Besides poetry, Kathryn Paulsen writes novels, short stories, essays, plays, and screenplays. Her work has appeared in publications from Canada to Ireland to Australia, including The Smart Set, Humber Literary Review, The Stinging Fly, London Reader, Riptide, Northampton Poetry Review, Scum, Craft, Spillway, and Big Fiction. Her short story collections and poetry chapbooks have been finalists in several competitions, and she’s been awarded fellowships at Yaddo, MacDowell, and other retreats. Kathryn lives in New York City but, having grown up in a military family, has roots in many places. Her paternal grandfather's family emigrated from County Cork in the nineteenth century.

Fur Piece

You’d prefer us to have fur

Like other animals’: thick, sweet, soft, glossy,

Pettable. Though you manage

Well to give the impression that you

Like petting this scant-haired arm,

For today, anyway, and that’s like other animals,

Who just do what’s in them to do

From heaven knows which mothers’ natures.

Now and then even the fathers count,

Left behind at the scene of the birth,

Too dim-sighted to make out

Which females have flown.

No, you say, that’s no close kin to us;

That’s lower animals.

Don’t kiss me,

You who don’t like getting tangled

Up in women’s long hairs,

Like them cut, asked me to put mine up,

Pull it back, get it out of your way.

Hair’s all right in bouquets of women’s heads,

Mere foliage for those features,

Themselves so troublesome.

The best eye is the eye inside.

A manageably short cut of fur would cover

All of us up, warm us, smooth us, shield us,

Even though we’re said to be

No longer ashamed of our nakedness.

José Antonio Mazzotti was born in Peru, but moved to the U.S. in 1988. He is currently teaches Latin American literature at Tufts University. His collection El Zorro y la Luna (poemas reunidos 1981-2016) received the José Lezama Lima International Prize of Poetry from Casa de las Américas, Cuba, in 2018. That same year a selection of his poetry came out in English with the title The Fox and the Moon. He has also published Sakra Boccata (translated by Clayton Eshleman in 2013) and Nawa Isko Iki / Amazonian Chants (bilingual edition, 2023).

Mashpi Pania

I am the only molluscle created exclusively

For pleasure. I’m happy to be touched

By the chorokes and their fine wings, their morning song

And their saliva in bloom; with that I am happy

And I wander around the corners spilling orange blossoms,

I raise the tide of the night with my red skirts,

Waving sovereign on the stone cinnamon hill.

I am the only birdcher who sings in a night suit,

Hovering over the undergrowth with my achiote wings,

Sensitive to the breeze that bristles my gostosa rump,

Path of a hundred days in the compass of the burning sun,

Knower of the secrets of the gigantic crickets

And their ancient violin, their voice finer than a drop

Of rain, towards her I go religiously.

I am the only dancevore of the hundred cane fields

That beat their stems with the herons and the green

Tokaris, inhabitant of stagnant and hard lakes,

Sovereign dolphin of infinite waters, towards you

I urge in this hour of total humility, your

Delicate fingers converging in the mud below

From your reed roots, those I aspire, I must suck.

I am the only flag bearer of your hidden dreams,

The one that eats your brain, like a worm, softly

And rich for the tongue of the storm when it rages

The gale that washes everything, the one that heals wounds,

The one that awakens in your mornings the illusion of the day,

Palpo el botón de dicha and it is in full swing, like

This hot broth of shells and boshkis, slightly salty.

José A. Alcántara is the author of The Bitten World: Poems (Tebot Bach, 2022). His poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming, in American Life in Poetry, Poetry Daily, Ploughshares, Bennington Review, Rattle, The Harvard Review, & The Slowdown. He has received fellowships from Fishtrap, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Willapa Bay AIR. José lives in western Colorado and wherever he happens to pitch his tent.

Galvanized 

In the mown field, a broken turtle – 

plastron, carapace, scutes – 

a casualty of the harvest. 

I bend and gather 

make ever wider circles 

plucking bone from chaff. 

Back home, atop a metal box 

labeled HIGH VOLTAGE! 

I reassemble my creature. 

I pray that a spark may come 

a life may be reborn, a slow 

steady thing, hungry, mad.

Ben Roth teaches philosophy at Emerson College. His fiction has been published by Nanoism, Flash, Blink-Ink, Sci Phi Journal, Aesthetics for Birds, Cuento Magazine, 101 Words, decomp journal, Bodega Magazine (nominated for a Pushcart Prize), Gambling the Aisle, Sensitive Skin, Euphony, Your Impossible Voice, Quibble, and The Bookends Review.

The Lost Hand

It has been two weeks since I lost my hand. I had angrily cast aside yet another failed drawing, consigning it to the shadowy recesses underneath the table-saw I used to cut stretchers for my canvasses.  What had started as a study for but one small part of a self-portrait had become an obsession. I sat surrounded by piles of crumpled sketches; from the one pool of light at the studio’s heart I looked over them, unable to tell which patches and smudges were shadow, which charcoal. The crumpled forms had become corporeal, and seemed to crouch in every corner, climbing over each other to fight for light and air.

“Look!” I shouted at myself.  “Just look!  Can’t you do that anymore?”  For days now, I had been trying to draw my hand, but whatever talent I possessed had escaped me.  So familiar, yet it refused to be captured on paper.  Scowling, I kicked over my stool, scattering one of the heaps of creaturely black hands.  My attention drifted to the other hand, my drawing hand: here was the real culprit.  It wasn’t that my left hand refused portrayal, but that my right refused to portray it.  I crumbled the stick of charcoal I found in it, letting its remnants fall to the floor.

“Use your eyes,” I said to myself, merely muttering now.  I studied the patterns of blackening on this hand: the way it caked under the nails, and collected in the furrows and folds of the palm.  I could not tell you now how long passed—long enough that the sun would reappear—but the familiar become strange, then disgusting, and finally disturbing.  The lines of ligaments across its back seemed alien mechanisms built for unknown purposes.  The chapped knuckles became miniature landscapes, desert mountains with wind-blown drifts of salt on their slopes.  Eventually all I could see were the greens and purples and blues obscured beneath the skin, colors not of living flesh, but disease, even rot.

I flexed the hand, and it became a dreadful swastika of a weapon.  I fractured its form into a rolling arpeggio, one finger after another, and a hideous crab was birthed.  All I wanted to do was look away, but I couldn’t—studying this creature, my eyes refused even to blink.  They watered; my vision blurred.  I let out a low, abject moan, and just when I thought I could take it no longer, it—the crab, my hand—was simply gone.  

I dashed around the studio, turning on every light.  Racing to the window, and then outside, I tried to look at it in the sun’s healing, natural light.  I desperately pawed with my remaining hand through the piles of discarded drawings, looking for it among them.  “Where’s my hand?  Hand!” I shouted, as if calling it home.  “Hand!  Hand!”  I repeated the word until it was reduced to a meaningless sound, a mucoused shape in my mouth.  Nothing.  My arm trailed off into indeterminacy.  Still today, whenever I try to look at my wrist or my forearm, my eyes are pulled into the vortex that is the absence beyond them.

For these long days and nights I have not been able to pay attention to anything but this blankness at the end of my arm. Weak with hunger, I sloppily eat with my left hand, food missing my mouth as I hope to regain a glimpse of my right. Exhausted, I pass out for a few hours on the stained couch, but my dreams are no respite, and I always wake to find my gaze pointed directly into that void. I cannot think about, cannot look at, anything else.

But today I have a plan. I just need to distract myself, and it will come back. I have been looking for it, at it, so long that I have seen through it, beyond it.  It is still there, just hidden from me.  If I can force myself, with greater pain and horror, to concentrate on something else even for a moment, it will come back, and all will return to normal. The circular blade of the saw whirs to life. Pinning one end of a cord to the table with my right elbow, I use my mouth to pull it into a tight tourniquet around my left wrist. The saw’s siren song calls out.  My left hand might not be guilty, but it is the sacrifice necessary to restore my sanity, my livelihood, my right.

David Valdes is the author of three nonfiction books (including the Today Show pick, A Little Fruitcake), four novels (including Finding My Elf, an Apple Book of the Month), and more than a dozen plays. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Huffington Post, and more. He teaches fiction and nonfiction at Tufts, playwriting at Brown, and theater at Boston Conservatory.

We Keep Our Dead

I come from Cremation People. Body burners going way back. But we’re still getting our technique down.

When Grampy died, Grammy didn’t waste a beat arranging cremation. We scattered the ashes right behind our house in the little rock garden the size of a plastic wading pool and we didn’t stand around contemplating it too long. It was one of Maine’s four actual hot days a year and our church clothes were melting onto us like polyester skin.

You won’t be surprised to know that the next time Grammy sent me out to weed, I got a little on me. I had expected the remains to be all soft, feathery, like the dark powder that lines the ashtray of a sinner who doesn’t know the body is a temple. But the ground was studded with hard bleached kernels, pebbles of death among the pansies. It was horrible but minimalist, a Zen boneyard.

This was supposed to be an improvement over the fate of Russell. Russel had been the fun uncle, fun because he was youngest and could fling pizza dough high into the air, watch the wobbly disc flip, and catch it coming down. Fun because he lived far away and never had to discipline us. He died faraway, too, 30 years old, lugged home to Maine in a carry-on by Grammy.  

Throughout my childhood, she kept Russell near in a dense golden metal box the weight of a concrete block. I suppose it was an urn, but when I learned the word in spelling, the picture was of something else, something vase-y and sleek, not heavy and square. Urns were supposed to be delicate ceramic affairs that might get knocked on a mantle in a madcap dive as the hero of a comedy tried to save it. We had no mantle, save the cardboard fireplace Grammy put up at Christmas, and if Russell’s home ever fell on you, you’d lose a digit for sure.

Russell was perched on a plant stand on the sitting porch where we ate grilled cheese sandwiches while watching the lightshow of thunderstorms or read by the woodstove as snow blinded the windows like batting.  He abided quietly over a domain of Newsweek magazines, African violets, and thousand-piece puzzles, his urn a little castle imploring, Dust me. The metal tarnished over time and we were poor enough not to have or maybe even know what you’d polish such a thing with. It didn’t seem a very nice outcome and more than once, Grammy muttered, “Prob’ly shoulda scattered him.”

 So, when Grampy died, scattered he was. By the next year, he would stop being so visibly a part of the rock garden, but in those first months, my mother and I both groused about this decision. I didn’t want to weed him and my mother hated that the rock garden was next to the old wooden picnic table where we often ate supper. You know what they say: Nothing kills a picnic like cremains.

Almost 30 years later, my mother moved from her Glade-scented senior housing apartment into assisted living. She tasked my then husband and I with emptying the place, sorting the ephemera from across the decades that cumulatively revealed her one true passion: here a bag of cat toys, there a pile of 1995 Cat Fancy magazines, and a life-sized mechanical sleeping cat with battery-operated purr.

The closet behind her easy chair was especially dense with cataphernalia, including a startling number of notebooks adorned with pretty kitty faces. Inside some were daily temperatures from across the decades. Others contained answered prayers. A few were blank, as if she’d wearied of filling them.

The tumult of that closet! Beyond the feline stationary, there were dozens of old phone books. I knew for a fact that she called fewer than 15 people in a given year, but she had old phone books from the 70’s to the 00’s piled up just feet from her chair. For what? To fuel a campfire in a coming apocalypse? For an elaborate art installation titled “People of No Interest to Me”?

And then, to my surprise, under all the faded yellow Yellow Pages, I found Russell. I lifted him carefully from among the detritus, sat him on a TV tray, and had one of those sober this-is-what-it-all-comes-to-moments. Growing up Seventh-day Adventist, I had heard it said many times that “the dead know not anything”—a slogan never more comforting than at that moment.

I decided to scatter the ashes right there in the Maine woods I had often been told that Russell loved. Trudging through the snow like a Robert Frost character, I bore Russell into a stand of birches and began the task. I held the urn away from me, trying to judge the direction of the wind, so that the ashes would swirl down on the current. But the air was still, and ashes had a mind of their own, falling out heavily, unprettily in clumps.   

And then rose petals began to flutter out of the container. They were startlingly beautiful, almost pure black and perfectly silky. Had they always been this color or had time done some alchemy? What magic had kept the petals so pristine? It took my breath away. 

This is where the Hallmark movie would end. But after the petals, there was still more Russell. Ashes seemed to pour and pour, beyond possibility. My extended arm ached and my teeth chattered and I really needed a pee. Eventually, the clown car of urns was empty.  Russell was free, returned to the earth he’d walked as a boy. I said a little prayer and headed back inside. 

Except that when I went to remove my boots, I couldn’t: they were caked with him. I knew he didn’t know, had been beyond knowing for most of my life, and yet and yet. I couldn’t just rinse away the fun Uncle, the tosser of pizza dough. Back out to the birches. I trudged about to let the snow claim him. It took a while, further reminder that the dead are not always easy. 

When it was my mother’s turn, she came home in a stiff paper bundle, no urn at all. I kept her in the house for a few months, Russell style, before I buried her in the lilacs out back, Grampy style. What I learned from the rock garden mess of my youth was to bury deep, so I dug a three-foot hole. What I learned from my first scattering was not to shake her loose. I set the entire package intact at the bottom of the opening and then filled the hole, first with soil and then with the roots of a freshly-purchased lilac tree. I had a new commandment: water thy mother.

Someday, I will die, and when I do, my daughter or perhaps a grandchild will deal with my ashes. I want them to fill a generous-sized Mason jar with me and bring me to the Back River in Maine, which I love the way Russell loved the woods. I hope they will keep the lid on tight and drop the whole thing in. The dead may or may not know anything but this much is true: the living won’t need an urn to keep me close. 

When you love someone, you always get a little on you.

Jinnie Mannion is a Fall 2023 graduate from Tufts university who earned her degree in sociology and philosophy with a minor in studio art. She is currently based out of Massachusetts and works in multiple mediums. She is a painter primarily working in oil paint, a porcelain ceramist, and a graphic designer.

Artist statement:

I seek to explore passion, eroticism, vulnerability, and intrinsic human essence through the subtlety of the female form.

Rachel (they/she) is a trauma-informed, body liberation photographer, artist, former birthworker and the creator of Bloodroot Sessions. They curate healing photographic experiences for people on the path back to their bodies in the form of private sessions, retreat experiences and community gatherings. Their work focuses on the process of people coming home to themselves and their bodies as a means of liberation from harmful systemic oppression that is rooted in body hierarchy. Rachel aims to capture this unfolding through collaborative healing photography sessions and communal experiences.

Artist Statement:

What does it mean to reclaim our bodies as our own- to reach down, so deep, to what was there before empires of separation told us who and what we could be. What does it mean to be witnessed and truly seen? To behold and allow ourselves to be all that we are as we release the shame of conditioning and step into the truth of these good and holy bodies?

Our bodies are the site of liberation, the place where our souls reside and where powers have sought to separate and deny us our humanity. Through shaking fear and uncomfortable emergence we silence the cultural voices to reclaim our own voice, our own heart and our own body until one day we find ourselves as we've always been...seen and unashamed, divinely whole and already free.

Isabella Arabia is a third-year Combined Degree student studying Biopsychology at Tufts University and Studio Art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.

Artist Statement:
 

“Plastic Reflection” is a self-portrait meant to confront the paradoxical nature of the societal expectations placed upon women and their impacts on individual autonomy and self-image. Inspired by the iconic Barbie doll, “Plastic Reflection” interrogates prevailing cultural ideals surrounding femininity and bodily autonomy, as well as the unrealistic beauty standards placed upon women and their bodies. By presenting myself within the confines of this plastic mold, I invite viewers to reflect upon their own personal struggles with authenticity in a society that so often demands conformity—and ultimately, I hope to encourage the reclamation of agency over the body and the self.

Sue Johnson (b. 1957, San Francisco, CA) is an internationally exhibited artist who earned an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Columbia University and a BFA in Painting from Syracuse University. Johnson's artworks and multiple media installations are revisionist in method creating plausible fictions that run both parallel and counter to canonical histories. Her research based projects focus on topics that include the origins of museums, cabinets of curiosities and “lost” collections, the picturing of nature and women, the domestic universe and consumer culture – and collectively, defy easy categorization.

Valerie Wong (AKA @theglutenfreepoet on Instagram) was born in Toronto, raised in Hong Kong and is a management consultant in New York. As a Third Culture Kid, she is a local and a foreigner wherever she goes. Her poetry has been published by journals and anthologies around the world,  including Stanford University’s Mantis, the League of Canadian Poets’ Poetry Pause and New  Zealand’s Blackmail Press. She is currently seeking representation for her debut romance novel, The  Sweetest Deal.

Anything i love i devour - men, butter mochi, prestige TV. i stay up far too late consuming all of the above.  like a flame burning through brushwood, driving ruthlessly toward completion. needing to stop but lacking  the willpower. plume of uneasy regret after. i wish i knew the art of savoring, of rationing things to make  them last longer. meting out moments. the artistry of crumbs. what i would give for a better bound appetite,  to love safely from a distance. 

Robert Isaacs worked as a juggler and unicyclist on the streets of San Francisco before turning to music.  Over the next thirty years, he conducted everywhere from Carnegie Hall to the Cook Islands, released a dozen CD’s, and earned a Grammy nomination. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Salon.com, Reed Magazine, Hindsight, The First Line, and other periodicals. He lives in upstate New York with his wife and two daughters.

PRIVATE PLEASURES

My body was still new in those days, unexplored, a temple of wonders. I bit down on my forearm and watched the indentations slowly fade. I concentrated until I could wiggle my ears. With a little grunting and cussing, I learned to hook either foot solidly behind my head (though never both simultaneously, alas). The body my mom had assembled was the toy I played with most:  we weren't a poor family, and there were plenty of plastic and wooden toys lying around, but none intrigued me as much as my own fingers and toes and ears and thumbs.

