sorry about this. If I’d known he was going to OD, I’d have sent him home.’ You know, like that’s all I’d need at the house. Anyway, I said, ‘Don’t worry about it. Why don’t you buy me a drink?’”

“Who are we talking about?”

“We?”

“Who are you talking about?”

“My deceased husband, James. So I says to Del—”

“Del?”

“Del’s the floor manager at the auto-parts warehouse where James worked, you know, when James was alive. Del, I think, is still alive.”

“Things are clearing up.”

“There’s this opioid situation at the warehouse, you see.”

“I see.”

“Actually, you might say the whole town has that situation.”

“Really?”

“And it’s not just opioids.”

“Of course not.”

“Hey, look. The people with the twins are holding the twins.”

“Oh, yeah. So they are.”

“I wonder if they want us to take a cellphone picture of them. We could go down there and do that.”

“No need for that. They probably have a selfie stick.”

“I hope they don’t drop one of those babies.”

“I do too.”

“It took forever for the insurance company to come through. At the warehouse, where James worked, there was insurance, accident and death, but if you kill yourself they don’t pay up. So what’s an OD, suicide or accident?”

“Good question.”

“A perplexing situation.”

Kenny nodded pensively.

“I tried explaining to the gal, you know, phone calls and her coming over to the house and so forth, that James didn’t want to kill himself. It was an accident. It could happen to anyone.”

Leslie sips her coffee. Kenny sips his coffee. Kenny’s cup is running low on coffee.

“I better get up to the room to see if Pam is alive, or awake. Do you want to go with me?”

“I’d love to, but I have to do some shopping.”

“Christmas shopping?”

Kenny looks at Leslie. Leslie stands up.

“Why don’t you give me a buzz a little later on, on my cell?” Leslie says.

“Okay. What’s your—”

“Pam’s a lot of fun if she’s awake. You could come up to the room.”

Leslie’s around the table, swift and nimble, paper cup in hand, but then she tosses the cup aside as she strides down the concrete path that leads to the flamingos. More of a crowd has gathered near the birds, sunglasses and shorts and caps and bottled water endemic. Leslie, in a flower-print one-piece, mules on her feet, slips into the crowd.

Kenny focuses on the crowd, waiting for Leslie to emerge. He wants to know what direction she’s headed.

Mom Mazin’

by Eve Ayers • May 9, 2020November 12, 2020

“Have you lost your virginity yet?” my mom asked in her usual impassioned tone as she was applying aggressive red geisha eye makeup on me. I had just turned thirteen, and was thinking about the Lizzie McGuire episode I would be watching after taking the South Shore train back to my Dad’s – my home – that evening. She glared at me with her golden brown eyes that were so intense I never wanted to gaze in them for too long, imagining they would transport me in a Victorian era melodrama scene I would have to live in permanently. One of her jet black, perfectly tweezed, Kate Moss shaped eyebrows was arched heavily, awaiting the answer – while her Lancôme eyeliner brush was hovering over one of my icy blue eyes. The moment was an uncomfortable halt, overly dramatic, and funny – like a lot of moments were with my mom.

“You can tell me if you did – just make sure he puts a rubber on it,” she said, motioning the brush with each word.

“Mom, oh my God.”

I laughed, embarrassed, and stared at my eye makeup through the illuminated night/home/office mirror on her black steel sunburst vanity that had seemingly five hundred old timey expensive looking French perfume bottles on it. While she was searching for something among Clinique-green compacts and Erno Laszlo astringents, I studied her: thick black hair full of curls – that I swear don’t exist anymore in the hair world today – NARS matte red lipstick, dark plum nails, Greek olive skin she covered generously with Estée Lauder translucent powder, maroon faux snakeskin ankle boots and always, always an all-black outfit. “I see a red door and I want it painted black,” she would often sing, or scream. I was wearing a yellow Abercrombie shirt that had probably been worn by five other girls in my grade through harrowing clothes trades orchestrated by notes passed in lockers in between classes, or fervently in a friend’s room after some questionable prank calls that usually ended in tears and adolescent paranoia of at least one girl. Will they know it was us?

She started to cloud my face with pale white Anna Sui loose powder.

“Well … have you come close?”

In the sea of powder in the air that smelled like a tea rose heaven I wanted to escape to, there stood my mom’s gaze. I really was in a Victorian melodrama, but a weird one where the mother keeps asking the geisha about her virginity.

I grew up in the ’burbs in Northwest Indiana, near Chicago. I daydreamed in school. I daydreamed in swim practice. I watched Limp Bizkit and Korn videos on TRL while drinking cranberry juice and eating cinnamon graham crackers my grandparents would get me from Aldi’s. I would circle the yeses or maybes on notes that were passed by a friend of the guy that wanted to “go out with me,” and even if I circled yes, I was so shy and nervous with the guys I liked I would never speak to any of them. I would see “my boyfriend” in a crowded hallway, next to his locker smiling straight at me, and I would actually feel the tangible love sparkles in his eyes. And I would walk right passed him to watch Great Expectations with Ethan Hawke after school while I ignored his phone calls.

“Tell him I’m at practice,” I would tell my brother.

“But you like him,” he whispered, his face scrunched up in disgust with his hand over the receiver.

“Just tell him!” angrily mouthing the words.

“You’re so weird.”

The next day I would ask my teacher for a hall pass just to stare at him sitting at his desk taking notes in class, and come up with my own movie in my head about our alluring romance… So no, I wasn’t close to having sex anytime soon and I definitely didn’t want to talk about it with my mom. I was way more conservative than her, still am – and I’m not even conservative. But this kind of questioning never took me off guard. It was my mom.

“Mom, no, c’mon… Stop!”

I shook my head away, annoying her craftsmanship.

My brother popped his head in the room, but noticed the tense aftermath of a mom question in the air and rushed back in the living room to watch The Sopranos on the HBO that we didn’t have at home – when we were at my mom’s he would watch HBO or Bravo (back when it was Inside the Actors Studio and obscure movies that played on repeat) while drawing comic-book characters on a drawing board that was attached to his hip. He was in his own little sanctuary while my mom would do my makeup for hours at her vanity, giving me in a deep sincere tone some of her wisdom, like “You can love someone but not like them.”

She eventually lost interest in my virginity after giving me some of her sage advice about love and men – that was so beyond my years I probably thought back on her advice when I was twenty-six and found it helped me, but at the time the only way I could process it was with the same emotions I felt from the final scene of Stepmom.She went on to talk about seeing the Smashing Pumpkins at the Double Door before they hit it big, her love for Kevyn Aucoin as an artist and as a person:“His makeup books changed the game, forever.” And the wealthy clients she had at her makeup artist job downtown, all women: the ones that were genuine, the ones that were heartless. But I was spacing out to the Mazzy Star that was playing in the background, my eyes closed – I felt my mom’s hand blending in rosy cheeks, which felt soothing in comparison to the intensity of her presence and I couldn’t help but wonder, Damn mom, when did you lose it?

She started giving me the geisha middle line on my lips and kept her monologue going while I made up stories in my head about her wild days in the late ’70s and early ’80s. I remember pictures of her then with a dyed blue-black permed ’80s mullet under the L at the Belmont redline stop with her best friend at the time, who looked like Robert Smith, kissing her cheek while she stared pensively in the camera. The photo of her, tan, smiling, on a couch – always so uniquely beautiful – surrounded by Chihuahuas when she lived in El Paso, Texas as a young teenager. I thought of her friends driving out to the middle of the desert at night in an old open jeep, with every star in the sky shining brightly, passing a joint and laughing through fits of coughing. Learning how to drive on the LA freeway, screaming with glee each time that she made it out alive. I thought that whatever world my mom had experienced in her youth didn’t exist anymore. I still feel like that.

I only knew scattered stories. Fun, wild, transoceanic stories, much like how I felt on our occasional visits. I knew my mom was the youngest of three sisters, and they moved around a lot with my Royal Tenenbaum-esque grandpa and ever glamourous, bedazzled, jeweled ring-on-every-finger, grandma. I knew she had dropped out of school when she was fifteen, and when she was sixteen she dated a musician ten years her senior. I knew she really had to make it on her own in a very punk rock way – and she did. I knew she met my dad in a bar after he had just gotten home from a postgrad architecture school backpacking trip across Europe and he was in the middle of a booth surrounded by “three women on each side.” I knew that our upbringings couldn’t have been any more different.

I looked in the mirror in the “night” light setting. She had fully geisha’d me: my long wavy dirty blonde hair in a messy Shimada bun, pale face, red eyes, black liner. From the neck down I couldn’t have been more of a stereotypical early 2000’s Justin Timberlake lovin’ tweeny beanie. The yellow Abercrombie shirt, Adidas striped snap pants, knock-off vans – should I mention the butterfly clips, and braces? I looked up at her reflection, and thought about when she gave birth to my older brother and me, how both times she told the doctor in an epidural haze that we weren’t hers because of our contrasting blonde hair and blue eyes.

She looked straight at me. “You are just to die for, girly.”

It’s funny how someone you have the most problems with can make you feel the most beautiful. I smiled. I loved it. I loved the look. I loved being in her Northside condo that reminded me of a Lorraine Kirke designed European dream: full of old world maps, crimson walls, and so many candles lit it seemed to be on a spiritual level. I loved the world she put me in – so exotic, foreign and different from my everyday life. But I was ready to go home.

It’s a strange thing that happens when your grandma that you’re extremely close to passes away, and your mom that you’re not close to at all is still here – you start to mourn her too. At least this is what has happened to me after this past Mother’s Day, the first after my grandma’s death last August. Previous Mother’s Days, I would never even think about envying smiling mother–daughter duos at brunch. But this year it was different. Was it watching Being Serena and seeing her mom take off the tennis champion’s sneakers after her difficult post birth that got me teary eyed? The “Thinking of You” Instagram post with the array of colorful bouquets of flowers and messages to those with strained mother/daughter relationships? Was it the Busy Phillips’ Instagram post about her once troubling relationship with her mom? Should I have just deleted my stupid Instagram? No, BP’s stories get me out of bed.

I realized that besides going on hikes and sporadically crying under a tree, I had not allowed myself to grieve properly. Floodgates of emotions and memories of my southern goddess grandma, and tragic free-spirited mother broke open, bombarding my head nonstop, so much so that if moms on the street saw my distress they gave me a pitying, “I will adopt you look,” although I’m a thirty-one-year-old grown-ass woman. And you thought you didn’t care that you never had a mom around. You thought you were so mom independent.

Ugh, I did not like this.

No, I have not gone to therapy after my grandma’s death. I purposefully picked out Joan Didion’s Run River instead of A Year of Magical Thinking. I’ve only brought myself to reread a few of the letters my grandma wrote me weekly since I left for college because I knew I would sob uncontrollably all over them even though I bought a Rose print binder (her favorite flower) from Hobby Lobby, and organized them chronologically after her funeral.

There are some people that handle death well – I am not one of them. I refused to grieve- It was just too painful. My dad’s mom had been such a staple and emotional rock in my life – the void she left felt unbearable. I’m lucky to have a great support system and I like to think of myself as resilient, but I truly believe when the mom or mom figure you have a deep connection with goes, you feel alone for the first time in your life. (Maybe this is different when you have kids, I don’t know.) The only thing that helped me was watching Julianne Moore interviews in passing. Every time she was asked about her late mom she’d burst into tears instantaneously. “She was just a really good mom,” she wiped her tears while trying to smile. My pain felt understood. My grandma was just a really good grandma. I don’t know what else to say.

My friend who the previous year seemed to be the only person as deeply affected as I was when his grandma died – the night she passed he tearfully called me. I met him at a bar to drink Black Russians – her favorite drink – and he talked about how she really rocked it at life and I tried my best to console him. I called him up the day my grandma died. I was tired of hearing the “Just let her go” and “She lived such a long life” murmurs I internally winced at. Will it make me stronger after I accept it? Will I become more like her automatically? Is there an “a-ha” moment? He said no. Not at all. He told me that there will always be that void, and all you will have left are the memories. You have to be grateful for them.

“You have to,” he said. He was right.

I could understand wanting to lie on my grandma’s couch, laugh with her while drinking iced tea this past Mother’s Day, but the fact that for the first time in years I thought about my mom doing my makeup and I started to also miss those times left me confused and frankly annoyed. My mom had always been an estranged enigma that hadn’t been around much in my childhood after my parents divorced when I was three. But it was overshadowed by my stable, always laughing around the dinner table, Simpsons and Seinfeld filled childhood with my laidback dad, annoying but always there for me artistic older brother, and loving grandparents. A very Norman Rockwell meets ideal ’90s upbringing that I’m truly thankful for.

When my brother and I were young we would spend the night at her place in the city, or she would pick us up from school once a month, or so. She would pull up in the middle of suburban soccer moms in a lavish, lurid Mercedes convertible rent-a-car wearing her black outfit, rose-tinted sunglasses, and a raspberry colored fur coat – for whatever reason my mom’s side of the family has always had a fixation with fur coats like it was the 1920s fur trade of Detroit that my brother and I have yet to decode. Eve!!!!!!!!! EVE!!!!!! She would scream my name repeatedly, lean on the horn, and wave ferociously while her stereo blared some obscure Violent Femmes song. It always reminded me of a rock star in apocalyptic mode. All the moms and kids would stare and I would sprint in my oversized zebra sweater, stirrup leggings, and beaming light-up gym shoes as fast as I could, papers flying behind me. Eve!!!!! HONK HONNNKKKK!

We would go to Schoops or a TGI Fridays where she would ask us about our current crushes. She’d get bored with our answers and talk mysticism, or how she loved Madonna as a person but couldn’t get into her music. “People should get over the fact that she likes to reincarnate herself – we all change over time.” She overheard two teenage girls sitting behind us calling a girl across the room a skeleton. My mom glanced over at the girl they were talking about, then glared hard at me with her transformative brown-goldies. “They are afraid of beauty. Never be afraid of beauty, Eve – it’s the ugliest thing you can do.” Then she would scream John Lennon’s “Mother” so loud that retired couples wearing Bears sweatshirts would look from the side of their booth to see what the commotion was about. She laughed voraciously, never caring what anyone thought. My brother and I would hide under the table while she overtipped the same waitress that she had complained about the entire meal.

On the way home, we would stop at the only gas station in town where they’d pump the gas for you. “I don’t like the smell of gas on my fingers,” she’d say, laughing, giving off a major Cruella De Vil vibe. She would always flirt super hard with the same young Opie lookalike gas station attendant and he would smile back and laugh. I think they’d even wink at each other. My brother and I stared in silence, giving each other confused glances. After stuffing a wad of ones in Opie’s shirt pocket, she would drop us off. We would go on living, and she would head back to the city. I imagine her smoking out of a one hitter while simultaneously putting on red lipstick in the rear-view. It seemed like everyone involved was pretty content with this arrangement, but when we got older things started to change.

Once I turned twenty-three and she remarried things got weird. My brother and I concluded this is the time when it happened. She must have realized she forgot to raise us and was stricken with a mix of delusions and ill-timed guilt which made her extremely destructive to herself and others. My mom had always been a bit manic-depressive and we always did have a somewhat rocky rapport, but this shit was on a whole other level. Her realization for the first time that we didn’t need her – or never had – sent her into a precipitous downward spiral that unfortunately pulled the fun and funny out of her personality, leaving her mean, irrational and very, very sad. I wish this upon no one.

Before we got numb to her dismantling behavior my brother and I would discuss it.

“I wish she would of had more kids at one point,” I would say to my brother.

“Me too. Maybe she would of been okay.”

The rest of my twenties involved a lot of learning how to deal with her maturely, setting boundaries, and feeling super thankful that I had a sibling to bring me back to earth. I raised you day and night! I was the best mother in the world! How dare you not answer me! She left messages with such conviction on my voicemail that I almost believed her. I would have to call my brother and ask if her accusations were true and I had somehow forgotten my childhood. No, Eve, duh. It was difficult to deal with at times, but it didn’t take me off guard. It was my mom.

Since then things have gotten calmer. She has become more at peace with herself due to time and my beautiful, and amazing blonde haired, blue-eyed niece who looks like my brother’s twin (and even at five is a better artist than him). As it turns out, my mom is a really good grandma. I recently visited her when my niece was over practicing Cosmic Kids Yoga.It was my first visit in a really long time, and it was nice.

“You two are just the most beautiful.” We both smiled.

“Namastayy,” my niece said, bowing her head to us.

I realized that the Mother’s Day saga of emotions and memories along with finally beginning to cope with my grandma’s death didn’t bring me any closer to my mom. But it did make me softer. When someone you love so much passes, it really does turn you into mush and your heart will explode. Mush. Softness. We are all imperfect. We are all human. And we are all left with only memories of the ones we love.

I am eternally grateful for the good memories of my mom – they are unique, interesting and some are so fucking funny. I’m grateful she gave me life. I’m grateful for the makeup. I am grateful she is one of a kind, and influenced me to be authentic. I am grateful she taught me never to be afraid of beauty. I am grateful for the intense, emotional talks about W Magazine photographs and life lessons she gave me when I was young that’ll probably help me when I’m forty-five. Even though my mom wasn’t the best mom, I’m thankful she was my mine – I wouldn’t have picked another one. And I’m grateful that she told me to tell him to put a rubber on it.

My brother comes in and tell us it’s time to take the L so we don’t miss our train. My mom shoves a copious amount of Stila compacts, anti-aging cream, and scented soap (that will smell up the whole train car) into my bag while we’re rushing out the door. My brother hands me a Sandman graphic novel to read while ignoring me from the seat behind. I look at my geisha face in the window as I fall asleep, smudging the makeup in my reflection. My dad picks us up listening to the Cubs game on the radio.

Walking into my house my grandma is cooking. “Hi, honey, I made some iced tea,” she says in her Tennessee accent. “Oh wow, look at that face! Are you tired, you wanna to take a nap? What’s on your mind, tell me everything. Let’s eat first.”

memoir

Arts & Culture

Dear Africa (from the Dystopian Letters)

by AUDREY SHIPP • May 7, 2020May 7, 2020

Dear Africa:

Your bronze statue stands and gestures in the Muse Museum located in the cradle of humankind. The namesake of the museum, the statue extends twelve feet skyward reaching her right arm toward the ceiling and bearing her torch with its eternal flame. In the five feet of her base burns the continuous pyre of World Bank debt. Her large Sarah Baartman buttocks glisten as the blistering sun pours through the skylight overhead. It was the Muse who got rid of the haphazard colonial borders imposed upon you. It was the Muse who gathered all of us descendants from the diaspora and brought us finally home. At the hour when the sun is directly overhead, she comes to life and recounts this history. Near her fiery base, the crowds sporting Bermuda shorts and sun visors gather with smartphones in hand. Their sandalled feet shuffle over the sands of the museum floor as they anxiously take photos of the huge statue with the phones they must purchase once a month in order to keep up with the latest technological innovations.

Due to the drying up of the oceans by global warming, the tourists do not have to travel far. The perennial drought and the gravitational pull of the sinking sands of the Sahara forced the continents to shift and reunite into your one large geographic body of tight globalism. The purpose of life for all humans has become the avoidance of being sucked into the terminal hole of the Sahara Desert.

To the right of the Muse in an adjacent room is the Tropical Forest display, the last of its kind on earth. The forest is encased in a plexiglass through which the tourists stare and fantasize about what life was like with lush greenery. They gaze upon the miniature trees, palms, and waterfalls. A tiny oscillating fan creates a breeze to move the palms as birds fly and flitter tree to tree. The shiny diamonds in the minuscule mines recall your now depleted minerals and chemical elements. After clawing for the headphones that hang from the ceiling, the tourists listen to the distinct calls of the tropical birds and the rush of the tiny river that is a tribute to both the lost Congo and the Amazon of Brazil. Other visitors snatch at the oxygen masks located along the walls so they can take in breaths of fresh forest air.

The cotton and sugar pavilions are the biggest draw. Lines of tourists wait nervously at the door of either room clutching their tickets of admittance. The wonders on display depict the end of your utopia of communal living with nature and the beginning of the industrial revolution. Spotlights shine directly on the cotton gin in one room and the sugar mill in the other. The walls display how we worked in agriculture in the formerly, far-off continents. Mostly emaciated and with backs bents, we picked the cotton and cut the sugar stalks beneath the sun that in comparison to today’s solar plasma would be considered mild. The audio on the tourists’ headphones plays our recorded moans as well as our spontaneous moments of breaking out in song. With flashes from the camera phones incessant, the tourists take photo after photo of us, our talents, and the wonders on exhibit.

Arts & Culture, Essays, The Litro Blog

Dear Corporate State (from the Dystopian Letters)

by AUDREY SHIPP • April 21, 2020April 21, 2020

What are we living for nowadays when we have no history to examine and no future to contemplate? Most of us remember when our parents had a home they were able to pay for far from the city center or when they at least had a 200-square-foot apartment which symbolized the last phase of individual living. The affordable-housing scarcity and sharp increase in prices left us dismayed. The world’s wealthy built tower upon tower of luxury high-rises with insurmountable monthly prices until we were eventually priced out. Now we are reduced to transport living in elevated Sweeper Trains that circle the city serving not only as vehicles for transportation but as lodging for us working-class folks. This is the livelihood you bequeathed to us as working people, as blacks, women, people of color, to circulate around the city aimlessly due to the lack of affordable housing.

We ride the trains incessantly, and they in reality go nowhere. They circle the 500 square miles of our city that has few trees but clean air. The air was refreshed once fuel shortages forced us to abandon our private vehicles. And now with the masses locked away in these trains, we at least have blue skies to gaze upon. Blue skies and the same city, as the trains complete loop after loop in circular fashion.

We ride until hunger urges us to retrieve our bagged meals from the platforms’ vending machines containing plastic bags with sandwiches and hard oatmeal cookies. When not using our headphones to listen to music, we pair them with the numerous screens inside the trains and on the platforms that offer pre-packaged news, sports highlights, and dramatic miniseries. Sleep is awkward and uncomfortable, a fidgety means of rejuvenation before we hop off at appropriate time and place, find a bathroom at our train stop to freshen up, and then off we go to work our gig jobs.

The majority of us work in train maintenance, and others labor at the small shops on the platforms or in the city at retail locales that cater to our personal needs. All of our jobs are based on sales or service because no one really makes anything anymore. Your corporate offices sent our industrial jobs away for cheaper labor, and your government bureaus went along with the plan despite the country losing its tax base. Soon your government departments started auctioning off parts of themselves to the cheapest private bidder. Those not working for the trains or shops work as assistants to the small band of wealthy who control everything. It was your skeletal government branch which decreed that assistants to the elites be grouped in the front cars of the trains always. They’re the privileged lot who get first digs at the platforms where they can get in line before the rest of us.

Other than blue skies, we also gaze upon the luxury high-rises built by the world’s wealthy. The majority are empty living quarters constructed not for housing but as investments for the rich to store their money. The money is in there somewhere although we don’t see it. You’ve given it more value than us.

creative non-fiction memoir Online Exclusives travel

Rome Suppressed

by Igiaba Scego • April 11, 2020November 12, 2020 • 1 Comment

Translated by Lucy Rand.

I start to walk…

I walk.

I always walk when I need to think. I walk the congested streets of Rome and my heart, my extravagant little heart, is instantly at ease. Only in Rome am I able to walk so well. We belong to one another, she and I. We love each other, hate each other, know each other, we are all jumbled up. Rome and I are eternal sisters, eternal friends, and eternal accomplices. We go way back. Together we are a brand new being, sparks fly from us, or so we believe.

Paris is beautiful, New York vivacious, Rio de Janeiro seductive. But Rome is Rome. It has something more and often something less. Rome is the center of me and the center of the world. Maybe even of the entire universe. My Rome is now so inadequate, so totally imperfect. She has aged. In Somalia they would call her Ajuza. Roma Ajuza who can no longer hide her years. Her ancient wrinkles blend into the decay. And her aches and pains torment her from morning till night. Rome is one big blemish. An illegible scrawl that shines infinite light over our wearied lives. Rome, with her secrets and unspeakable hysteria. Rome who has never told me her deepest buried truth.

I walk. One foot after the other. Quickly. Brusquely. I overtake tourists with their pocket-sized video cameras and psychedelic smartphones. I pass men selling trinkets made in who-knows-where. I pass the costumed gladiators swindling tourists and the city alike. I pass the cats that have made a home of the Theater of Pompey ruins. I outflank buses overloaded beyond every limit. Today I have a destination and I want to get there soon, before I lose my courage.

My foot falters, and suddenly a cramp. Ow, damn foot, are you trying to boycott me? I won’t allow it. I slow down. I give it a massage. I show some care and attention. But I have to go again, get back into my rhythm, reach my destination. I need to reach the heart, the real heart, of Rome.

Soon … soon … soon.

My foot, however, is in ambush, it’s trying to change my direction. It’s cajoling me, distracting me with the Palatine, the Colosseum, the pines reclining tenderly at the top of the world. But there’s no time for such monumental delicacies today. I need to get to Piazza di Porta Capena.

And I need to get there straight away. Immediately.

I’m here, finally… I don’t know how, but I’m here…

Out of breath, yes, but sure as God made little green apples, I’m here. My foot still hurts, but I pretend everything is under control and nothing can come between this strange piazza and me. Cars hurtle around an anonymous grass verge. Ah, the grass verge, that’s the one, there it is. I cross the road onto the neglected scrap of land. This is indeed my destination. This is the reason my heart is beating so fast. It’s for this verge that my stomach is twisted up like a freshly grilled mutton skewer. I forget the pain in my foot. I even forget myself for a moment. There’s a cypress. Tall, majestic, imposing, unhappy. I look at it and feel like crying. The cypress is a symbol of immortality, of life after death. Its utter verticality makes me feel so small. The cypress is like an elevator. An elevator of souls trying to reach God and the unknown within us. It was the tree of Hades. The tree of sadness and pain.

There are some plaques next to it. I’m curious, I read. The words “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” stand formally on a greyish-brown slab. The phrase (it says on the slab itself) belongs to the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana who died in Rome in 1952. It’s a simple, incredibly powerful phrase. There’s weight behind it. If I had a hat, I’d tip it. But my curiosity moves me on. I look at the two columns framing the plaque and my eyes stray to another piece of text.

In memory of the victims of the massacre of New York and Washington on September 11^th, 2001. The city of Rome stands for peace against all forms of terrorism.

My lip trembles this time. Trembles uncontrollably. Huh? September 11th? I’m perplexed. So … so … these two columns are supposed to be the Twin Towers? So they’re talking about New York? They’re remembering New York?

I wonder how many people in Rome know the true meaning of these two little columns abandoned amid the chaos of the city’s traffic. The Twin Towers … who’d have thought. Maybe nobody in Rome knows. Nobody… Sure, I had wondered about the meaning of these solitary columns as much as the next person. But what with all the commitments, distractions, I had forgotten to look into it. But it turns out I needed to. Damn laziness.

In the meantime a hysterical claxon pierces my eardrum. The traffic is ferocious, restless, solitary. A curse floats into my ear. Perhaps there’s been a collision, but I’m not sure. I didn’t notice anything. I fear I’d be a terrible eyewitness. “I was just so enthralled by the grass verge, officer, that I didn’t see anything else.” Yes, that’s how I’d justify it to the police. And they probably wouldn’t believe me. But I really didn’t see anything. By that point the verge had, fatally you could say, occupied the entirety of my cranium.

I felt confused. My mind skipped back and forth painfully between thoughts. The cypress, sensing my bewilderment, tried to console me. And perhaps it was the cypress that whispered the recent history of the place into my ear, or perhaps it was me thumbing through my phone and finding an explanation on the Internet, the all-knowing, all-disclosing Internet. And that’s how in just a few seconds I went from total ignorance to knowing more than I wanted to.

These columns, which at Porta Capena symbolized the Twin Towers, had been moved from the fountain of the Curia Innocenzianain Piazza di Montecitorio. Having transited through a warehouse on the Aventine, now they found themselves here, angelically sealing a pact of memory between Rome and New York.

The United States Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, came for the inauguration. Flowers were put down. The then mayor, Gianni Alemanno, described the composition (plaques, columns, unhappy cypress, Santayana quote) as “a silent call against all intolerance and all forms of fundamentalism.” Their commitment was to water the grass and illuminate the plaques.

Their commitment was to memory. What a strange word, memory. We must remember, people often say. Even Santayana reiterated it in his quote. Remember, so as not to repeat. So that it doesn’t happen again. Enough of death, massacres, murders.

Enough of torture, violence, rape.

Enough of subjugating people, blackmailing them.

All this was memory. But as the years had passed I’d learnt that not all memories are treated equal.

There are B-list memories and C-list memories. Memories that nobody wants to remember because they are too uncomfortable, too true.

I looked at the grass verge, so sad and alone, once more. I laid my gaze on the two columns, the plaques, my friend the cypress. I read Santayana’s quote for the hundredth time. And everything felt wrong. It was like in those puzzles in the newspaper where you have to connect the dots to complete the picture. But there were some dots missing in this story, as if somebody, feeling ashamed, had stuffed them into his jacket pocket. Without dots, without lines to trace, it was impossible for the complete picture to materialize. It was like a fetus slowly rotting in a dried up womb.

There was something deeply untimely about that place. Of course it was nice to know that Rome had a monument for the victims of September 11^th. That wretched attack had left a mortal wound in all of our hearts. Our lives changed forever that day. Not only the lives of those who died, but also of those who lived. Nothing has been the same since September 11^th. For a while nothing made any sense. So it was right to have the plaques, the flowers, the memory. But there was something deeply wrong about it nonetheless. I felt uneasy. It was as if there was a lack of oxygen on that grass verge. I felt like I was suffocating.

I felt an absence … a huge absence… And everything was so close to home, too … too close. Sure enough it was my Africa that was missing. That was it. My Africa had been slaughtered in that place. Yes, justice required another monument next to the September 11^th one, another memory. I felt that what was missing was a plaque (even a small one) dedicated to the victims of Italian colonialism. Once upon a time, even if many Romans no longer remember it, the Obelisk of Axum stood there. An obelisk that Fascist Italy had brought back from Ethiopia as war booty.

Ah, Italian colonialism. An unhealed scar, an unstitched wound, an obliterated memory. Italian colonialism pretended to be good; the myth of the Italiani brava gente (“The Good Italians”) was well entrenched in the popular imagination. But it exterminated as many as – sometimes more than – the other colonialisms. I was struck suddenly by the thought of the victims of Yperite poison gas in Ethiopia. The victims of that horrendous war ordered by Benito Mussolini. Bodies lacerated by the chemical. Black skins made white by a cowardly death. A death that didn’t give them the chance to fight a fair game, but eliminated people like insects, with gas that was banned by the Geneva Convention. I thought of the Eritrean and Somali women forced to sell themselves (if they weren’t victims of rape already) to an Italian master. I thought of the concentration camps, like the one in Danane, where people passed the remainder of their lives between beatings and hunger. I thought of the headless, hanged, violated bodies. And there, exactly where the cypress stands now, Italy celebrated the triumph of that barbarism. Mussolini, wanting to crown his African empire with a rhetorical flourish, made Piazza di Porta Capena the center of his imperial liturgy.

After one of the most wretched and devious wars, Mussolini added Ethiopia to the African colonies of Libya, Eritrea and Somalia. And a year after that conquest he ordered an obelisk to be brought from the city of Axum in Ethiopia, and reassembled in the middle of the piazza. In the same way that Augustus filled Rome with obelisks pillaged from the lands of Egypt, Mussolini – in imitation – brought back an obelisk as booty. That was where his vaudevillian power lay.

In that vile imitation. In that imperial mockery that swiftly drove the country to ruin. And then post-war Italy would spend a lifetime returning their ill-gotten gains to Ethiopia. Now the obelisk is in Axum, with its Ethiopian sisters. But what remains of that passage of history in Piazza di Porta Capena? Only emptiness, silence, absence, oblivion and amnesia dressed in an Italian salsa.

Nothing makes any sense to me.

Is it possible that I am standing on that strange tangle of history now?

Gianni Alemanno had talked of a “silent call against all intolerance.” He said those words of such paradoxical taste exactly where I am standing, with the cypress right behind him. But the biggest intolerance of all was the emptiness and silence around the painful history that linked Italy with Libya, Somalia, Eritrea and Ethiopia. Is it possible that he could’ve said such pretentious words about memory while forgetting all the barbarities committed by Italy against other peoples? Fascist violence devastated Africa. But my Rome, my matriarch, preferred to ignore that Africa was part of her, the very same Africa that is resurfacing on her streets and in her buildings, in our faces and dark eyes. She preferred to ignore it, Rome. Why dredge up those ugly stories? Why don’t we dwell on the tragedies of others instead? September 11^th was the perfect way to forget. It is something close, but ultimately distant. Something that doesn’t threaten to shake the foundations of Rome. That doesn’t make you delve deep into your errors, regurgitate your disgrace.

Italiani brava gente. Many people still believe in that myth. “We were better than the French were with our colonies,” said a woman from Le Marche at the bus stop a few days ago. “We built you loads of things. Schools, bridges, hospitals, roads. It was you with all your wars who didn’t look after everything we gave you.” What? I wanted to scream. How dare she? But the woman had a placid tone. She said everything with lightness. She was convinced of every word she said, convinced and proud. “My father was a mechanic in Asmara and Mogadishu. He used to sing me a song about you black women.”

It was raining and I was waiting for a friend. But I needed to leave. The woman would soon be singing me that dance-hall song I couldn’t bear to hear. I didn’t know if I could endure it, if I’d be able to digest the pseudo-fascist dirge before lunchtime. But it was raining and there was still no sight of my friend, damnit! But I just didn’t feel like leaving the comfortable awning outside the bookshop. It really wasn’t a bad place to wait and shelter from the downpour. “Let’s just hope she doesn’t sing,” I murmured to myself. But then she sang, and she was even reasonably in tune.

The dark girl selling bananas of Mogadishu, Mogadishu,
 Hears that boy and feels so cheerful, so cheerful, 
 Because she likes him, because she likes him. 
 If only she knew his wondrous tongue, 
 She’d say Oh exotic sailor boy, 
 I want to love you, I want to love you.

The song, the woman from Le Marche explained, was by Sergio Bruni and her father used to sing it to her as a lullaby. I thought of all the Italians who shared the same stories as that woman from Le Marche. Sometimes it was their fathers who had been to Africa, sometimes their grandfathers.

My friend F once showed me a photo of a fifteen-year-old girl. She was a Libyan girl covered in beads and had a childlike look in her eyes. “She was my grandfather’s girlfriend in the colonies.” My friend is a sensitive woman. She was ashamed of this episode from the life of a grandfather she had loved deeply. Her eyes asked, “But how could he?” I turned F’s photo over in my hands. And then I read what her grandfather had written on the back:

This is Kibra, a nice Aroche girl 15 years old my first sweet conquest and passion. Are you laughing? Peppino Elfoihut, Benghazi 14/01/1936 XIV.

The grandfather’s intention was to be funny. I wasn’t laughing.

I looked at the girl, Kibra’s, face. She was small. She looked younger than fifteen. She was naked and adorned with some horrid exotic trinkets. She looked like a little Christmas tree without leaves. A tree whose shiny decorations still hung from her now dry branches. In the girl’s eyes there was a mixture of shame and pride. But just behind her pupils you could make out a flash of daring. “I exist and I am not inferior to anyone,” Elfoihut’s little girl seemed to be telling us.

I exist and I am.

I am and I exist.

I thought of the woman from Le Marche and of her patriotism. She had never been made to look into the eyes of a Kibra, the eyes of somebody who had been subjugated, but was determined not to die a slave. How little of the truth had been told to the Italians, I thought. How little of the truth they sought… Italians preferred to forget, to erase… It was easier that way. But Kibra, with her eyes and her pain, was there to summon the guilty conscience of a country that has a lot of growing up to do.

The Ethiopian War happened, and I will not forget that, the climax of approval of Benito Mussolini’s regime. The pathological obsession with Africa was not only the fruit of Fascism: there was total continuity between Fascist Italy and the liberal age when it came to the hunger for colonies. Italy was fiercely present in Africa. But now? It’s all forgotten. All of it. My thoughts jump to the notebooks with maps of East Africa on their covers that kids, very young Balilla kids, used to carry in their schoolbags in the 1930s. I thought of the Luce newsreels that familiarized Italians with cities like Adwa, Mekelle, Asmara, Merca and Mogadishu. I thought of the Games of the Goose, the EIAR news reports, the propaganda, Mussolini’s pompous discourses “on the fatal hills of Rome.”[1] I thought of how much the colonial apparatus penetrated the fabric of daily life on the peninsula. Then, once Fascism was finished, that whole history was locked away in a box. Forgotten.

Of course there were those who were nostalgic, those who wanted to return to Africa as masters. Those who wrote memoirs. But the vast majority of the Italian populace forgot they had ever had anything to do with Africa and Africans. But then, in the seventies, people from those ex colonies started coming to live in Italy. Women from Asmara, gentlemen from Mogadishu, rebels from Addis Ababa. Rome started to become a part of the Horn of Africa. And still today they keep coming from East Africa. The ships that arrive at Lampedusa, Catania, Ragusa are always full of Somalis fleeing the war and Eritreans escaping a dictatorship that is one of the fiercest in the world. On October 3^rd, 2013 the Mediterranean devoured 369 Eritreans; women, children, young men. All the dreams of those shipwrecked people were washed away in that cold and hostile sea. But not one big newspaper wrote “those boys, those girls, those children are ours.” The historical link between Italy and Eritrea was not acknowledged, not recognized. In confronting this enormous tragedy Italy declared no responsibility towards Eritrea. The whole thing was silenced, forgotten, removed. And if the asylum seekers from Somalia and Eritrea are aware of this connection, Italy doesn’t want to hear it.

The real truth of Piazza di Porta Capena is that it exemplifies Italy’s inability to assume responsibility, to make a sincere pact of memory. Erecting a monument there for September 11^th, without putting beside it a memorial for the victims of the nasty, ugly, dirty Italian colonialism, screams guilt and cowardice. The reality is that in Italy the apparatus of colonial racism has never been dismantled. The xenophobic theses stated by self-styled Fascist anthropologists in the 1930s Race Manifesto are still circulating in Italian society today. Nobody has defused this diseased machinery. Italy has gone through no process of de-fascisization like Germany. Italy has not dealt with its colonial past and its immense guilt. It has chosen instead to bury its head in the sand like an ostrich. But the xenophobic apparatus is ready to fire up at any time. In fact it already has. As Paola Tabet reminds us in La pelle giusta (The Right Skin):

A car engine can be switched off, can be in neutral, can rev at 5000 rpm. But even when the engine is off it remains a coordinated whole, the elements tuned and interconnected and, provided it is in good condition, it is ready to move off whenever the engine is started. The system of racist thought that is part of Italian society is like this engine: it is constructed, well-tuned and not always in motion or driving at maximum speed. Its hum can be almost imperceptible, like a good engine in neutral. At the right moment, in a moment of crisis, it can move away. In any case, in different ways and to various extents, it consumes information, materials, and lives.[2]

In a moment of crisis, Paola Tabet says; like the one we find ourselves in now. A financial, moral, human crisis in Italy. We struggle to make ends meet and hate is rampant. So if somebody has a different colored skin or a different religion from the “norm”, he becomes the perfect sacrificial victim. The lamb of Christ sacrificed to the hate of the world. Tragically it happened to Samb Modou and Diop Mor in Florence. The Senegalese men were killed by an extreme-right sympathizer just for being black, just for being migrants. It is in moments of crisis that bygone ghosts emerge with their arsenal of racism and anti-Semitism. And this is why Faccetta nera is vomited out of ringing phones, and the threat of a holocaust is no longer so remote. A specter is roaming Europe … and it is not the specter of Marxist memory… This specter is adorned with the swastikas and fasces of a history we never want to see slither its way back into Europe. But oh how it slithers regardless. Hissing wickedness, the neo-Nazi and neo-fascist right is growing on the continent. In Hungary, Poland, Greece, Denmark and Italy … here in Rome.

But there is another Europe, a Europe that rides bicycles, that is made up of thousands of colors, that believes in multiple worlds. And that is the Europe that could blossom in places like Piazza di Porta Capena. The piazza is empty now, stripped of meaning. But what if we filled it?

I walk, I need to think…

One foot after the other, one thought after the other. How would we fill it?

There was an interesting experiment in Berlin. They tried to construct an idea of a city and a continent in an image that was different from the dominant one. Pantelis Pavlakidis and Maria Hoffmann (with the collaboration of the NGO Postkolonial) organized guided tours in the Wedding neighborhood to explore the traces of forgotten German colonialism in the area and the popular imagination.[3] The neighborhood of Wedding is called the African Quarter because the streets have African names, like Togostraße and Kamerunstraße. Through tours and history the project aims to educate the neighborhood’s inhabitants, school students and citizenry towards an anti-racist society. The project organizers wanted to highlight that migration is not a coincidence, but is linked to a violent imperial history that continues to this day.

Africa is still the most exploited continent on the planet. Petroleum, coltan, diamonds, and a low-cost workforce are continually extracted from Africa. Colonialism is fundamental to making Europe understand its errors and use them to try to reconstruct itself differently. Not in hegemony, but in mutual respect and collective story telling.

Rome also has an African quarter: Viale Somalia, Viale Libia, Via Dire Dauda, Via Migiurtinia, Via Tripoli, Piazza Amba Alagi, Viale Etiopia, Via Cirenaica, Via Tigré. Rome could also run guided tours like the German ones. But it would be good to go even further.

I walk. I’m anxious.

Unbearable news spreads through the ether. At Ponte Galeria some migrants have sewn their lips together in protest against heinous detention in CIEs. It is an extreme hunger strike. A mute shout, deafening. The CIEs are lagers in the middle of our cities. But the institutions deny it, and the media minimizes it.

As the writer Erri De Luca wrote in an enlightening tweet:

Mouths sewn up with needle and wire in the pigsty lagers: this news will make the pages of History. Our vileness will be studied.

To forget the history that links Africa and Italy is also vile. Because by forgetting we forget that we were vile, racist, colonialist. Italiani brava gente, the most self-absolving tell you, and therefore the same mistakes continue to be made.

Yesterday it was the colonized, today it is the migrants, victims of a system that self-generates and self-absolves. This is why I am obsessed with places. It is from places that we must begin a different journey, a different Italy.

I am a child of the Horn of Africa and a child of Italy. I was born here and I owe that to this history of pain, passage and contamination. I cannot forget this history. I don’t want to forget it. And that is why, perhaps, in my own way, I am telling it.

And that is why, perhaps, I walk.

[1] Translator’s note: Balilla was a Fascist Youth Organization operating in Italy from 1926 to 1937. Luce is the historic Italian film institute. EIAR was the Fascist Italian public service broadcaster.

[2] Paola Tabet (1997), La pelle giusta, Einaudi, Turin, p. V.

[3] http://www.berlin-postkolonial.de/cms/.

Arts & Culture, Essays, The Litro Blog

Dear Pandemic (from the Dystopian Letters)

by AUDREY SHIPP • April 7, 2020April 17, 2020

Dear Pandemic:

We could ill afford better circumstances than this attic to stow away and try to ride it out and hide it out from your viral encumbrances sweeping across U.S. North America. The darkness in the upper level of this edifice are yet a reflection of ourselves with each one of us maintaining a distance of several feet to avoid infecting the one to the other. The sloping wood of the attic ceiling forms a triangle above the large rectangular wooden floor, and the flickering screens stand in the middle throwing shadows against the walls. When the faulty wi-fi adjusts, the screens offer statistics of various sorts – how many millions infected, how many dead, and not just here in the States but around the world. Around the world is indeed how you would have it. Not content to stay in one place, you have devastated Europe, Asia, the impoverished of Africa and Latin America, and now us.

Thankfully, in the attic we can escape the medical police who scour the streets for the seemingly sick and administer the tests. If we test positive, we will be segregated in the large tents with their rows of cots where we are forced to lie out our last days amongst the coughing and wheezing of the similarly sick. We will be trapped by our own pneumonic lungs, in the sweaty hospital gowns, until we hopefully recover or are covered in a makeshift body bag and loaded on the trailer trucks.

Except for the exhausted healthcare workers, everything has ceased. The hands of Southeast Asia have stopped sewing our clothes and making our shoes. The African children mining for cobalt have put away their trowels, and the car and phone batteries that depend on these chemical elements can no longer be assembled in North America or Japan. The laborers in car manufacturing in Latin America are sheltered as the ships that import car parts drift at sea.

Everything is closed. The offices that tower to the sky in the skyscrapers, the schools, churches, restaurants, theaters, public gathering places of all sorts. The stores that allowed us to window shop and buy filling our closets and chest of drawers to the point of bloating are now shuttered. Shut tight. The airports are vacant vestiges of international possibility.

The attic protects us from the debt police. We owe our entire futures to college loans, credit cards, car notes, and late payments for the apartments and houses we long ago abandoned. Utility bills. Balance, fees, interest. If caught, the debt police grip their clubs to hammer and humiliate us in the street, shouting to remind us that we owe the fortunate not forced to lie on the cots in the makeshift hospital tents.

The screens flicker and fade offering national and world stats on the ill and dead. We hover, incapacitated, each in a corner, maintaining our distance so your death doesn’t spread. The stats recall the consequences of Pandemics 1918 and 2020. But just as we look on, we likewise look away and attempt to forget. Forget the numbers, forget our hunger, forget the possibilities.

-Audrey Shipp

Separation

by Derek Ivan Webster • April 5, 2020April 5, 2020 • 1 Comment

He lit the second candle. It added no more warmth or light to the room than the first. Weak orange licks of flame could not reach the blackness that hung outside the windows. The glass of wine stood, filled, near the center of the table. Its swollen redness defied the clean white tablecloth. Atop a simple silver platter, the braided loaf of bread remained untouched.

He occupied the chair at the head of the table. Or perhaps the tail. There were three other seats spread around the oval, all empty. He hissed in pain and the match dropped from his fingertips. Its tiny smolder quickly gave up atop the muslin. The fingers went to the bridge of his nose. This provided a warmth between his eyes that dulled the pain. His other hand reached out for the book at his elbow. One hand on the cracked leather binding, his lips parted. No words came out.

“Is this really necessary?” came a voice from across the table. “We already get it. No reason to beat the horse to death.”

He left his eyes closed, not wanting to dispel the voice. “Beat a dead horse,” he corrected quietly.

“Stop being pedantic. You know what I mean.”

“To beat a horse to death would imply a destructive intention.” His voice solidified; the engagement of a practiced lecture. “To beat a dead horse is to carry forward despite an intention already being achieved.”

“Fine. Then remind us of your intention for tonight.” The voice was pleasant, if a bit fragile at the edge. He couldn’t tell if the playful note was genuine or a compensation for vulnerability.

“It’s our havdalah. The reconnecting of the threads of our week after a day of separation. The chance to enter the week renewed, restored, made new and prepared for another opportunity at life.”

Silence from the other side of the table.

“You disagree.” The question trailed into a familiar acceptance.

“This isn’t how I taught it to you. There’s only supposed to be one candle, two colors braided to make a single flame.”

He nodded. Two separate candles had felt more honest this time. “Since when are you a stickler for details?”

“I learned from the best.” She chuckled, and the candlelight flickered against his eyelids. He was tempted to look then, to remind himself what wasn’t there. Maybe what had never been. He was not brave enough to prove the moment. Not yet.

“You haven’t set the table.” She sounded disappointed. More likely she was baiting him. “Didn’t you think that we would come?”

“I didn’t know,” he answered honestly. He had hoped for something tonight though he would have had a hard time explaining exactly what.

“Did you at least prepare a meal?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Enough for everyone?”

His lids tightened involuntarily and the world darkened around him. “I only hear your voice.”

“And whose fault is that?”

His eyes snapped open, momentarily blinded by the twin points of fire. The candles were shorter now, half consumed. The table remained empty: both the facing chair and the seats to either side. He reached out and took up the brimming cup of wine, carefully lifting it toward his lips.

“Blessed are you, oh Lord our God, who brings us the fruit of the vine.” There was a prayerful cadence to his words. He took a deep sip from the wine. His eyes pressed closed beneath the moment’s contentment.

“Remember the first time you let me taste the wine?” This voice was lighter, brighter, more confident. It came from the left side of the table. “Not the Manischewitz but the dry stuff you and mom keep for yourself.”

“Your lips didn’t unpucker for a month.” He smiled to himself, or maybe to her. “You said we broke your taste buds.”

“Mom blamed you the first time she caught me out drinking.”

“She was probably right. I let you get away with too much.” He shrugged. “You were a good girl though. I never forgot that.”

He could imagine her biting her lip, though he couldn’t hear it. She had always been so careful with how she spoke to him.

“I wish you hadn’t made us take sides. That wasn’t really fair.”

He swallowed the sudden weight he felt in his mouth. He wanted to take another drink. Maybe a few more. “I know,” he finally managed.

“We didn’t blame you for any of the rest. I hope you know that.” He couldn’t bring himself to respond. He didn’t know any such thing. “Sometimes I wonder though, what would have happened if you’d been with us.”

His hand trembled and he felt a wetness rush over his knuckles. He looked down to see the purple-red stain soaking into the table. He set down the cup before any more damage could be done. The vessel was nearly empty anyway. Had he spilled that much? Had he drunk more than he thought?

He pushed his own chair back and stood. Unsteady steps took him through the door to the kitchen. Everything was laid out and exposed, bathed in fluorescent white atop the stainless steel island. It was a clean kitchen; mostly testament to its recent disuse. The food was separated between heavy ceramic serving dishes. It was simple fair: grapes, a green salad, roast eggplant. Not his type of food. Not quite his family’s either, but the closest he could approximate. He picked up the dishes one at a time and set the table without any further spills.

Reseated, he took a long, loaded breath. A cleansing breath his wife might have called it. The scent was light but familiar. He reached out and lifted the canvas cloth bag to his eye level. He closed his eyes and gave voice to another song, the quiver remaining just beneath the surface.

“Blessed our you, oh Lord our God, creator of all spice.”

His fingers wrapped around the rough cloth and he could feel bits of material crushing together inside. He could smell the powerful mixture of aromas: cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, and something else he couldn’t quite place.

“It’s jasmine.” This voice was uneven and a bit hoarse. It came from the right side of the table. “You can tell from the quality of the sweetness. It’s the kind that doesn’t make you hungry.” The voice flattened awkwardly and cleared itself with a cough to regain footing. “Sometimes we would use balsam instead, especially in the winter.”

He took another deep, soulful breath. The smells were vivid, they carried with them a cascade of memories. Little fingers trying to knot the silk cord of the bag. A toothy smile failing to bite through infectious giggles. A boy sitting in the corner of the room, his face in his hands. Large, wondering brown eyes staring, lost within the glow of a single candle flame.

“That’s cool,” the voice observed. “I stopped minding when you ignored me a long time ago. A lot easier to deal with unspoken disappointment, you know. At least that never ended up with you two yelling at each other. At least not as often.”

“I loved you.” His breath was long and regular now. “It hurt me how much I loved you.”

“Maybe,” the boy’s voice allowed. “The loves that come easiest are those that draw us to ourselves.” Or was it a man’s voice now? Something in between; something becoming. “But the loves that last the longest, though much more difficult, are those that bridge the divide between the other and the self.”

“Who said that?” the man wheezed. It sounded so familiar but distant. It was as if the words echoed, trapped within an empty spot in his brain.

“I did.” The voice was definitely older now. “Or at least I might have.” It resonated with a deep and rich confidence. It was a voice you wanted to follow to the next thought. “I think I might have been a poet. Perhaps a philosopher. You and I could have spent Sunday evenings steeping tea and discussing the Republic.”

“That…” The man’s train of thought faltered. He felt detached from the logical conclusion of his feeling. There was a thing growing inside him that was too big, too dangerous to allow. “That would have been nice.”

“Can’t you see us? Sitting on the porch, pointing to the shadows we cast on the wall behind us. Laughing at how small and fragile and unavoidable our arguments had been. Appreciating how much stronger we were for overcoming that silliness, those difficulties, together.”

His fingers were clinched into fists now, he felt the cloves grinding to dust within his hand. It felt like a price to pay; a thing to be sacrificed for the sharpening line of his thoughts.

“A little harder to ignore that, I suppose.” The voice was drifting now. Its confidence remained but it seemed to be coming from farther away, from the edge of the room. “I don’t mean to be cruel. Reminding you of the things you lost. The things you were not strong enough to keep. I just wanted you to take a moment to consider what you’d had within your reach. If you’d had the patience, the kindness required.”

The voice was gone long before the echo had finished in his head. He reopened his eyes to the empty room. The eviscerated bag lay atop his open hands, clumps of spice scattered across table. He let the bag fall from his finger and lifted the dusting that remained up to his nose. The scent had changed now, it was marked with the warm tang of sweat from his hand and salt from his skin. The hand covered his face and slowly descended. He felt the smell and texture smear tracks down his cheek and lips.

He stood again and surveyed the room. All was in place: the candles burned low but would last long enough; the food looked serviceable, if not inviting; the dark reds and browns of his recent spills lent a curiosity to the scene, but nothing out of place. He held his hands out and open in front of him, facing the flickering light.

“Blessed are you, oh Lord our God, who separates between the light and the dark.” No lilt remained to his voice; there was no room for a cadence within the strain of his words. “Who separates between the holy and the profane.” He sat back down slowly and returned his face to his hands. It was only a few minutes before the light began to gutter. The wick had reached its end.

Darkness came upon him gradually. He knew the light had ceased to press atop his eyelids, but that signified little. His hearing did sharpen. He could make out the soft clicking of the mantle clock in another room. The light groan of the refrigerator came through the closed kitchen door. There were other sounds from outside but those were muted and alien, part of a separate world to which he did not yet belong.

The sound that finally caught his attention came from the far end of the table. It was a cough, or perhaps a short laugh. He opened his eyes. The darkness was not absolute. The coldest, thinnest of glows crept through the crack at the bottom of the door behind him. It was just enough to separate the room between lines of pitch and blurs of slate. No detail was left on the table, but contours of the surrounding chairs were distinguishable. As were outlines of the occupants seated there. Three guests had arrived.

He wanted to say a welcome but no longer had the courage. He wanted them to speak once more but no longer had the hope. Instead he stood and waited. It was many long hours before the dawn came to prove his eyes false. By that time he had reconciled himself, and was ready to face the world again. At least for one more week.

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Prozac and Presence

by Elias Lowe • April 4, 2020November 12, 2020

Prozac made me cisgender, I say to my therapist inside of her bright blue office-box, barely big enough to hold all of these painful jokes and thoughts.

Flashback. It’s August of 2015, well before my venture into Prozac, and I’m rolling around in my sheets in the sunlight. I live on the top floor of a disgusting old mansion with seven friends and my partner. Outside my window is Dawson Street, gritty and quiet. I’m relieved. I now know a name to put on the dissociation I have always felt from my body, and my anxiety during nudity or sex.

Soon enough, I come out as transgender. Everything, for a while, is new and embarrassing. I’m in constant confrontation with other people’s mistakes and apologies concerning my new name or pronouns. I want to tell people “it’s okay” before I even introduce myself.

People say that when you are around a calm presence, you become more calm. Similarly, when you exude anxiety, it is felt by those around you. Humans form collective emotional force fields, and our emotions travel, bouncing back and forth between bodies. We co-regulate; we share ghosts. Energies. That summer I wonder if people’s anxious reactions to me are causing my own anxiety.

But I think anxiety is innate in me. For most of my life I’ve been scared – really scared – of both material things and things that exist only inside of me. Both rational and irrational. Choking. Aneurysms. The government downloading my internet history. Heartbreak. Leukemia. Aliens. Being trans. Dementia. Climbing the steps by myself.

Serious panic used to shoot through my whole body when I climbed the steps alone. There was always someone chasing me and that someone was just as real as my own self. When I was a child, my fierce little legs would only dart, never walk, up the creaky wooden stairs of my childhood home. The walls were painted a deep, dark red ever since my stepdad moved in, and the hallways felt like intestines. The rooms were organs of an alcoholic – messy and chipping, full of love but falling apart. Now I live on the third floor of an apartment building and up until recently, I still dashed passed the ten black apartment doors, stirring up the air freshener and dust with my feet.

You are not your thoughts. You are not your thoughts, I sing to myself like a mantra, for years, as my thoughts lay siege on me. It isn’t until I’m 22 years old that I see a doctor for my mental health. The doctor talks about options for hormone treatment but that feels too big, too soon. She also says the words “Obsessive Compulsive Disorder” and refers me to a specialist not far from where I live. I never call him, but I do get a perfect little prescription bottle that I cling to tightly.

Having OCD looks many different ways on different types of people, as any diagnosis does. I understand it as an extreme version of anxiety, causing uncontrollable thoughts and sometimes manifesting in physical compulsions. It feels like being on a 90 mph Ferris wheel without a place to hop off.

Some people, foolishly, think that since I have OCD, I must be incredibly clean and hygienic. This isn’t the case at all. It does mean that for all of high school, I had the invasive image of mysterious, pale hands holding scissors in front of my eyes and cutting my eyeballs in half. I had this thought over and over. It crossed my mind so many times that somewhere along the line it stopped bothering me, and consequently my brain stopped producing it.

But I do still have repetitive, unpleasant thoughts – often less extreme than the scissors fantasy. The thoughts may be about a disease that I probably don’t actually have, or invasive images of my partner having sex with a cis-male, or images of me with the body and gender I want. This is OCD, too.

Four months after the doctor’s visit, I’m on tour with my band in an enormous yellow van in New England. I take my first pill because I feel like I’m going to break in half. I’m sick for weeks when I start Prozac. I’m heartbroken-sick and anxious-sick, and literally having-diarrhea-every-day-sick. As we drive from town to town, the traffic is awful and the scenery is hardly beautiful. We are all some form of unwell and the August heat is unbearable. The windows in the van only crack open and the air conditioning is broken like some type of cruel joke.

During the week that I’m on tour, I’m anxiously waiting for something to happen to my body or brain but I mostly feel overwhelmed and sad. Still, I meet a girl named Emily who makes me feel big feelings in Brattleboro, Vermont. Her hair is curly and brown and beautiful. She wears hiking boots in the summer. I’m obsessed with her.

She only has a flip phone because she’s skeptical of the surveillance that smartphones bring.

“It’s just not necessary for my life. I won’t invite the state to track me, to profit from each phone call,” she says, certain, calm and decisive.

We’re sitting in the kitchen of her house cooking pasta after one of my band’s shows and I watch her move around the kitchen with amazing grace. The room is dimly lit and I look down at the table when I have nothing to say. My lust for her is enormous. I lust for it all: the mountains, flip phones, the life in Brattleboro that I won’t ever live. It’s colorful. It’s overwhelming. Even this makes me obsess. I make lists in my head of how I can take a little part of this moment with me. This feeling isn’t pleasant, but it’s raw.

That was my brain before I came upon Prozac. Intrigued, amazed, loving, dramatic, hard to take care of, needing of support. Frequently dysphoric. My brain usually felt like a balloon expanding with air, getting ready to POP.

Six months later I’m biking on my way to buy wine for my friends. I feel casual like I’m sitting in an armchair on top of the world with my legs perfectly crossed. I feel graceful like Emily. I notice new things about my neighborhood. There are trees here and people with stories and lives that are not weapons. The sky is pale blue and lovingly frames the red-brick buildings like a canvas. I do not feel raw, but I feel calm enough to notice the small details of the world surrounding me. It’s pleasant.