For such fleshly obsession to emerge in a family of authors, mathematicians, and lexicographers seems curious. I was bred for the cerebral life, and by elementary school bore all the markings of a fledgling academic: the shortest kid in the grade, the pale skinny boy with freckles and bony knees and perfect test scores and an unfashionable haircut which his mother re-inflicted monthly. I was the seventh grader who solved everyone’s Rubik’s Cube and memorized digits of pi. [1] Every September, when we took up our stereotyped roles in the classroom drama — Sweetheart, Bully, Clown, Jock — my part was clear: I was the Brain.

And yet, I was fascinated with my Body. I would close my eyes and rub them with my knuckles, just to watch those bright spots moving around. Keep rubbing and the eyeballs change texture — they lose that boiled-egg resistance and go all mushy. Fantastic! Everywhere you push, it's like jelly. When you finally separate your lids the world is bright and hazy, and your softened lenses struggle to focus.

If you stick a finger firmly in your ear, I discovered around age seven, and thrust your jaw back and forth, you can create a popping sound, followed by a quiet tinkle. You get one pop per ear and then have to wait a while before it will work again. Generally I was apprehensive about this habit. It felt unhealthy, like something was cracking in half, perhaps my eardrum. I limited myself to one or two pops a day.

One night I was left alone at the dinner table, forbidden to leave until I had taken four more bites of spinach. Doing so was out of the question, of course, but it might be hours before my parents relented. To pass the time, I hooked my foot around a rung of my chair and clenched my calf muscle as tightly as I could until it knotted. One loosens a knot by simply straightening the leg, but what happens if you don't? It was interesting to feel the muscles fight each other for the next two minutes, trying to work their way back to their original positions — and it didn't hurt nearly as much as I’d always feared. Long after the knot subsided, its shadow remained. I could still detect it at bedtime (the spinach finally forgiven); a faint round ache, a pressure.

This capacity for enduring pain made me briefly famous at Camp Norway, on a lake in Vermont. “That's the boy from Cabin Eight!” kids whispered. “The one who doesn't feel pain!” Various campers and counselors took their turn, attempting to inflict discernible pain on the leper boy. Through all these tests of manhood — the Indian Burn, the Hanging Leglock, the Thumb Twist — I held my face expressionless and concentrated, zenlike, on some distant part of my body, far from the currently tortured limb. Over the next five years, to keep the attention of my peers, I also became a contortionist, a virtuoso whistler, and a champion breath-holder. I taught myself how to walk on my hands, how to sit in the lotus position, how to gurgle and hiss in uncanny imitation of a percolating coffee pot.

Tricks like these attracted only amused glances, not the ravishing popularity which I craved. But privately I began to think of my body as downright remarkable. Why, it was tougher and nimbler than most any other body around! What a fine sense of balance! What astoundingly quick hands! My pride in the capability of this body was matched only by my despair at its lack of loveliness. I never wore shorts, never removed my shirt in public, even on the hottest of days. Glimpsing myself in photographs dismayed me, for I could tolerate my face only in motion: the tongue waggling, the nose wrinkled, the eyebrows fluttering comically. Perhaps this distaste for my own appearance was what led me so frantically to entertain others, as if phenomenal dexterity could make up for a body's aesthetic shortfalls.

Then, around age fifteen, I started singing. It was simply another trick, at first. Imagine performing covert gymnastics inside your body, employing the ribs, spine, tongue, palate and jaw: singing is precisely that, a feat of coordination which is heard rather than seen. What most people call a beautiful voice is more properly an agile one, and I saw any form of agility as a challenge. Could I buzz both cheekbones? Could I lift my soft palate even higher? Could I sustain a note on one breath for twelve slow bars? Over the next few years I learned how to release sound into every part of my body — rippling through the roof of my mouth, vibrating my spine, shivering my hips and reverberating down to my ankles. When you sing a note right it feels fantastic, like sitting in one of those vibrating armchairs from the Sharper Image.

But it was just another game. I was never aiming for beauty. So I was startled when, after a performance in college, a certifiably attractive member of the audience described my voice as sexy. Sexy? Me?

“Sure,” she purred. “You can sing me a lullaby anytime.”

I was dumbfounded. Although I'd come to see my body as competent, it had never occurred to me that mere competence could elevate itself into grace, and grace could lift off into beauty — that my body, this skinny, pale, short, freckled body, could make something beautiful.

So I got a job as a music teacher. And finally, all the idle games of my lonely childhood came together:

“Do the foot trick, Mr. Isaacs, the foot trick!”

I narrow my eyes and cock my chin challengingly. “Only if you get this next rhythm absolutely perfect!” I dare them. 

Thirty-one sixth graders sit up eagerly in their chairs, furrow their little brows, concentrate with comic intensity on the banal exercise scrawled on the board. Their performance is flawless. I reward them by twisting my ankles slowly outward until my feet line up, heels touching, toes pointing toward the side walls of the room. I keep winding them farther and farther around (to gasps of delight and horror) toward the blackboard behind me. By the end of the trick, my feet achieve what a ballerina might call eighth position: they look like they've been installed backward. It is, I'm told, stomach-turning.

Satisfied, the children slide back in their seats. Then one remembers: “Do the tongue trick, Mr. Isaacs, the tongue trick!”

“Do Grover! Do that Grover voice!”

“If we get the next one right, could you balance a music stand on your chin like you did for the other class?”

I erase the board, smiling. Then I turn around.

“I wonder,” I suggest instead, “if you guys can sing one note, without breathing, for a whole minute?”

[1] 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399... good lord, why is it still there?... 375105820974944

Jabari Asim is the Distinguished Professor of Multidisciplinary Letters at Emerson College, where he is also the Elma Lewis Distinguished Fellow in Social Justice. His work has been included in Best American Poetry and Best American Essays. A Guggenheim Fellow and winner of a Pushcart Prize, he is the author of 14 books for children and 8 books for adults, including Preaching to the Chickens, named a New York Times Best Illustrated Book in 2016, and Yonder, a novel, named a New York Times Notable Book in 2022.

When I get up in the morning and the first image on my screen is Benjamin Crump wielding a pointer, I’m tempted to shut my eyes and dive back under the covers. Like uniformed soldiers showing up at a military spouse’s front door, his appearance means the news cannot be good. His press conferences expose an excruciating problem that African Americans must regularly confront: how to thrive in an unsteady nation committed to the systematic devaluation of Black lives. The predicament threatens our mental fitness, our ambition, our faith in justice and in ourselves — all critical elements of what W.E.B. DuBois would call our spiritual strivings.

I’ve got nothing against Crump, perhaps the nation’s most visible Black attorney. From what I’ve seen of him, he seems earnest if overmatched by fate. By fate I mean an indifferent public, predatory law enforcement, and inscrutable juries perversely averse to convicting police officers. It isn’t his fault that neither street-level activism nor traditional civil-rights campaigns have prevented police and self-styled vigilantes from continuing to kill unarmed African-Americans and mostly get off scot-free. Watching him, I can see that he is as exhausted by events as we are. I imagine him asleep, then startled awake by yet another phone call conveying bad, predictable tidings. Perched on the side of his bed, the box springs creaking beneath his shifting weight, he listens to wailing parents, shouting witnesses. Someone is dead.

Soon after, he emerges in a semi-circle of microphones, flanked by men in suits and perhaps a grieving relative or two. Behind him is an illustrated autopsy report, the flat, Black outline of a body against a background of daunting whiteness. Crump’s voice and image stream across social media as he points out the incriminating entry wounds, the tell-tale heart. Hunched over our laptops, we see Crump in the spotlight. In his drawl familiar to us since the Trayvon travesty, he tells assembled reporters exactly how many bullets severed the spine as the victim fled in terror, how many bullets shattered bones and ruptured organs while the victim was bound and subdued, how many bullets continued to fly after the unarmed Black man breathed his last. It’s the same ritual he performed after Michael Brown. After Tamir Rice. After Terrence and Stephon and EJ. I watch the mournful sequence unfold and wait for my headache to roll in, as reliable as the tide. As regular as a stream of dispiriting headlines.

“Chattanooga Cop Caught On Video Savagely Beating Handcuffed Black Man”

“He Served the Longest Sentence of Any Innocent U.S. Inmate”

“Supreme Court Guts Affirmative Action”

I’m as certain of the headache’s arrival as I am sure that somewhere, at the same time, another police officer is pumping bullets into a Black person’s back. Or ripping a Black baby from its mother’s arms. Or breaking into a Black man’s apartment and shooting him in his own living room. Or maybe just beating the shit out of him.

I can watch with the sound off and still determine everything Crump is saying, still take note of the careful legalese straining to suppress the outrage lurking in every syllable. I can visualize a future of endless press conferences, countless coroner’s inquests, and innumerable bullet wounds.

For these reasons, I’ve come to believe that Mr. Crump should preface his public statements with his very own content warning. Caution: Exposure to these comments could provoke a variety of traumatic reactions, including nausea, depression, paranoia, agoraphobia, and skull-splitting headaches.

Like Joan Didion, I have long known the latter as “central to the given of my life.” When I was in primary grades, my mother suspected my sluggish digestive system as the source of my torment, resulting in immeasurable hours in darkened rooms, chewing morosely on Sunsweet prunes, followed by St. Joseph’s aspirin, tears, and more prunes. I have suffered fits of wrenching agony all my life, since long before I learned of Benjamin Crump and his melancholy trade. My struggle with headaches, like injustice for Black people, is a pre-existing condition.

I don’t see auras when a migraine has me under its spell, but I do picture the affliction as a colorful, glowing shape trespassing inside my skull, seizing territory with all the presumption and violence of a settler colonialist. It exudes buzzing phosphorescence that improbably takes me back to “The Invaders,” a cheesy sci-fi series my mother was briefly obsessed with when I was a small child. I was too impressionable to watch it, but I hated to leave her side, so I paid for my disobedience with imaginary nighttime visitations featuring pale marauders from another planet. On the show, each time an alien was caught and killed, he glowed briefly before vanishing entirely. I sometimes recall those glowing aliens when a migraine descends.

The headache will generally take one of two forms. The first and less frequent invader is what I call the sledgehammer. It feels like my temples have been battered by a muscular assailant swinging the kind of bludgeon found in test-your-strength sideshow attractions. The “impact” renders me wobbly, like a cartoon character that has had a kettle thrust over his head and a mallet thereafter applied. The other, more frequent intruder is what I call the axe blade. Producing a sharper, more acute pain, it waxes and wanes in intensity, like a blinking motel sign. A sledgehammer headache tends to settle in one spot and squat there for hours. In contrast, an axe blade is restless and mobile. Like a policeman’s baton, it’s both predictably violent and violently unpredictable, making it hard to anticipate when and where it will strike.

II

“Working as a field hand while a young teen, [Harriet Tubman] was nearly killed by a blow to the head from an iron weight thrown by an angry overseer at another fleeing slave. She suffered from headaches, seizures, and sleeping spells  . . . for the rest of her life.” —

Kate Clifford Lawson, Bound For The Promised Land: Harriet Tubman: Portrait of an American Hero (p. xvi)

Psychologist Rachel Yehuda, economist Dora Costa, sociologist Joy DeGruy, and other researchers have each conducted various studies raising the possibility of trauma being transmitted through descending generations. Some scholars have challenged their initial findings, and Costa, for one, cautions against leaping to unwarranted conclusions. She has warned that her study of the effect of the Civil War on the grandsons of Union soldiers is by “no means saying that whenever there’s trauma, that it means it’s going to be transmitted.” Fair enough, but in the depths of my discomfort I can’t help wondering if my headaches might stem from violence committed against an ancestor centuries before. A collision with a constable’s nightstick, maybe, or a horse’s hoof. I could even suppose that a hapless Harriet Tubman heir might occasionally stumble under the impact of an invisible blow to the head, hurled like a weight across the centuries.

A headache can arise from emotional tension or from a physiological occurrence such as a constriction of blood vessels in the brain. A layperson can’t always determine what set off the pain and sent it thundering through her skull; in this regard it doesn’t differ much from general health concerns encountered in spaces where Black people live. Even in the best circumstances, it can be difficult to distinguish the varieties of mental anguish afflicting our communities from the more overtly biological ailments that also plague them. Writing in the Atlantic in 2018, the journalist Olga Khazan noted, “Across the United States, Black people suffer disproportionately from some of the most devastating health problems, from cancer deaths and diabetes to maternal mortality and preterm births . . .  African Americans face a greater risk of death at practically every stage of life.” Clearly, just the mental and physical effort involved in staying healthy is challenging enough to make us sick.

My temples begin to pulsate at the slightest consideration of these sobering statistics, and I imagine the facts and figures exert a similar effect on my fellow African-Americans. Of course, statistics are hardly necessary to verify observations like Khazan’s; one seldom has to take a gander beyond one’s own front stoop. “To look around the United States today is enough to make prophets and angels weep, and, certainly, the children’s teeth are set on edge.” That’s how James Baldwin accurately described the state of things — and he was writing in 1978.

The reality of our condition is compounded not only by news reports but also by all the uploaded and live-streamed footage inconceivable in Baldwin’s day. The more we learn, the more we hurt, and those aforementioned headlines only confirm our worst fears. One popular health pundit, Dr. Andrew Weil, recommends, as a partial remedy, going on news fasts from time to time. He worries, quite logically, about the substantive power of media reports to aggravate anxiety, sadness, and depression. I understand his reasoning but I can’t help feeling that for a Black person, choosing to avoid current events, even for a brief spell, can be as risky as getting pulled over by a state trooper on a lone stretch of road. In my experience, going without information is like going without oxygen. Sure, ignorance can provide temporary bliss, but it can also lead to a permanent dead end. Ultimately, I want to know what’s going on around me, or at least cling to the illusion that such knowledge is possible. However, when I remove myself from the center of the narrative, other considerations come to the forefront — especially with regard to the possibility of inherited trauma. In my steadfast inhalation of today’s adversities, am I transmitting untold misery to generations yet unborn? Will my great-grandchildren, without knowing anything about Freddy Gray, instinctively tremble at the sight of a police van?

III

A 2015 study in the Journal of the National Medical Association noted, “Compared to their Caucasian counterparts, African American headache patients are more likely to (i) be diagnosed with comorbid depressive disorders; (ii) report headaches that are more frequent and severe in nature, (iii) have their headaches under-diagnosed and/or undertreated; and (iv) discontinue treatment prematurely, regardless of socioeconomic status.” Learning that I am not alone provides no solace.

My headaches are most likely to arrive in the middle of the night. Sometimes I can fight one off by sitting up for a while, or standing, or walking quietly about the house. If I must lie down, I use pillows to support my body at a roughly 45-degree angle. Lying flat induces a terrible, drowning feeling, or the delusion that I’m a 17th-century Salem resident, accused of witchcraft and being pressed to death beneath a board weighted with stones. When simple remedies will not do, I often turn to sound. Soft music helps, as does darkness and solitude. After discovering that songs featuring cellos and double basses can be especially comforting to me, I compiled a playlist designed for maximum therapeutic power. It includes solo recordings by Yo-Yo Ma, Dave Holland, and Malachi Favors, to name just a few.

Sometimes a deep, sonorous voice can also work wonders, none as effectively as Isaac “Dickie” Freeman’s. A member of The Fairfield Four, a celebrated gospel quartet, Freeman died in 2012 at age 84. His voice was otherworldly in its depth and strength, part of a vocal heritage including legendary basses such as Paul Robeson and The Temptations’ Melvin Franklin. On his solo recording of “Beautiful Stars,” Freeman introduces the song with an anecdote about his childhood.

“Here’s a song my mother learned me to sing,” he explains. ‘My mother was a solo singer, and she sang in the Bethlehem Baptist Church. Usually whenever there was a program, they would always call on her for a solo. She would take me by the hand, and I would stand there while she sang and look up and repeat the words out of her mouth until I learned the song. And the song goes something like this.”

Beautiful stars of love

Shining from heaven above

Leading the world to look that way

Radiant is the glow over the earth below

Cheering me on to perfect day

In African-American parlance, Freeman doesn’t simply sing; he sangs. Listening to him sang never fails to ease my troubled mind.

The author and musician Jerry Zolten produced the Freeman recording. He recalled that neither of them could trace the origin of “Beautiful Stars,” although Zolten suspects “it may be a hymn of non-African American origin.” No matter, for Freeman made the song uniquely his. He infused it with a certain rough eloquence seldom if ever found anywhere besides Black churches, jook joints, and streetlights where makeshift quartets once gathered. His sound tapped into a rich oral tradition in which wisdom is passed down through the ages in the form of time-ripened discourses on everything: from storytelling and singing to planting and harvesting to loving and fighting, to watching and waiting. When Black people share observations in this way, it’s often called folklore; when white people do it, it’s called philosophy.

Freeman’s philosophizing (let’s call it that) can be easily traced back to the early spirituals that DuBois memorably dubbed the Sorrow Songs, beautiful, haunting tunes “in which the soul of the Black slave spoke to men.” DuBois went on to suggest, “through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope — a faith in the ultimate justice of things. The minor cadences of despair change so often to triumph and calm confidence.” This is also true of Freeman’s repertoire, which reminds us to not only look up at the stars but also to see ourselves reflected in them.

I try and fail to summon a similar confidence when Crump appears on my screen. I acknowledge that, like Freeman, the attorney can be seen as part of the same legacy that DuBois celebrated. The poet Henry Dumas described them as “long-breath singers,” women and men who use their voices to assert faith in Black humanity in a country of non-believers. Examples of these are not hard to find:

Tarana Burke launching #MeToo.