Prozac gives me presence. It makes the little things matter so much less and the big things feel manageable. But the depth of a moment, a crisis, the feeling of dysphoria, is flattened out like a tabletop. I kiss a girl and feel nothing in my gut. I’m convinced it’s good.

For the first time ever, it feels easier to believe in myself than to not believe in myself. I introduce myself loudly and proudly. “My name is Elias, my pronouns are ‘they/them’” I say, or if I’m feeling bold: “he/him.”

On Tuesday nights that winter, I get out of my writing class and wait at the bus stop. I shiver and feel the cold. I feel my feet on the ground and then I get on the bus and feel the seat below me. I go home and I make dinner. I love doing the dishes. I spend time alone without fear. I walk, slowly, carefully up my apartment steps. I smell the weird cologne-like air-freshener in the hallway. Sometimes I’m sad, and that feels great too. I’m much less needy and everyone seems to like me more. I think, this must be how normal people feel.

When I’m on Prozac I live in my body because the alarms in my head are soft. It feels fine that I have a less than flat chest, so I hardly ever put on my chest binder. My mind is quiet and even feels feathery sometimes, brushing over me with kindness. My body doesn’t feel inadequate or brutal. I don’t obsess compulsively over being something that I’m not.

Prozac made me cisgender, I say to my therapist inside of her bright blue office-box. My therapist laughs, which is the response I hoped for, and she says, “If Prozac actually made people cisgender, they would be putting it in the water.” And I laugh too.

Prozac did not make me cisgender. I still don’t identify as a woman. I still really don’t like being called “she.” But being on Prozac showed me something terribly sad and informative: For much of my life, my transness was hopelessly bound up with my anxiety, and my anxiety was bound up in my transness.

Of course, there are one thousand reasons why transgender people are more likely to experience anxiety and depression. Systemic violence, lack of representation, physical harm, microaggressions, erasure. To say the least: Even well-intentioned people feel anxious around us, which gives us that ghostly, contagious type of anxiety.

I considered that I could be cisgender when my anxiety and OCD symptoms lessened because I did not know how to separate those two crucial parts of me out from each other. How do any of us separate mind from heart, from body? But being trans is so much more than being mentally unwell.

Being trans is complex; sometimes euphoric, sometimes calm. Being trans means waking up in the morning and putting on my favorite black jeans and turtle-neck sweater. It means singing songs with a cracky, deep voice. It means packing or binding sometimes. It means allowing myself to be feminine sometimes. It doesn’t mean I need to always be mourning what I am and what I am not.

With the help of a therapist, medication, a queer community, myself, I realize this: trans people can be happy too.

It’s August again. I’m coming back from summer travels and settling into my new bedroom. I’ve harnessed a sense of stability. I’ve been walking calmly up steps and taking my shirt off in front of other people. I’m convinced it’s good. But buildings look more like cardboard and the sun feels less like a star. That is to say, some of the aliveness of my life is gone. I never, ever orgasm anymore. I miss the desire that used to come alive in my body, as my pulse and my heart climbed mountains and dove into valleys every time someone took my clothes off. I miss how my body would react to people like Emily and new places like Brattleborro, VT.

And just like that, I decide to come off the Prozac. As a way to mark a new period of my life, I paint my bedroom lavender purple. As I sloppily move the paint roller all over the walls, I skip my first dose.

I’ve been on and off of medication since. Sometimes I feel like I absolutely need it to feel like I can function in this world. Other times, I want the colors to wash over me – the painful, strange, invasive, colors, even when they’re uncontrollable. The wonderful thing is, now I get to choose when that is, and unfortunately, and beautifully so, it doesn’t make me cisgender at all.

Art, Arts & Culture, Technology and Arts Issue

Art & Technology: Spring 2020: Editor’s letter.

by Eric Akoto • April 2, 2020October 12, 2024

Welcome to Litro’s Art and Technology issue. From the first stone tools to the industrial revolution, and now the digital revolution, technology has always shaped our world. Today, it dominates our lives in unprecedented ways. We are never without a device, always plugged in and connected. While few of us would wish to be without the wheel, antibiotics, microchips, or MRI scanners, we must also acknowledge the challenges that come with progress—stolen data, election interference, and, above all, the climate crisis.

We are living through the sixth mass extinction of species, with climate change threatening our future. But maybe technology can also be part of the cure. It is time for a green revolution, and we believe that art has a vital role to play in that journey. In this issue, we remain optimistic about technology’s potential and its intersection with art and creativity.

Writers and artists have always engaged with technology—dreaming about the future, exploring its possibilities, and sometimes warning of its dangers. This issue celebrates how contemporary creatives are continuing this tradition, using technology to tell stories in new and powerful ways.

Technology & Creativity

From Cindy Sherman’s often nightmarish manipulations on Instagram to Leonardo da Vinci’s visionary sketches of flying machines, artists have always embraced new technologies to expand their creative horizons. Today, the landscape is richer than ever—augmented reality, virtual reality, and technologically mediated experiences are opening up storytelling in extraordinary ways.

In China, the art collective Liu Dao produces striking, tech-infused works that explore modern themes with humor and interactivity. Their collaborative approach involves artists, curators, and technicians, demonstrating how technology can foster not only new artistic forms but also new ways of working together.

MoMA & The Future of Art

The reopening of MoMA in December highlighted how digital consumption has become integral to the modern art experience. Immersive installations like Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s “The Killing Machine” invite audiences to participate, blurring the lines between art, technology, and viewer engagement. This is the future of art—a dynamic, interactive conversation between the artist, the audience, and the tools of creation.

Optimism for the Future

Technology can enrich our lives and our art practices, but only if we take its challenges seriously. As we enter the era of 5G and the true Internet of Things, we remain techno-optimists, eager to explore the possibilities for art, storytelling, and human connection. Who knows—perhaps the next issue of Litro will be edited by an AI. Until then, let’s celebrate the ways technology continues to inspire and transform the arts.

Neighbor Cat

by Dev Murphy • March 3, 2020February 29, 2020

The fair is crowded. The fair is noisy. My anxiety level is skyrocketing. We wade with linked arms through farm animal stink, sweaty hicks eating chili dogs at picnic tables, kids banging squeaky inflatable hammers, a bluegrass band. I remind myself over and over – You’re touching. You’re touching. The only thing separating Carin’s skin from my skin is my polyester sleeve. I hold my breath.

“The animals are back there, I think,” Carin says, leading me forth. “Oh, God, is that lemonade? I could go for a lemonade. After we see Christian, you want to stop there?”

I nod, but she isn’t looking. A fat, greasy, smelly man gnawing on a turkey leg walks within an inch of me and I feel that entire side of my body scrunch up involuntarily until he is past – an effort at implosion, maybe.

“Oh, and we can swing by the tent with the bamboo plants.” Carin has eight lucky bamboo plants already, all from past county fairs. She inhales deeply. “You smell the funnel cakes?” I nod, but I don’t know what she’s talking about, because every time I let myself breathe I get a lungful of farm animal. Either Carin is capable of feigning enjoyment in a way I’ve never known how to do – I’m bad enough expressing enjoyment when I do feel it – or else she really is happy to be here. And either I am better at feigning enjoyment than I think, or else she’s ignoring my unease. And if she’s ignoring my unease, I’m not sure if it’s a kindness or not. It might be. If this is a date, I want her to enjoy herself. You’re touching.

She leads me past a kiddie coaster – a giant segmented crocodile – towards the animal sector, and the farm smell kicks into overdrive. Past the cows, past the sheep – we pause before a stall with a llama – an alpaca – something long-necked. A blond boy stands inside beside the creature: Christian. He’s maybe twenty-three, the same age as Carin and me, tall and rugged, with a Bible verse tattooed across his right biceps. He’s stroking the llama’s back and talking to it. Not in a baby voice, the way people do with animals, just a regular voice. I wonder what he’s doing with his life when he isn’t showing farm animals at the county fair.

“But it doesn’t matter,” he’s saying as we come nearer, “because everybody knows you’re new, so there’s no pressure – oh hi. I was just talking to Lemma.”

“Oh yeah?” Carin says. She steps up onto the bottom rung of the stall gate and leans over the top rung and crosses her arms over it. “What were you saying?”

“Telling her she doesn’t have to worry about winnin’ any prizes. She’s still fresh meat.”

“How’d Pigga do?” Carin asks.

“First place again. Fourth year in a row.” A fly is buzzing around his head. He notices me. “Hi, sorry, I don’t think I know you.”

“This is Frank,” Carin says.

“Well hello, Frank. I didn’t know you were bringing anyone, Carin.” He seems sulky.

“It was sort of spontaneous,” I mumble.

“I’ll bet: you’re wearing a button-down. You just come from the office?”

“I don’t work in an office—”

“Frank always dresses nice,” Carin says. “It’s one of his defining characteristics. Who’s Frank? The fellow who’s always dressed to the nines.” She smiles. I don’t know if she’s teasing me or not.

“Is Pigga a pig?” I say, but at the same moment Christian says, “You guys want to pet Lemma?” so nobody hears.

“Absolutely,” Carin says. She stretches her upper body forward over the gate.

“Come on over.”

Carin hops over the gate.

“I think I’ll pass,” I say.

Lemma stares at me. She has a crooked underbite.

“Aw, how come?” Carin says. She looks confused.

I shrug. “Dressed to the nines.”

“What’s that?”

“I said, dressed to the nines.”

“Oh, oh.” She’s not really paying attention anymore though. She’s turned from me, towards Lemma and Christian.

Carin sits across from me smoking her pipe, her bare feet buried in her dog Samuel’s fur. “I’ve got an affinity for things that are very ugly,” she says. She studies the painting above my head. It’s George Washington crossing the Delaware, and it’s crooked, but she won’t fix it. “Like this sweater. Isn’t it just about the ugliest thing you ever saw?”

“I think it’s nice.”

“You’re a liar.” She smirks.

I’m perched on the edge of the tattered wingback that Carin found on the side of the road. I’m not sure she properly cleaned it, but I try not to think about it. Used furniture makes me uncomfortable. I can never help thinking about what all happened on it. People getting sick, people having sex, dog pee on it, bugs infesting it. But this has become my chair. Carin even calls it that – “Frank, I didn’t know you were coming,” answering the door, pipe in fist, “Samuel’s in your chair, but I’ll kick him off.”

Carin was my older sister Jody’s college roommate. Jody said that if Carin and I met, we would repel one another.

No, she didn’t. She said that if Carin and I became friends, we would cancel each other out, a negative meeting a positive, and neither one of us would exist anymore. (I am pretty sure I was the negative in the analogy.) Then she said she was surprised I was interested. “You’re never interested in anyone, Frank.” “Can I just have her number?” “I don’t know if I feel comfortable doing that. She’d have to say it was OK. Can I ask her?” “No – just forget it.” “Frank! Frank, come back.” “Augh.” “Don’t be a baby.” “I said don’t worry about it.” “I can’t just give out people’s private phone numbers, can I? What if I gave out your number to someone you barely knew?” “I wouldn’t care.” “You of all people would freak the fuck out.” “That’s not true.” “Don’t pout, Frank. Why can’t I tell her you’re interested?” “Because then she would know I was interested.” “So what?” “Jody.”

Jody did give me Carin’s phone number. The next day.

I suspect she asked Carin for permission behind my back. I tried not to feel embarrassed about it, because Carin clearly said yes, which means she didn’t mind my wanting her number, and possibly even wanted me to have it.

That was two weeks ago. We’ve been hanging out regularly since then. I took her to the museum, and Carin said it looked like her dog had made most of the modern art. And last week I took her to a teashop. She doesn’t like tea, it turns out, but she said she had fun anyway.

We also spend time at her place.

I know why Jody thinks Carin and I don’t go together. Carin is messy. She says she’s “cluttered.” She’s messy. But she’s fun. She’s interesting. She has a tattoo of Gregory Peck on her forearm, she wears purple lipstick, she plays the marimba. And she’s brave. She told the owner of the teashop that their products were outrageously expensive, and even though she doesn’t like tea, she made a show of drinking as many free samples as she could before they asked her to leave. It was principle, she said.

Yeah, there’s a dog in my chair whenever I’m not. There’s crooked George Washington on the wall. And, below the window, a row of empty pop bottles – arranged neatly, but they clearly haven’t been washed out; some of them still have a centimeter of brown liquid in them. Some of them have bugs in them. But Carin is fun. I’ve never been with anyone fun before. I’ve never been fun before. She said she means to use the pop bottles as vases.

“Is there anything you want to do?” she asks me now. She holds out her pipe to me. “Care to try?”

From where I sit, I can see a ring of purple lipstick around the mouthpiece of the pipe. “No, thanks,” I say kindly.

There’s a silence, during which I feel embarrassed once again at coming by unannounced. Is it OK to come by a girl’s house unannounced? I can never tell. I’ve never been spontaneous. But she told me to come inside.

“Well,” she says now, “Christian asked if I would come see him at the fair today – you know Christian?”

I shake my head.

“Oh, you’ll love him. Everyone loves Christian. He’s so much fun. And he has all these animals – and he’s just, you know, a really interesting person. And he plays the guitar. We’re thinking of starting a band, with him on guitar and me on marimba.” She laughed.

I weigh my desire to spend time with Carin against my desire not to go anywhere near the county fair. “Sure, OK, yeah. Let’s go to the fair.”

Carin bought her own lemonade. I don’t know what that means. She came here to see Christian, and she would have done that whether I was here or not. This isn’t a date.

Now she’s chewing on her straw and sitting cross-legged on the ground behind a skeeball booth. She looks up at me and holds out her hand. “Do you want some lemonade?”

I’m parched, but I consider my bathroom options, and decline. (A thump – a skeeball falling into a hole. Above the general chatter and music of the fair, the player hisses, “Yessss.”)

“Oh!” Carin says now, mind already on a different path. “We can see the bunnies.”

I haven’t felt this tired in a long time. “There are bunnies?”

“Have you never been to the fair, Frank?”

“It’s … been a while.”

“C’mon, let’s go pet some bunnies.” She reaches her hand out to me – not to offer lemonade, but to ask for help up. It quickly passes through my mind, I’ll admit, that she’s just had that hand on the ground, and before she had it on the ground she had it on her lemonade cup, and before she had it on the lemonade cup the man at the lemonade stand had his hand on the lemonade cup, right after he touched the cash that Carin handed him. Not to mention she was petting a llama an hour ago. She used hand sanitizer, but still.

I grip her palm in mine and pull. Her hand is soft.

The bunnies are in a tent. It’s a big, pale, billowy tent, sixty feet tall, and there are open entrances all around, letting in air – but it’s still a tent. There are bunny cages as far as the eye can see. People are talking loudly, laughing, children swarming the cages, sticking their fingers through the holes, sticking baby carrots through the holes, the sound of the bluegrass band is filtering in from the entrance on the other end of the tent. And always, eternally, animal stench. I think the bunnies might smell worse than Lemma did. But Carin hasn’t let go of my hand since I helped her up, and I think that means this is a date.

“Look at the size of that rabbit,” she says. “Kinda freaks me out a little.”

“Yeah… I’d hate to sit on its lap for Easter.”

She doesn’t respond – just lets go of my hand and moves towards a cage of baby bunnies – and I can’t tell if she didn’t hear or just didn’t think it was funny. I make a mental note not to use that hand to handle food or touch my face.

She turns back to me, still shoulder-deep in the bunny cage. “You want to pet the bunnies?”

I try to smile. “Ah, no, not really.”

She stares at me, just like Lemma stared at me, except without the underbite. “Why not?”

“I just … don’t.”

“You don’t like animals, do you?” she says. It’s teasing, I think. But maybe some underlying frustration.

“I … do, I just—”

“Frank, it’s OK! I’m just poking fun. I’m not serious.” She smiles and turns back to the bunnies.

Christian’s an animal guy.

This isn’t a date. Or if it is, it soon won’t be.

I stand behind her, not wanting to join her but not wanting to do anything else, either. Jody says hovering is one of my pastimes.

I take a step forward – but there’s poop pellets in the cage, and the bunnies are stepping in the poop pellets and getting it stuck in their fur, and I feel my skin crawling.

“Do you maybe want to go soon?” I ask. A few feet away, some baby is screaming about something or other. Loud noises make me anxious. I clench my fists tight.

She looks at me. “But – we just got here.”

“I just thought – we saw Christian, now maybe we can – I don’t know, go do something.”

She smiles. “We are doing something. I didn’t come here just to see Christian, you know.”

This is a date.

To my right, a little girl is screaming. She’s just fallen down and gotten her dress covered in mud. “Stop crying,” her mother says. “Dirt won’t hurt.” “Duht won’t … huht,” the girl recites between sobs. “Dirt won’t hurt,” the mother says.

“Frank, look!” I whip back around, and Carin is pressing a baby rabbit into my hands. It’s nestled in my palms, leaning against my chest, looking up at me and making gnawing noises. It’s pressing its nose against my skin through my polyester shirt.

I freak the fuck out. I unscoop my hands without thinking and hold them up above my head, contaminated objects: The bunny tumbles from its perch. The muddy girl shrieks. Carin lunges forward, one hand extended, the other covering her mouth.

The bunny lands on the dirt floor with a soft pat and then doesn’t move. A small crowd has gathered, murmuring with concern. My heart’s pounding with anxiety and embarrassment. A hefty woman in red flannel – she’s working the bunny tent, I guess – pushes me aside and scoops the bunny up. “Oh my God, you killed it!” she yells at me. “What did you do to it?” The murmur of the crowd gets louder; I hear gasps.

“She put it on my shoulder,” I say. I think I’m going to have a panic attack. I don’t do well being yelled at. “Why the hell’d you put it on my shoulder?” I say to Carin. I can feel my voice rising in volume; it cracks when I say “shoulder.”

“I didn’t know you were going to freak out like that!”

“I SAID I DIDN’T WANT TO PET THE BUNNIES.”

“You’re going to pay for this rabbit,” the woman says.

“Why do you give strangers access to the rabbits in the first place?” I say desperately. But she looks like she’s about to retort, and I don’t want to get in an argument, not in front of a crowd, not in front of Carin, not at all. I reach into my wallet and pull out a receipt – it’s from the teashop the other day – and write my contact information on the back. “Here,” I say. “Email me about the rabbit. I’m so sorry.”

She snatches the receipt from me. “Now get the hell out of here.”

I turn to Carin but she’s already walking away. I weave through people to catch up to her. As I pass the muddy girl, she says to me, “You’re bad,” which almost – almost – feels worse than killing a baby bunny. “Are you OK?” I say to Carin.

She looks at me – she’s crying. “I can’t believe we killed a baby bunny!”

I don’t say anything.

“Why the hell did you freak out like that?” she says.

“Animals … are…” I don’t know how I’m ending this sentence until I end it: “dirty.”

She stares at me.

This is not a date.

I don’t see Carin for a few days. The woman from the fair has emailed me, told me I owe something like sixty bucks because the rabbit was really expensive.

I spend most of the rest of my time in the shower, thinking. Showers are my safe zones. It may have taken only several washes to feel like I’d cleansed myself of the dirt and sweat and animal filth of that day, but, of course, the blood of a baby rabbit will take longer to wash off.

I don’t tell Jody what happened. She asks, says she’s noticed my hair is always wet when she comes over and postulates that I’m taking more showers than usual, wants to know the reason, but I don’t tell her. I say, “Do you think Carin wanted to date me?”

She says, “Yeah, but I don’t know why. You’re way too germophobic. And she’s, well, very much not.”

“Yeah.”

“She’s nice, though.”

“Yeah.”

I take a walk. I’ve got new shoes – I had to buy new shoes, after the fair.

I walk towards Carin’s apartment, linger in front of the building. I debate going in. I probably shouldn’t – a spontaneous visit didn’t work well the first time I did it, and that was back when Carin still presumably liked me.

I go home.

The next day, I sit outside for a few hours, on the patio. The neighbor’s cat joins me. I’m sitting in a chair; it’s perched on the edge of the patio, eyeing me with its yellow eyes. Its long black fur is sticking out all over the place. It’s an outdoor cat. Last night, it left a dead mouse at my doorstep. This cat has had a mouse – this cat has had a dead mouse – in its mouth. And now it’s staring at me. Carin would say that Samuel liked me because I never touched him; apparently, not paying him enough attention made him crave my attention all the more.

The neighbor cat comes closer.

I hold my breath, and lower my hand towards the ground.

The cat comes closer.

The cat licks my hand. The cat licks my hand with its dead-mouse-licking tongue.

My body tenses and I feel like I’m going to implode. The cat slinks away.

I go inside and take a shower.

Then I go and buy flowers for Carin, to put in her pop bottles.

TuesdayTales

creative non-fiction essay Essays Online Exclusives

Coming of Age on a Day of Rage

by Mara Cohen • February 29, 2020November 12, 2020 • 1 Comment

August 12, 2017. My husband pulled out his cell phone for the first time that day and began reading the news alert that flashed across its screen. “Something’s happened in Virginia,” he said.

My body tensed. “Oh, don’t tell me,” I sighed warily.

We’d just come home from our daughter Jacqueline’s bat mitzvah ceremony at our synagogue in Los Angeles. Seeing my own child carry the Torah, chant Hebrew from the ancient text and deliver her commentary on the week’s passages had me walking on air. I didn’t want the latest heartbreaking headline pulling me down.

Jacqueline was resting in her bedroom before the blowout party planned for that night. I was about to do the same as my husband continued reading aloud, “Witnesses described bodies flying into the air as the driver of a Dodge Challenger rammed—”

My hand shot up like a traffic cop’s. “Stop right there!” I yelped, lest visions of carnage taint my experience of our daughter’s special day.

My husband kept the bad news to himself.

Hundreds of white supremacists and neo-Nazis slithered out from dark corners of the Internet for “Unite the Right” in Charlottesville, Virginia. Emboldened by a sympathetic White House, they came from across the country to protest the removal of Confederate monuments in dozens of localities nationwide – including the planned removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee in Emancipation Park, formerly Lee Park – a renaming the protesters detested, as well.

Of course, Unite the Right was about more than saving statues and preserving antiquated park names. The rally was the IRL debut for the racist activists, misogynists and trolls who comprise the far-right subculture known as “alt-right” – a coming out party to save “white identity.”

A bat mitzvah is sometimes likened to a “sweet sixteen” or quinceanera, but a girl doesn’t have a bat mitzvah so much as she becomes a bat mitzvah: a morally responsible member of the larger community. Bat mitzvah literally means “daughter of the commandment.” Inspired by Jewish notions of chessed (kindness) and tikkun olam (world repair), community service has become a popular way to mark the rite of passage.

Jacqueline and I had batted around ideas for a “mitzvah project.” A number of laudable volunteer efforts – after-school tutoring programs, park cleanups – seemed somehow less urgent with Donald Trump in the White House slashing immigration to its lowest levels in a generation and making life miserable for undocumented immigrants. Fear of a ramped-up federal deportation machine was palpable in our home of Southern California – the biggest concentration of unauthorized immigrants in the country.

Jacqueline decided she’d be a friendly face for a nine-year-old from El Salvador whose legal status in the U.S. was in limbo. During meetings when the girl’s mother conferred with pro-bono attorneys, Jacqueline offered smiles and candies to lighten the mood as the lawyers’ questions touched on memories the girl had tried to forget. The girl’s mother quietly described the brutality of life under gang rule in their hometown in El Salvador, the violence that had taken the life of the girl’s father and the atrocities awaiting the girl should the U.S. government force her return. That’s when Jacqueline kept her young friend entertained with amusing SnapChat filters.

During our drives home, Jacqueline laid out a rationale of why her new companion would be an asset for the United States – perfect English, awarded “citizen of the month,” an “A” in fourth grade math. “Did you notice she wouldn’t eat the banana I brought her? She said she was saving it for later because she didn’t want to be greedy.”

250 young white men marched in a torchlight procession onto the University of Virginia campus, shouting Nazi slogans: “Blood and Soil!” “Jews will not replace us!” Their rally was a surprise Friday night kickoff to Unite the Right.

The procession ended at a sculpture of Thomas Jefferson, the university’s founder, where an interracial group of thirty university students had hastily assembled and linked arms in a show of solidarity against racism. The marchers encircled the statue and the students, mocking them with monkey sounds and shouting, “White Lives Matter!” Some threw lit torches at the sculpture and at the students. There were shoves and punches and chemical irritants sprayed. Other than a solitary campus police officer, law enforcement was nowhere to be seen during the torchlight march nor for several minutes after the skirmish started.

The injured attended to one another until emergency personnel arrived.

That evening, before her bat mitzvah, I took Jacqueline out for frozen yogurt.

The animating purpose of Unite the Right was defending the legacy of the Confederacy and asserting white supremacy, but the marchers were also obsessed with Jews. The same twisted ideology they use to justify looking down on other races and groups leads them to view Jews as the masterminds behind a conspiracy to bring immigrants into the country and destroy the white race.

By this logic, it made perfect sense for men who’d come to rally against the removal of General Lee’s statue to assemble across the street from Charlottesville’s Congregation Beth Israel during Saturday morning prayer services, dressed in fatigues and toting semi-automatic rifles. Alerted that Nazi websites had posted calls to burn the building, congregants exited through the back, taking their Torah scrolls with them.

That was just about when I was sipping my coffee and scrolling through my phone. It didn’t occur to me to check if neo-Nazi Pepe the Frog memes were trending, nor did I check the headlines. Instead I pulled up “Prayer-eoke” on YouTube to practice once more the prayers my husband and I would chant during Jacqueline’s ceremony.

Songs and prayers rang out in Emancipation Park where an interfaith, interracial group of clergy and civil rights activists had gathered ahead of the scheduled noon rally. “This little light of mine,” they sang.

“Our blood! Our soil!” white nationalists roared back. They streamed into the park waving Confederate or swastika flags and posters declaring, “Jewish media is going down” or “Jews are Satan’s children.” Some protesters wore red baseball caps emblazoned with the Trump/Pence campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.” Some wore body armor or camouflage fatigues and brandished shields, metal poles, wooden clubs, handguns or assault rifles. Estimates put their number at 500.

Sunlight bathed the chapel as the bat mitzvah services began. Jacqueline’s friends, some of whom had never set foot in synagogue, followed along in the prayer books and sang the Hebrew transliterations.

Their voices raised together made me feel like I was floating two inches above my chair: “May the One Who makes peace, bring peace down, bring peace down.” I visualized this wish for peace radiating from my heart, out to my daughter seated beside me, to everyone in the chapel, out beyond the walls of the synagogue – loving-kindness enveloping the world.

Over 1,000 counter-protestors were converging on the park, including local residents, church groups, civil rights leaders, and anti-fascists. Gun-toting militias and young men in helmets and boots were spoiling for trouble. Metal barricades erected around the park were coming down. Brawls were breaking out. Fury was building.

My heart leapt as the congregation sang, “Ku-mah Adonai,” – Arise, G-d – my family’s cue to join the rabbi on the pulpit and form a row for the customary passing of the Torah. I planted myself in my patent leather pumps and braced the scroll against my shoulder as I took it from my mother. I felt the weight of it in my arms, the weight of generations of my family gone and generations to come, the continuity of the Jewish faith for thousands of years, before entrusting the Torah to my daughter.

Two dozen anti-fascists attempted to block access to the park. White nationalists charged the line, throwing punches, swinging sticks, spraying chemicals. Virginia State police and Charlottesville police stationed around the park made no move to break up the fights.

Celebrants surged toward Jacqueline as she carried the Torah briskly through the aisles of the chapel. They beamed and waved and offered congratulations. Her friends called out, “Good job!” and “Good luck!” Some who were Jewish kissed their prayer books or prayer shawls before touching them to the velvet shrouded scroll.

Three hours after people had begun arriving at Emancipation Park, Virginia State Police declared the gathering an unlawful assembly. Officers pushed the white rights protesters out of the park and onto surrounding streets where they made their way to McIntire Park, a mile away.

“This city is run by Jewish communists and criminal niggers,” one demonstrator complained to a reporter.

A Klansman leaving Emancipation Park drew his pistol, aimed into a crowd of counter-protesters then quickly lowered his arm to fire at the ground, inches from a black counter-protester.

Nearby, six white supremacists cornered DeAndre Harris in a parking garage next to Charlottesville police headquarters. With poles, metal pipes and wood slabs, they proceeded to beat him within inches of his life.

Jacqueline chanted in Hebrew from the scroll unfurled before her on the pulpit:

Remember the long way that the Eternal your God has made you travel in the wilderness these past forty years, in order to test you by hardships to learn what was in your hearts: whether you would keep the divine commandments or not.

At our daughter’s silvery voice, my husband looked at me and smiled.

“Fuck you, nigger! Go the fuck back to Africa,” a marcher screamed at a black woman. “Dylan Roof was a hero!” his companion joined in.

Jacqueline reminded the congregation that in Eikev, the week’s Torah portion from Deuteronomy, Moses enjoined the Israelites to “walk in God’s path,” to care for the widow and the orphan, to love the stranger.

“Unlike the Israelites, I haven’t walked through the desert,” Jacqueline told a rapt congregation… I’m grateful to be an American. The right thing to do with my privilege is to help others who don’t have the same advantages as me.”

Jacqueline described the girl from El Salvador she’d befriended through her community service, one of thousands of “kids my age and younger who fled their homes because they were being recruited into gangs or forced into prostitution. They are victims of rape and assault, witnesses to murder and unspeakable violence.” Jacqueline explained how instead of welcoming these children as refugees, our government has made it a priority to deport these kids. “Is this caring for the orphan? Is this loving the stranger? Is this who President Trump wants to keep out with his border wall?”

“One people! One nation! End immigration!” chanted alt-right marchers through the streets of Charlottesville, along with other anti-Semitic, racist and anti-immigrant slogans.

I stood with Jacqueline before the congregation. She was radiant and fresh in her flowered dress. Gone was my chubby-faced toddler. I marveled at the accomplished, long-legged beauty who’d taken her place.

I felt the same amazement I had moments after her birth, the first time we’d gazed at one another, as I held her hand and recited the special blessings I’d composed for the occasion. “May your heart be open, may your life be filled with love, and may you know that you are loved. May you find inspiration everywhere and experience many moments of awe. And may you use your gifts to spread kindness, wisdom and joy so the world is better because of you.”

Minutes before noon, a hard core of about 100 alt-right protesters who’d reconvened in McIntire Park to hear scheduled speakers were informed Virginia’s governor had declared a statewide emergency. The rally was off.

On a pedestrian mall four blocks from Emancipation Park, counter-protesters were celebrating the decision. A silver Dodge Charger idled at the intersection. Next came the rev of an engine, tires squealing, a car accelerating through the throng. The driver, James Alex Fields Junior, a twenty-year old Nazi sympathizer from Ohio, then threw his car into reverse, plowing through more people before fleeing the scene. “This is what terrorists do!” screamed a bystander as he pleaded with a police officer for help. Nineteen people were critically injured in the attack. 32-year old Charlottesville resident Heather Heyer was killed.

Hours later, Jacqueline’s party got underway. By that time, social media was flooded with images of a black man savagely beaten, people mowed down by a car used as a deadly weapon and a president refusing to single out white supremacists and Nazis – instead insisting there’d been violence “on many sides.”

I was likely one of the only people in that ballroom that night, a good number of the teens included, who didn’t already know about Charlottesville’s day of rage and hate.

“He’d said he was going to an ‘alright’ rally,” James Fields’s mother stammered when reporters tracked her down at her home and informed her of what her son had done with his car. “I thought it had something to do with Trump.”

Jacqueline and her friends crowded onto the dance floor under a sparkling chandelier. Composed of mostly thirteen-year-old girls and a smattering of boys, they formed a beautiful mosaic of ethnicity and hue. The adults dancing were gay and straight, immigrants and native-born, of various religions or none at all. In ballerina flats, Chuck Taylors and high heeled sandals, all of us danced with abandon and sang along at the top of our lungs to Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito.” The DJ kept the party rolling. Even the catering staff seemed to be having a wonderful time.

The day after the rally, the alt-right website Daily Stormer called on its “troll army” to disrupt funeral services for Heather Heyer. “What’s the location of the fat skank’s funeral”? read the post. “I want to get people on the ground there.”

Heyer joined a growing list of victims claimed by alt-right violence, attacks that spiked since Trump’s election. Hate groups have also proliferated, including neo-Nazi, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant groups. For the first time ever, groups tracking right wing extremism have added male supremacy groups to the list. As disaffected white men interact in-person and anonymously online, calls for radical individual action will likely incite more violence.

I’m proud of my daughter’s social conscience. Still, part of me worries that instead of encouraging her to stand up for her beliefs, to practice her religion, to celebrate her life – I should warn her to keep her head down.

The story of my first love

by Dimi • February 23, 2020February 29, 2020

I first saw her at a book burning. It was her eyes. That wild orange they reflected. She had this mischievous half-smile, as if she was doing something naughty. I guess book burnings awaken the child in all of us. Just like with snow, you become someone else, playful, carefree. You can finally relax and enjoy the moment. I was in that mood too, otherwise I’d never find the courage to decide to talk to her. Before I realised it I was walking towards her through the floating black soot. It was a beautiful moment, just like a movie. I stood next to her and checked the badges on her arm to make sure we were compatible. Same social class, education, health, race and targets. Alright! It was fate! The only concern was the black dot tattoo on her wrist that meant there was a traitor in her family. I shouldn’t judge her for that though, I thought. I was not raised to be biased. I should get to know her first.

“Hey,” I said. “Nice fire, huh?” It was not the smartest thing to say, I know. I realised it straight away, so I carried on immediately. “Are you new around here? I haven’t seen you before.”

She looked at me, then at my arm badges, then back to me and smiled.

“We just moved here a few days ago. I’m Lillian.”

“Great name,” I said. “First Lilian I ever met. I’m just Tom. Boring, I know. So I guess we’ll be neighbours? Umm, wanna go eat something after this? Fires make me hungry. And I’ll tell you all about the ’hood.”

She gave me a big smile and nodded. I watched her as she threw books in the fire and cheered. I blew a flying black page on her and she laughed. Very soon, we were giggling and making funny faces as if we had known each other for ages. There was some flirting too, some touching. I picked up small pieces of burned paper from her gorgeous blonde hair and she held on my arm when the excited crowd pushed us (I made sure to flex my muscles every time). When we got bored of it we walked to a nearby fast food restaurant and ordered cheeseburgers, fries and soft drinks. I paid for all of it with my newly installed wrist chip. I have to admit I was totally showing off and it worked big time.

“Whoa,” she said. “You have your own chip? How old are you?”

“Just turned sixteen,” I said casually. “You? Not too young, I hope, I don’t want to get in trouble!”

“Nah, don’t worry, I’m fifteen. And three months. I’m sooo jealous. I can’t wait to have my own pay chip. It’s not fair! We have every right to buy stuff, no matter how young we are. I mean if we can go to war and die for our country why not also support its economy while we’re here?”

“Totally. They do say they’ll lower the chip age again though and we’ll get to take loans younger.”

“That’d be nice,” she said. “But by the time it will go through parliament I’ll be 16 anyway. That’s politics for you!” She nibbled the edge of a pickle like a rabbit and I laughed. It was so easy to talk to her. We moved from silly to serious topics and back to silly again just like that. I was excited and didn’t even try to hide it from her. We talked about movies, music, everything. She loved all the things I loved. Same bands, same comedians, same generals, same TV shows. We almost shrieked with excitement every time we discovered another thing we had in common. The bond was real. I couldn’t go on without knowing about the black dot. So I asked.

She took the straw out of her cup and wrapped it around her finger nervously, trying to find the right words. She knew I had every right to know. People like her are supposed to explain to anyone who asks.

“Actually,” she said, “that’s why we moved away and came here. To get away from the stigma. The dot is for my father. He was the traitor. It was a terrible thing. Don’t worry, he’s been executed. Long story that I’ll tell you some other time. Just rest assured that I wear it with pride. I want to prove I’m nothing like him.”

“Oh, I know,” I said, “don’t worry. Traitors’ families often make the best patriots because they have so much to compensate for.”

“Exactly,” she said. “Thanks for being so cool. Some people are weird about this.”

“Yeah, well, those people are old farts and who cares what they say. Our generation is more progressive.”

I held her hand over the table and she smiled with relief. We talked a bit more. I wanted to lighten the mood so I told her about the cool spots in the area, the square with the fountain, the cute cafes, the Youth Cadets centre, the rally grounds, the vintage cinema, the forced-labour camp, and so on, and offered to take her to all of them. We would probably stay at that table all night like that if it wasn’t for the curfew. I walked her home, a cute little terraced house newly marked as a nine-member household. Her mother should be proud, helping out her race with the right amount of children, despite the traitor husband of hers. “She’s still young,” Lillian explained, showing me the family sign, “she can have more kids when she marries someone else, which will be sooner rather than later. Many eligible widowers out there.”

She leaned towards me as if to kiss me on the cheek for goodbye but then changed her mind. It was too soon, I understood. But she gave me this long and meaningful look that made my insides tickle. Then she turned around and walked in. I waved stupidly at the closed door, in case she saw me from the camera.

I ran all the way home because I was a bit late to find my mum waiting for me at the entrance.

“I’m sorry!” I said, preparing for a fight. “Come on! I’m never late. And you know what? I met a girl. So there.”

To my surprise, my mum smiled. She didn’t look worried, just amused.

“I know, you silly-goose. I saw it all on CCTV. It made me happy. She’s really pretty. You look cute together!”

“Ha! I knew it! We’re made for each other! It’s gonna happen, you know. And then we’ll be the best couple in school. Thanks, Mum!” I gave her a quick hug and ran to my room to think about my new love in privacy.

I invited Lillian to the cinema two days later. I agreed to see some boring romantic comedy but I was rewarded because she rested her head on my shoulder and half way through the movie we were already kissing. It was awesome! I mean, I had kissed girls before – it’s not like I was a complete virgin or anything – but this was by far the most beautiful girl I had ever kissed. I wished my classmates were watching us on the cinema’s CCTV, they’d be all dying from envy.

We still had two weeks until school but by that time we were seriously in love. We even went to declare our relationship to the authorities together. I mean, how romantic is that! It was the first time for both of us, so we kept looking at the forms giggling while the administrator rolled his eyes. The permit took a full week to come back but hey, bureaucracy eventually works!

At school we quickly became the most popular couple, as predicted. We were the first to be invited to everything, parties, book burnings, excursions, public executions. If we didn’t go, nobody else would. It felt good. I can tell you now, whoever says they don’t care about popularity in school, they are liars.

It also helped that my parents were so understanding, especially considering the traitor thing. They showed a lot of respect for what these people had been through because of her father’s deviance. A few weeks after we started dating she finally told me the full story. I mean, who even cares about her stupid father? Her oldest brother fought in two of our wars, sixteen years straight, so yeah, this makes up for everything else in my book! I’d give anything to have a war veteran in my family, but none of us have been selected so far. It’s a bit embarrassing, to be honest, although my father and older brothers are guards at the extermination camp, so they contribute in other ways, cleaning up our country, which is also an important duty.

The most incredible thing is that this was the reason her father ended up being arrested and executed: he didn’t want his son to return to duty after he came back injured. I mean, talk about selfish and ungrateful! Anyway, the rest of her family was pretty nice, real patriots, so we ended up having big, loud barbeques together, talking half-jokingly about our future children’s names.

For our six-month anniversary I wanted to do something super romantic, so I took her back to the place we first met. There had been another book burning recently and some pages were still left here and there. We started picking them up to make our own little romantic pyre under the stars and read passages in mocking voices. It was a huge adrenaline rush to read forbidden texts, and sceptical resistance is taught in school anyway so we were old enough to handle it, or at least that’s what we thought.

“Listen to this,” she said at some point, crouching with a half burned page in her hands. “I think it’s some kind of ‘poetry’ thing. Once the colours change, once the sun has a new face, words won’t matter, and there will be no return. Gauges broken are gauges fixed, for those who come next. True slaves don’t know they’re slaves.”

Her voice had lowered so much by the end of the last sentence I could hardly hear her. She read a few more words to herself, her lips moving silently, tracing forbidden phrases.

“Ew, stop that, I’m gonna throw up,” I said.

“It’s gross,” she agreed and crumbling the paper, she threw it in the fire. She came close and put her arms around me. The fire sparkled and glowed in the dark street. It felt even better to burn the pages after we had read them. Like when we are taken to school clean-ups at the beach, getting rid of all the dirt, making everything pure and clean again. And after you pick up all the trash, you look at the sand and the sea and it’s prettier than it has ever been, prettier for having been ugly before.

I held her close to me as the fire warmed our bodies and I smelt her hair, a mix of coconut shampoo and smoke. It was the perfect moment, the perfect anniversary. I should have known it then – once you reach the perfect moment it’s all downhill from there.

Soon after that, she started to change. She became more distant, she wouldn’t laugh with my jokes as much and she didn’t seem excited to see me anymore. She would arrange things with her new friends and would not include me. She’d see my messages and reply hours later, or not reply at all. It drove me crazy but I was too proud to show it. I started doing the same to her and the distance between us grew more by the day.

Everyone at school was asking us what’s going on and I had no idea what to say. I felt like we would break up sooner or later but I didn’t have the heart to do it first. And when eventually I went to her place one day in order to do the “talk” I was on the verge of crying.

“I just need some time,” she said.

“Wow, how original,” was my bitter reply. “I think I deserve at least an explanation.”

She crossed her arms and bit her lip, looking at me as if I was a stranger she just saw in front of her, a stranger she couldn’t be bothered to meet and wished she could just pass by.

“I don’t know what to say, Tom. It’s like … don’t you ever feel that there is a bigger picture than all of this?”

She waved her arms around, as if she was showing me the world, even though we were stuck in her tiny room. I looked at her posters, her magazines, her gun collection.

“Than what?” I said, feeling already exasperated.

“Than everything. Look, when we are together I feel like are wearing rose-coloured glasses. Like the rest of the world doesn’t exist and we are oblivious to other stuff happening right in front of our eyes. Like a part of my freedom and clarity of mind has been taken away without me realising. Like there is something toxic hidden in my joy.”

I looked at her as if she was speaking one of those foreign, banned languages that no sane man understands. She seemed desperate to find the right words.

“Listen. Remember that line from that stupid poem we read on our anniversary? About the true slaves?”

“I guess?” I said. “Is this about it? I knew we shouldn’t be looking at forbidden texts. They mess with your mind like that. That’s why they’re forbidden.”

“I know,” she said. “They really do. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I feel really guilty, I mean what if they knew? I don’t want to get in trouble. But it’s been on my mind since. I think I know what it means.”

I became tense and looked at the camera in the corner of the room. The bedroom ones are not supposed to activate unless something illegal is happening, it’s a privacy concern. One of those amendments to please the hippies in the opposition, god knows why. Was it activated now? If Lillian said something dangerous they had to know I disapproved. But she didn’t and she went on talking about our relationship.

“The poem was about us,” she said. “I believe it means you shouldn’t become a slave to just one thing, even your first love. The world is much bigger and we’re limiting ourselves to only a tiny corner of it. I like you, I want to stay friends, but I need to spend time with myself too. Have fun. We are only young once.”

I grunted because I had nothing to say.

“There you go, Tom,” she snapped. “This just proves I’m right. You don’t understand because you are too self-centred, I’m sorry but it’s true. You think the world revolves around you but I’m more open-minded. I want to explore, myself more than anything. I have some great self-help books that could help you too. Breathing techniques and all that. Don’t laugh! See, I can’t tell you anything. You know how these stress exercises help all adults. We are almost adults. You should think about that.”

“I just don’t see how I prevent you from doing all this … whatever it is you’re talking about.”

“Look, I don’t have much time, right? You can still go to uni and have adventures and stuff while I’ll need to be a homekeeper and raise kids soon. So let me have some fun for the time being, date other people, whatever. You know many other girls at school feel the same way. It’s a girl-power thing. Get it out of our system before our real duties start. And if we’re still compatible in a couple of years, who knows? Maybe we’ll get back together. But let’s not be slaves to each other right now.”

She held my arm in an awkward way, like she was a mother and I was a kid ready to run away and then she pulled me close and gave me a side hug. I wanted to push her away but I was thinking that this might be the last time we touch each other. It lasted about five seconds and then I broke free and left the room, without turning back once.

I walked around the city for hours, trying to make some sense of it. I had done everything by the book, I was the perfect boyfriend and then she reads one banned line and loses her mind. I could so easily hate her right now, the way I hate these books that ruin people’s lives. Embrace your hatred, feed it, it turns you into a man, isn’t that what they teach you in school? But I felt more sad than hateful, no matter what technique I tried. I fought back tears, waving my hand close to my face to pretend they were from the smoke, in case anyone saw. In the central square they were beating up some illegals and I didn’t even feel like throwing one rock, that’s how miserable I was. I got home and, I’m ashamed to admit, I cried that night, silently, well hidden under my blanket. I thought I’d never feel good again.

I couldn’t face her at school, let alone going through the breakup declarations at the authorities together. Many awkward silences there, the administrators shaking their heads knowingly. They’re probably used to stupid teenagers like us falling in and out of love all the time. It’s all a process of growing up, isn’t it? The first time is the hardest and then you’re wiser. At least that’s what my mum said. Mums are almost always right, but you only realise that when you’re a bit older. You realise many things when you’re older.

So that’s it, pretty much. Mum was right, writing down everything makes me feel slightly better. Sure, it will take me some time before I can go to another book burning without thinking of her. But I know I’ll get over it. I know I’ll see things more clearly sooner or later and everything will make sense. Maybe one day I’ll appreciate my first and short-lived romance. I’ll see the whole picture. Why not? I’m still so young. The world is a beautiful place and I’m only starting to discover it.

creative non-fiction essay Essays

The Road that Leads Back Home

by Hauwa Shaffii Nuhu • February 22, 2020November 12, 2020

Photo by Joshua Oluwagbemiga on Unsplash

Once, I sat on a sidewalk in the dark, overwhelmed with the fatigue and sadness that seeped from it. I held my head in my hands, willing myself to not cry; trying to still myself against the fullness and force of the tides. A man drew towards me like a cloud, and asked uncertainly, “Are you alright?” I did not respond, because I knew my voice would fail me. So he sat next to me, silent, just offering me his presence as a wall around this weakness. He sat with me until the tides passed. It could have been a minute, it could have been twenty minutes, it could have been an hour. But he sat with me until the tides passed, and I collected my face from my hands, turned to him and said thank you. And then he left.

When I think back to my time in Kano, it is this memory that collects me, the way a mother who has spanked her child might receive him back as he’s crying, to say sorry.

In that city, I was introduced to the kindness of strangers. In that city, I was introduced to the length and breadth of darkness and its teeth. This was a city that saw me, that really saw me. Humans tend to drift towards elements or people that see them, because to be seen is to be deeply validated. But I hated this city because it saw me. And perhaps it is why I have always rejected the idea that perhaps I had built a home out of it.

Once, during a period of darkness, when my anxieties grew severe and now came with unconquerable nausea and zero tolerance for human touch, I sat shaking on my bed, my body moving to the rhythm (or lack of) of my thoughts, my heart racing so hard and fast I was sure it’d burst out of my chest. I cried because my body felt too small to contain the electric currents ripping through it at such a pace, but I cried too because this was happening in a city that was not mine.

Back home in Minna, I had these attacks, but never this severe. And perhaps this added to my pile of reasons why Kano could never be home.

I have always been drawn to the idea of home as safety, as where love lives. I have heard people talk about home as a feeling in time and not a physical place. And I have held many times too, that as humans, it is impossible to exist beyond geography. And so it is impossible to feel outside of places. And so home would be a combination of places and feelings. Sometimes, the product of this is humans. Sometimes not.

For years, all I wanted was to leave that city for good, but when the day drew near, it wasn’t relief that filled me, but a slow crippling sadness and restlessness, and for the first time I had to confront the possibility that perhaps home was mobile after all, that perhaps I had really built a home out of Kano.

Kano with the scalding sun in June, and the brutal cold in December. Kano with the kind, kind strangers and the offer of privacy and solitude. Kano with the Ruka, with the Farida, and Joseph, Kano with the Ridwan and AY; friends who had turned family.

One night after we were done studying in school for the exam we were going to take the next morning, and my friends who stayed on campus proceeded to their hostel, myself and the two others who stayed around the same area proceeded outside school. We started to talk about postcolonial theory and Chimamanda Adichie’s comments on it. From there, we segued into other matters; Chinua Achebe and his magnificent Things Fall Apart, Wole Soyinka and his role in trying to avert the Biafran war, writing (even though I was the only writer in the cohort), religion, and the fragility of faith. And somewhere in that night, as we slipped in and out of each other through our words, as we laughed at a thing and then frowned at another, as we walked deeper and deeper into the cold, silent distance, it occurred to me that this, right here, was the kind of community I had hoped and even prayed to find when I first came to Kano five years ago. And yet here I was, finding it when we had only two days left together.

On my first day in school back in 2014, I sat on a concrete slab along with a few other girls because our classroom hadn’t been opened yet. We had been there for quite a while and it did not look like the class would be opened anytime soon, and so I started to consider going to the library. A chubby, dark-skinned girl came towards me. She wanted to know where the library was. I told her I was heading there. We went together, introducing ourselves to each other and making small, light talk. When we sat at a table in the library, I noticed her hands: the nails were painted black. It was those hands that held me, five years later, when I fell sick on the eve of our finals exam day. They were still painted black.

We became friends: the sort who signed attendance for each other before asking why they didn’t show up for class; the sort who took long night walks and made up secret nicknames for people they didn’t like, names like serving spoon, because the girl in question simply had a head whose shape truly bore a striking resemblance with a serving spoon; the sort who argued and argued and argued; the sort who spent short holidays with the other’s family.

Throughout the course of my degree, I shed and wore, and shed again and wore again, different layers of myself. I grew. And though I like to talk about this in a negative light in relation to Kano, I realize now that that is actually what growth means. Growth is an ugly process. I conflated it with Kano. Perhaps because I needed something to blame.

The night before I leave that city for good, I go to the school hostel to see my closest friends. I lie in Farida’s room for quite a while. The room, quiet, and cold from the infant harmattan. I am on my phone and she’s buried deep under her blanket. The door is locked but I can hear the noise from the rest of the hostel; girls teasing and screaming at each other, some laughing in that way that stops time, others singing offkey. The world as I know it right now in this moment, will end when I step out of this room, because it will be for the last time. And so even though it’s getting dark, and I’m not doing anything here, and I should get going, I am still here, because I want to hold this moment for a little longer before it becomes a memory.

The answer to my questions about home came to me one kind morning in Minna. I woke up bright and aware of it. It was one of those mornings that could pass for a feeling.

I had a few errands to run that day, and one involved delivering a letter to the Police Headquarters. I did not know where it was located, so I asked my sister who seems to be a map because of her vast knowledge of places. She carries places with her the way one does a thing beloved. She paused, her chin between two of her fingers, seeming to scout for the easiest way to describe it to me. Finally, she started to explain. She tried and failed to give me the directions. She said, “You know what, ask Y to drop you off.” Y was our cousin who was in fact only a few months old in Minna. “He literally doesn’t know anywhere in this town other than here,” I said. “That’s true,” she agreed, then tried again to describe it. Exasperated, she said, “If you get lost on the way, just come back home. At least, wherever it is you are, you’ll always know the road that leads back home.”

I laughed hard for close to a minute, and then it struck me:

Home is that place you return to whenever you are lost, home is the road that never leaves your consciousness.

Editor's Pick Online Exclusives TuesdayTales

The Writing’s on the Wall

by Martin Lymer • February 18, 2020February 29, 2020

6:30 in the morning and the city is just waking up when I glance out the cracked kitchen window of my tiny apartment and see something unexpected yet familiar in the shadows of the unfinished apartment block across the alley.

Setting a cold glass of OJ down in the only clear spot on the coffee table I rummage through my backpack and draw out a pair of binoculars. I’m convinced they’re the kind of thing a reporter should carry.

Opening the balcony window releases a gentle rush of sea air that edges me closer to wakefulness. Binoculars raised to my eyes, I can’t help but smile. Out there amidst the red steel and grey concrete, seven floors up, is a graffiti tag. Six feet tall and twice as wide, spelled out in an explosion of greens and pinks is the word “DUKE”.

The wild-style writing would be incomprehensible to the casual observer, but typography is the graff writer’s obsession and a decade ago I was king of the docks. Back then I sometimes ran in a crew with DUKE.

People tend to assume graff writers are guys, and she chose a name that played into that. Sitting on a cold stone wall one night, sharing a joint and looking out over the million tiny lights that illuminated our playground, she told me about her dad. She said he was an old school authoritarian Catholic, basically a janitor for the church, and a big fan of John Wayne. She’d developed a hatred of Wayne by association and thought it funny to illegally plaster his moniker all over town.

Something’s nagging at me. Maybe the job already made me paranoid, seeking out stories where there are none, but I don’t think so. I’ve been out of the scene a while, but I was a tagger for years and it’s that cluster of neurons that are firing, shooting impulses to the part of my brain more recently developed and demanding to meet up for a chat.

A few minutes later I’m making my way up the cold concrete steps in the shell of the building, feeling a shadow of the excitement I used to live on. I’m somewhere I shouldn’t be, enveloped in the sounds and smells of the city. This is what graff is about, making a physical connection, anchoring yourself to the bricks and mortar, steel and glass of a city that otherwise doesn’t feel like it needs you.

My instinct is right, the tag is wrong. It’s close but I know DUKE’s handstyle as well as my own and this lacks her fluidity. Lines are joined up when they should be a seamless flow. Outlines bulged unevenly showing a lack of control. Copying is a big no, no in the community. I’d fired off a text to DUKE on the way out, but it came back unsent, number no longer in use.

An hour later I’m snaking through the traffic on my scooter, passing an urban gallery of steel shutters covered top to bottom in graffiti. This is the new norm in the city. After several high-profile pieces of politicized street art had appeared the authorities took a hard stance on all graffiti and it was “rubbed out” as quickly as it was put up. But the graff had been a tourist draw for decades with some operators even running graffiti tours. A compromise was reached called The Shutter Initiative. Hundreds of small shop owners gave permission for graff artists to use their shutters as canvases. Any unauthorized graff, or political street art anywhere, would be subject to immediate erasure. This makes the DUKE tag particularly odd. Regardless of its execution it took time and effort to produce but will be gone as soon as the site workers or authorities spot it.

I park outside Graff-Land. The shutters won’t be up for another hour but it’s the owner, Herman, that I need, and he lives above the store. I press his button on the intercom and announce myself. A moment later a window opens above, and Herm’s long face squints down at me. Herm was born old but now his face looks like a worn brown Converse.

“Holy shit, the prodigal returns. What brings you to my window? Call of the wild got too strong for ya?” says Herman.

“Not yet. Need to track down someone from back in the day, and seeing as you know everyone who ever put paint to wall…”

“Gimmie a sec.”

Herm opens the door in black combats, and a faded Nirvana shirt. Rather than inviting me in he steps out and rolls up the shutters.

“Had to start selling drinks and shit. Don’t sell enough paint to keep it runnin’. I’m usually open by now but I hit dismiss instead of snooze. Good thing you knocked.”

Inside, the long counter has been shortened to make room at the front for a pair of fake brown leather sofas and a coffee table. On the counter there’d been a wire rack stocked with sketchbooks and blank stickers, now there’s a food cabinet. There are still the racks of cans, but not as many as I remember. Herm clicks on the TV and fires up the coffee machine. Two kids walk in, bags on their shoulders. One is chowing down on a pizza slice. They drop into adjacent sofas with a familiarity that tells me they spend most of their free time here.

“Hey, you can’t be eating food from some other place in here,” says Herm

“Then you need to get your ass outa bed on time,” says pizza boy.

Herm rolls his eyes and shrugs before turning his attention back to the coffee machine.

“I don’t get it. With the Shutter Initiative making it less risky I figured there’d be more people doing it than ever,” I say.

“Without the risk it’s just painting. When you tagged that crane at the dock you were a legend. Think the Shutter Initiative is creating any legends? Most of that metal hasn’t seen new graff in a year.” I find this depressing, but it makes sense.

“So, who you looking for?”

“DUKE. Her tag appeared on a construction site next to my flat last night, but it wasn’t her that did it.”

“Huh. Brother, I haven’t seen DUKE in years. She drifted away from the scene not long after you quit. Maybe she’s back though, just a little rusty.”

“DUKE’s a guy,” says pizza boy’s companion. He’s turning a sketchbook this way and that as his marker skitters across the page.

“What do you know about DUKE?” I say. “You were still in nursery when she was around.”

“We were doing our thing a fortnight back and saw a kid coming out of this lockup. Had a drawstring on his back bulging with cans, guy practically rattled when he walked. We broke in once he’d cleared out, DUKE was tagged all over those walls.”

“You get a good look at him?” says Herm

“Nah, just saw him from the side, and he had his hood up, you know. Throw us forty and we’ll show you the place though.”

“You’re mistaking older for wealthier,” I say. “Give you twenty for the address?”

I make it to the paper on time, where between coffee runs and digging out archive photos for the sports section, I manage to get a few minutes with Stephanie Toza, the Arts and Culture reporter. I want to know if there’s any graff-related stories coming down the pipe and she wants to know why a lowly intern wants to know. What I get is that the Shutter Initiative is coming up for review in a fortnight. Grudgingly she gives up the name and contact details of the person that proposed and now oversees the initiative. I don’t see how it could have anything to do with the mystery tagger, but I promise to share anything I find with Toza in exchange for a byline.

The name I get is Mary Spinoza. Toza says she’s a local artist of some success, and she runs art classes for underprivileged teens at the Tapies Memorial Centre. I give them a call to confirm she’s there before heading over in my break.

Standing in the corridor looking through the big glass windows of the classroom I see DUKE for the second time today, only this time she’s standing there in the flesh, passing from student to student pointing out things that’re good, things that need work, always smiling. I catch my reflection in the glass and force the dopey puppy dog grin from my face. I could never be cool around DUKE.

“Oh my god, look at you,” says Mary, hugging me tightly.

“You haven’t changed. Can still smell the weed in your hoody,” I say, holding the embrace a fraction too long.

“Yeah well, I’m an artist, it’s expected.”

“I heard. How’s your dad feel about all this?”

“Dad never had a problem with the art, he’s still got a bunch of my old sketchbooks at home. He just thinks it should be indoors, not on doors. Anyway, what are you doing?”

“Interning at the Herald, which is kinda why I’m here.”

I pull out my phone and swipe to a photograph of her tag.

“Took this from my balcony this morning. Posted it up on social and there’ve been a half dozen other sighting over the city, all scrubbed now.”

“Shit. That’s not me, I haven’t done that for years.”

“I figured. It’s a little sloppy. Any idea who it could be?” Mary is pacing now, pirouetting on the heels of her Docs. I remember those same Docs putting down some asshole that was getting handsy with her one night at the beach.

“Any one of a dozen suits on the council. The Shutter Initiative scraped through the first time around. It’s up for review soon.”

“You think this could scupper it?”