Rep. Maxine Waters claiming her time.

A little girl in Flint, Michigan reminding us that she still has no drinking water.

In this context, Crump’s revelations can amount to singing, discordant but necessary notes in the ongoing magnum opus that is the African-American experience.

Despite my knowing this, his disclosures send me careening through cycles of fury and bereavement, my own habitual “cadences of despair.” Only after shaking off the gloom — and the headache — can I begin to think about a quality as transcendent as resilience.

IV

A cure for the severe headaches common among African-Americans isn’t likely to be found in a bottle of extra-strength pain reliever. Consequently, we do what we must to remedy our afflictions, including but not limited to seeking therapy, praying to Allah, offering thanks to Oshun, building bottle trees and burning sage. Handled with care, these are not contradictory practices but the marshaling of multiple forces to support our spiritual strivings. This wellspring of custom and philosophy fuels the remarkable intestinal fortitude that keeps us keeping on, no matter what. The result is a miraculous Blackness honed over centuries of instinctive and intentional practice, one that reflects our wondrous gift of reinvention and all the ways we bring it. I remind myself of this wellspring as I turn from the screen, Crump explaining in the background.

Massaging my temples and breathing deeply, I allow myself a few seconds of respite from the gunshots and headlines. I will honor the ancestors, I tell myself. I will ask them to take me by the hand. I will repeat the words out of my elders’ mouths. I will receive from our amalgamated philosophies all the resources I need to keep my heart pumping and my head unbowed. I’m going to learn to move on up a little higher, as Mahalia sang. To run, stumble, fall and rise again, like Robert Hayden described. To navigate the marvelous wreck of this world while staying woke and staying sane.

Mm-Hmm. All of that.

Notes.

“ ‘They Basically Saw A Black Man With A Gun’: Police Kill Armed Guard While Responding To Call,” Mark Guarino, Alex Horton, and Michael Brice-Saddler, Washington Post, 11/12/18.

“Charges Droped Against Brooklyn Mother Who Had Baby Ripped From Her Arms By Police,” Michael Gold and Ashley Southall, NYT, 12/11/18.

“A Dallas Police Officer Shot Her Neighbor, and a City is Full Of Questions,” Manny Fernandez and Marina Trahan Martinez, NYT, 9/14/18.

“ ‘It’s Still A Blast Beating Pople’: St. Louis Police Indicted in Assault of Undercover Officer Posing As Protester,” Tim Elfrink, Washington Post, 11/30/18

Kate Clifford Lawson, Bound For The Promised Land: Harriet Tubman: Portrait of an American Hero.

“Inherited Trauma Shapes Your Health,” Olga Khazan, The Atlantic, Oct. 16, 2018.

“Being Black In America Can Be Hazardous To Your Health,” Olga Khazan, The Atlantic, July/August 2018

“Black Children Are Suffering Higher Rates of Depression and Anxiety. What’s Going On?” Katherine K. Dahlsgaard, The Inquirer/Philly.com., 12/11/18.

Tim Tomlinson is the author of the chapbook Yolanda: An Oral History in Verse, the poetry collection, Requiem for the Tree Fort I Set on Fire, and the short story collection, This Is Not Happening to You. Recent work appears in Bangalore Literary Review, Tin Can Literary Review, and the anthology, Best Asian Short Stories 2023. A new collection, Listening to Fish: meditations from the wet world, will appear with Nirala Publishing early in 2024. Tim is the director of New York Writers Workshop, and co-author of its popular text, The Portable MFA in Creative Writing. He teaches writing in NYU’s Global Liberal Studies.

The Anemones

I’m at a fringing reef off Biläo looking at the wide array of fish—yellow tangs, black durgons, a small school of blue-striped grunts. A pair of dog snappers, yellow with large lips, hovers beneath the curl of a fan coral, also yellow, and from their partial camouflage they look at me looking at them. They know how to disguise themselves amidst the like-colored fauna. (I know the fans look like plants, as do many of the soft corals, but they’re actually colonial animals made up of many individuals cooperating as one organism.) The sight of them gives me great delight: their large amber eyes, their honey-gold sheen, their sense of security against the similarly colored background of the fan—the science of them, the perfection of their bodies, their evolution. The sight of me makes them wary. From my mouth size they know that I pose no real threat in terms of oral attack. But what am I, exactly, a question I often ask myself, especially on dives: this large, peculiar creature with what appears to be one enormous eye, blowing bubbles out of each side of the oral rictus? The dog snappers hover motionlessly beneath the fan’s curl, but they’re poised to bolt forward or jet backwards in a nanosecond should I make any sudden movement. If I come closer—I am roughly three-feet away—they make imperceptible adjustments to preserve the distance. So the sight of them causes me sadness as well. Why must I be avoided, even feared? Of course, I understand why—humans are not to be trusted. Many humans who dive do so with spear guns. These snappers might very well have been the targets of one, or more. And a good spear gun right now, or even a bad one, could skewer these two in one clean shot through the gills and in under an hour they’d appear on a plate garnished with lemon and a sprig of parsley.

Below me, craggy sheets of fire coral provide shelter for an arrow crab, a creature that resembles eight long narrow jointed sticks extending from the central pillar of a thick, short trunk, and it too is looking at me, registering me, through orange eyes with white horizontal stripes that look like bandwidth on a computer screen. Conscious of me also is a purple tipped anemone. On land, the anemone is a flower, a windflower associated with forsaken love. When Adonis was gored by a wild boar, Aphrodite’s tears mixed with his blood, et voila—six scarlet petals. It symbolizes anticipation, relaxation, and serves as a reminder to enjoy the moment. Undersea, the anemone is an animal, sentient, with a nervous system, but without eyes, ears, or brain. It resembles a bunch of fingers reaching from a soft ottoman. To most sea creatures, these fingers are toxic. But not to the clownfish who live within their tacky toxic caress and serve as the anemone’s eyes and watchdogs. On duty in this clutch of white fingers  is a trio of clownfish, orange with vivid white stripes and black beady eyes that glare at me with great umbrage. I am too close. They rise from the anemone’s fingers and make aggressive gestures. One actually nose-pokes my mask. Another nips a finger on my camera hand. The nip doesn’t hurt, but it’s not a pleasant sensation, either. Unpleasant as it is, it’s also somewhat amusing: the courage of these critters, no larger than the palm of a hand, attacking a strange creature hundreds of times their size—and, it bears noting, getting their way, imposing their will, since I move not closer but back up and away. They have much more courage than I, especially now, at my age, when I wouldn’t attack anything, even if significantly smaller and easily defeated (flies and mosquitoes excepted).

Once, I visited a friend who’d married a painter with whom she had a son. The son was three and he remained in his room during my visit. On several occasions, my friend got up to check on the son’s well-being, leaving me in the company of her husband, whose company I did not care for. I felt that he was non-stop aggression. Geniuses don’t write, he exclaimed upon learning I was a writer. Geniuses paint! I promised to note that in my next story. Further, I suspected, as did others, that he’d had cynical motives for marrying my friend; she was the owner of a highly successful gallery that featured a sizeable roster of thirty-something millionaires, while he was, in the parlance of the business, nobody, a status my friend quickly transformed. The painter began telling me a long story that my friend must have heard before, more than once, about the time he’d confronted his father over abuses the father had inflicted on him. They had taken a drive near the father’s upstate home. It was nighttime and they parked on a hill overlooking the Tappan Zee Bridge, its lights and the traffic a glittering necklace over the flat black water of the Hudson. The father was terminally ill and the painter sensed that he might not get another chance to unload his hurt and his anger. I pictured the father slumped over the steering wheel, and all those glittering lights on the bridge blurring into halos through the gathering pools in his eyes, while the painter recited the index of his father’s failures like a prosecutor summarizing to a jury. Several weeks later, the father died. The painter asked, what would you do, in a similar situation, that is, if you, too, had had an abusive father. And I had. Wildly abusive. He’d left deep wounds. But I told the painter that I didn’t think I’d confront my father the way he’d confronted his even if my father’s health was robust, as his was not. Forgive me, I said, but it seems unkind, and unnecessary. I mean, what difference could it possibly make? Didn’t the painter believe that his father had tried, perhaps not his best but close to? Didn’t the painter appreciate the many complexities involved in the parent-child relationship, and that other factors, both internal and external, and utterly unknowable to a child, play enormous parts in the dynamics of that relationship? And that ultimately, in many cases, no one is to blame? Didn’t any of that occur to him? Didn’t he wonder what kind of father he’d be? Didn’t he know that he’d fail his own son, at least on some level? I said, You get some hollow satisfaction that doesn’t change anything, and you make your father’s miserable last days even more miserable. Honestly, I don’t see the point.

When my friend returned, she found us in a tense silence. She invited me to have a look at their son, whom we found seated on the floor of his bedroom staring at a wall. The wall was painted a deep ocean blue interspersed with images of a coral reef. Angelfish, black durgons, blue tangs. A crazy-colored grouper, all wrong but plausible. Even an anemone, purple tipped, hosting a tomato orange clownfish. I found the effect dizzying, like going beyond a reef’s edge and hanging suspended over the abyss. But the boy appeared still and calm. He studied the wall in front of him as though looking through a window, and he wiped a flat palm across its surface the way the boy in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona palms the glass that separates him from the projected image of his mother.

We’re beginning to worry about him, my friend explained. He’s often like this—unreachable. When she takes him to play dates, she said, or to gatherings of other children, he behaves similarly to the way he was behaving now: he stares at walls or objects, transfixed or perplexed. Or worse, he mirrors behaviors, mumbling things that don’t resemble speech, without musical or linguistic rhythm, or any kind of intelligible syntax. He’s about to undergo tests, she said, and we’re frightened about what the tests might conclude. I told her how sorry I was to hear that. I hoped that it was just a phase. I told her I knew a boy who didn’t speak until he was four, who went on to lead his high school debate club. That was a complete fabrication, but unverifiable, and I thought it might give her some comfort, some hope.

At the sound of my voice, the boy turned. He stood abruptly and walked straight  toward me with his arm outstretched. With surprising force he shoved the palm of his hand into my thigh and shouted, Go home!

At the door my friend apologized. The painter was off somewhere else in the apartment, shouting into a telephone. I’ll tell him you say goodbye, she said. Unless I shouldn’t bother.

I always think of that evening when I get nipped by clownfish. But I understand that their nature is entirely intact. They are not disabled, or differently abled, or challenged, or special, or spectral. They are exactly the way clownfish have always been. They are acting the way clownfish acted centuries, even millennia ago, toward anything, large or small, that they perceived as potentially threatening to themselves or to their sightless, soundless, and mildly toxic hosts, the anemones. And I began to think of that couple, my friend and the painter, as The Anemones. He was Italian-American and his last name was pronounced not terribly unlike the sightless creature I identified as his analog. The analogy held further, I believed, because the anemone feeds and passes waste through the same rictus.

Later I learned what my friend learned once the first—and second, and fourth and fifth—tests were done: the boy was on the spectrum, which level would take time to determine. How terrifying it must be, I thought, to raise a child, knowing that day to day, minute to minute, no matter how much security you provide, how many precautions you take, how much effort you devote to positive parenting, however you understand that, that despite all of that, terrible things can and will happen, and in fact might already be happening, even as you hold the child in your arms and delight in whatever expressions form on its face. The same is true, of course, for the coral reef. No matter how militant the clownfish are, no matter how many large organisms they repel, how many hapless humans, there are other humans they can’t see, humans above the surface, and those humans remain hell-bent on destroying not just them, or their anemone hosts, but every single creature on the coral reef, and then the sea. Remember that old Mothers of Invention song, “Trouble Coming Every Day”? I’m not black, says the singer, but there’s a whole lots of times I wish I could say I’m not white. Oh, to be a fish, an anemone, a dog snapper. Anything but another maniacal human.

Not long after the diagnosis, the couple divorced. The painter blamed my friend for their son’s autism. Against his wishes, she’d had the boy vaccinated. That was, at least, the reason he gave her, and it’s the version she repeated to me. You don’t do that to human bodies, he’d shouted—this, despite being MMR vaccinated himself. And every year, she added, he’s the first fuck on line for a flu shot.

I ascend from my dive off the Biläo reef. At five meters I take the requisite safety stop—three minutes of hovering in the water column to release the nitrogen that diving builds up in the body—and stare down at the reeftop, so precious I don’t want to miss a second of its beauty. And this, typically, is when I offer up my gratitude mantra. I thank my friends the fish for allowing me to spend time with them, for trusting me alongside their bodies. I thank my friends the corals for providing a home for the  splendid array of diversity. And I thank the ocean for providing such a fertile environment in which to reflect on my own deep space, my isolation, and my hostility.

Rebecca Stevenson is based in New York City and works at Penguin Random House. Her writing can be found in the Huffington Post, scissors & spackle, and the West 4th Review.

NAKED AT THE HAIR SALON

I hadn’t known that haircuts could cost more than thirty dollars until I moved to the city for college, and hadn’t bothered to pay more than twenty for a trim until my sophomore year. As a child, my mother gave me the same mushroom cap cut all the Indian kids had until I aged out of the style and into tri-monthly Hair Cuttery trims. It was again time, I decided my sophomore year spring, to age. It was time to put aside the frugality and frumpiness of the budget cuts of my youth and become someone new and someone chic, someone like the New York girls.

I quickly learned, however, that I could not afford to be someone new and chic like the New York girls. The nice salons, in fact, the nice salons listed as “budget-friendly,” seemed to all cost a minimum of a hundred to trim hair of my length. I kept looking, and eventually found a site advertising salon apprentices who were still training to be stylists. They posted much cheaper prices. I found Phil, who worked in Chelsea and would cut my hair for forty. I emailed him and made an appointment for midday Thursday.  

The receptionist greeted me at the door when I entered the salon. She had incredibly sleek, shiny hair, and looked as nonchalant as I aspired to be. She took my temperature, asked my name, and led me to a dressing room.

“Here, I can take your coat,” she said, offering me a soft black robe in exchange. “You can get changed in here. Phil’s ready for you once you’re finished.”

“Right, ok!” I closed the curtain of the changing room, set my bag down, and wondered what on earth the receptionist expected me to do. There were no changing rooms at the Hair Cuttery, and no robes either, just short capes tied at the neck. But this wasn’t the Hair Cuttery, I reasoned, this was a place for classy people. Maybe classy people treated their hair salons the way city people treated their beds: no outside clothes allowed.

I began to feel increasingly uncertain with each layer of clothing I shed, until I was down to my underwear with a sense of despair. With the robe on, I folded my clothes into a neat pile and peaked out the changing room. I tried to spot anyone else getting a haircut, but I was at too steep an angle. I gave up and stepped out, the pile of clothes in hand.

I looked around for the proper place to set them, but there were no clothes lying around, and in the closet where my coat hung were only other coats. I began to feel a pulse of panic as a salon employee passed by.

“Excuse me,” I said to her. “I have a stupid question.”

“Oh, no!” The employee looked at me kindly. “There are no stupid questions!”

“Um.” I patted the clothes in my hand. “Are we supposed to take, like, all our clothes off?”

I saw the salon employee pause, stare at the clothes, and perhaps hold in a laugh. “Are you getting a cut or color?”

“A cut.”

“Well,” she glanced down at the cleavage that peeked through the robe. “We usually recommend that clients remove their shirt when they’re getting a color treatment so it doesn’t stain.”

“Oh, ok,” I said. “Um, I’ll be right back.”

I stepped back in the changing room and quickly re-dressed. But by the time I got to my shirt, I was still confused. I had made an appointment for a cut, but I wasn’t sure if color was complimentary at places like this. Why else, I wondered, would the receptionist have taken me here to get changed? I peeked out the curtain again, but the salon employee was gone. Flummoxed, I stuffed the shirt into my bag.

I walked out into the salon and saw Phil wave at me from the back. The receptionist sat stoically between us. I had seen her glance over as I spoke to the salon employee and knew she had seen my nakedness. I avoided looking at her, instead inspecting the other salon customers as I passed. There was only one, a middle-aged Indian man. He was, I noted, wearing a shirt.

Phil was friendly enough, and made me forget that there was only a bra beneath my robe. He asked me if I had a reference photo for the cut I wanted. I showed a photo of Jennifer Aniston with long hair and long layers.

“What do you like about it?” asked Phil.

What did I like about it? I didn’t know what I liked about it. I didn’t even know you weren’t supposed to get naked at the hair salon.

“Um,” I said. “We both have straight hair?”

Phil gave me a look.

I tried again. “But this cut gives her, like, volume?”

Phil got to work, making polite conversation as he shampooed me and continuing to chat as he began to cut. By the time he started blowing out my hair, I was feeling fatigued from trying to present myself as much smarter and more worldly than I was. Phil, on the other hand, looked increasingly energized as he put product after product in my hair.

He presented a black and gold spray bottle in front of my face. “This is what I’m using. See how it makes that difference in volume?”

I did not. “Oh, wow! Yes.”

“We have it for sale here.”

“Oh, ok.”

“It’s forty dollars,” said Phil.

“God,” said the stylist cutting the Indian man’s hair. “That spray smells so good!”

Phil looked at me sternly. “You said you wanted volume.”

I had indeed said I wanted volume, I thought back dejectedly, but did I really? It seemed I didn’t at all know what I wanted, except maybe to be fully clothed again.

“Ok I’ll take it!” I said.

Phil finished blow drying my hair and I handed him a tip before returning to the receptionist to pay for the cut and the spray. I placed the black and gold bottle down and took out my wallet.

“Do you want to schedule your next appointment today?” asked the receptionist.

“Um, I have to check my calendar first,” I said.

I changed back into my shirt and coat as quickly as I could. I folded the robe neatly and handed it to the receptionist.

It was drizzling as I walked from Chelsea to my dorm. I had no umbrella, so the droplets dampened my hair, destroying the blowout. I kept my head very still so as not to disturb the new cut any further. When I reached my room, I clicked the light on and looked in the mirror. I wanted to send my family a photo, to show them what a real haircut, a New York haircut, looked like. But as I analyzed my reflection, as I ran my fingers from root to tip, I could find no difference from a Hair Cuttery trim, other than that it had cost me twenty dollars more, and several shreds of dignity. I took a photo anyway and sent it to my family, hoping that they would see something in it I no longer could.

Born in Hong Kong as an Indonesian national, Xu Xi 許素細 xuxiwriter.com is an Indonesian-Chinese-American author who has published fifteen books of fiction and nonfiction.  Recent titles include two collections, Monkey in Residence & Other Speculations (2022) and This Fish is Fowl: Essays of Being (2019). She co-founded Authors at Large and presently holds the William H.P. Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters, College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. A diehard transnational, she currently splits her life between the state of New York and the rest of the world.  Follow her @xuxiwriter on FB, Instagram, LinkedIn & X.

Rachel Jamison Webster is author of four books, including Mary is a River (Kelsay Books, 2018), a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and September (Triquarterly, 2013). She earned her MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College and received a Young Poets Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Her poems have been published in Poetry, the Paris Review, the Southern Review, the Madison Review, and other journals.

Webster edits the online anthology of international poetry, UniVerse. For several years, she designed and taught writing workshops for city kids, and with them, she edited two anthologies of writing by young Chicagoans, Alchemy (2001) and Paper Atrium (2004). She now teaches creative writing at Northwestern University.

Transformations: A Chorus

I woke up with the large-hand feeling. It begins with a tingling in the center of my palms and then I feel my hands swelling. The sensation as I wake is that I do not feel the bounds of my body and my hands are throbbing beside me like giant torsos. This usually means that I have something to write. Only this time, I didn’t know what it was. I lay there trying to note which thoughts shrunk the hands and which made them expand. My administrative mind—with its endless list of things to do—shrunk the hands. Other ideas, already played out for me in projects I have already begun or collapsed into concepts, also shrunk the hands. So now I am writing in my journal, wondering what unborn thought will further expand my hands.

I think Kafka began with a real feeling of transformation, and then attached it to the image of the roach before the roach took over to become the story. I talked about Kafka with the writer Stuart Dybek last night. We gave a reading and then went to a French bistro and talked about cooking, spear fishing, writing. At one point he asked how I chose my daughter Adèle’s name, which is a derivative of his mother’s name.

I said that her father, Richard, retrieved it when he traveled back to Europe and reconnected with his father’s family there. He was digging around in the attic with his newly acquainted fourth cousin, and he found the cookbook of their common ancestor—Adèle Fammerée. She was a Jewish woman living in Belgium in the late nineteenth century, and there were her recipes, in her hand. When he saw them, he felt like he recognized her, Richard said.

Then Stuart began telling a story about going back to Eastern Europe to teach. He hadn’t intended to look up his family there but had coincidentally run into his brother’s former fiancée, a French woman, just waiting for a train in Prague. They began walking down the street together, and they heard Klezmer music.

“And it was like a deep memory,” I interrupted.
“Why would you say that?” Stuart asked.

“Because that’s how Klezmer feels to me.”
“Yeah, it was like a deep memory,” he went on, and told me that as the music played, the French woman convinced him to travel back to Krakow, where his ancestors had lived, and where, she said, they would hear the best Klezmer music. They took the train there—Stuart, his wife and the woman—and found a small bistro where they ordered dinner. When the waiter heard his name, he got very excited. After they finished eating, he walked them to the local Jewish temple, to meet a Rabbi who had the same name. The Rabbi was imposing, and didn’t seem impressed that this cheerful American guy was also a Dybek.  

“In fact, he didn’t believe me,” Stuart laughed. “I was raised Catholic. Being Jewish was never a part of the story,” he added.

“My paternal grandmother’s family is from Hungary,” I said, “and my great grandfather came over alone at the end of the nineteenth century, when he was just a boy. His name was Evans, but I always wondered if his name was something else, if he was sent here to escape the pograms. Otherwise, I don’t know how to explain the affinity that I feel with that music, those traditions. Like a kind of recognition.”

That’s also how I’ve always described love, I realize, as a feeling of recognition. The first time I saw Richard, I shivered. I thought I saw our daughter’s profile in his profile somehow, although she was years from being conceived.

It made me think of Rilke’s “Duino Elegies.” “When we love,” Rilke wrote, “a sap older than memory rises in our arms. . .inside us we haven’t loved just some one in the future, but a fermenting tribe; not just one child, but fathers, cradled inside us like ruins of mountains, the dry riverbed of former mothers, yes, and all that soundless landscape under its clouded or clear destiny—girl, all this came before you.”

*

Stuart was teaching in Prague and he and his friend saw a poster for Eduard Goldstucker

giving a talk on Kafka. They thought it was a typo—surely it was some scholar on Goldstucker and Kafka? Goldstucker, Kafka’s great friend, had to be dead, right? But no, they got there, and he was the one speaking. He was in his nineties at this point, and he said that he could not die until there was a museum named for Kafka.  

“And in his talk, he said something that I never forgot,” Stuart said. “What you have to understand,” he said, “is that in the beginning of Kafka’s life, Judaism was a religion. But in his lifetime, he watched a religion become a race. He said, until you understand that, you will not know how to read Kafka’s stories.”

It was one of those insights so clarified that it makes all other literary criticism seem like a self-protective and decorative enterprise. Kafka watched something that was a living, sacred ritual and inheritance become “othered”—positioned over its practitioners as a fixed definition, priming them to be marginalized and then “exterminated.”

There are transformations brought on by inner need, and transformations brought on by outside forces, I remembered, and we are privileged to the extent that we can choose our own transformations.

*

“This can’t be the way the story goes,” a friend said to me when Richard first got sick with the incurable illness, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or ALS. A degenerative neurological disease, ALS relentlessly attacks the nerve cells that control voluntary muscles. People with ALS incrementally lose their strength, and the ability to move their arms, legs, and body, before finally losing the ability to breathe on their own. It is a slow-motion death, a terrible transformation in which the body becomes a confinement, an unyielding shell while the desires and mind go on living. It is a little like Gregor’s transformation in the “Metamorphosis.”

“This can’t be the way the story goes, this can’t be the way the story goes, this can’t be the way the story goes,” Richard must have said to himself as his body grew more and more paralyzed, as he tried every treatment, from medications to shiatsu massage to acupuncture to teeth pulling to breathing therapies. First, he could not walk as fast as he used to. Then he could not lift his foot. Then he could not lift his arms. Then his voice began to slur and disappear, all while his mind remained sharp, alert, intact.

The final entry in his journal, before it goes blank, entering the months in which he lost the ability to hold a pen and did nothing but try to survive, reads:

Seventeen days ago, I fell off my bicycle after an hour spinning in sun and soft wind. I had just arrived home and decided to inch my bike closer to the green garage door, when the slightest incline prompted the bicycle to the right. I fell beneath it, my right hip hitting the cement with the finality of a great bell’s last ring. The series was over and the silence surrounded me.

The “series” was over? What was the series? I wonder now. Those moments in time that had made up the forward motion of his life?

*

“The terror of art, the horror of life” said Kafka, discussing his Metamorphosis, “is that the dream reveals reality, which conception lags behind.”  The art that we see on the page tells us who we are, what we will have to endure or become.

“’What’s happened to me?” Gregor thinks in the story, realizing what has happened only after the terrible transformation has transpired. The mind needs time to catch up.  “It was no dream. His room, a regular human room, only a little on the small side, lay quiet between the four familiar walls.” The space he occupies has remained the same, but he has changed—involuntarily and irrevocably. Who he was has departed.

*

I have always intuitively believed in reincarnation—that’s where all these echoes of recognition come from, right?—but I can’t think of it as a literal, exact equation.  

“If I come back, I think it will be after I’ve already entered the great chorusing whole, after I’ve already been folded into oneness,” I said to my friend last night, “so if I return I think it will be as elements of me, reconfigured into new combinations. Maybe the way cells combine and split and recombine.”

“So maybe there’s a kind of alphabet of genes and human qualities, and that alphabet can be arranged into endlessly new novels?”

“Exactly, but since the alphabet is the same, there are always words, and sometimes whole scenes, that you recognize.”

*

Gregor’s incarceration in a beetle form forces everyone in his family to work the several jobs of the poor—the father as a messenger, the mother sewing the delicate lace of others’ underthings, the sister as a shopgirl with a newly naked neck—until they are forced to bring rude boarders into their very apartment. And yet, as the family is plunged into struggle, they also come alive somehow, focused around their urgent, private misfortune.

This too, I recognize. I wonder if I could have ever have fully known myself without those years of caring for Richard while he became increasingly ill. We hovered around the poverty line. I made calls to hospice and insurance, trying to hire in-home help with any resources I could find. I navigated Medicaid for him and potty training for our toddler daughter. I spoon-fed the man I loved and raged against the loss of him while I worked full-time and worried endlessly about paying the rent, raising our child, buying groceries. I came to understand something about myself, and my strength, in those awful years.

And while they were legitimately awful, I also would not trade them. We were living, we were learning, even while he was dying. We were communicating even through the months when he could no longer speak. His illness stripped him of everything he had been able to do, everything we thought he would go on to do. And yet there he was, there I was. This sense of presence and connection taught us to believe more fully and necessarily in the soul, in the ineffable, irrepeatable essence of who he was, who I was.

Maybe it was my sleep-deprived state or maybe it was my heightened alertness, but sometimes I felt like I almost recognized that story even while we were living it. Those shapes of love and hardship seemed patterned in us. They felt karmic or ancestral, somehow, like an intrinsic story of suffering and caregiving that we needed to externalize to finally release, or a process we needed to weather in order to find our equanimity. Sometimes I saw his illness, and that whole chapter, as a shell we would move out of into some greater radiance.

*

Even the reader feels some relief at the end of “The Metamorphosis,” and it is a little like the guilty relief a caregiver feels after a long and terrible illness. How was Gregor to go on in that awful, ill-fitting form, that shelled paralysis? Wasn’t it simply impossible?

Some of us who loved Richard comforted ourselves after his death with the fact that his suffering was over.  

“I’m just glad that he doesn’t have to wake up this morning into the terrible realization that he can’t move,” his sister said to me the day after he died. But at least he would know he was alive, I thought contradictorily.

At the end of the story, it is Gregor’s sister, Grete, who the family has pinned their hopes on. Her parents note that, in spite of all the hardships that turned her cheeks pale, she has blossomed into a good-looking, shapely girl. She will not become the violinist that Gregor had hoped she’d become, but they will be able to find her a “good husband.”  Her life, her dreams, have collapsed into conventionality. But she will go on in a way that is recognizable to the family, the culture.

I too experienced a collapse into conventionality after the heightened experience of Richard’s illness and death, his presence. I felt sometimes like I went from living in three dimensions to two, or five dimensions to three. Now I am living more conventionally, in a much more recognizable pattern. Now people are not so afraid to talk to me.

During those years of caregiving, I felt that Richard’s illness and death had torn a hole in the center of my life. Then I wondered if maybe I would step through that tear to enter my life more fully. But now I don’t know. My life may always feel like a half-life now, a carapace I too will one day shrug off.

*

Like any resonant text, Kafka’s “Metamorphoses” is interesting not only for the transformation it depicts in Gregor Samsa but for those it engenders in the reader. It is translated, quoted, imitated, and repurposed in every generation, recently and hilariously by Haruki Murakami in his story, “Samsa in Love,” in which the beetle Gregor turns into a human.  

Samsa looked down in dismay at his naked body. How ill-formed it was! Worse than ill-formed. It possessed no means of self-defense. Smooth white skin (covered by only a perfunctory amount of hair) with fragile blue blood vessels visible through it; a soft, unprotected belly; ludicrous, impossibly shaped genitals; gangly arms and legs (just two of each!); a scrawny, breakable neck; an enormous, misshapen head with a tangle of stiff hair on its crown; two absurd ears, jutting out like a pair of seashells. Was this thing really him? Could a body so preposterous, so easy to destroy (no shell for protection, no weapons for attack), survive in the world? Why hadn’t he been turned into a fish? Or a sunflower? A fish or a sunflower made sense. More sense, anyway, than this human being,

“Why would the soul choose to become a bird? Or a boy?  Why did you come into a body?” Richard sang in one of his songs.

Richard’s former bandmate Carrie told me that she’s finally writing songs again, for the first time without him. “And sometimes when I’m composing, I just cry,” she said.

“I know,” I said, “I miss him too. But writing is cathartic. It’s like it externalizes some feeling that was inarticulate, or maybe just removes some pain or question that resided in my body and now can be released.”

“I don’t think it’s just that, she said. “I think it’s that I go around thinking I am myself and when the music comes through me, I realize I am not just me, I am something not-me, or something being imagined through me. I think I cry because I’m releasing some smaller idea of Self.”.

“Isn’t it time our loving freed us from the one we love and we, trembling, endured: as the arrow endures the string, and in the gathering momentum becomes more than itself?” asked Rilke.

*

It is morning of another ordinary day I am lucky to have. My hands—both flesh and energy—have tried to tap out this stream of voices. They do not conclude a thing, but do come together for a time, into a loose combination and re-combination, into the body of a conversation.

I can recall the beloveds, ancestors, family, and friends who have given me the shape of my life. This container in which I am trying to come awake. I can recall the writer Murakami, recalling Gregor Samsa:

He picked up a metal pot and poured coffee into a white ceramic cup. The pungent fragrance recalled something to him. It did not come directly, however; it arrived in stages. It was a strange feeling, as if he were recollecting the present from the future. As if time had somehow been split in two, so that memory and experience revolved within a closed cycle, each following the other.

To sense the future in the past, to get glimmers of those deep and recent guides—this is one way of being present, I think. This is one way of staying alive.

Claudia Santos (@claudiaexcaret) is a Mexican English Major, poet, interpreter, translator, and cultural gestor. She founded Libros en el transporte over 5 years ago. Through this project, she promotes literature, art, and independent mexican projects. She is an UNAM graduate student who has also founded La secta de los libros, a youtube channel that promotes literature and offers academic advice.

Love speaks as a character from La Rosa de Guadalupe

Claudia Santos

And it may be because love, whom from now on will be called Hermenegildo, belongs to a really specific high social class in Mexico City, but the sensation that his way of speaking caused me at the beginning of our relationship had me confused for several weeks. What does this way of speaking imply and why it was so uncomfortable for me? I'm not talking about the accent… he also had an accent, but it was listening to his Spanglish that caused in me a bit of a stir. 

I also use Spanglish often, and I am sure that it was because  I use it often that he had the confidence to do the same. However, my Spanglish doesn't make me cringe, and it doesn't make me stop and think about it either. This may be because sometimes we forget to stop and think about how we speak and why. The fact that his use of Spanglish sounded uncomfortable to me made me realize, in the first instance, that our Spanglishes were different and this led me to try finding these differences and their implications. 

I live in Colima, Mexico, and I started mixing my Spanish with English probably in the second year of my University career (English Major). I consider (as many of us in my socio/academic circle consider) that I borrow some expressions from English into my daily Spanish because they are closer in meaning to what I want to say, at least in the immediacy that speech needs. I also think it is important to clarify that we only use these English words among ourselves and with other people who use the same or some other type of Spanglish. Most of us, not coming from families whose parents are familiar with English, do not use expressions in this language at home. However, when we are talking to each other it is not unusual to hear, here and there, a “supportear/supporting” instead of “respaldar” or “probar”; a “relies” as something between “apoyar” and “confiar”; a “by the way” instead of the not so untranslatable “por cierto”; or recently I heard “masculine presented” instead of “aquel que se presenta a sí mismo (not orally but using clothes/styles/behaviors usually related to this gender) como masculino”. This last example, at least for me, makes it clearer why we think we have to take these expressions from English: because if the other understands them, what one means is much clearer, in less words, and communication is faster. This “type of Spanglish” comes, at least in that sense, and at least for me and those with whom I have talked about it, from an attempt to speak more effectively: one uses English in an attempt to be able to convey meaning faster and closer to the ideas you want to transmit. However, it is important to recognize that, due to the fact that many of these expressions in English are acquired throughout our university studies in this language, there is a marker of these same studies in this use of “this Spanglish” that distances us from most everyday Spanish speakers (with whom, I repeat, we do not usually speak like this). 

Now, the Spanglish of Hermenegildo can use “btw” or “supporting” or “masculine presented”, but unlike ours, it also uses “house,” “school,” “party,” among many other words. This allows him to create phrases such as “después de la school nos vamos a una party, y al final te dejo en tu house”. One would think that, on everyday speaking, one decides to make use of the words that are closest to us in order to immediately convey what one wants. But is it really possible that the word "house" is somehow closer or more common to you than "casa" and this is the one that comes to you first? Perhaps through custom, at some point, it is, or becomes so, but at first, I don't think so. In other words, I don't think that when Hermenegildo and his social circle made the decision (consciously or unconsciously) to start talking like that, it really was easier to say "school" than "escuela", especially considering that they (and this I asked) didn't grow up talking like that, but rather started doing so at some point after childhood. It is important to mention that this phenomena is contemporary, Hermenegildo’s parents or his friends parents don’t speak English just like our parents don’t speak English. There are some young parents who speak this type of “fresa” Spanglish that may transmit it to their children, but currently I do not imagine many 60ish parents being “fresa.”