“If they can connect it to me. It was my idea. If there’s any suggestion that I’m flouting the rules myself…”

We exchange number and arrange to meet up later. I hold off telling her about the lockup. I have an idea what’s going on but need to get back to the office and make some calls.

DUKE’s father has moved up the ranks since the old days and is now in charge of maintaining the church buildings across the whole diocese. I manage to arrange an interview with him, tell him we were doing a series of opinion pieces on graffiti in the runup to the Shutter Initiatives review. He’s keen to take part.

I’ve never been religious but in this city the church is inescapable, so I spent the Sunday mornings of my childhood squirming on a hard-wooden bench as the man behind the lectern droned on. It hadn’t occurred to me till now that those Sundays may have planted the seed for my tagging escapades. The only thing I liked about church were those big stained-glass windows. A light in the darkness, a towering block of color against the ancient stone. Perhaps it wasn’t just me, perhaps El Pez, Btoy, Miss Van, had all gotten the spark while sitting in the pews, tracing the lines of lead in those great glass throwups. Looking up at one now, through the crossbars of a scaffold tower it seems obvious.

Up top, is DUKE’s dad, Anthony.

“Mr. Spinoza? It’s Paul, from the Herald”

Ten minutes later we’re sitting outside a café opposite the church, in a box canyon made of apartment buildings. Anthony Spinoza looks older than the buildings he cares for.

“It’s just sad,” he says, spreading his arms to encompass the plaza. At street level the apartment blocks give way to shops and cafes, the former now closed for the day. A ring of painted shutters encircles the church.

“If they painted on the church it would be gone by midday, but we’re ten meters away and they can do as they please. Makes me sick.”

“Not a fan then?”

“If it’s art then they should be treated like artists. They display in a gallery. If they can afford paint, they can afford canvas.” There’s a tremor in his espresso.

“If it isn’t art then what are we doing letting them paint at all. This is a city of culture and we’re encouraging them to paint over it like, like … it’s shit.” He slams his fist down on the cast iron table, making the little basket of condiments jump and clatter. He stares at it, too embarrassed by his outburst to look at me.

“I agree with some of what you’re saying, but it’s not your decision to make and I’m not gonna let you throw your daughter under the bus to stop it.” That gets his attention. I toss a couple of photographs down, the tag from this morning, and the lock up. His shoulders sag, no denial.

“I don’t know who you paid to paint Mary’s tag all over town, but they used that lockup to practice. It’s owned by the diocese, storage space for when one of the church’s properties is undergoing major work, which makes you one of the few people with access to it. I spoke to Mary this afternoon, she mentioned that you had a bunch of her old sketchbooks. Her tag must be all over those, that’s where he copied it from right?”

“Are you going to tell her?” Even tone, eyes back on the basket.

“Not if it stops, and you don’t tip off the review board. I assume that was the plan. It’s dying out anyway, look at them.” Herm was right. The paint on the shutters is old, faded. My shoulders sag as well, and for a moment I feel closer to the old man across the table than the boy who used to skulk around the docks with a bag full of cans.

At home I message Mary that I won’t make it, but that she needn’t worry about the tagger, then I switch off my phone. Back on my balcony I look out over the building sight. The tag’s gone. I wonder if Toza will be pissed that I don’t have a story for her, so I fire up my laptop and open a new document.

Graffiti (The Writings on the Wall)

Translations

Translation Tuesdays

by Eric Akoto • February 17, 2020February 18, 2020

Starting this Tuesday, Litro will be inviting each month a special guest to curate a selection of translated works – we will shine the Litro light on the translator and author. We open up the project with the talented and great supporter of literature & translation Gabriella Page-Fort.

” For me, Litro Magazine is all about place; I trust each issue to enrich my imagined landscapes with complexity and familiarity at once. When Eric asked me to guest introduce this translation series, I wanted to spotlight how translation itself informs the traveler – our ability or ignorance of a language determines the way we perceive our surroundings, and points us where we might choose to go – and here we find wondrous access to the subtle details we alone might have missed while passing through. Literature as both informs and predicts my experiences as a tourist, and for the stories I have selected I wanted to isolate literary examples of the unknowable that I seem to collect when I’m moving through the world. Less a cultural handbook or guide than a flipbook of trees passing impossibly close to bus windows prismed by the glaring light of a sun busy around the planet causing tropical oppression, healing heat, and hope for a higher class future. Just one sun, but so many varied effects.

They are translations, the world refracted through two artists’ minds, inviting us to consider worlds beyond our reach and letting us carry the torch of the strangeness we all experience as people alive on earth – and to remind us we’re all pulling from one single light source.”

Gabriella Page-Fort

Gabriella Page-Fort is Editorial Director of AmazonCrossing, where she has worked since 2010. Her list includes award-winning authors from around the world, such as Laksmi Pamuntjak, Martin Michael Driessen, Laura Esquivel, Dolores Redondo, Laura Restrepo, Zygmunt Miłoszewski, and Ayşe Kulin, as well as bestsellers Oliver Pötzsch and Petra Durst-Benning.

Still Life

by J. T. Townley • February 16, 2020February 16, 2020

Lara says I wake up in the night crying. Just sobbing and weeping like a little girl, not that I ever remember it. Pull yourself together, she says. What if the twins hear you? Good thing they’re grown women, reared and married off. I shouldn’t be telling you any of this, Carl, but I know I can trust you. Anyway, Lara says the pressure’s getting to me. Can you believe that? But maybe she’s got something. I mean, my hair’s all white! I’m kidding, of course, we both know it was the presidency, happens to everyone. That’s why they call it the White House. But seriously, the show’s in less than a week. Can’t say why I ever agreed to it. I’ll be the first to admit I’m no great artiste. But I’m a driven person, as you well know. Like to set myself goals and keep fighting till I meet them, whether it’s business or baseball or politics. And now painting. I’ve shown you some of my pictures, Carl.

Not bad for an old man, huh?

Thing is, my style’s changing. I’m in a period of what they call transformation. What I mean is, my paintings look different now than when the fine folks at Dallas Christian decided I should put on a solo show. Granted, it’s my library. Always was. I can do what I want. But still, they’re not the same paintings we all selected to hang the walls. It wasn’t intentional, but my art teacher, Mrs. Henderson, who’s got to be one of the sweetest ladies to ever walk God’s green earth, behind Mama and Lara, of course, tells me that’s how this whole thing works sometimes. When you’re making art, you don’t always know what you’re doing. The subconscious mind’s running the show, almost like a dream, or, in my case, a nightmare. Sounds like a crock, Carl, I know. That’s what I used to think, too. A bunch of mystical malarkey. But it’s got to be true. What other explanation could there be for how my paintings look?

Course, I don’t recognize the changes until Lara points them out. I’m in my art studio down at the ranch – did I tell you how I turned a guest bedroom into my painting room? – and Lara pokes her head in the door. Her angelic face is all aglow.

’Bout ready for some lunch, Jorge?

Only she’s got to ask me three or four times, is what she tells me. I’m not just focused, I’m completely in the zone. I’ve got me these powers of concentration, Carl. But you know that, you’ve seen me at work. Maybe never at the easel, but I go about my art-making with the same purpose and determination I do everything, from waging war to drinking beer. Not that I can put them away like I used to, age catches up and it’s all you can do to keep yourself in shape. Don’t take it personal, Carl, you’ve got a gut, but it suits your personality. Anyway, she finally catches my attention.

You gonna paint all day or what?

Sorry, honeybunch, says I. I flat didn’t hear you calling.

Open a window, Georgie, she says. It’s fumy in here.

That’d be the paint thinner.

It’s not good for you.

It’s no big deal, sugar. Used to do worse to myself – and on purpose!

Lara shakes her head, pursing her lips so she won’t laugh.

Fact is, I say, I can’t even smell it anymore.

That’s what I’m afraid of, she says, grinning. Anyhow, lunch is ready. Maria made tacos al carbon.

Lara clears her throat, and I can guess what’s coming.

Con cebollas, uh, green peppers, y queso.

Darling, you’re mighty bonita when you’re talking español.

There’s plenty of arroz and frijoles, too.

See the kind of progress she’s making, Carl?

By now, Lara’s a couple-three steps into the studio. I’ve asked her not to gawk at my works-in-progress, but she can’t help herself. I don’t blame her. She’s just curious, is all. As she pads from one picture to the next – and I got them everywhere, on easels, leaning against the walls, propped up in the windowsills, everywhere – her eyes go wide and her face turns white. I hear her taking these little gulps of air, like she’s trying not to breathe but can only hold her breath so long. I’m just watching her, smiling, feeling the blood rush through my face and into the tops of my ears. I still got my apron on and a brush in hand. Lara lingers in front of a portrait I painted of her on the living room couch here at the ranch. (I painted Whiskers in there, too, though she was off lolling in the sun somewhere.) Lara just stands there, swaying and mumbling to herself.

Sugar-pie? I say. You alright?

What have you done?

What do you mean?

She spins around and glares at me. What in God’s name have you done? Then she sweeps her hand, like she means all my pictures, but she points at the portrait. She’s still glaring. Last time I remember seeing her this mad, I was waking up on the front lawn back in Odessa, Lone Star in one hand, Jack Daniels in the other, both empty.

Trust me, I say, you don’t have man-hands! I snicker, but Lara’s scowl deepens. I know I’m no Rembrandt, honey. I’m still learning. I’ll work on it.

You know that’s not what I mean.

She waits. I learned long ago to watch and listen and keep my mouth shut. She waves me over to where the portrait leans against the wall. I take a knee and gaze where she points. When I say nothing, she says:

A week ago, this was a good painting. Endearing, even. And now look what you’ve done to it.

I told you it wasn’t finished, I say. I told you I had some touching up to do.

Lara’s nostrils flare. But I’m wearing a hijab!

I think maybe her blood sugar’s getting low, but I take another look, and sure enough, Lara’s sporting one of those Arab head scarves. So is cute little ole Whiskers, though hers looks more like a bonnet.

I’m tempted to say, Not too bad, huh? But I know better. Lara’s on the warpath, make no mistake. So I bite my tongue, wondering when I did this. And why. See, Carl, I can’t remember a thing. But for better or worse, Lara refreshes my memory. Apparently, I’ve made some unexpected additions to all of my pictures, including the ones we’d decided I’d put on public display.

There’s a portrait of the twins in the porch swing, and they got on head wraps, too. They don’t look half-bad in them either. But you know how photogenic they both are, Carl. They look good in anything. In the background, right out there on the manicured Bermuda grass, you can see a pile of dead Arabs. Must be twenty of them. The whole thing’s horrifying, of course, but I made good use of space and light.

The portrait I painted of Bo – you remember Bo, Carl, my faithful Golden Retriever? – uses a similar Middle Eastern motif. It didn’t at first, of course. It was just a picture of man’s best friend on Bo’s favorite couch in the sun room. (I had to paint Whiskers out of that one.) When I finished it, that picture was one of my favorites, maybe the one I was proudest of. Only when I look again, Bo’s holding a dead Arab baby in his mouth like a duck he fished out of the lake on a hunting trip. But at least I got what they call the chiaroscuro right.

The worst might be the landscape. I’m no good at them, Carl, can’t get the perspective right, which is why I fudged this one. I painted it as if through the kitchen window at the ranch. It was nothing special. Grass and mesquites and cedars, dirt road and fence line and cloudless blue sky. Only it’s a different story now. I didn’t change the kitchen window perspective, that’s all the same. You can even see my apron embroidered with Mr. President hanging over a chair. But the ranch is a hellish nightmare. It’s all explosions and fire, screaming faces and burning bodies. Now where did all that come from, Carl? Why would I do that?

Now Lara’s asking me the same questions. Only just with her eyes. She gives me this weird look that says, What have you done with my husband? Once I’ve had a chance to take in this unexpected shift in my artistry, she grabs my hand and says, John 3:16, Georgie. Recite it with me.

For God so loved the world, we say in unison, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. (We prefer the King James. It’s the real deal.)

Then she walks to the door. Before she slips down the hall toward the kitchen and Maria’s tacos al carbon, she says, La vida, Jorge. Siempre la vida.

I take Lara’s point, of course. But I still don’t know what’s going on. It’s like somebody else came into my studio while I was out clearing brush and doctored all my pictures. Maybe the Secret Service is getting sloppy, huh? Because these new motifs are out of character for me, Carl. And I’m the first to admit I’m no Michelangelo or Picasso. So I don’t see where the technical skill came from. Maybe I’m a better artiste than I give myself credit for?

After lunch, I pick up the phone and call Daddy.

Georgie Boy! he says. How’s the hunting?

That’s right, it’s turkey season. Flat slipped my mind, I guess.

Well, you been watching the baseball? Rangers are looking good. And what about Castro down in Houston?

Who let that commie in? I say.

Kid’s got a bazooka for an arm. Good luck stealing on him!

Haven’t really been following it, Daddy. I’ve been painting.

You’ve got to put a fresh coat on every year, Georgie Boy, especially in that Texas sun, or the wood will weather and rot and then where will you be? But can’t you hire somebody to take care of it?

Listen, Daddy, I say, scratching Bo behind the ears. You made a lot of tough calls when you were in office. Operation Sandstorm, for instance. You ever question your decisions?

What do you mean by that?

I pet Bo some more. His ears are about the softest thing you could imagine. He’s snoring in my lap.

Not regret, exactly, I say. But do you ever wonder if you knew then what you know now, would you have made a different choice?

You can’t second-guess, Georgie Boy. Ever. What good will it do you or anyone else? You make your decisions, you stick by them. That’s how this all works.

I know, Daddy.

He doesn’t say anything for a minute. I can hear a ballgame in background. The announcer’s making a ruckus.

Sorry, Gerogie Boy. Red Sox and Yankees. Big Papi just went yard.

He’s a slugger, alright.

Now what were you saying?

Don’t you ever remember things? About what you did? Or didn’t do?

So that’s what you meant by painting. Listen, Georgie Boy, you have a beautiful wife and two precious daughters. You’re a hero to the nation and the world. If you remember anything, remember that.

That makes me feel a whole lot better. You understand, Carl. Daddy went through all the same kinds of things I did when he was at the helm. Crucial decisions about when to go in and how. About air strikes and ground-troop deployments. About precision, laser-guided bunker buster bombs. Those are tough decisions, Carl. The American people won’t always understand them, which is why you need a silver-tongued press secretary. Anyhow, Daddy’s coped just fine. You don’t see him buckling under the strain of all those years calling the shots.

And hell, Carl, I’m twice as tough as him.

So it’s business as usual. I go back to my studio and set to work on my paintings. I’ve got a lot of touching up to do now, what with these new motifs and the show only two weeks away.

First things first, I concentrate on my portrait of Lara. She looks exotic in that head wrap, but she doesn’t like it one bit, and she’s right that folks won’t understand it. I’m not sure I get it myself, Carl. Thing is, the more I work at it, the worse it gets. I’m not fixing anything, just smearing paint around the canvas. Turn a good picture into a complete mess, remaking my blushing bride into a cone-head with a bad complexion. I slip the canvas behind a stack of blank ones and move on.

I try to reverse engineer a couple more, but they don’t work even as well as the first. Meaning I all but wreck them – even more than when I gave them that Arab look. Including the portrait of the twins and the one of Bo. (I don’t go anywhere near that ranch landscape.) It’s like I’ve lost my touch, Carl, if I ever had one. Only thing for it’s to start over from scratch.

So, the next morning, that’s what I do. I know time’s short, and the likelihood of finishing enough new pictures for the show’s not real high, but I’m not about to let that stop me. I’ve faced worse odds. So I kneel and say a little prayer, then tie my apron on and put my nose to the grindstone.

First thing I paint is a self-portrait. I know what you’re thinking, Carl, but that’s not it. It’s not about glorifying yours truly. I’m working on technique, exploiting what Mrs. Henderson’s been teaching me about the power of reflections. So I put myself in front of the mirror, shaving. The viewer’s watching Mr. President from behind (not in the buff, Carl: I’m wearing a green terrycloth bathrobe), so mostly you see my shoulders and the back of my head. You can also see I’ve got my right arm raised, razor in hand. Besides that, there’s the pedestal sink and the mirror, in which you see my whole face, half-covered in shaving cream, focused and determined to get the job done. That’s how I am, Carl.

Anyway, that was the intention. That’s what it was supposed to look like. That’s what I thought I painted. Only when I come back after lunch with Lara (BBQ sandwiches and Ruffles), that’s not what I see. Everything’s how it’s supposed to look, more or less. Approximately, I mean. I’ve given it my best shot, hoping to make Mrs. Henderson proud. Except my face in the mirror. Reflections are tough, Carl, no matter how cocksure the painter. Anybody’ll tell you that, Mrs. Henderson included. But they’re not that tough. I mean, I know what I look like. Except for a laugh line here and there, this mug hasn’t changed much in the sixty-odd years it’s been with me. Only my face isn’t the face staring out at the viewer. Nope, it’s this Arab kid’s, all dimples and scars, probably doesn’t even shave yet. He’s got a turban on and these flaming eyes, and he’s pointing – at me or the viewer, it’s not clear. It’s nicely rendered ambiguity, Carl. And make no mistake, the composition’s striking.

But what the hell?

I’m not about to let this whip me, so I try again. I glance out the window and notice my pickup. Ford F-250 King Ranch 4 x 4 with all the bells and whistles. I love that pickup like a son, Carl, so I figure I might as well paint it. Why not, right? It’s just a pickup. So I set my easel up by the window. I’d go outside, but it’s too dadblame hot. Then I paint that sucker in all his glory. The tires give me fits, same with the grill guard and diamond-steel toolbox. But I never back down from a fight. Maybe it’s a little flat and two-dimensional when I’m done, but I do a good job with the ranch. Meaning the landscape looks nice and natural, without any bombs or fire or screaming Arabs.

But I don’t stop there. I’m just getting warmed up. Fact is, I’m on fire.

Lara’s got a vase of flowers as a table centerpiece, so I grab it and bring it into the studio. Lara’s into her Reader’s Digest and doesn’t pay me no never mind. Anyhow, we’re not talking dahlias in Waterford crystal here, Carl. This is Crawdad Ranch. It’s a big ole Mason jar full of bluebonnets. I know they’re illegal to pick, but they grow on my land, and I’m the leader of the free world. Or I used to be. Anyway, I’m not worried. I paint those flowers in the vase on a table that isn’t even there, showing how the Texas sunlight pours through the window. Maybe it’s a little slapdash, not enough Alizarin crimson in the Prussian blue, the lines wobbly and the perspective whomperjawed, but it’s not as bad as all that. Flowers are tough, Carl.

Then I figure, why not a full-blown still life? I’ve never done one before. And what could be more benign than a bunch of fruit in a bowl on a table? Pretty near nothing, Carl. So I make a beeline for the kitchen. There’s plenty of fruit, since Lara and I like our healthy living, so I grab a big glass bowl and some apples, pears, and bananas. I’d love to do it Texas-style, with grapefruit and peaches and jalepeño peppers, but that’ll have to wait till next time. On my way back through the living room, Lara glances up from her reading and gives me this puzzled look.

Hold up there, Georgius Maximus. Where you going with all that fruit?

I love it when she calls me that, Carl. Have I ever told you that?

I’m grinning from ear to ear. I wrestle the fruit under one arm, then reach out and pinch her cheek. No time to jaw, dear, I say. I’m making art.

Back in my studio, I set the bowl down on the desk and put brush to canvas. It doesn’t take long. I already invented the table for the bluebonnet picture, so it’s easy to reproduce. The rest of it’s line and color, space and light. I give myself plenty of distance, taking in an imaginary kitchen (cabinets, sink, window, light fixture) so I don’t have to get up close and personal with the fruit. That level of detail’s simply beyond my powers, Carl. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I’m no great artiste. I paint the whole thing in one go, knowing I’ll need to do touch-ups later if it’s a keeper.

But that’s the million-dollar question, right?

When I’m done, I take a deep breath, dip my brushes in thinner, and wander outside. It smells like honeysuckle and cut grass. Except for the heat, springtime’s lovely on the ranch. Anyhow, I’m not going anywhere in particular, just trying to get some air and clear my head. I amble over to the barn and climb up onto the John Deere. The key’s in the ignition, Carl, right where I like it to be. I backhand sweat off my brow, then crank that baby up. Sucker makes a helluva din, I’m here to tell you. For a second, teeth rattling and bones shaking, I wish I had me something to raze or demolish or destroy. What good’s all that power for if you don’t use it? But that’s not why I’m out here. I shut the thing off and swagger back up to the house.

How’s the pintura coming, Jorge?

See what I mean, Carl? You’d think she spent all day slaving over her Spanish books. Not bad, I say.

No more death and destruction, right?

Siempre la vida, sweetums. That’s the way you told me.

Muy bueno, Jorge.

The woman’s practically fluent already, Carl.

I’m feeling good when I step back into my studio. The tractor still starts, Lara’s gorgeous as ever, and the sun’s smiling down on all of us. Thanks to a little ventilation, my studio doesn’t stink so bad, so maybe I won’t get all woozy and lightheaded. Not that I mind all that much, but still. Fact is, I might be a little high on fumes right now. Not this very second, Carl, it’s not like I hauled all my supplies up here to Big D and set up an easel in my hotel room so I could keep painting right up till the eleventh hour. I’m not huffing from a flask of paint thinner to keep the demons at bay. No, I mean right now, when the story’s happening, as I step over to my new paintings. I’m ready to look at them again, to see them with new eyes. That’s what Mrs. Henderson always says: You have to step away from them sometimes to see them at all.

I’m ready, so I take a look. And you know what, Carl? I almost wish I hadn’t. Because where there was just some bluebonnets in a Mason jar, now there’s also an arm. I mean it, a brown little arm but no body to go with it. Looks like it came off a baby. Limp little wrist hanging over the lip of the vase. Thing’s still bleeding, looks like, coloring the water translucent pink. And where there was just a pickup, my Ford F-250, now it’s full of Arabs in turbans and sunglasses and surplus military jackets. They’re in the cab and extra cab, in the truck bed and all over the diamond-steel toolbox. Where’d they all come from? They’re pointing AK-47s, Carl. Wielding RPGs and missile launchers. It’s a very threatening picture. But the worst is the still life. I know, it’s just a still life, what could go wrong? The apples and pears and bananas are still there, and they don’t look half-bad. Trouble is, mixed right in there with them, and in Lara’s good bowl, are several hand grenades. And some heads. Two with bearded faces, one clean-shaven, all of them bloody. It’s not easy to capture carnage in such detail. It takes patience and precision. So if I painted those heads – and I don’t think Whiskers did it! – I’ve got better technique than I realized.

What did I tell you, Carl? Mrs. Henderson’s a great teacher!

Believe it or not, there’s something else. In all three of the new paintings, there’s that Arab kid from the self-portrait. Remember him? With the turban and the flaming eyes? Well there he is, right in the foreground, eyes on fire. He’s pointing at yours truly, no doubt about it this time, and you know how I hate folks pointing at me, Carl. I don’t know who he is or how he got there. I can say with a clear conscience I’ve never seen that kid a day in my life. But he seems to know me, or knows who I am, at least. It’s eerie. And when I take a look at my other pictures, he’s in every one of them.

Now, I’m rattled, I’ll be the first to admit. For a minute there, I think I’m losing it. I storm out of my studio and make a beeline for the kitchen. Lara’s gone missing, but I don’t worry about it. She probably just took Bo out for a walk and didn’t want to disturb me. I tear open the fridge and grab a six-pack of Lone Star. I tear off a can, punch a hole in the side near the bottom with a paring knife, then shotgun that baby. It comes so natural, I don’t even realize what I’m doing until I’ve downed three cans in five minutes. Now I’ve got a good buzz going, Carl. The room’s spinning, my face feels flushed, and everything seems funny, from the shape of my hands to the fact I spent two terms in office, everything. I head back to my studio without even closing the refrigerator door.

I’m ready to take on the world.

Except maybe I’m not. Soon as I step back into the studio, I get this haunted feeling. It’s spooky, Carl, I’m here to tell you. Everywhere I turn, that Arab kid’s pointing at me. Plus, the Middle Eastern motif has gone too far. I can’t take the sight of all that gore, not even after I guzzle a couple more Lone Stars. All at once, nothing’s funny. Goes from hilarious to dismal faster than you can say I’m a war president. I’m down in the dumps, Carl, all because of one Arab kid. I mean it. I get all weepy, and I’m not usually a sloppy drunk. Not that I’m drunk, exactly, but I’ve been off the sauce for years, so it doesn’t take much. Let’s call it loopy. I slump down on the floor in the middle of my studio, gazing at all my ruined pictures through this wet stuff leaking from my eyes.

Then, all at once, I want to say I’m sorry. Don’t ask me why. We did what needed doing. Still, I want to say sorry to all of them, but mostly to the Arab kid that keeps pointing at me. And you know what, Carl? I think I even mean it.

So I say, I’m sorry. That’s what I say, right there in my studio. Nobody around but me, not even Bo or Whiskers. I’m sorry, I say again, and my voice cracks. Something weird about it, too, like somebody else is talking.

But the kid doesn’t move. He just goes right on staring, eyes in flames, staring and pointing. I can’t get rid of him. There’s nothing for it. Maybe I’ll have to cancel the show, I think. Maybe I’ll have to give up painting altogether, I don’t know.

Only maybe it’s too late for that. Turns out, waking up in the night crying wasn’t all that bad, because now I can’t hardly sleep at all. That Arab kid keeps me up nights, Carl. He’s got me wondering, Did we do the right thing? All that time, we followed the path of the righteous. That’s plain as day. We did what needed doing. It was the right thing to do. You know it and I know it and the American people know it. Hell, the entire world, Carl!

But, I don’t know, what if it wasn’t?

Fiction, Print Issues, Technology and Arts Issue, Uncategorised

Uncategorized

Cinnamon rolls and racists

by DM Zoutis • February 15, 2020February 15, 2020

Eikones

Dignity is the most precious type of deformity there is!

Midaq Alley, Naguib Mahfouz

I was sitting in a coffee shop located in a Hiroshima hospital killing time before I had to get the poisons. I was reading an article about how a friend of Prime Minister Abe stole lots of money and got land for almost nothing. This guy was trying to open another school that would teach kids to revere the Constitution. Not the current one, but the one from Meiji, which eventually led the country to the horrors of the slaughters in Asia and the war crimes of the fire bombings of Japan, and to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and to total destruction and to an endless occupation. He was also pushing the Rescript on Education of 1890, a document infused with the bullshit of the samurai, which the majority of the people did not embrace, and do not now embrace, but which is at the core of Abe’s and the extreme right-wing group Nippon Kaigi’s beliefs and their attempts to destroy the current Constitution, which, regardless of myth, was substantially put together by Japanese, especially Article 9, or the “Peace Article”. Swirling through my angry and depressed mind was this newspaper article, detailing how Abe’s wife cried as kids recited the Rescript of 1890 and later sang (literally; see YouTube!) the praises of Abe and his destruction of Article 9 and the passage of prewar-like State secrecy and police powers laws. Suddenly, a man two seats from me started saying,

“Koreans are bad. They hate Japanese. Chinese, too. They are bad,” said Yoshi-rin.

Not interested.

“I lived overseas and I know. Koreans are bad. I hate them.”

Could you leave me alone? I don’t want to hear it. I am reading my paper and eating my cinnamon roll and that is it, OK?

“But they are bad. Abe is right. We need to do something. We need to get rid of Koreans in Japan.”

At this I lost my mind. Depressed by how this place is going and by various encounters with the rising hate, worried about whether my son, who is Japanese, will eventually be hunted down and drafted and forced to be in the next foolish attempt to fight China, I lost it very quickly. While the guy kept on hurling insults (with his wife trying to shut him up), I grabbed my uneaten cinnamon roll and asked him if he didn’t maybe perhaps want me to shove either this roll or my fist in his mouth. I then made the choice for him and threw the roll at him and watched as it bounced off his face.

Now you might shut up, no?

“Call the police,” he weakly croaked to his wife and the store manager.

I gave him a few fricatives and the almost peace gesture and left for my chemo chemicals.

Several hours later as I made for the toilet to pee red poisons I noticed some cops milling about near the coffee shop. When I came out of the toilet there they were, surrounding me, all six of them. At first I gave them some shit and then I just gave up. They took me outside the hospital and questioned me at the front doors. I asked them if they were questioning the lunatic who started this madness and told them that I wanted him arrested under the new hate-speech law. They were indeed questioning him, they assured me as they hustled me into their aged detective car filled with smoke and some sort of rattle and drove me off to the dirty and old police station to be questioned some more and fingerprinted and forced to write my confession. They also took pictures of my chemo bald head, focusing on the back with its small bits of remaining hair that I had my son quickly shave off after I got home.

This I believe: to oppose

Is the only fine thing in life.

To oppose is to live.

To oppose is to get a grip on the very self.

Opposition, Kaneko Mitsuharu

Is his your first case involving a cinnamon roll? I inquired.

“Ha ha! Yes, yes it is,” the young detective admitted.

What do you want? Are you arresting me? Is this going to court? Do I need to ask for a lawyer? Are you doing the same thing with that nut?

“No! No! We aren’t arresting you and this will not go to court.”

Hmm. I want that guy arrested.

“They are talking to him now. He says you had a metal knife.”

Ha ha! Yes, I admit it. I had a metal knife and I was stabbing my cinnamon roll. Maybe you should arrest the coffee shop manager for providing the deadly weapon.

“OK, OK. Yes, we heard it was the shop’s metal knife for all customers.”

So he had one as well! Arrest him!

“Ha ha! Look, he isn’t going to press charges. He is just going to forget it. He understands your serious medical situation.”

But does he understand HIS serious situation?

“OK. If you can just write what happened and an apology we can drive you home.”

Ugh. Give me the paper.