Now, I am aware that both of our uses of Spanglish constitute, at least in our contexts, a class marker. In our contexts, learning this second language also implied belonging to a certain social class with a certain economic status that allowed us (and our circle) to pay for the education with which we acquired this other language. Foreign language acquisition in public schools is difficult because of the quality of education that these schools provide. However, these two class markers that our Spanglish gives us are, in my opinion, different. I explained a moment ago that I consider the Spanglish of my social circle to come from an attempt to achieve the desired meaning. Hermenegildo cannot, however, try to argue that when he says "school" it is because "escuela" does not have the same meaning. I also explained that I am aware that this approach to meaning implies distancing our Spanish from most common uses of Spanish (such as those that my parents have) and that, although we do not usually use it with these speakers, we excuse this distance with the idea that we are approaching the desired meaning of what we want to convey. In contrast, Hermenegildo's Spanglish tends to convey exactly what it would convey if only Spanish words were used. Now, if what this other use of Spanglish is looking for is not to get closer to clearer meaning, what is it is actually looking for? I consider that his Spanglish also implies a departure from the everyday uses of Spanish; however, the words his Spanglish uses are often much easier for someone who is not fluent in English to understand. My parents don't speak English and could understand “school” or “party” but not “by the way” or “relying.” So one may dare to think that his Spanglish is less distant from those who do not speak it because it is easier to understand. Despite this, if they are not trying to achieve a meaning that Spanish does not allow them to reach or that others do not understand, what are they looking for? 

Before proposing an answer, I want to mention that I do not consider that their use of Spanglish comes simply from their knowledge of English. Arturo E. Hernandez explains in his bilingual brain course (given by the University of Houston) that this change between one language and another (also called code-switching) does not happen by mistake or naturally. When the Chicano community, for example, speaks in Spanglish, it is not that they are constantly changing their code, but that they use a specific type of Spanglish as their code. Thus, the types of Spanglish that I am talking about here are not used because knowledge of the two languages ​​makes you change code unintentionally, but both are used on purpose, and the proof is that both groups recognize being able of not use it (and that no group uses it all the time). 

If this more "fresa" or “high class” type of Spanglish does not seek to achieve a specific meaning (because it uses words with direct translations) nor moves away from the understanding of those who do not speak English (because it uses words that are usually understandable without great knowledge of the English language), and it is still a class marker, then, in my opinion, it only seeks to mark the class. The speaker of this “high class” Spanglish may use it to belong to their social circle because he/she got it from those around him/her, or for many other individual reasons. However, beyond these individual reasons, its collective use mainly marks class. It is a class marker, as the way we speak always is, as are accents, as are many of the ways we present ourselves. But not all class markers can be used at your own choice; it is complicated, for example, to change the accent to choice; and this Spanglish as a class marker is a chosen one. And, as a lot of class markers do, it segregates. It segregates because it separates, and what differentiate us may separate us or unite us but through (or despite, or thanks to) this first rupture. 

So, in my opinion, this “hay que tener breakfast juntos” type of Spanglish only seeks to mark class, segregate, and is, therefore, classist. Of course, there are many possible types of specific uses where it is not, such as those in which it is used if it is the only or best possible form of communication, the most effective, but the occasions in which it is not, such as when it is used without knowing if the receiver is familiar with English (and if he could, beyond understanding us, listen to us comfortably) can be classist because they segregate and allows one to mark its class, many times, above this other not -familiar with English. 

I also want to point out that there are other uses of Spanish that also seek to get away from everyday Spanish and, given the lack of knowledge of them, that also make it difficult to understand those who use them, and they do not try to reach any meaning that is not attainable with most everyday Spanish words. An example of this may be a part of the population of Mexico City in contrast to speakers of other Mexican states. To arrive in Mexico City for the first time and hear expressions such as “Qué Pachuca por Toluca?” or “Aguas, aguas, aguaaaaas…. y refrescoooos,” it is also not comfortable for an external receiver. However, I think that the speaker who uses these expressions would hardly be segregating by marking their class above others: it would also cause a difference and therefore segregate; it could make you feel outside of a foreign culture, for example, but hardly inferior. This departure from plain simple Spanish (if anyone uses it that way or such thing exists), as opposed to “high-class fresa” Spanglish, may be a class marker, but not classist. 

The ways in which we speak presents, whether we like it or not, many characteristics of us. They can mark our class, what culture or sub-culture we belong to, our studies, our interests (which technical words can you handle and which ones you cannot?). Our choice of words says a lot about us, and it can come with an intention that, although not personal, causes some negative effect for the receiver of our speech. 

Summer Maxwell is a senior at Tufts University studying Political Science. Outside of her coursework she is an Assistant Editor for the Features section of the Tufts Daily, a broadcast anchor and reporter for Arlington Community Media, Inc., and a captain of the women’s rowing team. Summer hopes to pursue a career in narrative journalism. In her free time she enjoys hiking, reading, and cooking with her friends.

Andrea Lankford reminds us why we should fear the outside

The park ranger-turned-author on burnout, loss, and breaking the Wild effect

Summer Maxwell

Photos by Salisha Blackburn
 

Andrea Lankford doesn’t lose sleep over unsolved missing persons cases anymore, but there's still one that irks her: Gabriel Parker, a 20-year-old whose car was found abandoned at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon in 1995. At the time, Lankford was working as a ranger at the park and was assigned to lead the search. Now, almost 30 years later, she still looks pained as she recalls having to tell Parker’s father that the search was being called off without any answers. 
 

Months after the search, Parker’s body was found by chance at the bottom of a cliff in the canyon. Despite the Parker family eventually receiving their answers, Lankford never got over having given up on finding him.
 

On the day of our interview, Lankford was visiting the Sierra Nevadas for a weekend of pleasure hiking, not work, a treat she savors after over a decade of grueling toil as a ranger for the National Park Service. She greets me with her gentle Tennessee brogue from her hotel room, which is decorated with the typical fair of mountain lodges— including a wood framed mirror and a bedside lamp whose base is made of a cast of a ponderosa pine cone. She is the picture of an outdoorswoman.
 

Lankford grew up in Tennessee hiking the Great Smoky Mountains with her father, which inspired her to study Forestry. After her undergrad years, she attended a law enforcement ranger academy, and landed positions at Yosemite and Grand Canyon National Parks serving as a protection ranger, also known as a gun-toting ranger, whose responsibilities include search and rescue operations, EMS, and firefighting. 
 

Lankford shared that the credo of protection rangers is to “protect the park from the people, the people from the park, and the people from each other.” Fulfilling that role in a place like the Grand Canyon, which received nearly 5 million visitors last year, “can disillusion a park ranger and wear them out,” said Lankford. “They say the Grand Canyon chews up park rangers and spits them out. And that's what happened to me.” 
 

After 12 years working in the canyon, Lankford emerged exhausted and, to my eye, bitter about people’s recklessness. She set out to reconnect with nature for her own enjoyment by thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail (AT), where she is better known by her trail name: Tennesse Walker. Lankford reflected on the experience as therapeutic. “I was only responsible for myself, my own safety. I didn’t have to worry about rescuing other people,” she said of her experience, which was refreshing after years of trying to protect others from the indiscriminate ferocity of the outdoors. 
 

But what made her 5 months on the AT “enchanting,” as she described it, was the kindness of others in the form of trail angels, people who help hikers by providing small kindnesses like hot food or even just a cooler of Bud Lites left on the side of the trail. For Lankford, it was a total role reversal. “I would get help, instead of me helping other people,” she said. It was nearly foreign. 
 

Leaving search and rescue behind, Lankford began a career in nursing. That is until she got wind of the case of Chris Sylvia, a thru-hiker who had gone missing in 2015 on the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), the AT’s less famous but perhaps more formidable twin on the West Coast.
 

Sylvia is far from the only missing hiker who was lost during Lankford’s retirement from the Park Service. But Sylvia's case resonated with Lankford, evoking memories of the Gabriel Parker case. “I’m working hard as a nurse, but I hear about this case… [that] immediately reminded me of the hiker I didn’t find in 1995,” she said. 
 

Once Lankford learned the authorities had given up on finding Sylvia, she found herself asking for his family's blessing to investigate, believing she could solve the case. “I didn't really know where that was gonna go, I was just gonna do it,” she said. “That's what launched me into the hole.” 
 

The hole turned into a multi-year search for Sylvia alongside two other missing PCT thru-hikers: Kris “Sherpa” Fowler and David O’Sullivan. Lankford spent years on the three cases flying and driving across Washington and California to participate in ground searches, scouring over drone footage, interviewing potential witnesses—including some unsavory characters—and parsing through the internet and Facebook groups to find any credible leads, all on her own dime. She turned her experience into a book released this August, titled Trail of the Lost. 
 

The book explores nearly every fate the missing hikers could have met, from more far-fetched theories about cults and murderous cannabis farmers, to a healthy dose of rational explanations for the disappearances. Regardless of what theory readers may find the most believable, it is the sheer scale of the search that is the most captivating. . 
 

So what makes Lankford the type of person that would drop everything and tackle three cold case search efforts? If you ask her, she attributes it to her stubborn nature. “At Yosemite they called me the bulldog, because I would grab a case and not let go,” she said, proud of her reputation.
 

 I don’t doubt that Lankford is dogged as they come, but I believe she pursued these cases for a different reason: compassion. 
 

I asked her about the level of personal risk she took when engaging in search efforts—she fractured her fibula while on a solo bushwack in California's San Jacinto mountains—and she immediately dismissed my concerns. “I just tripped on a little rock,” she said, downplaying her injury. “I was more concerned with the others…the amateurs, that they would also get hurt.” 
 

For Lankford, an injured volunteer under her leadership is a worst case scenario. “That's where my stress lies as far as the risk one takes when you're trying to find a missing hiker,” she said. 
 

Part of Lankford’s nonchalance regarding her own perils is certainly due to her fierce self-reliance. As she says in the book, “playing damsel in distress is not my forte.” But what I found most revealing about her response to my question was the genuine concern for the other searchers she was directing. Sure, maybe some of the protective instinct is leftover from her ranger days, but I believe it's more innate. At her core, Lankford is deeply compassionate and cares for others. She didn’t spend months in the Californian desert or Washington’s Cascades for the chance of the bragging rights of solving the PCT’s toughest cold cases; she did it to bring answers home for the desperate families left behind. She is a trail angel of sorts for the communities of the missing, stepping in to try to help with no benefit to herself. 
 

This compassion led Lankford to develop strong personal ties to others on the scene, particularly Cathy Tarr, an idealistic volunteer spearheading searches for the hikers, and Sally Fowler, the mother of a thru-hiker who had vanished near the PCT’s northern terminus. 
 

Getting too close with people involved in a case is not advisable when conducting an investigation, something Lankford is well aware of with over a decade in law enforcement under her belt. “I'm losing some objectivity when I get that personally involved,” she said. But that isn’t the only hat Lankford has worn. “I'm a former cop and a nurse. And there's a difference… a nurse is trained a little bit more to be present with the emotional situation with a family crisis, for example, or a patient in pain.” For Lankford, that meant melding her professional experiences to understand that close relationships are not an inherent hindrance, but can bring comfort to families knowing someone they could trust was out there searching. 
 

After dedicating so much time, effort, and money to the search—and writing a 300-page book about it—Lankford is now enjoying a quieter life in Tuolumne County, California, where she lives with her husband, a US Forest Service worker. There, she enjoys easy access to the nearly year-round hiking season of the Sierras, and is once again able to spend time outside for pleasure. No more peering behind boulders in search of curled corpses seeking shelter from the cold or parsing through brush for evidence of a body mauled by a mountain lion. Instead, Lankford can relax.
 

But I can’t. The most brutal thing after reading the book and watching Lankford’s search efforts unfold is that—spoiler ahead—she does not find any of the missing men. Nor does anyone else. “It is disturbing, a little scary to me that with all our technology, [and with] how hard and how many people have tried to find these three guys that we can't find them,” said Lankford. “There's something profound about that to me that you know, humans, we're not in control.”

Lankford’s experience serves as a stark reminder that we are not invincible against the great outdoors, a warning that comes at the time when it is needed most, as record-breaking numbers of people attempt long haul hikes.
 

In her book, Lankford mentions what is known in the hiker community as the Wild effect, a reference to Cheryl Strayed’s 2012 memoir recounting her soul-searching journey on the PCT. Wild was so popular that it has inspired surging numbers of hikers to tackle the PCT since its release; many of whom approach the trail as a spiritual journey rather than a remote wilderness expedition.
 

At first, Lankford was worried her book might scare hikers from attempting a thru-hike of their own. But now she views it differently. “[The book] I hope, is going to prevent hikers from going missing in the first place. It may actually save lives,” she said. “I'll be happy if I scared them a little bit.”
 

Fear can be an important tool in managing the level of risk we take, and if Lankford’s book humbles other hikers like it did to me, maybe more people will bring personal location tools, like a Garmin inReach, on their hikes, or make more conservative decisions like skipping sections of trail they aren’t feeling comfortable tackling alone yet. 
 

Even if you aren’t planning on hiking over 2,000 miles through rugged mountains anytime soon, there is value in understanding the fear Lankford hopes to force readers to sit with in her work. “Writing about scary things is a way for us to contemplate them and also, it's a way to empathize with things other people have had to go through,” she said. 
 

Maybe what Lankford hopes for us to take away from her book the most is that we can all be a little bit safer, a little more compassionate, and a little more prepared for when the worst-case scenario becomes reality, whether in the wilderness or elsewhere. Because as Lankford says, “there's going to be tragedy in all our lives, that's part of being human.” Maybe being a little scared is a good thing. 

Stephanie Sauer is an interdisciplinary artist and the author of Almonds Are Members of the Peach Family (Noemi Press) and The Accidental Archives of the Royal Chicano Air Force (University of Texas Press). She lives between Brasília and Northern California, teaches prose writing in Stetson University’s MFA of the Americas program, and develops Lólmen Publications for the Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians. [www.stephaniesauer.com  |  IG @spoonsinthewoods]

Slickens & Bone

In her famous essay, “Slouching Toward Bethlehem,” Joan Didion refers to Malakoff Diggins by
using the proper conjugation of the verb-turned-noun when she reports from Haight-Ashbury in
1967: “We drink some more green tea and talk about going up to Malakoff Diggings in Nevada
County because some people are starting a commune there and Max thinks it would be a groove to
take acid in the diggings.”

The official California State Park brochure available in the ranger’s office lists its name as the locals
speak it, omitting the final “g.” An entire panel is dedicated to instructing visitors that, “at Malakoff
Diggins, the world’s largest hydraulic gold mine devastated the pristine landscape—leading to the
first environmental law enacted in the nation.” Today, Malakoff Diggins is the first state park in
California to operate using only solar power.

Taking acid in the Diggins is, in fact, a groove. Or so I was told while thirteen and stoned on some
friend’s parents’ kush as we all wandered a canyon of moon-silvered siltstone and purple-limbed
shrubs. The land at Malakoff had become its own planet, a haunted afterbirth of genocide and greed.
We carted our boomboxes onto this moon and played Pink Floyd and Janice, Hendrix and The
Dead, all the albums our parents told us were the best. We got high with these parents, tripped balls

2
with them, ate shrooms between peanut butter and bread with them. They lived off-grid and farmed
naked, communally-schooled their kids, and ran for local office on platforms of conservation and
mediation. We skinny dipped and foraged and let our hair go matted with twigs under the
supervision of those child runaways and “dropouts” who fled the straights for the Diggins.

My parents were not like those parents. They were hill kids turned cabinet makers, the offspring of
loggers and minnow farmers. My father’s grandparents arrived on the San Juan Ridge during the
Dust Bowl with other poor farmers who settled in abandoned mining towns with names like
Humbug and Rough & Ready and Jackass Flats. To be from the Ridge became synonymous with
being Okie—not a good thing in the 1930s.

Some Ridge kids went to war and came back armed with the G.I. Bill, bought houses in town, and
began their pursuit of the American Dream. My parents were given a plot of family land when they
married, built a house on it, voted Republican, sold Amway products. They all disparaged the arrival
of the longhairs. Until, that is, my father met Sam, the “sit-down farmer.”

-

Because, Aristotle wrote, metals that are mined are formed from the “vaporous exhalation” of the
earth, “they are water in a sense, and in a sense not. Their matter was that which might have become
water but it can no longer do so...copper and gold are not formed like that, but in every case the
evaporation congealed before water was formed. Hence, they all (except gold) are affected by fire,
and they possess an admixture of earth; for they still contain the dry exhalation.”

3
Today, we understand that gold is formed in the heat of stars and is released into space by their
collision. More specifically, gold is formed at the dying of a star: when a massive star with strong
magnetic pull spins so fast its insides propel outward, the gold it held impales planets as hot shining
metal or traverses space as asteroids. Or, at least, this is what we humans know so far: the poetry of
star combustion and collision giving way to gold.

-

A popular song among California gold miners in the late 1800s was called Acres of Clams. Its lyrics
speak of disillusionment and its aftermath:

No longer the slave of ambition,
I laugh at the world and its shams,
And think of my happy condition,
Surrounded by acres of clams.

-
In the 1960s, unsatisfied with St. Louis suburban life, Sam Dardick and his wife Geeta had packed
up their three children and Sam’s wheelchair and set out in a van on the Hippie Trail from Europe
to South Asia. After several years in India, they returned to the US, where Sam found a job as a
planner for the commune Didion mentions. He and Geeta decided to build their own off-grid
home, complete with rotating crops that Sam could cultivate while seated in his chair.

Noticing that my father was one of the few folks who used a wheelchair on the San Juan Ridge, Sam
introduced himself and extended an invitation to play tennis. They eventually formed the Nevada
County Wheelchair Sports Association, and soon, Sam and Geeta were kin.

4

-
“Never have I beheld water falling from the sky in denser or more passionate streams,” wrote John
Muir of a storm he witnessed in 1875 in Knoxville, California. Dry creek, Muir reported, “was now a
booming river as large as the Tuolumne, its current brown with mining-mud washed down from
many a ‘claim,’ and mottled with sluice-boxes, fence-rails, and many a ponderous log that had long
lain above its reach.”
Just upriver, the tall levees that surrounded the city of Marysville like a fortress were failing.

This booming Gold Rush river city was quickly filling in with toxic “yellowish ooze” like an in-
ground pond. In a matter of hours, the metropolis that had within a few years transformed from a 
tent camp into what Mark Twain observed was “the most well built city in California,” was devastated.

For over twenty years, valley farmers and residents had withstood flooded orchards,
drowned livestock, engulfed houses, ruined livelihoods, and even the loss of lives that resulted from
torrents of debris that ran down the mountain from mining operations in the Sierras. Mining silt, or
slickens, had even disrupted navigation as far south as San Francisco Bay, but residents of the lower
elevations had born the burden of living downriver because they relied so heavily on the northern
mines for their economic survival. The flood of 1875, however, would prove to be the final offense.

-
Impaled at its molten origin, earth absorbed gold from space, however it had formed, into its iron
core. As our planet cooled, the primordial gold remained settled, sending up only the occasional

5
spittle in volcanic valves. The majority of this spittle dissolved into the atmosphere, its remnants
folding into stone. Exploded star matter continued to rain down, implanting the mantle with liquid
metal that cooled into silicate-rich seams and solitary splinters. One half of one percent of all the
gold on this planet resides near the surface. This is the gold some humans find, mine, and covet.

-

“Slickens” is a term you grow up hearing when you grow up in hydraulic mining country. While its
meaning originated to define a natural occurrence (the thin layer of extremely fine silt sometimes deposited by
flood waters of a stream), it has now come to refer to the residues of the Gold Rush (finely pulverized
material from a quartz mill or washings of lighter earth sluiced away in hydraulic mining). This very change in
definition may be the most accurate way to describe the history of land use in the Americas. An
“efficiently brutal” process, as Samuel Bowles described it, hydraulic mining harnessed the forces of
gravity and water to strip entire hillsides in the search for gold without concern for its effects.

My parents didn’t much mind the Diggins either way, never ventured to the slicks on their own plot
but warned me to stay out of the rust-hued milk that pooled there after a rain.

-
Alta California had, until 1948, been a remote northern province of Mexico. The district’s ruling
class called themselves Californios, and they owned extensive cattle ranches worked by enslaved

6
members of the region’s 200 Indigenous tribes, including the Nisenan. Upon defeating Mexico in
war, the United States seized California and the rest of the Southwest and, despite a treaty
guaranteeing Californios “free enjoyment of their liberty and property,” white adventurers calling
themselves argonauts made off with 14 million acres of Californio land. Joining the Union in 1850,
California’s population swelled by 300,000 immigrants who had sailed or trekked west in America’s
largest human migration.

Settlers combined a zeal for riches with virulent racism as they embarked on what historians
Robert Hine and John Faragher call “the clearest case of genocide in the history of the American
frontier.” Between 1846 and 1873, vigilantes, militiamen, and U.S. Army soldiers slaughtered as
many as 16,000 Indigenous Californians in an atmosphere redolent of torture, rape, and deportation.
Dispossessing the Sierra Nevada region’s Nisenan gained the interlopers access to Yuba watershed
placer deposits that soon ran out. A dead claim, or mining location, came to be known as a
“humbug.” The term attached itself to a locale where a town grew, which was officially named
Humbug, California.

What Humbug lacked in placer gold deposits, it made up for in gold veins. By the late 1800s,
miners graduated from ditches to flumes, wooden aqueducts angled atop trestles to maintain and
direct water pressure. North Bloomfield Mine boasted 100
miles of ditches and flumes that washed pay dirt over
complexes of riffled and slitted sluices that collected gold
and sent tailings into streams and rivers. Landslides were
common in this work that went on at all hours and in all seasons as miners transmogrified evergreen
forests into moonscapes.

7
To get at the pay dirt, miners fashioned rawhide hoses with wooden nozzles through which
through which they aimed impounded snowmelt at the mountains, blasting away unwanted soil. The
resulting contraptions, more artillery piece than water conduit, were dubbed “monitors” and moved
up to 100,000 tons of dirt a day to obtain a few
ounces of gold.

The debris from the mine had to go somewhere. And that somewhere was down the
mountain. For over twenty years, toxic sludge flooded orchards, choked rivers, engulfed houses,
collapsed levees, and killed people and livestock in valley cities like Marysville.

-
When finely divided, gold may appear black or ruby, violet, deep azure.

-
Hippies like the Dardicks brought their revolutionary thinking into a deeply conservative
backwoods, where clear-cutting and gravel dumping were again threatening the land. Poet Gary
Snyder, who lived on the Ridge, urged a return to public commons and place-based living; he and
others put these ideas to practice. Hundreds of “dropouts” erected homes, lived off the land, and
organized large festivals to celebrate each new season. They formed a nonprofit to protect the local
watershed from dams. Emphasizing a love for rural life and the river, activists built coalitions across
political lines.

8
Two of the newcomers, John and Sallie Olmsted, established the conservation nonprofit Sequoya
Challenge. John wanted to build a wilderness path that his friends could access in their wheelchairs,
and thus was born the Independence Trail. Studying old maps to find a site, he noticed the
abandoned Excelsior Canal, complete with wooden flumes once used to carry water for the
Northern Mines.
The Olmsteds and a group of local residents initiated the construction of several wide, level
paths that connected the old flumes together in more than 3.5 miles of wheelchair-accessible trail.
My father joined the nonprofit’s board, his first experience working on a social cause. “That was the
whole thing about the San Juan Ridge community, they really made an effort to blend ideals,” he
tells me years later after Trump has sold millions of acres of national park land to oil and gas drillers.
“John was great about getting all these conservative stakeholders
to give him their time and resources.” John, persistent but
respectful, even convinced my grandfather and other
conservative logging outfits to donate timber for the rebuilding of several flumes. The trail was
completed in 1982.
In the 1990s, Republican lawmakers rolled back many environmental gains, winning battles
over dam removal and development. An anti-logging campaign to protect the spotted owl created
rifts where there were once budding alliances. Yet most residents remained unified by a desire for
their family and friends with disabilities, particularly Vietnam vets, to live in an accessible
community.

9

-

In its pure form, gold is too soft to survive continuous touch.

-

Known then as the “Gateway to the Gold Fields,” Marysville existed because gold mining existed.
Its location at the confluence of the Yuba and Feather Rivers meant that it served as the main link
between the northern mines and the San Francisco port. In the late 1800s, to counter the interests of
the mines would be to counter the city’s own interests. But in the aftermath of the devastating 1875
flood, valley farmers began to fight back against the ceaseless mercury-laden onslaught. Edward
Woodruff, a legal resident of New York state and Yuba County property owner had watched floods
wreck his properties three times, finally rendering his land useless. Woodruff and other valley
residents organized the Anti-Debris Association of the Sacramento Valley to stop mining companies
from dumping in the rivers. A Farmers’ Association formed to oppose the Hydraulic Miners’
Association. Intent on keeping its tracks and hundreds of acres of Sacramento Valley rights-of-way
clear and safe, the Central Pacific Railroad, later to be the Southern Pacific, joined the resistance. In
1882, the plaintiffs filed suit in the Federal Circuit Court for the District of California. Woodruff v.
North Bloomfield Gravel Mining Company called for a “perpetual injunction” against dumping tailings
into rivers. Woodruff caught fire across California. "[F]armers pouring into the valleys of California
created an agrarian empire and set in motion years of controversy,” historian Robert Kelley writes.

10
“Of these clashes. . . none was more remarkable than the long controversy which raged in the
Sacramento Valley over the fate of hydraulic gold mining in the northern Sierra Nevada."
Arguing against controls, mine investor Lester Robinson rallied miners and allied businesses.
Both sides engaged in fiery rhetoric. Damage to dams, flumes, and water cannons drew accusations
of vigilantism. Bribes, whether cash or whiskey, traded hands in both directions. Miners set up an
informal network to warn one another to cease illegal activity because an informant had been
spotted.

The Ninth Circuit Court Judge appointed to the Woodruff case, Lorenzo Sawyer, who had himself
gone to Nevada City hoping to strike it rich, spent two years traveling throughout Gold County to
survey in person the devastation caused by the mine. In all, he heard from 2,000 witnesses and
poured over 20,000 pages of testimony. He studied the damage caused by the collapse of dams due
to the tailings. In the midst of the court battle, Judge Sawyer and the public learned that Lester
Robinson had once successfully sued a company that dumped coal mine tailings into the stream that
fed his own San Joaquin Valley farm. Whatever Sawyer’s decision would be, Robinson was losing
the campaign for public sympathy.
-

My wife and I wander through the Cornish Christmas Faire and drop into a shop whose name we
recognize from their sponsorship of the community radio’s daily astrological forecast read by a
woman named Starlight Kompost. An adult with faerie ears poking out from her straight hair greets
us and asks if we’re looking for anything in particular. No, just browsing, thanks. I move toward a
shelf of imported crystals and gems, their energetic properties detailed on handwritten cards.

11

I look up and recognize a book of spells I
shoplifted when I was twelve and a wannabe
Wiccan who didn’t pay attention to the wax
pooling on the carpet of her room when she and
her best friend attempted a séance under the light
of a full moon that bled through her window.
That was the year I began wearing all black with a
studded leather belt around my waist and a dog collar around my neck, thick black eyeliner on my
lips and eyes. I brought extra sets of clothes to school and change into them in the bushes on the
walk home up our steep hill in the 105-degree sunshine. I started writing poems then, poems about
dying and killing and unrequited love and journeys to the inside of the earth and bad trips and
skinny dipping in snow melt high in the mountains in late October. I collected the drawings my
friends and I made and adhered them to the sticky pages of a thrifted photo album. My friends
wrote poems and inscriptions on the inside covers and signed their names like in a yearbook. The
love between us girls then was dark and viscous and tinged with the depths of things we could not
yet name. We slid into the underworld for the first time in our lives, drawn to the moon and ancient
cosmologies and the deepest chords on the bassoon. We marveled at the metallic flavor of our own
blood and the power it surged through us. The occult was popular again at the height of the 1990s.
The occult had been popular at the inception of our hometown during the Victorian era, too—or at
least by the time Victorianism traveled that far west. We read the inscriptions left under stairwells in
old houses, the dust-encrusted engravings on headstones at the cemetery where we played a night,
and we took them all as signs. We dressed up as vampires and haunted main street under the dark
moon, role-played elaborate scenes in abandoned city parks, played Beethoven on instruments
borrowed from band practice, drank forties and smoked roaches over the graves of miners. Some

12
bragged about performing satanic rituals in distant cow pastures, about sacrificing goats and
recanting spells. The rest of us called bullshit but secretly wondered. We all longed for death in the
way teenagers do and we performed for our beloved with verve.

By the late 1800s, the boom had worn off the mining towns and residents were attempting to mimic
what they considered to be civilization. Their glance, of course, turned east toward Europe, where all
things occult and “other” had previously been heralded by the (mostly young) Romantics. While
authority seemed to be moving
away from traditional religious
institutions and into the realm of
science and secular thought, a monumental revival of belief in the supernatural was also underway.
Spiritualism was in vogue, as were mediums, mesmerism, telepathy, séances, ghost stories, and parlor
games of magic. Women were thought to have a particular sensitivity to the spirit world, and several
ladies made their own fortunes as traveling spiritualists, performing rites and rituals for the
sympathetic rich across the New-to-Them and Old Worlds.

A century later, I found affirming this notion that my body’s monthly expulsion of blood somehow
thinned the veil between this world and what lay beyond. It made sense of my feeling separated
from that place and the people who inhabited it. The boys around me—the ones not in drama club
or raised by hippies, anyway—seemed to be cut off from this underwater world. My first boyfriend
was punching holes in his bedroom wall and drumming for a death metal band. His rage terrified
me, how it punctured the surfaces of the world that encased him, but this same rage was also inside
me. I left welts on my younger sister and peeled back my skin until it bled. Close friends were
shooting heroin and taking acid and popping pills, and even the one with the Mexican grandmother

13

whose neurosurgeon father could afford piano lessons talked at length about joining the local neo-
Nazis. She had been my bully-turned-BFF since second grade, the one who nicknamed me “White

Trash” in reference to the Marilyn Manson song. She was obsessed with Manson and later, after
she’d trained as a firefighter and married and popped out two kids, admitted to wanting to try sex
with women. I’d come out in college, lifting the taboo, and she felt safe now to invite me to bed. But
her rage still hadn’t faltered. It was the same consuming white rage—white being a loose term in rural
California—that suffocated everyone in those hills. Entitlement turned sour at the exposure of
mediocrity, at the denial of class disparities: blame the brown folk, blame feminists, that’ll ease the
pain.

-
Gold salts were humans’ first defense against tuberculosis. Now, miniscule spokes and spheres
wrapped in gold turn light
energy into heat and spread
that heat through water,
holding the promise of a
cure for cancer.

-
While most mine owners felt assured that Judge Sawyer’s previous vocation would win them his
loyalty, in January 1884, he handed down his decision and a 225-page document describing the
damage hydraulic mining caused. Sawyer’s decision effectively banned hydraulic mining, marking the
first time the federal government regulated commercial matters as they related to the environment.

14
The owners of North Bloomfield Gravel Mining Company, however, weren’t about to give up. By
1884, after nearly 30 years in operation, the mine had barely broken even and its investors were dead
set on turning a profit. Workers continued to
operate monitors in the frigid winter months,
fighting off renegades who they claimed
destroyed property.
Woodruff and his allies responded by
bringing two contempt actions against the North Bloomfield Mine. Aware that an agreement had to
be made and not wanting to entirely devastate an industry that had become the economic engine of
the entire state, in 1893 Congress passed a law that sought to revive hydraulic mining within a strict
regulatory framework, but the cost of responsibly moving the debris proved too much for the mines
to garner any profit.
The North Bloomfield Mine and the town of Humbug were finally pronounced dead. Most
miners flung their gripsacks over their shoulders and fled to better opportunities elsewhere.
-

15

-

Today in Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil, illegal miners apply similar methods as those used in the
California gold rush when extracting gold from rivers and mountainsides, and from lands legally
belonging to the Indigenous peoples still living on them. In the global press, these operations are
given the appealing name “artisanal mines,” but under that name lies the largest source of mercury
contamination on the planet, far exceeding coal combustion and cement manufacturing. Under this
name lies the formula: for every pound of gold extracted, laundered, and circulated into the global
market, six pounds of mercury are released into rivers and water tables, air and fog and cloud.
Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, leader of the Yanomami, tries to warn that “Omama buried the bad
spirits and the smoke of illness inside the earth with the minerals. This is why we should not extract
minerals from beneath the surface of the earth, so as not to awaken the smoke of illness.”

Named after a slippery planet named after a slippery god for its slippery properties, mercury was
thought to be the key to alchemy. It held protection magic, carried cures. But this cure also ailed:
inflammation of membranes, loosening of teeth, cramps in the abdomen, nausea, vomit, numbness,
loss of appetite, tendency toward depression and social withdrawal, bloody diarrhea, tremors in the
extremities, urine cessation, death.

In the body of the earth, mercury slips between states, permeates boundaries, snakes across
borders, uncontainable by nature. Once released, there is no capture.

-

16
When John Olmstead called my father’s landline in the mid-2000s while I was home from college, I
answered. He asked who I was and, upon hearing that I was my father’s first born and a writer,
proceeded to tell me that he remembered my mother working on The Independence Trail with me
in her belly. He stated several times that I should write his story, that it was an important story, and
he continued to tell me the whole of it. I was in my early twenties and rolled my eyes on the other
end of the line upon hearing this old white man claiming self-importance and total responsibility for
a political and physical effort that took the force of many—not least of whom was the woman who
married him—to successfully accomplish. I’d heard this same story all my life in activist circles, the
white male savior one, and wasn’t about to spend my time recording it again, changing only the
names and the particulars.
-

Gold’s ability to reflect infrared light allows the construction of telescopes through which humans
glimpse other galaxies, even expired ones.

While the California Gold Rush may be romanticized as a scurry of individualistic adventure, most
emigrants arrived as laborers contracted with large mining companies. Scholar Maureen A. Jung

17
explains that, “during the 1850s, California mining was quickly transformed from individual
adventure to an industry organized by corporations and worked by wage laborers.”

In parts of California that have branded themselves Gold Country to attract tourism, school children
learn that the miners who left their families and home cultures to pan or dig for gold did not make
much money. Most of those men moved away broke, died in the violence, or gave up on life
altogether. Those who did make a killing were the Bay Area, East Coast, and European capitalists
who financed large mining ventures or the merchants who sold overpriced goods to the feverish
seekers. Their money and the companies they founded still sound familiar today: Levi Strauss,
Pacific Bell, Wells Fargo, Stanford University, Union Pacific, and Pacific Gas & Electric—the same
PG&E that did not invest in infrastructure for decades and whose outdated, failing equipment
sparked many recent wildfires.