And so I wrote my Nazi/Soviet-style forced confession and got a free ride home (instead of a bullet) from the police, who came with me to my door and had me unlock it to make sure I (and the alien card, too) wasn’t lying and that they could check in on me one day.

Je confess!

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you. — John Ashbery

Killing time in the coffee shop and minding my business as always, suddenly a scary man started saying horribly racist things to me while holding a metal knife. Scared and feeling cornered I reached for my tasty cinnamon roll (uneaten) and, reluctantly, used it in an effort to protect myself from this crazy racist attack. I feel bad. About losing the tasty cinnamon roll. And about the racism. And about wasting all this time. And for the police, who must have many more important things to do for the people, like arresting thieves who steal money from taxpayers to try to build scary schools that promote hate speech, which is against the law now. I feel an apology is necessary. Many apologies. I, for one, promise to never go into the coffee shop again and to never ever throw a tasty cinnamon roll ever again at racist nuts.

I have to admit I broke my promise months later and went to have a tasty cinnamon roll in the coffee shop in the hospital. The manager welcomed me back warmly and said: “Long time, no see!” As happened 99.9% of the time, no racist nuts yammered at me. In fact, like 99.9% of the time, mercifully, no one yammered at me at all. And I thought to myself that that cinnamon roll was damn tasty, as I vigorously cut it up into pieces with my now plastic knife.

A Lack of Understanding: Storytelling for Robots

by Henry Shevlin • December 25, 2019December 25, 2019

“Have you ever heard of the poet Xu Zhimo?” asked Paul.

I hadn’t, nor was this a question I was expecting to hear from my Uber driver in a discussion about autonomous vehicles.

“A great Chinese poet, studied at Cambridge. The Chinese tourists love him. They go get their picture taken by the plaque over at King’s College. Problem is, it’s a big plaque, so they have to step back into the road to get a picture of it. So whenever I drive past King’s and see a group of Chinese tourists, I know I have to be on the lookout. Could a driverless car do that?”

Paul had a point. On the face of it, at least, being able to anticipate a pedestrian’s behaviour like that would require not just quicksilver silicon reflexes, but the ability to get inside their head, to understand their motivations, their goals, the reasons for their actions. In other words, to tell a story about what they were going to do and why they were going to do it.

Most of us make these kinds of predictions effortlessly. From planning a perfect date to getting the seating right at a dinner party, we’re able to understand and anticipate each other’s behaviour. This capacity is what philosophers call folk psychology – not the psychology of scientists in labs, but the psychology of everyday life. If I know my co-worker feels undervalued, I know he’ll appreciate an earnest email of thanks, and if I know my friend likes to be seen as an expert on arts and culture, I might make a point of asking her opinion on the latest Tarantino movie. At its most exalted, folk psychology can seem like magic – that moment when the detective intuits exactly what the murderer will to do next, or the lover knows just what to say to make her beloved swoon.

At its core, folk psychology is a matter of constructing models of people – their beliefs, dreams, fears, wants, and needs. In this sense, it’s a matter of storytelling, of creating narratives about the people around us. When we tell a story, we transform a dry and chaotic cosmos of objects, properties, and events into a vivid and tractable world of characters and motivations. And just as a story requires characters, so too do characters require a story.

It’s perhaps tempting to think that these abilities are a rarefied human quality – something required of people navigating complex social environments, but hardly a requirement for an artificial system. When Siri yet again gives me the wrong answer to my query, and I say an exaggerated thank you, it doesn’t matter that she doesn’t recognise my sarcasm. But cognitive scientists have long recognised that our ability to construct and elaborate stories and characters is key to many everyday tasks, from language, coordination, and leadership. And if we want artificial systems that aren’t just crude tools but colleagues, then they’ll need to learn to construct and understand stories – or at least, to convincingly fake it.

II.

In thinking about the importance of storytelling, language itself provides a good demonstration. Consider a sentence like “the scientists gave the monkeys bananas because they were hungry.”

This might seem like a simple bit of text, readily digestible without the need for storytelling or understanding. But there’s more complexity here than meets the eye. Nothing in the rules of the grammar or syntax of English tells you that the ones who were hungry were the monkeys – the word “they” could just as easily refer to the scientists themselves.

The reason we know it’s the monkeys who were hungry is that we’ve constructed a microstory: some scientists are doing an experiment, and they’re making sure the monkeys are properly fed. If we’d been given an unusual backstory – for example, one in which the scientists were only allowed to eat after giving bananas to their experimental animals – then we would naturally interpret the reference of the word “they” quite differently.

Examples like this have created a fertile test for artificial intelligence known as the Winograd Schema. If an AI can satisfactorily resolve this kind of ambiguity, the reasoning goes, it must actually have some intelligence, some ability to understand. Unfortunately, as is often the case in AI research, it turns out it’s easy to cheat on the test. By exposing artificial systems to large corpuses of text, it’s possible to teach them patterns of language and speech which they can use to work out the most likely reference of an ambiguous word. Artificial systems may not be able to understand, but – as it turns out – understanding isn’t necessary in this case for successful prediction.

This kind of ambiguity, though, is just the tip of the iceberg. Philosophers have long recognised that language doesn’t consist of simple atomic propositions, utterances like “the cup is on the table.” Most human language conveys far more than meets the eye: it’s full of shades of nuance and unspoken assumptions that can only be decoded once we have a grip on who we’re speaking to and the purpose of the conversation. This is most obvious when we speak obliquely. If I ask you if Jane is dating anyone, and you pause before replying that she’s been flying to New York a lot recently, I’ll naturally (and effortlessly) recognise that you’re hinting at a distant love affair.

This kind of implicit meaning – what linguists call pragmatics – underpins even simple communication, and involves a dizzying amount of interpretation that we conduct unconsciously. Imagine you’re sitting on a bench in the park and your friend leans over and points in the direction of an ice cream van. You instantly recognise that the person working in the van is your friend’s secret lover. But are they pointing out the ice cream van or their lover?

It depends. If they’ve disclosed their secret lover to you, then it’s reasonable to assume they’re pointing her out. But let’s say you know about their lover secretly – for example, by having read their secret diary without their knowledge. In that case, you know, but they don’t know that you know, so they’d have no reason to expect you to recognise their lover and must be pointing to the ice cream van. But things get yet still more complicated. Imagine that they caught you reading their secret diary. Now they’d know that you knew, and you’d know that they you knew that they knew, so it would make sense they were pointing out their lover (if you know what I mean).

It’s easy to get lost in descriptions of these kinds of complex “mind-reading” scenarios, but none of us have any difficulty in navigating them as they arise. We can keep track of who knows what, and who knows who know what, thanks to our effortless and largely unconscious social minds. It’s interesting and perhaps telling that even our closest relatives, chimpanzees, don’t seem to use pointing gestures in nature, and struggle to understand when scientists use pointing to help them locate food; even in these simple gestures, there’s a rich tapestry of social cognition woven into our everyday communication and even body language.

This casual facility for understanding others is brilliantly demonstrated by flash fiction. When we read a story like Hemingway’s “For sale: baby shoes, never worn”, our minds instantly fill out background details, turning a black and white sketch into a technicolour portrait, something no existing AI would be remotely capable of achieving. In order to understand stories, you have to construct them, by filling out a world with characters, motivations, backgrounds, and personalities.

Of course, not everyone has it so easy. Neurodiverse individuals, and in particular people with autism, often struggle to decode the subtle implications buried in these simple short utterances, and sometimes face real challenges in interpreting indirect communication. I should stress that autism takes many shapes and forms, and many people with autism have managed to find effective strategies for dealing with the frustratingly circuitous communicative tendencies of others. But their experience at the very least shows that the easy social understanding wielded by neurotypical people is a tricky cognitive achievement.

The exact nature of the achievement, however, is still something of a controversy. Do we learn to construct stories about others, or are we born with the ability to do so? Philosophers and psychologists are deeply divided on the issue. One famous experimental paradigm known as the “Sally Anne Test” (or more prosaically, the false belief task) has suggested that there’s a specific window in childhood development – around the age of four or five – when neurotypical children acquire the ability to understand that other people can have their own beliefs and agendas. In the classic version of the test, children see a doll (“Sally”) put a marble in a basket. Sally then leaves the room, and another doll (“Anne”) comes in and moves the marble to a different basket. Sally then re-enters the room, and the children are asked where she’ll initially look – in the basket she put the marble in originally, or the basket that Anne had moved it to?

Somewhat surprisingly, children younger than four seem to adamantly believe that Sally will look in the basket where the marble really is; the idea that she might not know that it’s been moved just doesn’t compute. But around age four, something seems to change for the neurotypical children: they pass the test fairly easily, suggesting they can now make sense of the fact that the world contains people who don’t believe the same things as them. By contrast, children with autism struggle with this test, suggesting that they haven’t yet acquired this ability. And while most adults with autism can pass it, they acquire this ability later, perhaps suggesting that they’ve had to learn to construct stories about others the hard way, rather than relying on some innate ability.

Even as adults, people with autism struggle to pass some subtler tests of this kind. In one such test, for example, participants are told a story about Sarah and Tom who are going on a picnic. Just as they sit down, torrential rain starts pouring down, to which Sarah remarks “How wonderful.” The participants are asked to say what Sarah meant by this. While most neurotypical adults immediately infer that she’s being sarcastic, those with autism are less confident, suggesting, for example, that perhaps Sarah really likes the rain. Here again, it’s the ability to tell accurate stories – to project ourselves inside Sarah’s head, to gauge her likely motivations – that’s key to understanding.

Exactly how to interpret results like these is still hugely controversial among philosophers and psychologists. But the most straightforward reading is that neurotypical people have an innate ability to understand others that “comes online” early in childhood, while people with autism have to acquire this ability the hard way.

It’s not hard to imagine why evolution might have endowed most people with this ability. We’re fundamentally social creatures, and the ability to easily model others’ beliefs and goals – to construct rich stories about each other’s minds – is extremely useful for our thriving and survival. Some thinkers have suggested that this ability is what makes humans so distinctive. For most of our recent evolutionary history, humans have lived in tight-knit social groups in which coordination, cooperation, and reciprocity have been key skills, whether via working together to bring down large prey or just keeping track of our friends and rivals, and stories are what enable us to do this.

There’s also a darker side to our ability to tell these kinds of stories, namely that it lets us manipulate and control each other. If you can effortless intuit other people’s motivations and beliefs, then it becomes easier to control them, whether by feeding them plausible lies or playing on their hopes and fears. And while not every social environment is as cutthroat as Game of Thrones or House of Cards, we’ve all encountered brilliant persuaders and manipulators who always seem to get their way. There’s even a view – the so-called “Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis” – that claims that it was this aspect of our social intelligence rather than cooperation that drove the explosion in our brain size in our recent evolution. Put bluntly, we’re smart because we need to be devious.

While systems such as DeepMind’s ToM-net (short for “Theory of Mind network”) are capable of predicting certain kinds of behaviour – and effectively passing the Sally-Anne test – they lack the understanding required for true manipulation: we need not fear an imminent virtual Iago. And while the cold impersonal intelligence exhibited by the ruthless artificial systems of Terminator or 2001 are certainly dreadful, their wickedness pales in comparison to the Machiavellian hatred of genuinely devious AIs like Harlan Ellison’s famous AM (“Aggressive Manipulator”) of “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream”. A system that was blind to the existence of others and their inner lives might be a killer, but it couldn’t be cruel, malicious, or exploitative. If this is right, then we should perhaps be somewhat relieved that this is a kind of intelligence that AIs seem to lack (at least for now). For humans, by contrast, the ability to tell stories is like the forbidden fruit: expelled from the Edenic solipsism of early childhood, we’re faced with a world of actors both malign and benevolent, and become ourselves capable of good and evil.

III.

We construct stories to understand and control. But we also create them to share. From the blind bard of Chios who stitched together the myths of Achilles, Odysseus, and Priam to the Mesopotamian scribes who laid down the tales of Gilgamesh and Enkidu at Uruk, every civilization with a written record has bequeathed to us its folklore and mythology. Exactly why we tell stories – their social and cultural function – is itself a vexed question among evolutionary psychologists, but it’s certainly true that the use of stories not merely as interpersonal tools but as a form of shared culture is that rara avis of anthropology, a near-universal human trait.

It’s tempting to think that our ability to craft and share stories publically is a development of something more basic, namely our ability to construct private mental stories to understand one another. Certainly, it’s hard to imagine that someone could write convincing fiction unless they already had a good grip on how other people tick. When the hashtag #menwritingwomen went viral last year, Twitter delighted in exposing the embarrassing blunders many male authors made when trying to craft believable female characters. Implicit (and sometimes explicit) in the critique was a charge not merely of literary ineptitude or anatomical cluelessness but a certain lack of empathy and understanding for the different experiences of women (apparently women do not routinely look in the mirror and compare their breasts to large items of fruit). It’s natural to think, then, that to tell a story about someone, you first need to get inside their head.

If this is right, then the one career that doesn’t need to fear automation any time soon is that of fiction author. But as proved to be true with linguistic ambiguity and theory of mind, even if artificial systems don’t really understand, they can do a passable job of faking it. A striking demonstration of this came with the development of a system called GPT-2 earlier this year by researchers at OpenAI. GPT-2 is a language model trained on some eight million webpages with a simple goal: predict the next word in a sentence. In this sense, it’s loosely comparable to the predictive text systems we’re all familiar with from smartphones. But GPT-2 goes way beyond their capabilities. Give it a prompt – even a few words – and it’ll wax lyrical, turning a sentence or two into a text resembling a news story, an essay, a short story, or even a poem.

It’s an unsettling experience which is worth experiencing first hand (you can try it yourself online at talktotransformer.com). For example, when I plug in “once upon a time”, GPT-2 returns a nice little poem –

Once upon a time
I was a very strong girl,
But soon I began to fall.
I’ve fallen too far.

But maybe that was too easy. How about a more specific opener; say, “Draco looked at Hermione coldly”?

Draco looked at Hermione coldly.

“I have to keep up appearances in class, you know,” he said. “The whole world gets to know me, that’s part of what makes me so mysterious. But I will keep it quiet if it means we will all be fine.”

“We must all be fine,” she said. “No one is going to want to touch your wand.”

Of course, GPT-2 isn’t operating in a vacuum here: of the 8 million webpages it was trained on, doubtless at least a couple of million of them were Harry Potter fanfiction (many of which probably involved a fair amount of wand-touching). But faced with an AI able to produce passages of fiction that could easily have been written by a real person, it’s hard not to feel human exceptionalism slipping away.

IV.

When we think about humans, stories, and AI, there’s a tension that’s hard to resolve. On the one hand, stories seem critical to our understanding of the world, of language, and of each other. They’re part of what makes us human, and part of the reason our species has been able to thrive so destructively. And yet everywhere we look, we can see artificial systems encroaching on our estates, clumsily but relentlessly doing what we do with stories, all with a complete lack of understanding. For now, most of what we see is a bad cover version: a simulacrum of human behaviour built on very different foundations. But with every new press release from Google or research paper from IBM, it feels like a little bit of human distinctiveness slips away.

When Paul had first told me about Xu Zhimo, I’d been impressed: clearly, anticipating the behaviour of pedestrians in the way he described was impossible for an artificial system that could get inside people’s heads. But the more I thought about it, the less sure I was. If there’s one thing AIs are good at, it’s learning from mistakes. A few chance collisions or near misses outside King’s College would be all it would take for a driverless car to realise that this was a dangerous spot. Given enough time and data, it might even learn to be cautious of large groups of tourists in front of Xu Zhimo’s plaque, and all this without a shred of understanding or empathy.

If AI can do so much without stories, then we face the question of why we tell them at all. Is the understanding they grant more superficial than meets the eye – nothing more than a rose-tinted Instagram filter on reality? Is it a mistake to argue, as I have, that they’re so important for our skills and abilities?

I think not. Even if stories aren’t essential for intelligent beings to understand the world, they’re a cognitive shortcut – an incredible interpretative strategy that lets us pull off miracles of prediction. When someone – even a person we just met – tells us that they’re afraid of flying, or have always dreamed of visiting Paris, or are excited about their new job, we can easily to fill out a picture of them that lets us understand and anticipate their behaviour. When we read a first-hand account of a parent who has lost a child or a soldier left to die on the battlefield, we can gain powerful new insights into human actions and emotions. As far as raw prediction goes, perhaps an AI will one day be able to match us at guessing what a desperate lover will do next, or how a community will react to a sudden tragedy. But it will do so thanks only to having copious amounts of data analysed grindingly over hundreds of millions of processing cycles. We can do it on the cheap.

There’s something almost mystical about this ability. In a memorable passage from Hogfather, the author Terry Pratchett asks us to grind the universe to the finest powder, and find a single atom of justice or molecule of mercy. If we grind the universe to a powder, we won’t find stories, character arcs, or motivations. Yet somehow we can use these things to understand, anticipate, and even manipulate each other. They may not be real in same way as atoms and molecules, but – to borrow a phrase from philosopher Daniel Dennett – they’re real patterns, and we’re exquisitely attuned to them. The stories we tell ourselves aren’t just some Dulcinea we need to believe in for our own comfort; they’re a royal road to understanding.

The Representation of Augmented Reality in Fiction

by Olivia Belton • December 25, 2019April 2, 2020

Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is set in a near-future where everyone is effectively immortal, and money has been replaced by the crudest form of social capital – power is determined by popularity rankings called “whuffies.” The book’s protagonist, Jules, and his girlfriend, Lili, live an idyllic life in Disneyland, maintaining and repairing the old rides. However, new engineers are in town, peddling augmented reality sim rides that adapt to consumer preferences in real time.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she said, after a hard moment’s staring into the moonlight reflecting off the river.

“Tell you?” I said, dumbly.

“They’re really good. They’re better than good. They’re better than us. Oh, God.”

[…] “I don’t think so. I don’t think they’ve got soul, I don’t think they’ve got history, I don’t think they’ve got any kind of connection to the past. The world grew up in the Disneys — they visit this place for continuity as much as for entertainment. We provide that.” I’m offline, and they’re not — what the hell happened?

“It’ll be okay, Lil. There’s nothing in that place that’s better than us. Different and new, but not better. You know that — you’ve spent more time in the Mansion than anyone, you know how much refinement, how much work there is in there. How can something they whipped up in a couple weeks possibly be better that this thing we’ve been maintaining for all these years?”

She ground the back of her sleeve against her eyes and smiled. “Sorry,” she said. Her nose was red, her eyes puffy, her freckles livid over the flush of her cheeks. “Sorry — it’s just shocking. Maybe you’re right. And even if you’re not — hey, that’s the whole point of a meritocracy, right? The best stuff survives, everything else gets supplanted.”

In this exchange, a contradiction immediately emerges – the augmented reality is both self-evidently better than the real thing, and self-evidently worse than it. If it wasn’t better, why would Lili be so threatened? If it wasn’t worse, why would there be reason to mourn? Jules insists that the original staying power of the Disney rides is due to ineffable qualities, such as history and soul. The augmented reality is, yes, potentially more entertaining, more immerse, but it is not real.

Disneyland is perhaps an odd venue to use as a stage to fight about the real. After all, postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard refers to Disneyland as a space designed to confront hyperreality. As he wrote in his 1981 book, Simulacra and Simulation, “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.” Baudrillard argues that in contemporary society, our reality is filtered through new media (primarily, but not exclusively, television) and our urban lives are designed to cut us off from nature. Therefore, there is a very real sense that our reality is no longer “real” – that we are surrounded by representations that don’t have a real counterpart. This is the simulacra of the title. Disneyland exists to be an incredibly visible copy of America – to reassure us that, by contrast, everything outside is real.

And yet the characters of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom cling to the reality of the physical rides over the augmented reality. Part of this is because one symptom of the postmodern condition is the belief that we have run out of anything meaningful to say through art – as Frederic Jameson argued, the best we can hope for is new and novel forms of pastiche. We cling to the past forms of art as inherently better and more authentic.

Augmented reality is at the cutting edge of entertainment technology – most peoples’ first experience with it will have been 2016’s mobile game Pokémon Go. (Again, even the new technology is packaged with a nostalgic intellectual property – Pokémon Go promises to make the childhood fantasy of Pokémon real, combining the old and the new.) Although the concept of AR has been around for a while – hence Doctorow’s usage of it in his novel – it has become more commonly included in science fiction literature, film and television since 2016. Part of the reason is surely novelty – these works portray the use of AR, now novel, as commonplace, reinforcing the futurity of their settings. But AR functions as more than a curiosity.

Augmented reality’s ghostliness is emblematic of the cheapness and ephemerality of modern capitalism. We live in a rentier economy – fewer and fewer people own their own homes, for example. Video streaming services curtail our choices (try finding a film on Netflix made before 1970) while ensuring that we never own films or music. Even tracks bought on iTunes are not really ours – they are subject to recall at any time. Augmented reality in these works is a frustrating reminder of this reality. It is a form of entertainment that you pay for, but can never touch – and never truly possess.

Denis Villeneuve’s 2017 film Blade Runner 2049 gets at the pitifulness of augmented reality. A sequel to the 1982 cult classic Blade Runner, the film follows K, a replicant (an enslaved artificial human) who works for the LAPD to track down and kill rogue replicants. K’s personhood is evident, even though he is owned by the state, as evidenced by his longing for companionship.

After work, K comes home to a tiny apartment in the sprawling megacity. He is greeted by his holographic girlfriend, Joi. Joi is programmed to adore her owner, and she is quite literally confined to the home. Joi can be a hard character for a feminist to love. Although the use of holograms in science fiction is not new, there are several moments where Joi recalls contemporary AR – the moment when she superimposes her image over the replicant sex worker Mariette, their movements not quite syncing up, recalls not only contemporary deepfakes controversies, but also plays off the same eerie disconnect between the incorporeal image and the real world that makes, say, seeing a Pikachu in a graveyard so fascinating. The incongruity calls attention to the lack of embodiment.

In many ways, Joi is a retrograde sexual fantasy – a virtual woman utterly devoted to her man, willing to do anything to please him. The old-fashioned gender politics seems to be baked into Blade Runner’s DNA. The original film featured Rachael, who was styled like a 1940s femme fatale. Unlike the duplicitous yet in-control women of film noir, Rachael passively fell in love with Deckard after he forces himself on her. Blade Runner’s use of film noir elements is emblematic of our inability to imagine a different future – this is perhaps even more apparent in the countless cyberpunk novels and films since then that have shamelessly plagiarised Blade Runner’s “Art Deco for the rich, dirty Asian-ish back alleys for the poor” visual aesthetic. The films also reassert the primacy of the male – if Rachael was a 40s new woman defanged as part of the 1980s backlash against feminism, Joi is a 1950s housewife for a generation that can afford neither a house or a wife.

On the other hand, it may be that Joi is not so simple to read. After all, Rachael was meant to be a “real” woman – she was unaware of her status as a replicant before Deckard figured it out, and her memories are that of Tyrell’s real niece. She is meant to be fully in control of her actions, and yet she is utterly subservient to Deckard. There is little indication in the film that her declaration of love at the end is false – despite her insistence that she didn’t want to sleep with him. Joi, on the other hand, is explicitly a fantasy, bought for one specific purpose – to provide companionship for a being that is deemed unfit for human company. Even then, Joi manages to break from her programming. When K leaves the city to track down Deckard, Joi insists on coming with, even if it means that her automatic backup will no longer work. She is murdered on the trip – lost forever.

One recurring image in Blade Runner 2049 is the extensive use of large-scale holographic advertisements. In one sequence, K walks between the giant feet of a ballerina, projected to be storeys high. After his copy of Joi dies, K encounters a giant advertisement for a new Joi. Although this one is also played by Ana de Armas, her look is entirely different – she is naked, with neon-blue hair. Her features are smoothed out, and her exaggerated size emphasises her unreality. She flirts with K, but he walks away disillusioned. The Joi he knew was different, and she will never come back. We are one of the loneliest generations, and K finds to his despair that love – real love – cannot be bought.

The theorist Mark Fisher argues that contemporary art, and contemporary society, is locked into “capitalist realism.” While the 2008 financial crash has exposed the failings of the capitalist system, we are no longer able to imagine any alternatives to it. However, 2016 had the effect of rupturing, at least partially, the logic of capitalist realism. The Bernie Sanders movement and the current UK Labour party have rejected the dominance of capitalism, while followers of Donald Trump have rejected the logic of realism. Blade Runner 2049 shows some of the cracks in the ideology of never-ending capitalist stasis. Film academic Robin Woods wrote that Blade Runner should have ended with Deckard joining a replicant liberation movement – Blade Runner 2049 shows us that movement gaining ground. Augmented reality also plays a large part in two 2017 video games that criticise privatised capitalism – Prey and Tacoma.

Both games are set in a world where privatised space travel has become commonplace – in many ways fulfilling the dreams of Elon Musk and Richard Branson. Prey is set in an alternate history where John F. Kennedy lived and rapidly advanced the space programme, while Tacoma is more clearly extrapolating from our current world, as companies such as Amazon, Hilton and Carnival (a cruise company) are explicitly name-dropped. Both programs feature a protagonist exploring a largely-abandoned space station. In Prey, Morgan Yu is exploring the Talos station after the release of deadly aliens; in Tacoma, Amy is investigating a lunar space station on behalf of the fictional Venturis Corporation following a purported accident.

In both games, augmented reality is not a recreational tool, but is key to corporate tracking and surveillance, and is used to help understand what happened on these space stations. The use of AR is fairly incidental in Prey – Morgan uses the recorded footage of the lead-up to the aliens escaping in order to figure out why they lost their memories, and determine the true motivations of their brother, Alex. The use of AR is utilitarian, although the effect of Morgan walking around the projection and seeing the same event from different angles is fascinating.

While AR is merely used as a narrative shorthand in Prey, AR is central to the narrative and themes of Tacoma. The AR is used to track the movements of the workers at all times – speaking to an extreme version of current corporate surveillance culture. The crew of the Tacoma are absent from the ship, but their recorded movements and conversations are represented by brightly-coloured silhouettes. Much like the previous game made by Fulbright Studios, the highly influential indie hit Gone Home, Tacoma allows you to dig through other peoples’ lives in order to solve a mystery. Like Gone Home, the pleasure of eavesdropping is in uncovering the full humanity of the absent people you are observing. While Amy is hired to assess the corporation’s liability in the accident, that is not what is most striking about the narrative. While the AR is also intangible and ethereal, it is also remarkably intimate. The player can watch a crew member rehearse his declaration of love for another – an endearing moment of privacy. While it is immensely rewarding to discover these moments, it calls to mind the pervasive access that their employer has to their every movement.

Like Blade Runner 2049, Tacoma both takes place in a dystopian extension of current capitalist logic, but also offers a way out. (Without spoiling anything, Prey is much more pessimistic.) Tacoma’s recordings take place on Obsolescence Day, which is an annual holiday for the blue-collar workers. It is later revealed that Obsolescence Day commemorates the day that human workers were meant to be replaced by artificial intelligence. This was blocked by a strong trade union movement. It is then later revealed that the Venturis Corporation engineered the accident in order to have an excuse to remove human workers from their spaceships. The ruthlessness of the corporate system seems to resonate with, say, the despicable conditions in Amazon warehouses, and the human crew members are often stuck in impossible positions – while none of them are particularly happy with the Venturis corporation, they are also unable to leave steady work. The crew are in the end rescued by a rival company – suggesting that, while Venturis may be harmed by these revelations, the capitalist system will continue unimpeded.

However, the existence of trade unions in highly precarious industries seemed like a fantasy in 2017. Silicon Valley, and start-up culture in general, is notoriously hostile to organised labour. But Google contractors recently became the first significant union in the tech sector. Tacoma suggests a future of human solidarity (and AI solidarity) in the face of corporate malfeasance. Banding together can work. In the end, the humans survive because a rebellious ship AI (ODIN) rebels against its programming and tips off the crew as to the corporation’s plans. ODIN is then due to be destroyed for disobeying orders. In one final twist, Amy is revealed to be a secret agent for an AI liberation movement, and she offers ODIN asylum. Like the replicants of Blade Runner¸ ODIN is an intelligent creation that is owned by an organisation that does not have its best interests at heart. Tacoma suggests that there may be a way out of this bind, but it requires class solidarity and radical action.

Augmented reality, then, holds a strange place in contemporary science fiction. It reflects some of the direst failings of our current system – our inability to own anything, our loneliness, our reliance on employers who seek to exploit us. But in these works of fiction, we can see a way out of this conundrum. It won’t be easy, and the gains may be partial – but it is better than surrendering to despair. Science fiction reflects our world, extrapolating our hopes and fears in a distant setting. But science fiction also provides a vision of the future. These works suggest that what we want this future to be is entirely in our hands.

Print Issues, Technology and Arts Issue, Uncategorised

Art and Algorithms: The Work of Manfred Mohr by Charlotte Kent

by Charlotte Kent • December 25, 2019December 25, 2019

Manfred Mohr
……. …….
P2602-cc_14, 2019
Pigment ink on paper
20.25 x 20.25 in

Algorithms don’t seem like fun. New sources regularly announce how algorithms are responsible for assorted prejudices against certain populations that will only get worse. They are part of the reason that artificial intelligence is getting stronger every day, going to take over jobs, and make humanity useless. But even if these dire forecasts are true, there is another side to algorithms epitomized in the art works of Manfred Mohr.

Mohr had been an abstract painter and a musician before he turned to computers. He played the tenor saxophone and oboe in jazz clubs across Europe and was a member of the band Rocky Volcano. Reading about Max Bense’s information aesthetics in the mid 1960s, however, launched Mohr on a career-defining trajectory. Bense aimed to create a rational aesthetics and “program the beautiful.” His work influenced many across Europe to investigate the computer as a system of art making. He saw the computer not as a mere tool but as embodying the rule of art. Many engineers started creating art-producing programs, contributing to the later explosion in graphic design. For Mohr, Bense provided a new way of thinking about art. If algorithms allowed a sense of order, then introducing randomness was a means of introducing the unforeseen, akin to the artist’s intuition. Mohr would later say: “Even though my work process is rational and systematic, its results can be unpredictable. Like a journey, only the starting point and a hypothetical destination are known. What happens during the journey is often unexpected and surprising.” His works are visual analogues of the algorithm’s process. They are the visualization of an event.