-

“Tourism is the straw grasped by desperate economies ravaged by mining and gas/oil development
or abandoned by second-homesteaders. It has been described as a mixed blessing,
a double-edged sword, and a devil’s bargain.” —Lucy Lippard, Undermining

18

-
When Dana Carvey joked that Nevada County has the most diverse population of white people he’d
ever seen, he was not kidding. Since the founding of Ananda Village, a commune that first brought
hippies to the Western Sierra foothills, interactions between countercultural newcomers and
established residents have fundamentally altered the cultural and political makeup of the region.
Pagan festivals that mashed together elements from non-Western cultures around the globe
alongside ancient Western ones sprang up in the forest in the 1960s. The later Celtic Revival brought
celebrations of pre-Christianized cultures that white people could readily claim without fear of
seeming suspiciously ethnocentric. In the seventies and eighties, influxes of Central American
refugees settled in the hills and intermixed with locals.

A blended surge of Christian evangelicalism and
white nationalism again surged in the 1980s.
Megachurches that could double as casinos
abounded and, within a decade, the neo-volkisch
movement established its headquarters in Grass Valley at a place called Wolf Age. The group’s
ethos, borrowed from romantic castings of the Viking age by a prominent neo-Nazi, was replete
with the virulent misogyny already popular across the county. Wolf Age kept a low profile and
modeled its own intentional community after Ananda Village.

-
“...with all you must understand the proportion of your Fire, and the form of the Vessel

fit for your Work.” –Khalid ibn Yazid, Secreta Alchymiae

19
Fire, ancient alchemists tell us, is key to the quest for purity. One must make white—the white of
hottest heat—before one can make red. Fire burns away the impurities, cleanses the “filthie
originall” (Sir George Ripley), reveals the hidden heart of the material. Melt the solid into liquid and
the impurities separate.

-

Nisenan storytellers relate that when wildfires rage through evergreens and scrub brush and oak
savannas, gold is sown into the land.

-

The Independence Trail was razed by wildfire in 2021. It is currently being rebuilt, but the political
factions that divide the county have widened and work on the trail is now a decidedly left-wing
project.

-

20
On the eve of the new millennium, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Boarderlands: The New Mestiza was coming into
its second printing, the edition I encountered in college. In it, she recalls: “I was two or three years
old the first time Coatlicue visited my psyche, the first time she ‘devoured’ me (and I ‘fell’ into the
underworld).” She describes her fear of fissure in a fragmented poem typed across the following
page, and how Coatlicue, Aztec goddess of earth and symbol of both creation and destruction,
pointed this out. The famous image of Coatlicue that Anzaldúa references is cut into a circular
volcanic stone and depicts the goddess after she is decapitated and butchered by her own brother,
limbs and armor splayed in all directions. “I have split from and disowned those parts of myself that
others rejected,” Anzaldúa admits, calling on Coatlicue to help her “(re)member” herself. Coatlicue,
ruler of the underworld who has had to piece herself back together in the aftermath of patriarchal
slaughter, (re)presents the “a third perspective—something more than mere duality or a synthesis of
dualities.” This underworld, of course, includes all that is buried and (re)membered in the body of
the planet.

-

Gold’s ability to reflect infrared light allows the construction of telescopes through which humans
glimpse other galaxies, even expired ones. It was through one such telescope that Galileo viewed the
cosmos and conceived of a universe not centered around European notions of life on Earth. It was
through one such telescope that Christopher Columbus viewed an island he is said to have mistaken
for the Orient.

21

-

On earth, gold occurs as invisible grains, as flakes and nuggets, masses and veins. Its pulse freezes in
quartz, settles in riverbeds, hardens into sinew on the underside of fault lines, drifts in seawater, and
hides in ore. Tons by the billions have accumulated on the ocean floor. Trace amounts subsist in
garden soil and sewage sludge, in house dust and ear wax, in leaves and lungs, in hair and livers and
the nails that grow on the ends of human thumbs. The brains of mammals function only when
miniscule amounts of gold atoms are embedded in their neurons. Half of all the gold absorbed into
the body becomes bone.

Layla Kennington is a third-year student at Tufts University studying International Relations, English, and Arabic. Originally from Maryland, Layla grew up across the Caribbean, South America, and Africa. Her family currently resides in Hong Kong. On campus, Layla has served as a staff writer and editor for the Tufts Daily, the Observer, and Onyx, Tufts’s Africana literary magazine. Currently, she works as a reporter for the local Massachusetts newspaper Cambridge Day. Typically, she seeks to write about identity and resistance, in addition to local politics. Layla’s interests lay in journalism and Black and anti-colonial literature.

On Girlhood

The month before my 20th birthday, I cut off all my hair. I spent the next 31 days agonizing if I was still pretty enough to be thought of as a woman, and if after the month ended I would still be a girl. The dominating perception I had of myself was intrinsically linked in those hundreds of strands, and with every step I took around campus I felt both the physical lightness and metaphorical heaviness of their absence. Turning 20, and that inevitable divorce from my teenage years, seemed to me to be a decisive shift from girlhood. But I did not know entirely what that meant.

Girlhood, and all its nuances, has been widely deliberated online. It is a fraction of the cultural zeitgeist, with the memes of “girl dinner,” and “girl math,” becoming an integral part of Gen Z lexicon. And in response, the media has supplied us with a host of misinterpretations and confused think-pieces on the ways that this newfound slang is representative of our cultural descent and the death of “true feminism.” Just this month, Food and Wine Magazine and Business Insider published articles entitled “Please don’t Gender my Dinner,” and “Why Girl Math is a Toxic Trend,” respectively. While both pieces attempt to address the very-real subjects of eating disorders, financial mismanagement, and misogyny— all issues that do plague women in a unique way— the authors fall short in realizing the true meaning behind these trends.

What these authors miss, and where the root of their argument falls apart, is recognition of the usage of the word “girl” as opposed to “woman.” For it is women, as opposed to girls (i.e. children) that are proliferating these trends. Why is it that these adults choose to identify with a word that relegates them to childhood? What could possibly be empowering or relatable about publicly aligning oneself with dependence, naivete, and adolescence?

I can answer only through the lens of my own experiences. I grew up as a girl in a brown body, and it is for this reason that I believe that the answers to the aforementioned questions go beyond the simple idea that youth equals desirability. The facets of my identity coalesced within the confines of what my girlhood was, and all served to detract from acting, and being treated,  like a kid.

It is a fact that Black and brown girls experience adultification at higher rates than their peers. According to research from Georgetown Law Center, adults believe that Black girls as young as five need less protection than their white peers. This has served, in my life and in the lives of many Black and brown girls that I know, to produce expectations that force one to not only act older than their age, but endure the pressures of early sexualisation. And despite the fact that this adultification happens mainly to girls of color, none are free from these societal pressures. Girls historically have been made to mind after the house, after their siblings, to be responsible for the conduct and attitudes of their male peers.

At risk of sounding trite, it is also necessary to consider the rise of social media as well. More than ever before, children are presented with information and trends far earlier than they would be otherwise. As explained by YouTube video essayist Shanspeare, “the desire to be grown is not different, but the mediums to explore such desires are.” And the result of this newfound, widely accessible medium, is that girls are engaging in trends in which they showcase their bodies, discussing what it means to be “submissive and breedable,” and presenting at more advanced rates than earlier generations. This has been widely covered as the “death of the tween.” Girls are no longer, if they ever were, expected to just be girls. To be children.

The last time my hair was above my shoulders, I was a recent 9 years old. In the photos that my parents keep plastered to the side of the fridge, I am pictured as I was then: teeth too large for my mouth, crisp blue uniform, a sepia-toned barrett pinned at the temple. In a year I would be dress coded for the first time for showing my shoulders in 90 degree weather. In four years I would be told to be understanding of the boys who would grab at my chest during class. In six years I would strive to be “perfect,” even when alone, thinking that whatever solo performance I could conjure would somehow still be perceived by the world. I was, then, just a girl.

It is within this framework that we must understand the “girlhood trend.” The reality of being a girl, then, is to have been expected to act years beyond your age. To engage in perfection, to be a sexual object, to be responsible. Your body, which you’ve only just begun to realize is there, is the site and basis upon which others judge you. Many years later, engaging in the “girl trend,” responding to conflict with “I’m just a girl,” is to honor the imperfection that should have been allowed during those years of adolescence. It is to acknowledge the messiness and confusion inherent in growing up, to reclaim all those seemingly lost years.

Therein probably lies my scissor-happy escapade all those months ago. I was trying to reclaim my body from the grasp of desirability, and so truly aging up according to my still not- yet fully-formed prefrontal cortex. If I broke up with the concept of beauty (which for so many women, and for Black women especially, is rooted in their hair), I would effectively learn what it was to be a woman and to belong to myself. Being half-white has meant that my hair has been the site upon which my desirability was pinned for my whole life. I figured that if I could divorce myself from that which made me attractive, I could self-define my own femininity and womanhood. Girlhood, to me, felt like being stuck within the confines of an incessantly-perceived body.

There are obviously faults with this way of thinking. Womanhood itself is additionally to be constantly perceived and picked apart. One need not look further than the historical record: ever-shifting body ideals, the idea that mothers are the backbone of our country’s moral condition. There is ultimately no way to escape the laser-focus of society when living in the female body. But if anything, it showcases that we’re all still figuring it out, and whether girl, or woman, we are all mutable, and ultimately imperfect.

Sybil Baker’s latest novel is Apparitions published by Signal 8 Press. Her short novella The Picture Vanishes is available as a free ebook from Signal 8 Press and on Amazon. She is also the author of five books of fiction, including While You Were Gone, which won an IPPY Silver Medal. Her book of nonfiction Immigration Essays was the 2018-2019 Read2Achieve selection for the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. She was awarded two MakeWork Artist Grants and an Individual Artist’s Fellowship from the Tennessee Arts Commission. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, is the Director of the Meacham Writers’ Workshop, and is on faculty at the Yale Writers’ Workshop.

On Listening to My Dad’s Old Jazz Albums

1. Riverside History of Classic Jazz (1956)

Volume 1 includes Congo tribal music, street cries of Charleston, and Blind Lemon Jefferson. Ragtime (Volume 2) includes music by Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll Morton.  The back jacket reads, “It stretches over many years and much geography: from the work songs and Negro church music that preceded jazz; through ragtime and the early blues; through the great formative years of New Orleans jazz.” This album seems to have aged well, with one Amazon reviewer saying, “Listen to this and you will understand where jazz comes from, what jazz is and how it does what it does.” Given the album’s release date, I imagine this was one of the first albums my dad bought, which would make sense, as it seems most focused on the origins of jazz. This album is one of my favorites, and I wonder what my dad thought of it as he listened to Congo tribal music and the other early songs that connected to the music of enslaved persons as they worked in the fields.

Did he understand that jazz and blues came from an articulation of that oppression, an oppression that our ancestors participated in?

2. The History of Jazz: N’Orleans Origins, Volume 1 (1957)

The album cover is of a collage with a painting of a thin Black man in denim overalls and a red shirt and cap (signaling his working-class background) holding a trombone, looking outside the album’s frame. Around him are smaller paintings of a funeral dirge band, a man sitting on a bed, his hands covering his bowed face as a woman stands behind him, arms crossed; a steamboat; and a horse-drawn wagon carrying jazz players blowing their horns. This album has singing, exuberant “primitive music” from Mt. Zion Church Choir and iconic early blues musicians, including Leadbelly. I wonder how much of these images fed into stereotypes of the time and how much they revealed to my dad a musical culture and way of life?

On the back cover, Downbeat writer Dave Dexter writes, “In the beginning, the South conceived and cradled the infant. From the simple church hymns, work songs, party music, and the sorrowful dirges of the American Negro, there evolved the chesty, viral adult called jazz.” Dexter, like the other music critics who write of jazz on these albums, is White. Dexter writes, “Jazz may or may not have its roots in Africa, and the Caribbean, as some claim. The question is academic anyway; no one can deny that the music is wholly American.” Dexter’s analysis is of its time and place but his hedging of “may or may not” have its roots in Africa, minimizes the conditions of how this “American” (i.e., Black) music began and its connection to slavery.

            Dexter’s question and answer is not academic. Or rather, if he claims the music is “wholly American,” does he understand that to be wholly American is to be broken? As James Baldwin says of (White) Americans in his 1961 essay “The New Lost Generation,” “Europeans refer to Americans as children in the same way that American Negroes refer to them as children, and for the same reason: they mean that Americans have so little experience—experience referring not to what happens, but to who—that they have no key to the experience of others.”

             I imagine that my dad listened to these albums as a way to understand the what—the history of jazz while avoiding the who—the “who” who were people our ancestors had enslaved, the “who” who see White people like my father, like me, as children who refuse to listen.

3. Mardi Gras in Dixieland

The cover’s lurid giant yellow and green costumes with oversized heads, plastered painted lips, and grotesque upturned eyes that reminded me as a child of demonic clowns. Beneath the artificial heads, White men’s faces poke out of cutouts, carrying over-large wooden forks and spoons. One of faces under the costume looks more like a child than a man. If there were liner notes or a narrative to this album, they have long since disappeared. Because the music is for Mardi Gras, the music is playful, clean, but the cover of the White men in costumes in the dark gives me a sinister feeling that I can’t shake. 

My parents went to New Orleans for their honeymoon in 1961, but strangely, my mom says they didn’t see any live music while they were there. Why did my dad want to bring my mother to New Orleans for their honeymoon, but then not take her to live performances of the music he loved? I wonder if he had wanted to see Dixieland jazz on their honeymoon, but because my mom was not interested, decided not to. Or perhaps this was a secret test, to see if he could shed his old bachelor self, just as he had quit smoking as he promised he would on the day they married.

                But when I look at this album cover, I’m reminded again how ominous everything looks. The oversized heads, the White men hiding behind them, waving their large utensils like weapons. The lurid grins on the masks presented to the public and the pale small men hiding behind them. Perhaps my dad let go of that part of himself because he wanted to protect my mom and us from a world he didn’t want us to know.

4. Dixieland From St. Louis with Sammy Garner and the Mound City Six (1958)

According to legendary music critic Nat Hentoff, Sammy Gardner was a St. Louis clarinetist who formed the Mound City Six band in the late 1940s. While regionally successful with a popular local TV series, the band chose not to leave St. Louis for bigger cities. Hentoff quotes Raymond Scott, the musical director of Everest Records, the label the album is recorded on. “I like the way they play because the intensity of their love for the music is carried over into their instruments.” As St. Louis was one of the cities that benefitted from the Great Migration, it’s not surprising that even an all-White band would embrace music whose origins are from the South. During his bachelor years, my dad lived in St. Louis for a while, and I imagine he bought this album when he lived there, possibly even seeing them live. My mom told me when he was single he took dance lessons on a ship in St. Louis, where he learned the waltz, two step, the box, polka, and the jitterbug, perhaps because he enjoyed dancing, but also as a way to meet women. After they married and had relocated to Florissant, Missouri, just outside St. Louis, my parents would go to that ship and dance, enjoying their newlywed life in the years before I was born. 

On the back of the album, Hentoff writes, “Perhaps the most immediately accessible and enjoyable form of jazz for someone new to the music is Dixieland.” As a self-taught student of the origins of jazz, I wonder, if my dad, as a self-taught student of the origins of jazz, had remained a bachelor for the next few years or fell in love with a different type of woman, if he would have continued his studies beyond the accessible Dixieland to the more challenging and contemporary forms of the day like Bebop. I doubt it. Even in his coolest bachelor period, my dad seemed somewhat conservative in his musical tastes, preferring to look back than engage with contemporary music. 

But he would only look back so far and so deep. I have to remind myself that when my dad lived in St. Louis, before and during the early years of their marriage, that he listened and danced to music that came from people who were legally not allowed into the spaces he inhabited. That he could enjoy this music of joy and pain without having to face the people who suffered for it. He could experience their pain mediated through albums, and join White bands and critics. He did not have to think much about how he’d arrived here, a descendent of enslavers, a recipient of the GI Bill, and of those who had not. 

He never had to look Black people in the eye.

5. Jazz Begins, Parade Music by the Young Tuxedo Brass Band (December 1958)

On the front: a brass band walks on a wide dirt street alongside barefoot women, children, and a few men dressed in vibrant pinks and light oranges dancing and laughing. On the back of the album are younger men, dressed again colorfully, one with an umbrella doing the second line, the group of musicians following the casket. The faces show joy in a country-like landscape. There are no White people in the frame. 

The songs are traditional melodies of going to (side one) and returning from (side two) the cemetery and include written and improvised music. According to the album’s copy, the tradition of funeral parade music went back to 18th century when enslaved people were allowed to bury the dead. “Brass bands represent a continuity from the 19th century when ancestors of several of the bands members played in groups that pre-dated even the original Tuxedo.” According to the website Funeral Wise, “the music and dancing celebrated the release from earthly life, which had, in the past, included the release from slavery.” The music then is a celebration of release as much as a mourning of death.

In 2007, when my father knew he would soon die from cancer, he gathered his grown children visiting from Virginia, Turkey, and South Korea, to discuss his funeral arrangements. He wanted to be cremated unless anyone had an objection to it. He didn’t want us to dwell on sad stories at his service but wanted instead happier ones. One of his last requests before he died was that “In the Sweet By and By” be played at his funeral. By the time he made that request, my dad was on morphine to dull the pain of his cancer eating away at his body. Hospice workers had told my mom that my dad’s death was probably a matter of days. He was asleep much more than he was awake. He’d stopped eating and was barely taking in water. I imagine that he remembered the song from his childhood, as it must have been sung at the funerals he’d attended at the Southern Baptist church in Possum Valley, Arkansas. I expect the famous chorus appealed to him:

“In the Sweet by in by /We shall meet on that beautiful shore.”