An algorithm is, at its simplest, a set of instructions. It provides a set of rules for a specific procedure. Roman Verostko, an artist who left the priesthood to become one of the pioneers of computer art, explains that even a recipe for baking a cake can be understood as an algorithm. The cake is the visualization of the process that is an algorithm. The formula on the page appears static, but it describes an event in time and space. Euclid’s geometry provides algorithms that, for example, lead to Proposition I.48 wherein the square of two sides of a right angle triangle equal the square of the hypotenuse. Beyond mathematics, however, algorithms appear in many common situations, like knitting or tying shoes. What transformed the concept of algorithms was the advent of the computer. Computers made it possible to solve far more complicated problems within a useful time frame. For some, the extraordinary power of those calculations also meant a new ability to generate forms.

Software wasn’t commercially available until the 1980s so most of the original artists using computers needed the ability to program. They designed algorithms but also recognized that the process could be made visual with devices like plotter arms (a kind of robotic arm for drawing). Jean Pierre Hebert proposed the term algorists in 1995 for those who create an object of art with a process that includes their own algorithms. Included in the original list were Yoshiyuke Abbe, Harold Cohen, Charles Csuri, Herbert Frank, Hiroshi Kawano, Manfred Mohr, Frieder Nake, Georg Nees, Vera Molnar, and Edward Zajec, all part of this early period of computer art. Hebert even created an algorithm that determined an algorist, which speaks to the playfulness of the group and their idea of what it means to work with algorithms:

if (creation && object of art && algorithm && one’s own algorithm) {
include * an algorist *
} elseif (!creation || !object of art || !algorithm || !one’s own algorithm) {
exclude * not an algorist *
}

Mohr’s titles all include the numbers that are significant to the algorithm. The first number references the specific body of work. For example, in the case of P2400-299_714, 2400 is the number Mohr assigns to the series. 299 refers to an older program he wrote in 1978 which is an important and substantial aspect of the P2400 series. The number 714 is the random number from which that particular drawing process started. It would be a mistake however to think his work is about the math. He uses multidimensional hyper cubes and charts paths through them to expand what people can see and think. In the early days, he was one of the few artists who found respect across the sciences and humanities. Scientists appreciated his work because of his precision and rationality while the art world recognized the purity of his abstraction as a clearly aesthetic practice.

Similar but different

When Sol Lewitt wrote that “the artist would select the basic form and rules that would govern the solution to the problem,” he could have been describing the type of work that Mohr was doing. Similarities exist between conceptual art and algorithmic art in the 1960s. Both aimed to eliminate the artist’s presence. Lewitt wanted to disassociate from the individual craft of the artist; the process should be able to be replicated by anyone. The works of Mohr, likewise, eliminated any spontaneous gesture. The algorithm was fixed and the plotter arm drew the work as indicated.

The stunning resemblances between Mohr’s P-154-C (1973) and Lewitt’s Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes (1974) often lead people to think the two artists, as well as conceptual and computer art, are the same. Both works display the construction and deconstruction of a rotating cube, adding and removing one line at a time. In a grid-like formation, Mohr’s investigation of the cube occurs across ten images for seven lines, while Lewitt’s grid is thirteen by ten. Despite the impersonal use of serialization, standardization, and a strict logic and order suggestive of a certain commonality, Grant D. Taylor describes the radically different critical reception of these works in When the Machine Made Art (2014). He explains how those engaged with computer art did not write manifestos or articles articulating their relationship to other avant-garde movements. They did not present philosophical statements. Computers were seen as “cold and soulless” and so the works were too. Today, the term digital art is most common but despite the change of term, many audiences still reject its artistic merit.

A difference can also be drawn to those who combined art and technology but weren’t specifically interested in how technology produced visual forms. In 1966, Robert Rauschenberg collaborated with the Swedish physicist Billy Klüver to produce a series of performances at the New York City 69^th Regiment Armory. It laid the groundwork for Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) the following year, a movement largely responsible for introducing technology within art practice in the United States. EAT brought artists and engineers together, as well as industry professionals from companies like AT&T, IBM, and Pepsi, to encourage collaborations across the disciplines. At that time, computers were large, cumbersome objects mostly held in research facilities, so artists who wanted to produce works had to find willing partners in the military and science fields. This had led to culture clashes, as described infamously in C.P. Snow’s 1959 Rede lecture, then published as The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.

In the post-war period, use of computers was largely dedicated to the growing technocratic military-industrial complex. Mohr was once accused of using a “devilish capitalistic instrument” and someone else at that same lecture threw an egg at him, all because he used computers. EAT participants aimed to reorient the cultural potential of the computer to transform the social order. Rather than cultivating ever better tools of war or expanding industrial pollution, the arts could harness technology to “infiltrate engineering and reform industry,” as the digital artist and critic Edward Shanken would later describe of the movement.

In this way, EAT had a significant socio-political goal to question the underlying moral implications of technology, an attitude that was not present in many computer artists whose background in mathematics and engineering often did not feel a need to examine the social implications of what was for them simply their tool. Since EAT sought these larger goals, it wasn’t particularly focused on the computer and so embraced all media. They produced large-scale performances, sound works, and displayed the computer as a part of the visual art work. This distinguished it from computer artists specifically interested in the potential aesthetic output of the computer.

Algorithms for a new generation

Mohr continues to produce works but many artists these days are more interested and concerned by the impact of algorithms within social structures. Algorithms allow for quantities of data to be analyzed and turned into specific results. Target could identify pregnant women by their shopping, long before those pregnancies were apparent or shared with family. The algorithms of many social media sites have been blamed for creating filter bubbles, whereby audiences only see posts, news, and advertisements that are similar to what they have liked previously.

Many companies use algorithmic decision systems to mitigate human error, improve accuracy, cut costs, and increase efficiency. Unfortunately, as evidence of bias and harm increases for those within criminal justice, education, employment, and healthcare systems, there is inconsistent proof of their benefit. Organizations like Data & Society or AI Now actively address these issues and disseminate research to help create a more informed population. Artists like Stephanie Dinkins, Yang Jian, Esther Hovers, Jennifer Lyn Morone, Inc., Trevor Paglen are only some of the many artists addressing these complex issues in very different forms and formats. Daniel Canogar is among those whose work responds to environmental factors. Jim Campbell examines notions of memory in a world of databanks. The list goes on.

A tendency remains to clump artists working with technologies together, as if all were somehow doing the same thing. Just as we recognize that oil painters differ widely in style and content, so do artists whose work now revolves around computers and the use of algorithms. Artists working with algorithms may actually produce their own algorithms to create a visual output, just as Mohr and many of the algorists did. But artists may adopt software to create projects and thus implicitly use algorithms; just about any artist using a computer or digital camera falls into this category. Artists may use data from others’ algorithms to create work. They may produce work about the social use of algorithms, though the art work does not per se involve algorithms or even computers. These are wildly different projects, all of which use or respond to data and algorithms.

For Mohr’s most recent show at bitforms gallery in New York City, the artist did an interview about his work. That video is titled “I Can Trust the Machine.” These are powerful words in this day when so many feel overwhelmed and confused by what the computer seems to already know about and do for us. Beyond these anxieties, however, Mohr’s work is also a reminder that algorithms in and of themselves are not the problem. The recent show’s title points a different direction for thinking about algorithms: Manfred Mohr: A Formal Language. Working with algorithms is an opportunity to create forms with affective and intellectual possibilities. Artists like Leo Villareal use algorithms to create light effects in public spaces; they may be engineering feats but audiences respond with feeling. Mohr investigates mathematical configurations to examine how we can think about what we can’t see. These inquiries remind us that algorithms can produce positive contributions. In better understanding algorithms, we can become better judges of those that harm and take pleasure in those that expand our world.

Art, Arts & Culture, Print Issues, Technology and Arts Issue

Five-Hundred Year Anniversary: Leonardo da Vinci at the Louvre

by Erik Martiny • December 23, 2019April 2, 2020

It seems fitting that the current Louvre exhibition has surrounded the Renaissance man who saw himself as a scientist with all the latest in new technologies to commemorate the 500-year anniversary of his death. Although the Mona Lisa is absent from the exhibition (it has remained on view in its usual display case for all to see in the Italian Renaissance galleries of the Louvre), access to the iconic painting is available by dint of a virtual reality headset. In some ways, it’s actually better than viewing the real painting behind its thick bullet-proof glass covering at a distance, usually behind a bustling throng of visitors. You get to see the painting released from its frame. You even get to experience the grain of the poplar wood panel underneath the paint. The VR documentary also showcases da Vinci’s sfumato technique, an approach which involved applying numerous thinned layers of paint that make the transition from light to shadow almost imperceptible. To round off the experience, you get to fly into the ghostly blue mountains that reach far behind the enigmatic sitter.

The virtual reality experience allows you to get as close as you would like to the painting while a soothing voice unpicks its secrets. You learn, for instance, that the reason why the Mona Lisa never travels abroad is that a single journey could be fatal to it. Da Vinci spent the last ten to fifteen years of his life painting it (alongside two other masterpieces) during his final stay in the employ of the French king François I. When he died, Leonardo gave his last three paintings to one of his pupils who promptly sold them at an exorbitant price to the king. François I cherished Leonardo’s work as much as Louis XII had, to the extent that he installed the paintings in his favourite room, his lavishly decorated bathroom.

As you can imagine, years of exposure to hot steam did little to strengthen the poplar panel on which the Mona Lisa is painted. It warped the painting into a permanent convex shape. It is currently so fragile that a split at the back of the wooden panel still threatens to break right through Mona Lisa’s face. Apparently, even a small temperature difference during a trip abroad could snap the whole piece in two. While the lapis lazuli paint underneath is still intact today, the coat of varnish that covers the painting has darkened over time, making the silk veil covering Mona Lisa’s dress seem opaque rather than translucent.

Another novelty in the exhibition’s scientific display apparatus is the widespread recourse to infrared reflectograms, a technique that makes the drawings underneath the painting visible to viewers. Reflectograms pick up on the carbon signatures of the drawings so that you can see the graphite without the overlying coat of paint. This allows the viewer to perceive any pentimenti, changes that Leonardo made to the drawings as he executed the paintings, but it also allows you to see the murkier parts of the paintings, those cast in shadow by the chiaroscuro technique that Leonardo used to such astounding effect. There were reflectograms of all the major paintings that could not be present at the exhibition but also of those on display. The only pity was that the reflectograms weren’t placed side by side with the finished paintings to make comparison easier.

There were a larger number of Leonardo’s scientific drawings and notebooks on display, including Vetruvian Man, probably the most famous drawing in the world. It almost didn’t make it into the exhibition, becoming the object of a polemic, France and Italy being at loggerheads in the current political climate. Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi was supposed to be delivered but hasn’t arrived yet. Another Renaissance version of the painting is on display though; ditto for The Last Supper which was of course impossible to present at the exhibition as it is painted onto a wall in the refectory of the convent of Santa Maria Delle Grazie in Milan. (There was a tendency in the Renaissance to place themed works in appropriate places: The Last Supper was deemed ideally suitable for the church canteen. El Greco’s The Disrobing of Christ was similarly painted for the ecclesiastical cloakroom of a church in Toledo.)

The French king Louis XII liked The Last Supper so much that he attempted to remove it from the wall of the refectory to bring it back to France. He failed to do so and the mural has remained in its original setting ever since, fading slowly year after year. The technique of fresco painting is something that Leonardo was entirely new to when he began the mural and he quickly discovered it didn’t suit his painstaking, slow-moving approach. To make the fresco adapt to his slow delivery, Leonardo used various chemicals which haven’t aged well. Leonardo’s scientific turn of mind pushed him to experiment relentlessly, proceeding by trial and error. There are errors in his military drawings too, those he drew for Lodovico Sforza, the duke of Milan. Some have argued that these mistakes were put in deliberately so that others would not steal his secrets and take the credit for his inventions. He also wrote from right to left, possibly as a way of perplexing spying eyes.

Although Leonardo is known today mostly for his paintings, historians argue that he was really more of an engineer who liked to paint. He tended to leave his paintings unfinished as soon as the prospect of an engineering position cropped up, leaving the commissioners of his paintings in the lurch. He left his first major commission in Florence unfinished to enter the employ of the Duke of Milan, a man who was mostly keen on waging war.

As a military engineer, Leonardo devised the most brutal military weapons alongside the first known tank, portable bridges and other strategic weaponry. He even invented a monster-sized crossbow that was 27 yards across. It was never built, however, and was probably designed to fire large stones or primitive bombs that would explode on impact.

After Milan, he moved on to Venice and finally back to Florence where he became obsessed by a longing to invent flying machines, hundreds of years before the first engineers devised airplanes. Observing birds, he understood the way their wings worked through flapping but also using subtle feather movements that captured air. His later drawings show a willingness to devise flying machines that attempted to harness the forces of nature: using wind and air, rather than trying to counter the force of gravity.

Although few of his inventions ever saw the light, recent attempts to construct some of his drawings have been fruitful. Leonardo can be credited with having invented the ancestor of both the hand-glider and the helicopter. He also he invented what is called an ornithopter, a machine based on the working of bird wings.

Understandably, the exhibition at the Louvre tends to favour the painter in Leonardo, pointing out that he wanted to elevate painting to the level of the most prestigious sciences. In his day, poetry was placed as highly as mathematics in the hierarchy and there was no real distinction between the sciences and the humanities. Leonardo called painting “the divine science”.

The curators of the exhibition are at pains to emphasize Leonardo’s passion for painting, disqualifying the long-standing idea that Leonardo was interested mostly in conception to the detriment of execution. The small number of paintings attributed to Leonardo (between 15 and 20, according to most contemporary experts) does not reflect a dilettante approach to painting; on the contrary, it shows how slow, meticulous and earnest he was about the technicalities of the art. He often spent several years painting the same picture. The Mona Lisa, for instance, was started circa 1503 and “finished” circa 1517. Some experts argue that he didn’t see it as finished when he died in 1519. He would have agreed with E. M. Forster that a work of art is never finished, it is only abandoned. Most artists would agree in fact. The French painter Gustave Moreau used to add finishing touches to his paintings no less than thirty years after he first “finished” them. Henry James was known to modify the sentences in his published novels when he found copies of them in other people’s homes.

The curators of the exhibition in the Louvre are so keen to emphasize Leonardo’s devotion to painting that they opine that the unfinished paintings (those left half painted with the drawings left apparent) were part of his sprezzatura, his lightness of touch, his rumbustious spirit of endeavour, something which Leonardo called his “componimento inculto”, a sort of intuitive composition that included movement and unfinished sketch-like compositions.

Basing their point on the thousands of drawings and the tumultuous preparatory drawings on the panel of The Adoration of the Magi, the curators argue that Leonardo was an artist who constantly changed his mind, reworking compositions endlessly. But the theory really only works for The Adoration. As the reflectograms show, Leonardo’s other painted compositions vary little from the initial drawings sketched onto the wooden panels that support the paintings. There are a few pentimenti one or two other early paintings, such as The Annunciation or The Madonna of the Yarnwinder, but the other paintings follow the original drawn lines very faithfully, suggesting that Leonardo’s compositional quandaries plagued him mostly at the beginning of his career. He later painted two completed two substantially different versions of The Virgin of the Rocks, but only because his commissioners found the first one problematic on a theological and iconographic level: it was objected that the angel Uriel was pointing at Saint John the Baptist rather than Christ. His commissioners failed to appreciate the compositional originality of the first version (the one in the National Gallery in London): Leonardo used the pointing angel to draw the viewer in to the scene to indicate a model of devotion, Saint John addressing his prayer to Jesus.

Although the componimento inculto theory is enticing, making Leonardo a kind of anticipatory Renaissance Futurist who relied primarily on shifting impulsive intuitions, it’s ultimately more convincing to accept that Leonardo was a perfectionist who never managed to find the time to complete his paintings. He certainly had a whirlwind of swirling ideas on his mind, but he was also a man with no fixed social position at a time when political earthquakes were constantly sending out premonitory cautionary tremors that made Leonardo shift his professional and political allegiances at the drop of a hat. Leonardo was restless and footloose and eager to make a living wage wherever he could find it. He was often pulled away from his paintings by his desire to make it as a military scientist.

Whatever the case may be, the exhibition is certainly very successful in having brought together a large number of his masterpieces, the largest ever gathered: eleven out of around fifteen. It’s actually a world record – even Leonardo never saw that many of his greatest paintings reunited.

The three greatest visual treats on show, as far as I’m concerned, are the Louvre version of The Virgin of the Rocks, Leonardo’s Leda and the Swan and Andrea del Verrocchio’s amazingly beautiful sculpture, Christ and Saint Thomas. Verrocchio was the first major artist that Leonardo came into contact with when he joined his workshop as a very young apprentice. One of the greatest artists of his day, Verrocchio is supposed to have said that he would never paint again when he saw how exquisitely and accurately the young Leonardo had painted the angel on the left of his Baptism of Christ. The Leonardo workshop version of Leda and the Swan brims with erotic energy and playfulness. Its motifs and composition will have you spellbound for minutes. As I moved from masterpiece to masterpiece, I kept wanting to circle back to it.

Arts & Culture, Interviews, Print Issues, Technology and Arts Issue

Interview with Virtual Reality artist, Rachel Rossin

by Eric Akoto • December 23, 2019October 12, 2024

Eric Akoto: You’re a self-taught coder and game designer. How did you develop the programming skills to support your artistic practice?

Rachel Rossin: I’ve been coding and using command line since I was about five, it’s something I’ve always loved. Some of my first drawings were made on top of spooled dot-matrix printers.

There is this misconception that coding is something you have to learn in a structured setting, but the reality is that all programmers are self-taught because the sands are always shifting.

Eric Akoto: Why has immersion become so important to your work, e.g. in Stalking the Trace?

Rachel Rossin: Immersion felt salient for Stalking the Trace because that show is about control and agency. I wanted a space where I could overtake the viewer and pull back when I needed to.

“Immersion is about threading absence and presence.”

Experience Rachel Rossin’s vision with AR. Scan the QR code below:

QR Code for Zabriskie Point AR Experience

Eric Akoto: Can you talk me through your process, inspirations – Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point is an inspiration, are there any others? – and what is that process from seeing Zabriskie Point and producing The Sky is a Gap.

Rachel Rossin: When I cite outside material, it’s because it ends up acting like a synecdoche. For example, with Zabriskie Point, Antonioni wanted to initially end the film with a plane skywriting “Fuck You, America,” but the producers didn’t want to pay for that. That was the message he wanted to send. He charged that high-spectacle explosion scene with that type of energy, but he gets lost in the beauty of it. That’s the type of intent I wanted to charge that piece with.

Explore More:

Eric Akoto: What does the future hold for VR?

Rachel Rossin: Right now, we’re in a nice place because our devices are still separate from us. We’ve always used peripherals to extend what it means to be human…

Future of VR: Our devices will evolve from being separate peripherals to becoming intrinsic parts of us. Explore an AR vision of this future by scanning below:

Eric Akoto: What do you hope audiences will get from your work?

Rachel Rossin: Live laugh love :’)

Arts & Culture, Interviews, Print Issues, Technology and Arts Issue

Interview with multidisciplinary artist Nwando Ebizie

by Ellie Broughton • December 23, 2019December 23, 2019

Fizzing silhouettes, low synths, dancing in the dark: Distorted Constellations captured imaginations at Manchester’s PUSH festival and Brighton Festival earlier this year. The immersive installation of music, holograms, ritual and dance was designed by Nwando Ebizie, who also performs as part of the work.

At the heart of the piece is Ebizie’s experience of a rare neurological condition that was barely recognised until 2014.

“Visual snow” came into the mainstream five years ago when in Brain, a neurology journal, a paper was published about the experiences of twenty-two patients. Commonly, people with the condition have their sight disturbed by dots in their field of vision – often compared to TV static. Many also suffer migraines. Authors noted that some patients with visual snow had first had symptoms misdiagnosed as side effects of anxiety, depression, or even after-effects of LSD. The condition can develop mid-life, or be with patients from birth. There is no cure, and it affects vision, hearing and cognition. For some, it can be disabling.

For audiences who already experience visual snow, seeing Distorted Constellations may be the first time anyone has portrayed, projected and shared the embodied experience of visual snow with people who have no experience of it.

Ebizie always solicits responses from the audience. (Amongst the 289 recorded in Brighton: “one of the most amazing sensory experiences I’ve had”, “timeless”, “amazing”). Extraordinary encounters seem to be the norm. Recently, she recalls: “An artist who came said that she recently got visual snow. She had had to quit her job: she worked in theatre as a set designer, and she just felt like she couldn’t do her job anymore.

“Coming to see my project changed her mind because she saw me creating this visual art piece, as someone who has visual snow, and said: ‘Oh, you know, if she can do it then maybe I can still do it’.”

For people affected by visual snow, the work offers them a unique chance to connect and access new research, Ebizie explains: “One of the important things about the project is that it’s offering a model whereby you can have art and science sitting together. You can create an experience that can somehow feeds back into scientific research.” In Manchester, for example, Ebizie hosted an event with Dr Francesca Puledda, a neurologist researching the pathophysiology of the condition at King’s College London. People travelled from as far off as Cornwall and Doncaster to attend.

As well as crossing the “two cultures” divide between arts and science, for Ebizie Distorted Constellations also fulfills a social mission: “When I started researching visual snow, one of the things I realised is how despairing some people are who have visual snow, and how depressed and anxious it makes them to suddenly have their perception completely change.”

She was doing a project for the Wellcome Collection when she began to develop ideas around visual snow: “Because it was only discovered in 2014, there’s this thing of feeling like it just suddenly appeared. There’s no evidence it has just appeared, but there’s no evidence that it hasn’t just appeared either.”

When she began looking through their library for accounts of symptoms dating from before 2014, she drew a blank: “I couldn’t really find anything, but I realised it was because language and perception is so slippery. One of the main descriptors of visual snow symptoms is seeing something that looks like TV static, which is obviously only something something someone could describe from the latter end of the 20th century.

“What would somebody have described to us before? So I started looking at other artists, like Van Gogh, like Seurat, who maybe created their reality in a way that actually describes what they’re actually seeing or experiencing.”

For many, tackling such a huge new subject might be intimidating, but for Ebizie she thrives on the opportunity to deep-dive into fresh subjects with every project: “The way I work is, each of my projects works in quite different art forms and quite different kind of subject matters because I get really interested in something and go really in-depth into it. The process always begins with learning a new idea, subject matter or technique. With Distorted Constellations I became a Fellow In Immersion with an organisation called the South West Creative Technology Network and learned about immersive technology. With the opera I’m currently creating I researched medieval Benedictine ritual.”

When I ask her whether she faces any difficult moments working on Distorted Constellations, she replies: “It’s always really difficult. I’m trying to create something that’s a model of my perceptual reality, which we already know is something that most people don’t have and they can’t empathise with. Neuroscientists now understand that brains are inherently unique, and exist on a spectrum, with some being more typical and some being more atypical.

“Trying to create the installations, trying to create the systems of the project, can be really frustrating for everyone involved. It’s a collaborative project, so you’re constantly trying to find a shared language of something that hasn’t been created. It’s inherently creative and interesting, but it is also really tiring to feel that you’re constantly explaining yourself, and explaining why certain things are important.”

The stress was particularly sharp because the work combines two intensely personal (and poorly understood) subjects: “There is a lot of personal material in the idea of the project, because it’s this exhibition that, in a wide sense, is trying to encapsulate my reality. A part of that is my interest in Afro-diasporic ritual, and that’s very much within it, which is a whole other area which most people don’t know about. Having to explain that and weave that in isn’t… Yeah, it’s … interesting.”

In Distorted Constellations, immersive sounds and imagery become a medium for sharing the spiritual knowledge and experience that underlie the project.

One of the two key technologies in Distorted Constellations is its visuals. Ebizie’s work with a neuroscientist, Ed Bracey, into neural pathways inspired its labyrinthine design. Another artist-technologist, Coral Manton, co-developed projections that mimicked visual snow.

The installation’s other key technology is its ambisonic system. Unlike a typical two-speaker stereo system used in many installations as well as cinemas and venues, Distorted Constellations has a 360-degree sound setup (in Manchester, on eight speakers, and at other venues, six) to create a more surrounding, immersing sonic environment for its sound “palette” of others’ visual snow symptoms.

Key to the success of the installation was finding ways to make it more accessible. One collaborator, Guillaume Dujat, produced a binaural mix of Ebizie’s original composition, “Twenty Minutes of Action”, by recording the sounds from the ambisonic system on a dummy “head” (the mics sit where the ears would be. For people who will listen to the composition on headphones or audio loop, it provides a really close simulation to listening in-situ). For those who can’t attend the installation in person, an online 3D “game” version of the exhibition is in development.

It’s been a huge year for the artist. As well as touring Distorted Constellations, Ebizie also held a fellowship with the Southwest Creative Technology Network, launched a new composition at King’s Place last October, and was one of six artists to win the UK’s biggest award for women in experimental music last summer. The Daphne Oram prize, awarded last June, was presented for her work in her pop persona, Lady Vendredi, which has taken her to packed audiences at the Barbican, the Roundhouse and a BBC Music stage at Latitude.

But her achievements have also brought their own stresses with them. From autumn last year to the following May, when Ebizie started working intensively on Distorted Constellations, she experienced a “pretty consistent” panic disorder: “I was having a lot of anxiety issues and depressive symptoms. I found most things that I do quite difficult because of that.”

A change of scene has helped, she says: “It’s given me more headspace. I felt a constant crushing weight of too much going on, always being on the go. People aren’t like that outside of London.”

She left London a couple of years ago to move to the Calder Valley, and has been wild swimming and fell-running in her spare time. “If you had told me two years ago I would be doing that I would have laughed in your face,” she jokes, “‘I would never get in zero degrees water, that’s insane’.

“I’m surrounded by the hills so it’s really easy to get away – I mean, not always, because sometimes walking out the door is difficult. But it’s easier than being in London, in that you can go away. In two minutes I’m surrounded by hills, and no people, and sheep.”

Another year looms, and another project. Up next: an opera about a 12th-century mystic. Ebizie discovered Hildegard von Bingen during research into possible historic cases of visual snow. The mystic had already been retrospectively diagnosed by Oliver Sacks, she notes, with what might have been scintillating scotoma. Ebizie performed some original compositions from the opera at King’s Place in London last August, but has even grander plans for the project: “I want to build it up so it’s this kind of modern, secular ecstatic experience related to the ritual that Hildegard, or someone like her, would have gone through when they entered a monastery as a child … A death ritual with a funeral liturgy spoken over them as they laid on the ground, covered in leaves. They would have had to say, ‘I’m leaving this world now…’ She would have been about eight.”

To Ebizie, Hildegard’s significance was more about than her neurodivergence: “I was just really interested in the mind of someone who had that and but was also this crazy, incredible genius at this time when that was so difficult to be. She was crazily strong-willed enough to do it.” As two stars draw together, a new constellation appears.

Do you love me?

by Kate Shapiro • October 13, 2019October 13, 2019

I never should have let Ben come home, he promised he would stop drinking and he did for a little bit, and I thought even though I have a restraining order against him, he said he had quit drinking, and he had quit pills, and I wanted to quit pills too, and I thought: it’d be nice to be with him, just him, the real him, but then he waited until I fell asleep last night and went to the store and drank two 40s and invited this girl, who he may or may not have been trying to fuck I don’t know I read the texts and he says it’s nothing but who can tell, over to sell her xanax and shorted her or something I’m not sure I was asleep, so she started yelling and he tried to hit her, well he did hit her, and my roommate woke up and tried to intervene and the girl ran away then so he started hitting my roommate too and she started screaming my name, Melinda Melinda Melinda and that’s when I woke up and she was scratching at his face, and he was bleeding and so was she and my roommate’s boyfriend was trying to hold her back and even though she was 100 lbs she kept squirming out of his arms to scratch Ben with her jagged, unclipped fingernails. It was clear he was drunk, and probably barred out too, and I hated him because he said he wouldn’t drink, he said he wouldn’t do this again, but here he was and he kept trying to talk to me but I wouldn’t. He asked if I wanted a xanax and I said no and he then tried to put it in my mouth but I shook my head, then he put his fingers in my mouth to hold it open to shove pills in that I kept on spitting out and my roommate’s boyfriend said he was going to order a pizza then stepped out of the room, and Ben kept on shoving pills in my mouth, and I kept on spitting them out, and my roommate was crying and trying to keep him away from me because he kept trying to put his arms around me and kiss me too, and Ben kept saying Melinda do you love me? Tell me you love me. My roommate’s boyfriend came back and said that he didn’t order pizza and that he called the cops instead and I was upset, see, because Ben has warrants for assault and I guess for violating his restraining order, domestic violence stuff against me and the pigs want him bad. He’s facing real time. If my boyfriend’s roommate had asked me to call the cops or if he had called them in front of me I would have said no, please, no, I love him, I love Ben, but he didn’t ask probably because he knew that and I was happy he didn’t ask really because Ben broke his promise to me and was completely fucked up and I wouldn’t speak to him, I wouldn’t speak to him ever again, and it was good that he was going to prison, I was happy he was going to prison. The cops came really quickly, like I said they really really wanted him, and my roommate’s boyfriend let them in, one of them was squat but not fat and the other was tall, both white, and when Ben saw them he immediately started screaming and he lunged at my roommate’s boyfriend and the cops intervened and pushed him face front on the ground and the squat one put his knee into his back and Ben asked what was going on, who are you guys, and they said it’s the police your girlfriend called the cops, and he said, Melinda you would do that, and I said no I would never do that, and then I snapped my mouth shut because I forgot I wasn’t talking to him but it was okay because in the space it took for me to answer his question he forgot the cops were there because he was so fucked up on pills, Melinda kiss me he said, and I shook my head, and he said I’m sorry these men are on top of me will you kiss me, and the cops said you have bigger problems than a kiss buddy, and Ben asked who they were again, and the cops said we’re the police, and Ben said pathetically I can’t go to jail again, and my roommate said you deserve to be in jail, and Ben started crying saying look at my face, and the police found marijuana and pills in his pocket, and he would have gotten a possession charge if he didn’t tell them it was mine for my anxiety and the tall cop politely handed me the drugs like it was nothing then they spent a minute telling Ben that he had to go down the stairs, that he violated a restraining order and he had warrants out for assault, and Ben kept saying what are you talking about what are you talking about and they finally said they couldn’t explain it any other way and they heaved him up and he screamed that they were hurting them, his arm, his arm, and recoiling away and they said we’re not touching your arm, and there was confusion about where his shoes were and which shoes were his and which shoes were my roommate’s boyfriend all the while my roommate saying you deserve to be in jail and while they were hauling him out of the house he screamed Melinda, do you love me? Do you love me, Melinda? Do you love me? I said you did this to yourself, and then the police told me I could pick up his wallet and incidentals tomorrow at county corrections if I wanted, and then were gone and it was very quiet. I thought it was good he was going to jail and I couldn’t believe he lied and drank while I was sleeping and I wondered what he would do when he was out of jail and that since he wouldn’t remember any of this would he think I called the cops and come after me again, like he did a few months ago, when I had to move out of my house and into a hotel because he was trying to kill me and I had to tell my friends not to tell this person, this person who was my close partner and who I could tell anything to where I was. The cops said he would be in jail for a long time but what if he wasn’t, he’s bailed out, or there’s overcrowding or whatever reason the cops let people out of jail, and he came back and terrorized me more, and got drunk and looked through my phone and deleted the contacts of any men he found, and I had to move again, this time out of the city, or maybe I’d have to kill him, like actually kill him to get him to leave me alone, to be safe finally, or for his own good. His own good, ha, like it matters, like it even fucking matters, the good of the world, what a joke, a few years ago when Ben was better we were watching YouTube videos in bed about this guy, Albert Widmann, who was a chemist in the Nazi euthanasia program and he advised the chief planners on the most suitable means of performing mass murder and he recommended carbon monoxide and gave technical instructions to all the various participating doctors on how to administer it to mass quantities of patients at a time, and then after, how to extract gold fillings from the bodies, and he processed orders for deadly medicines for special euthanasia sites and tested them on disabled patients in certain hospitals in Belorussia with the Einsatzgruppe, and he developed special poisonous ammunition for handguns and tested it at Sachsenhausen Konzentrationslager. After the war, when he was caught he was only sentenced to five years in jail for aiding and abetting murder but only for the poisonous ammunition and later he was charged on another thing but he gave 4,000 DM to a foundation for disabled people and the government decided that’s that and he became a varnish manufacturer. Anybody who belongs in jail doesn’t stay there very long. Ben just called me through a third party and asked if I was still his girlfriend and I hung up. I wish I had let him put the xanax in my mouth.

Arts & Culture

Neo-slavery in Italy? The Controversial Status of Africa’s Migrants in the Boot

by Olurotimi Osha • October 12, 2019October 12, 2019

Italy’s race relations between white Italians and its African migrants and black Italians, while not stellar may not be as dire as race relations in America, but economic opportunities afforded to blacks in Italy, are certainly not as promising as in the United States.

About 10:30 p.m. in the streets of Milan, close to Porta Genova at the metro hub, in the middle of nowhere, I realized I had taken the wrong tram. After disembarking I try to get directions from the men I see, who are elderly but can’t speak any English. The streets are almost empty on this Wednesday night, but after I crossover to the bus stop, an elegantly dressed and pretty Italian lady in her 20s, who noticed I was lost offered me assistance saying she could speak English. After explaining where I needed to go, I was beckoned to follow her, as we boarded another tram. She dropped me off and walked me to the Duomo, where I now recognized, and which was walking distance from where I lived, and then went back on her way.

This impressed me, considering I knew better than to approach a young white woman at 10:30 pm in the streets of New York, in my homeland. I would at least have gotten screamed at, if the cops weren’t sicced on me. This was another taste of what I had deemed Italian (or Milanese) kindness and courtesy, which I mostly experienced everywhere in my 6 months of law school in Milan. It was a fortiori given just a few days before, there was news of a drug-dealer Nigerian migrant who’d allegedly hacked an 18-year-old Italian girl to pieces and stuffed her dismembered parts in several suitcases dumped in the streets. This gruesome news is said to have triggered a xenophobic outrage in which an Italian gunman, 28-year-old Luca Traini, randomly shot and injured 6 black African migrants. While these tragic events did not sully my experience in the Boot (sobriquet for Italy because of its shape on the map), my Italian roommate from Rome cautioned me that he feared there was increasing racism and anti-black migrant hostility because Sicily and southern ports were inundated by African migrants.

Even my female Italian classmate, eager to match me up with an Italian girlfriend would also caution me about the provincial sentiments of those she considered ignorant Italian folks (and less educated, as she put it), who sought to preserve the Italian bloodline and did not want Italians to intermarry with foreigners. It is ironic given the diversity of Italians and their history of mixing, evident in the diversity of their physical features. A ginger-haired classmate would explain to me that the distinctive red hair of many Italians was possibly an inherited trait from an old Celtic conquest of the Lombardy region. Arabs would populate Sicily to grow citrus fruits in commercial quantities for trade with the British, after its medicinal value in treating scurvy was discovered. The northern region bordering Switzerland and Austria had Italians with blonde Nordic features. And there was a long history of integrating North Africans.

However, the new influx of sub-Saharan African migrants escaping wars, persecution and hardship in Africa has been resisted. One refugee from Nigeria named Efe, who subsists by panhandling, holding out a trucker hat to collect change from kindhearted Italians, informed me that he was starting to experience racism in Milan. Once I asked him why I had not experienced the same thing, he responded, “You are rich, and are bringing in money to their school and so they treat you well.”

My Italian classmate and roommate had said something similar, informing me that African Americans were admired in Milan where hip-hop and other black music suffused the sound waves, and there was also an increasing classism going on among the nouveau-riche Italians. (Coming from America, where I have lived for over 20 years, I was considered African American by Italians.)

However, Efe, a graduate of a Nigerian 4-year polytechnic college, insists that Italians are better than the tribalistic people he left back home in Nigeria. He, like many other Africans on the cadge in Milan, has his Italian documents in order, but he remains unemployed as he claims that racism exists although it is not the openly hostile and violent type that prevails in the United States. He explains that his continued unemployment after 3 years of living in Italy, is a result of what he calls an Italian resistance to strangers. Thus, jobs, he says, are retained for traditional white Italians and even North Africans are integrated, and gainfully employed, but there is a resistance to blacks.

Every morning before he starts his mission of scrounging for a living, he sweeps the streets and surrounding areas of the shop where he stands to beg pedestrians for change. His labor is for free. Similarly, another Nigerian migrant, Osa, whom I have seen often on my morning jog, arranging tables for a pizzeria and sweeping the floors of the surrounding area, is not paid for his labor. After the owners of the pizzeria had started to look at us in a suspicious way as we engaged in our conversation, Osa gestures that he needed to return to “work” sweeping the floors and setting up the tables for the pizzeria. He said that although he was not paid for his labor, the shop owner expected him to do it regularly like a job as an implicit condition to allow Osa to beg pedestrians for change in front of his store. Consequently, the shop owner was saved from having to hire an extra hand to do the work that the African migrant did for free. On another day, on my morning correre, I saw Osa setting the tables around 7 a.m. and stopped for a chat. After a while, the shop owner actually called him out and expressly told him to get back to work and arrange the tables and sweep the floors. Osa told me he is not paid, and the shop owner does not even give him any food from the pastries or pizzas he stocks.

My roommate from Rome had complained about the cheap and often free labor of the African migrants supposedly infiltrating some Italian industries and making it difficult for traditional white Italians to secure jobs as an employment crisis exists in Italy. He believes the mafia is responsible for trafficking African migrants to provide inexpensive labor to Italian industries.

It is against this backdrop and a promise to stanch the migrant flows from Africa which is increasingly a burden on Italians, that a populist far-right government has been swept into office. In June 2018, Matteo Salvini, the Minister of the Interior and Deputy Prime Minister, violated international law when he barred a ship, MS Aquarius, carrying 629 refugees from Africa to dock. The standoff was eventually resolved after the Spanish government demonstrated compassion by allowing the distressed vessel to dock in its harbor. I spoke with a half-German and half-Dutch friend, who was in Italy for two years studying Italian, and she informed me that Mr. Salvini’s speeches and proclamations denouncing certain groups and enunciating ethnicities and types of people he wished to bar from Italy, made her skin crawl.

She said he markedly reminded her of Adolf Hitler. Like Hitler, he is a demagogue and a school dropout. He is also given to histrionics and signs of xenophobia. Despite the anti-immigrant and seemingly racist rhetoric of Mr. Salvini, his party, Lega Nord would secure electoral victory to install Toni Chike Iwobi as the first black Italian Senator in parliament in Italy’s 2018 general election. Toni Chike Iwobi, married to an Italian woman, immigrated 40 years ago from Nigeria, his native country, after securing a student visa. He holds several university degrees, ranging in fields from economics to computer science, from the United States, Britain and Italy.

However, the newly installed black Italian Senator from Nigeria, who is said to have established his own technology company in Italy, traveled a different path to the Boot from that taken by another fellow Nigerian, Godwin, who survived for 3 days on an inflatable boat (he called it a balloon) on the Mediterranean Sea before being brought ashore to Sicily, by an Italian rescue team. Godwin now eked out a living working 8 hours a week cleaning a school, but his wages cannot sustain his wife and daughter or pay his over 1,000 euro a month rent in Milan. Consequently, with his open hat in hand and after sweeping the streets and a stretch of the sidewalk by a supermarket on Via Giambellino for free, Godwin supplements his income via begging generous Italians for their change.

Godwin who speaks eloquent English, informed me that he is a graduate of a Nigerian university—Imo State University. Godwin, like the black Italian Senator, Toni Chike Iwobi, is from the Igbo tribe in Nigeria, famed for their entrepreneurial abilities. He told me that he had come to Italy with the expectation that he would be able to secure skilled employment with his university degree and diligence.

After paying about 800 dollars for his passage through the desert he arrived in Italy about 3 years ago. He’d set out from Kano in northern Nigeria, traversing Niger and traveling through the Sahara Desert in an opened pickup truck, in which about 55 passengers wrapped their limbs around a 10-foot pole impaled into the boarding of the bed, where some kneeled or sat with their knees pressed firmly to their chest. In the weeklong drive, dodging paramilitary and border officers who randomly shot at migrants to prevent them from illegally passing through, Godwin saw the sandy trails littered with corpses of travellers like him, who had fallen off unable to hold on, or had been discarded after falling severely ill. They were each given a gallon of water to subsist on for the week through the desert. Individuals who ran out sometimes resorted to drinking their own urine to quench their thirst in the scorching desert heat. According to Godwin, some passengers who had to squat in the uncomfortable position in the truck bed for hours and days became paralyzed.

Godwin would eventually make it to Tripoli alive and subsequently found work as a paid laborer for about 4 years, before Libya was bombed by NATO forces, and a state of anarchy ensued, which left Nigerians enslaved in Libya. Godwin claimed that Libyans weren’t racist but had been kind to Nigerians who occupied their professional cadre during Gaddafi’s regime. The one thing that marred Libya, he said, was because their women were not permitted to mingle with foreigners for cultural and Islamic reasons, the large presence of West Africans precipitated a prostitution ring where Nigerian girls, including teenagers and even university graduates were trafficked with the lure of a pathway to Europe. In reality, the captive girls were made to have sex with about 40 men a day, every day for about 3 years, to pay off their debts, which often escalated once the journey had started and they had no means to go back to their homes. They became sex slaves in brothels called “connection houses.”

Godwin said often the girls were not asked to pay money upfront, but simply to take an animist oath administered by a Babalawo, promising to pay an open (undisclosed) amount once they arrived in Libya. Failure to comply with the contract would incur death. It was a blood pact. Thus, many of the girls were unwittingly forced into prostitution. Some died after a few years, some got terminal diseases such as AIDS, while those able to pay off the debt that was demanded in Libya and were able to remain healthy after 3 years of service as unpaid sex workers, crossed the Mediterranean Sea to Italy, where they often continued in prostitution, having been accustomed to the trade.

Miraculously, Godwin had traveled with his wife all the way from Nigeria, and they both made it alive, through the desert storms, and the tempest of the Mediterranean Sea to arrive in Sicily, where his wife was already pregnant and would deliver their daughter in the camp in which they lived for 8 months until they were cleared with their papers. Goodwin and his wife each received 75 euros a month, free health services, and food while in the refugee camp in Italy. Godwin informed me that he had obtained papers enabling him to stay because he had been a political dissident involved in student protests against the government in Nigeria, in part due to the crisis in the Niger-Delta, where he is from.

Ironically, the Niger-Delta area where Godwin told me was his home, is an oil-rich region that produces most of the oil revenues in Nigeria’s monocultural oil economy. (While only about 10% of Nigeria’s 1.1 trillion-dollar GDP comes from the exportation of crude oil, it still constitutes about 70% of the government’s revenues.) The largest Italian energy company, Eni, is currently embroiled in a corruption scandal and court proceedings in Milan, arising from its executives’ oil deals and bribes allegedly paid to government officials in Nigeria.

But the Nigerian common folk remains indigent and without hope in his native country, rich with the world’s most valuable resources, while an unconscionable and exploitative cabal of ex-generals, civil servants and politicians live lavishly off stolen funds—worth billions of dollars. The type that get accepted in Europe and in Italy, where their offspring lavish scores of thousands of euros on expensive education and a jet-set lifestyle, are the Nigerian-big men and their children, who should be lavishing in jail for embezzlement instead of being celebrated by their retinue of sycophants. Thus, given Italy’s increasing classism, a dichotomy exists in the treatment of Africans corresponding to a demarcation between those Africans with loot or money by any means, and those without, who invariably arrive on the shores of Italy by escaping a deathtrap via the desert, forests and the Mediterranean Sea.

Black refugees are often imperiled even as they near the seeming shores of safety. My roommate from Rome told me there was a time there were “murmurings” among Italians in the streets that perhaps an expedient solution to stemming the flow of African immigrants was to shoot them once sighted approaching their shores, as he claimed some other European nations did (Greece perhaps and the now penitent Spain once did). Thus, if these refugees are undeterred by the risk of death constantly in their paths, why would labor without wages not stop them, I ask? Is a condition of providing free labor as an impecunious adult not akin to slavery, which should be avoided at any cost considering it is dehumanizing? (Incidentally, an Italian classmate had asked my opinion of an offer extended to her for an unpaid internship at a prestigious American law firm in their Milan office. Such internships and summer associate positions typically pay similar law students 40,000 dollars in the United States—a tidy sum for any student for just 3 months of work. Labor without remuneration appears to be slavery.)

Furthermore, the prevalence of Africans hat in hand, being forced to beg Italians for their change inadvertently reinforces white supremacist dogma and the dated trope of Africans being the white man’s burden. The sight of healthy able-bodied young black men looking demoralized by having to panhandle dehumanizes and emasculates black African men in relatively patriarchal Italy. These African men risked their lives to use their skills for gainful employment. Not to beg. They could have stayed in Africa to beg their wealthy oppressors, had their motives been to beg for a living. Mamoudou Gassama, nicknamed “Spiderman of Paris”, for having climbed up four stories to lift a 4-year-old French boy to safety, as he dangled precariously on the banister of a high-rise balcony, similarly passed through Italy with luck of finding work. After his heroic feat the French President, Emmanuel Macron favored him by making Gassama an automatic French Citizen and giving him immediate employment as a fireman. How many more spectacular men and women among its African migrants, who have bravely crossed the Mediterranean, is Italy missing out on? People able to grow the Italian economy and not mooch off it.

Although Italy is a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) Article 4, which specifically prohibits slavery, servitude and forced labor, Mr. Salvini’s flagrant contravention of international law, by refusing the refugees to dock at Italian ports may be an indication that he will be violating laws that Italy is bound by. My Italian law classmates expressed their concern that the populist Five Star Movement party rankles with agitation from seemingly disenfranchised young Italians in the remote areas for an Italian exit of the European Union. Furthermore, in its alienation of African migrants, circumventing them from being gainfully employed, there is an argument that Italy already violates Article 14 of the ECHR, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race and national origin among others.

While Osa indeed believes he is in a helpless state, being forced to panhandle for a living on condition that he sweeps the sidewalk of the store where he is allowed to ask pedestrians for money, he still thinks is better than an alternative which some Nigerians are forced into because of their unemployment: selling drugs. This was the case for the Nigerian drug dealer alleged to have hacked an Italian teenage girl, who was his customer, after she had overdosed on cocaine he had allegedly supplied her. For Osa, there is no going back to Nigeria. He even alleged that Nigeria is ruled by leaders who are diabolical, and do not care about their people or the common folk, like the Italian government does.

They were off the consensus that in time, their Italian born children would secure equal rights to white Italians, as they become integrated into Italian society. He said although there was the traditional Italian nationalism and cultural dislike of strangers, he could see growing signs that younger Italians in their twenties and their teens, were increasingly more comfortable and familiar with black Africans. However, 24-year-old Italian-born, black male, Claudio, does not share their optimism for a cultural change that will integrate blacks. Claudio, whose parents are of Ghanaian origin, said he had lived and mingled with white Italians all his life, and his best friends are white Italians. He informed me that even though he was born in Italy, living in the south the only work available to him is factory work. He said that access to skilled employment and the professions, even with a university degree in Italy, apart from Milan, was through family connections and a network which simply bars the children of Africans. He said he understands that he will not have the same opportunities open to his white Italian friends because he is precluded from them as a black person. He said he plans to emigrate to London, where he has family and use the opportunity of his European Union nationality to enter England without a visa and to eventually settle in cosmopolitan and more inclusive London.

As for the panhandling diehards who’d lost all hope in Nigeria, when I asked one of them if he was not bothered by the cautionary lessons of history indicating that when a nationalistic majority has felt its economic security threatened, a discrete and conspicuous minority has often been targeted. The Holocaust happened to Jews in Nazi Germany even after Jewish assimilation and social integration into German society, where they thrived and produced the likes of the most accomplished folks, such as Albert Einstein, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Did the fear not exist that their black descendants could face a parallel experience in the future? Efe responded that such a tragedy could never occur in Italy.

Efe claimed that Italians did not possess that sort of malevolent racism which the Nazis demonstrated, but rather are simply more insular and culturally protective of their identity in their nationalism. He claimed they are in fact polite and sensitive to the sufferings of migrants, but simply wish to maintain their closed culture and their jobs for white Italians. I asked the Igbo one among them, why he could not start a small business, since his people are known for being enterprising. He said it is very difficult for foreigners to start small businesses in Italy, as taxes, licenses and a culture resistant to foreigners are near-insurmountable hindrances. Yet he is optimistic, that through many years of panhandling, he will be able to build two houses in his hometown in Nigeria, where he plans to retire after seeing that his children have been well taken care of in Italy.

Preparing to return to America, the land of the free, as my stay in Milan comes to an end after completing my studies, I ponder over the complexities of Italian nationalism, the demonstrable politeness and even kindness I believed I experienced from Italians I interacted with and the conflicting xenophobic position of the co-ruling party Lega Nord (Northern League), which had helped elect the first black Senator in Italy’s history, the Nigerian-born Toni Iwobi. Generously, my Criminal Law professor, F. Vigano, who had been called by the President of Italy to become a Justice of Italy’s highest court had awarded me the grade of e lode, as the highest scoring student, although I was the only black person in the class.

Stepping into the kitchen after a long day at the library, I found a ray of hope to resolve my ambivalence, after I opened my refrigerator. I found my shelves in the fridge stocked with groceries bought for me by my new Italian roommate from Calabria, who had noticed that my usually stocked section of the fridge was uncharacteristically empty. He’d heard that a misfortune had befallen me after my bank account was depleted on a recent European tour. I was told the groceries were for me. As I thanked him for his generosity, Giuseppe my roommate, waves it away, saying, “Don’t worry Olu.” Tranquillo is the Italian phrase meaning “to stay calm.”

Reggio Calabria, where Giuseppe hails from, is one region in southern Italy, whose mayor said he would defy Salvini’s order and allow the Aquarius to dock in its seaport. I chose to read more to my Italian roommate’s words. I took it to be a reassurance that the League’s xenophobic stance was not a foreshadowing of the future endangerment of African migrants living in Italy, and those still braving the perilous journey across the Mediterranean Sea.

Arts & Culture

The Email that I Just Sent my Psychiatrist was a Tour de Force of Sanity and Grace: On Reading from the Sent Folder

by Kirkley Mehndiratta • October 12, 2019October 12, 2019

Dear Dr. Hanover, my Psychiatrist,

I wrote you an email just now that was most certainly a testament—proof!—of my sanity and the grace with which I bear my mental and physical afflictions, the latter of which are actually just side effects of the medication you have prescribed me (Abilify).

I was doing one of my favorite things just now—reading an email that I already sent and poring over the subtext that is the email to one’s psychiatrist.

Well, this is not that email. The purpose of this is to prove that the email I sent to you just now was a tour de force of sanity and grace and that, therefore, I’m right about everything I said and believe, period, and you should congratulate me on my compliance with treatment, the pristine state of my mental health, and thus affirm once and for all that I’m sane and cured and will no longer be needing your treatment or services. Moreover, my email is a testament to the fact that I no longer need any more of those pills and their side effects that are not just ruining my life, but to hedge my claim carefully, of which the costs are beginning to far outweigh their benefits (I’m talking about Abilify).

When I started out the email to you with a greeting (being careful to be polite and respectful by using ‘Dear’ and moreover, using that salutation to communicate that I am sane, warm, and as in control of my emotions as possible), I shortly thereafter mentioned my primary care doctor by name and my recent primary care visit to recount my many symptoms—none of which are psychiatric in nature. Why did I do this? First, I mentioned this to establish that what I’m experiencing is REAL. These are not ghostly physical and mental ailments. No. They’re measurable and someone else has recorded them. Thus, I mentioned another provider in the healthcare system with whom you are in a possible alliance and with whom you are likely complicit in my treatment to establish that I am IN on the joke that is the American medical system. At the same time, I did this effectively to play you against your disdain for Internists—because I know, I know, all specialists think that Internists/primary care doctors are “FLEAS” (“Fucking little egotistical assholes” as they call them in the secretive, skull-and-bones-like pyramid scheme of privilege that is medicine)—but my primary care PHYSICIAN actually BELIEVES that I’m sane, goddammit, and that my symptoms are real, whereas I’m not sure I can say the same for you.

Note that in the last paragraph just above I did not use the word ‘doctor,’ but, rather, physician, for the former would be too quotidian and ignorant of the term those of you on the inside of the system use. See?! I can use your medical jargon. I must, therefore, be sane, and worthy of the same respect as going through 10+ years of medical training.

While typing this letter to you (not THIS one—the one I actually sent to you through the Patient Portal), I admit that I pondered the Star Trek bobble head dolls and Buddhist texts you keep side by side your office along with your Ted Baker briefcase that is made to look older than it is (much like you in your oversized suits), the outdated DSM on your shelf, and your framed certificates from YALE MEDICAL SCHOOL AND MASS GENERAL. WHOA.

Further, in the emailed missive, when I waxed prophetic on my most recent symptoms with as much specificity and detail as I could, I was careful to stop short of analysis and to couch my symptoms in terms you could understand—“vertigo,” “CPK levels extremely elevated”—without sounding like a complete paranoid hypochondriac. My use of “extremely elevated CPK levels” was a nod to SCIENCE—the levels of some sort of enzyme in my muscles were elevated, and there’s no disputing a TEST THAT YOU GAVE ME.

I then documented each symptom I have lately experienced, from random night sweats to memory loss to an odd feeling constantly surrounding me that I’m about to die. Because even though I have read entire sections of the DSM (which is expired, or much of which is obsolete by now, I know—Did I mention I’ve read it?), I’m deferring to you, the PHYSICIAN, and your God-like status as arbiter and transmitter of health. Sure, I could have googled Abilify side effects and cited articles from a medical journal instead…. Oh? What’s that? I did cite an article from a prestigious medical journal? Yeah.

The article I cited in my email to you is from a legitimate medical journal—see? The Journal of Neuropsychiatry-something-or-other. Published recently. There’s no hidden agenda on the author’s end that I can discern, though there is an entire medical system—the system You help to direct and operate (well, not operate—you’re not the surgeon at the top of the medical pyramid after all), intended to thwart any truth much less a CURE for these ghost-like mental-and-physical ailments.

I’m not paranoid, but everything is connected, Dr Hanover.

EVERYTHING.

BELIEVE ME, DR. HANOVER. Can’t you just for a moment, if but for a moment abandon the mafia-cult-conspiracy against the individual that is the world of medicine and “health” “care” and just take my words seriously for once? I am not a mere dilettante of my own health. I may “present” (that’s medical-speak, using ‘present’ as a verb for you) as a layperson of medical science, and yet, I am the one and only expert on ME—the sole expert on the side-effects of these drugs my psychiatrist (that’s YOU) is peddling and pumping me with day after day. I am an expert on the state of mind that is my own? I left a question mark there because, well, is my mind really my own anymore, or have you rented it out to Abilify, Dr. Hanover??

JUST LISTEN TO WHAT I’M SAYING TO YOU, DOCTOR. What has happened to medicine? It’s been taken over by corporations and insurance companies and extroverts. What happened to the brooding, deliberate and deliberating doctor who meditated over the state of the patient as though he was a priest for the body—the healer?

Fuck “heal thyself.” I’m without the power that is medical knowledge. I can only Google random articles on Abilify side effects and try to divine, as though through magic, what the fuck is wrong with me, for I (again deferring to you) lack the medical knowledge that you have managed to hoard, consolidate, and lord over powerless minions such as myself over the years. I’m asking you nicely, now. Heal ME by releasing me from Abilify’s clutches, Goddamn it. I’m pretty sure that the 7^th circle of hell is a rare, undocumented side effect of Abilify, and I’m PAYING YOU TO LIVE IN HELL RIGHT NOW.

Thank you for your time. Thank you for reading the email I sent you, Dr. Hanover—again, not this one, but the one that I was careful to send through the patient portal just now, for it is a privilege to have email access to one’s doctor, if but through a highly secure and closely guarded patient portal—a privilege that must be used cautiously and seldom so I can demonstrate my extremely high level of sanity and with the slim hope that you’ll believe I’m sane and that you’ll fucking take me off of Abilify and put me on another drug that is really ultimately not going to be any better.

Playing By Ear

by Nancy Ludmerer • October 11, 2019October 25, 2019

After my 90-year-old mother’s right hearing aid falls out and disappears, an otolaryngologist implants an electromagnetic hearing device inside her right middle ear. This implant uses the most advanced technology and really seems to help. Mother’s home health aide Gloria is pleased since the implant can’t fall out and be lost. I, who pay the bills, am pleased because I won’t have to replace it, hopefully ever. Both of us are pleased because we no longer have to shout at Mother to be heard.

Soon Mother starts insisting that a tiny fairy lodges in her middle ear, alongside the implant, speaking to her in schoolgirl French. “The fairy’s name is Nanette,” says Mother. She gives me a sly look, the one she’s used since I was a girl, whenever she suspects I’m hiding something. “Nanette knows things.”

When I was in middle school, Madame Clio gave each student in French class a French name. Mine was Nanette — a name I disliked and often didn’t respond to. That was 48 years ago. I worry about Mother. Is she descending into dementia? But except for this Nanette business, she’s lucid.

Then Mother begins to comment on things I don’t tell her, things I don’t want her to know. “I’ve been looking in Help Wanted,” she says. “There are opportunities even for someone your age.” How can Mother possibly know? That I took early retirement. That I’m not looking for work. Has Gloria seen me around the neighborhood when I should be downtown? I glance at Gloria but she’s busy setting Mother’s hair. When she’s done, Mother will look like a queen.

The next day, Mother brings it up again. “What about BNP Paribas? They’re hiring tellers.” Same as in middle school, I pretend not to hear. I won’t work in a bank again. I’m studying piano in the Juilliard evening division. During the day I frequent a practice room, not an office. At night I take lessons and work on my touch and sight-reading.

“Nanette says you want the Steinway when I die,” Mother says a few days later. “She says you deserve it for taking in me and Gloria. That’s not going to happen, cherie. You and Charles will inherit equally. You two can sell the piano and partager the proceeds.” Charles lives in Paris and visits Mother once a year. He’s completely unmusical – like Mother. Mother inherited the piano (now in storage) from grand-pere, who played by ear. I can’t play by ear, though I tried. When I started lessons at 10, Mother lamented I didn’t inherit this gift. I needed to study a piece to play it.

Today, while Mother and Gloria are in the bathroom, I spy Mother’s old hearing aid, the one she lost, wedged between the seat and metal frame of her wheelchair. Mother’s implant has a 90-day return policy. We could get it removed, and get our money back. Adieu Nanette.

Yet Nanette knows I dream of living with Bach and Mozart, not Mother; dream of Debussy commanding me, instead of maman.

Nanette knows me as Mother never has.

I can’t let her go.