What does the subconscious carry, what tensions in our own life are just unresolved conflicts inherited from our ancestors? Just as my dad was drawn to the music of the formally enslaved, I wonder if he also chose that song to be sung at his funeral because it is a standard dirge played at New Orleans’ jazz funerals.

And while my dad’s funeral at the Clemmons Moravian church he was a member of had little in common with the street processions of the jazz funerals of New Orleans, my dad, who had told me he was ready to die, was certainly ready for his release.

6. The Legend of Bessie Smith (1958) sung by Ronnie Gilbert

Ronnie Gilbert was part of a folk band called The Weavers, which originally included Pete Seeger. While they were popular in the early 1950s, the band was blacklisted by the FBI during the McCarthy era. After the band disbanded, Gilbert, a White Jewish woman, embarked on a solo career, which included recording her only jazz album. Bessie Smith was a native of Chattanooga, Tennessee, where I moved right before my dad’s death in 2007. Years later, when I was writing a novel set in Chattanooga, I listened to her music on repeat. 

             Bessie Smith is the only singer I have my own memories of that aren’t tangled with grief over my dad. In this sense, my connection with this album isn’t as removed as it is from the other albums. This connection is not only based on my nostalgia for a fantasy of my dad in a time from before I was born but is also related to my direct experience with her music. 

              I wonder why my dad would buy an album of Bessie Smith songs sung by a White woman, rather than by Bessie Smith herself. I imagine that he may have wanted his experience with the music of the descendants of the enslaved to be mediated by White people—White critics, White musicians, White singers. For to engage directly with the pain our ancestors inflicted was something he was not prepared to do.

And here the two types of nostalgia converge. One, my nostalgia to know this person, my bachelor dad, a person I can imagine only from the artifacts he left behind. It is similar to my dad’s nostalgia for Dixieland jazz, which came from a time from before he was born, a time he could only learn about from the albums he listened to. The other nostalgia is my desire to connect to grief: the grief of the loss of my dad, the grief expressed as joy in those second lines following a casket, the grief of those forcibly enslaved, separated from their people and their land. 

The grief in those albums my dad played, the voices asking us to listen.

Zia Wang is Indian American and part of the third generation of her family from East Africa. She completed her undergraduate degree in English at Princeton University and her medical degree at NYU. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in The American Journal of Poetry, SWWIM, and Wilderness House Literary Review among others; her work was also selected as a runner-up in the 2023 New Orleans Review Poetry Contest. She currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area where she practices psychiatry, writes, and lives with her husband, two daughters and an orange cat.

On Turning Forty-Nine
 

I know, darling

but aren’t we so alive 

when we step off platforms 

amidst Alaskan spruce 

carabiners slicking our ropes 

your fingers strumming my hair

sticky citrus resin 

in our mouths, our whoops 

streaming like ribbons 

between branches?

Baby, let’s release our sorrows 

from their cells, watch 

them flutter freely trilling 

like snowbird sparrows 

returning to nests
hidden in tall grass.

Sonnet
 

I repeat Ruh-ZEE-yah with patient smile.

My name, its new American beat, flows

buttercream-trimmed with sweetness and guile. 

But, can’t we call you something easy, like Rose?

My smile and its remains, clot. In scrawled chalk

at school, I write my name but then erase

myself. I’m the mouse, tick tock up the clock,

my English, clay accent reshaped by place.

I could carve in stone rather than relent,

but, then again, why hold sacred its sound?

In Arabic, RUH-dih-yaa means content

but, within English Rose, can I be found?
 

            My father says, Listen hard, you are not lost

            but he is gone. And, to heed a ghost must cost.

Lorraine Olaya is a Colombian-American poet and recent graduate from New York University where she received a Bachelor's degree in English Literature. Born and raised in Queens, New York, she often draws inspiration from her identities and experience as a first-generation Latina and native New Yorker. Her poems have been previously published in West 4th Street Review, The Roadrunner Review, Laurel Moon Magazine, Esferas Undergraduate Journal, and elsewhere.

papi sabe más que yo 

Tus manos are lined with rivers.
veins make mountains and valleys
out of your brown skin, wrinkles
like the sand of la Guajira 
joints are creased bark, palma de cera 

and if I look close enough, maybe I’ll see
a little finca nestled between mountains
with tiny cows, some chickens too,
teeny tomatoes, coffee mugs, dirty shoes 

a little porch where you, mi viejito, can sit
while I lay my head on your lap,
you can pat my hair and tell me stories
using the lines on your skin 

has vivido más que yo
entonces cuéntame otra vez 

how the galaxy once filled the sky above you,
stranded in a sea of sand and cardón guajiro 

the towers crumbled to dust two blocks away
from where you worked, y te quedaste mirando 

everything you and mami owned is still in New Jersey
so no se puede confiar en nadie, not even family 

diste gracias a mi abuelito before getting the call,
wiping tears, you went back to installing wires 

cartas de renuncia landed on too many desks
where you weren’t valued because no te peges a nada 

so tell me again
y aunque creo que ya escuché todo,
que ya estás repitiendo la historia,
por favor, cuéntame otra vez

Vinita Agrawal’s latest collection of poems Twilight Language was the winner of the Proverse prize Hongkong 2021. She has authored five books of poetry. She was awarded the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize 2018 and the Gayatri GaMarsh Memorial Award for Literary Excellence, USA, 2015. She co edits the Yearbook series of Indian Poetry in English. She has edited two anthologies on climate change Open Your Eyes in 2020 and Count Every Breath in 2023. She is on the Advisory Board of the Tagore Literary Prize. She is Co chair for CoE - a Global Council for Excellence for Environment and Sustainability and on the Advisory Board G100 World Peace. www.vinitawords.com.

Ja


Ja in Sanskrit means born from -

ambuja, neerja, pankaja, saroja*

Born from water.

Synonyms for lotus.

The flower that grows in mud, unstained

like the sun rising from night.

You were a lotus in my womb.

cradled in the waters of birth.

I held on to you with my breaths.

Every inhalation 

filling your pink lungs with life

for you to emerge unstained.

But they wouldn’t let you.

They -  who wanted more sperms

in the family, than ovaries.

They stained your immaculate body

with knives.

I’ve bled so much since then

that when I walk

red liquid seeps from my feet.

Like the Buddha,

I leave lotus marks 

with every step I take

ambuja, neerja, pankaja, saroja.

* common names for girls in India. The poem addresses the practice of female foeticide prevalent in some parts of India.

Sudeep Sen’s [www.sudeepsen.org] prize-winning books include Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems (HarperCollins), Rain, Aria, The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry (editor), Fractals: New & Selected Poems | Translations 1980-2015 (London Magazine Editions), EroText (Vintage: Penguin Random House), Kaifi Azmi: Poems | Nazms (Bloomsbury), Anthropocene (Pippa Rann), and Red. The Government of India awarded him the senior fellowship for “outstanding persons in the field of culture/literature.” Sen is the first Asian honoured to speak and read at the Nobel Laureate Festival.

Sudeep Sen

OM: A CEREMENT

Architecture of frozen music.

— Goethe

In my city, I am surrounded by constant cries 

   of the dying, burning pyres heaving 

under burden of wood, smoke and bones —

   wailing summed up by sonic notes of Om.

Civilisation’s first sound — Sanskrit syllable

   echoing a conch shell’s harmonic mapping — 

its involute spiral geometry holding within

   and emanating airborne sonar screams. 

My ancestors, grandmothers, mother — blew 

   into this smooth shell cupped in their palms,

held intimately as if it were a talisman, 

   a prayer, a pranayam in yoga’s daily ritual.

But breathing is a privilege these days —

   pandemic-struck, oxygen-deprived,

my friends perish, the country buckles, airless. 

   Even an exquisite cerement lacks the sheen 

or wax to wrap the contours of a corpse now. 

   Each day as I write endless condolence notes, 

etching dirge-like couplets on gravestones — 

   my city continues to be dug up — not to make 

space for burial sites, but for palaces of illusion:

   an architecture of frozen music, greed, calumny.

A country without a government,

   a country without a post-office — Shahid laments:

“Let me cry out in that void, say it as I can. 

   I write on that void.” Om’s celebration now

an unceasing requiem. Yet we chant in hope, 

    for peace: Om Shantih, Shantih, Shantih.

Samuel Haecker is an experimental poet currently studying in the MFA Writing Program at Columbia University. Born in New Hampshire to a Colombian mother and German father, he grew up speaking Spanish and German and lived in North Carolina and Frankfurt, Germany before moving to New York. His work has been published in Harpy Hybrid Review, SHIFT, and The Blasted Tree.

Brittany Perham is the author of Double Portrait (W.W. Norton, 2017), which was selected by Claudia Rankine for the Barnard Women Poets Prize and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award; The Curiosities (Free Verse Editions, 2012); and, with Kim Addonizio, the collaborative word/art project The Night Could Go in Either Direction (SHP, 2016). Her work has received support from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the James Merrill House Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, the Wallace Stegner Fellowship Program, and Yaddo. She lives in San Francisco and teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University.

Birthday 

You’re 40 getting fatter 

getting fatter doesn’t matter 

your disasters are personal forgettable 

you say things like in the scheme of things 

dreaming the scheme into scenes 

the once-city a landfill ringed with cranes 

no right-turn lanes only flames 

that’s someone’s cane someone’s name 

a byline this is a headline someone’s doing the work 

but it isn’t you someone’s fighting 

in the other room this child 

has thrown peanut butter into that child’s hair 

the balloons are in the air 

we’re all aware who the good moms are 

the good citizens we’ve known  

as long as we can remember we remember 

the disasters spaced just a little further apart  

no further apart move it 

this child in this chair that child in that chair 

the paper towel shredding the baby hair 

your tolerance for the big one is growing 

your age is showing 

is it as bad as ___ is the question you’re asking 

everyone’s mastered multitasking masking  

you want a prize 

you want to be the girl in F-A-T earrings you scrutinize 

heartbeat digestion waist-size  

what’s the best you can hope for 

your cousin 31 dead in bed 

the medical examiner said 

nothing wrong nothing a cause nothing an effect no defect 

the magazines keep saying it’s time for a new you 

haircut if you feel anything jump-cut 

to CNN MSNBC NYT you’re waiting on the platform  

with everyone else this child wants to perform  

a dance for that child  

an apology there’s also a song 

i’m sorry i’m sorry i’m sorry i lick your face  

how long is this sorry going to take  

this child licks that child’s face  

that child wants more peanut butter for eating not for wearing 

one of the good moms films the resolution  

when a song is still a solution 

tomorrow she’ll go public 

to your aging social republic
in the still shots you’ll look fatter  

in the children’s silent laughter  

the cake disappearing faster 
everyone will say you look so happy

Les Wicks  Over 45 years Wicks has performed widely across the globe. Published in over 400 different magazines, anthologies & newspapers across 36 countries in 15 languages. Conducts workshops & runs Meuse Press which focuses on poetry outreach projects like poetry on buses & poetry published on the surface of a river. His 15th book of poetry is Time Taken – New & Selected (Puncher & Wattmann, 2022).

Plaguefish

I was told a story about social justice.
Someone added a backbeat

why not choirs?
 

There’s been plagiarism —

a strange bunch stole the word liberty

then shut down all the clinics.
 

Interesting bars charge too much

for an honest glass of water.
 

Fair Trade Slavery is listing on the Exchange

our kids borrow money for property investment

or just to buy a decent breakfast.
 

Capital is simply worn out.

Six former celebrities now teach kindy

& learn to smile.

They’ve lost

like us all.
 

One crop flooded

another burnt.

Education is an answer

but there wasn’t that question in the exam.
 

There’s a meeting

of Fine Honourable Men —

they’ve decided to change nothing.

Eleanor Stanford is the author of four books of poems from Carnegie Mellon University Press, including the forthcoming Blue Yodel. Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, and many others. She was a 2014/2016 Fulbright fellow to Brazil, where she researched and wrote about traditional midwifery, and a 2019 NEA recipient in poetry. She lives in the Philadelphia area.

The Lover’s House

The lover’s house is improved by fire.

Rumi

I waited for you in Barcelona.

I waited for you in Prague. 

I waited for you in the dentist’s chair: head thrown back, mouth wide open, unable to speak.

I waited for you on the bus north, listening to Rihanna, watching the olive trees wring their hands.

I waited for you on a bridge in the rain.

I waited for you in the car, driving my twelve-year old to his piano lesson, talking about math homework and the end of the world.

I waited for you at the end of the world.

I waited for you in red gingham, in a sepia photograph, an unreadable look in my eyes.

I waited for you in a church.

I waited for you in a stone forest, in a tree’s vestibule.

I tried calling you on stolen wifi from the Kentucky Fried Chicken across from the Sagrada Familia.

I waited for you in the movie theater til the final credits. In the ancient amphitheater, all the actors moving without sound. 

In the bowl of blueberries, I waited: the last sour green knot. 

I waited for you in my bed, where I read a 600-page history of debt, and also several self-help books about love, where I ate frozen yogurt popsicles and watched a show in which Nicole Kidman plays a creepy New Age Russian guru.

I waited for you in another century. Sometimes as a woman, sometimes as a man.

I waited for you in someone else’s bed. 

I waited for you in the Wegman’s between the rainbow chard and the cheese counter. 

I tried calling you from the closet of my parents’ house during Thanksgiving dinner.

I waited in the smoke from the fire pit.

I waited without a coat in January.

The next time I tried calling it was Passover, I was in the bathroom, half-drunk, while we were still wandering in the desert, eating bitter herbs and making fun of the script we were supposed to be following.

I waited for you instead of “setting an intention” or “extending my side body” or “raising my hands to my third-eye center.”

I waited for you on the banks of my marriage, staring into the murky shallows.

I waited for you in the soft blade of your fern, the shined spathe of your anthurium. 

I waited in the locked chest of your childhood, with the wedding and funeral saris, smelling of bitter camphor.

When the Berlin Wall fell, when the ice caps started invisibly melting, I had already been waiting for you a long time.

I waited for you on the corner of 47th and Baltimore.

When I thought I had been waiting for a long time, I thought about the Sagrada Familia, which has been under construction continuously since 1882.

I waited for you on the dating apps, waited for your face to appear behind the next software engineer or financial analyst posing in front of the Eiffel Tower.

In English, it is possible to wait without hope. 

I waited for you in a market stall in Karachi, in the names of the fruits you touched and weighed and cradled.

I waited for you in the airport.

Every time a plane touched down or lifted off, I wanted to text you.

I waited for you when my fifteen-year old son told me he would never respect me again for as long as I live.

I waited for you when I didn’t know if I was supposed to laugh or cry.

I waited to call you, and once or twice I didn’t.

I waited for you the way I waited for my period.

I waited for you the ways Jews wait for the Mashiach.

I tried to tell myself that the waiting meant I was in touch with the cycles of suffering and rebirth, that I should be grateful.  

I was waiting for you when the factories and schools shut down and the airplanes stopped flying.

When sea lions lounged on the sidewalks of Buenos Aires and the smog lifted over Beijing and Mumbai, I waited for you.

I waited for you all summer, from the first incandescent magnolia blossom to the last yellow leaves.

I waited for you in New Jersey, while the waters rose along Atlantic Avenue.

I waited for you in the pine barrens, where there was no cell service.

I waited for you in the future that had already happened.

I waited for you in the future that would never happen.

I waited for you by getting stoned and submerging myself in water so hot the entire bathroom disappeared.

I waited for you under the tree of awe.

I waited for you on the fire escape in late April, the sun going down and my shoulders pinned to the sky.

Katherine Hollander is a poet and historian. Her first book of poems, My German Dictionary, won the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and was published by the Waywiser Press in 2019. Recent poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Salmagundi, The Hopkins Review, The Common, On the Seawall, and elsewhere. She teaches poetry and history at Tufts University. 

My Teacher

The summer they cut

the cancer out of your ear

you looked like Van Gogh:

white bandage, ginger beard,

pink face, blue shirt. But never

was any artist so sane as you. 

You are the man who builds

poems and houses: sound,

without charm, without artifice. 

There were tiny buddhas

in your office, carved elephants

on the windowsill. We 

came, and the poems 

came, and you spoke to them, 

kind and serious, and combed them

til they knew themselves. 

When we last spoke your beard was gone

and you seemed hale and well. 

T., how I need your strict look now, 

for I want to put my poems aside

like the girl in the old story who said

This needle is too heavy.

Colin Pope is the author of Why I Didn’t Go to Your Funeral (Tolsun Books, 2019) and Prayer Book for the New Heretic (NYQ Books, 2023). Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, Plume, AGNI, and Pleiades, among others. He is Assistant Director of Creative Writing at Northwestern University and works on the editorial boards of Nimrod International, RHINO, and TriQuarterly. He lives in Chicago.

Hand Gestures I Make in the Mirror to See If I Belong Anywhere
 

Salute. Peace sign. Hailing a yellow cab.

Pointing out the man in the courtroom

I saw flee. Pointing to the emergency

exits above the wing. Middle finger. 

Pinky drawing the letter J. Thumb out

on a lonely road in New Jersey. A dog.

A duck. A gun. A fluttering dove that

splits in two beyond my reach. A fist

pounding the conference table. A fist 

raised in solidarity. Scout’s honor. Heil. 

Hand at my neck. Hand at my heart. 

Hands hanging lifeless at my sides.

Hands on the counter, leaning forward

so I can look myself dead in the eye. 
 

The Ways They Die in Saranac Lake
 

They drink too much and pass out in a snowbank.

They salt the walk and miss a stair. 

They inhale woodsmoke, they doze under a blanket,

one tassel stretching a golden finger toward

a space heater. They go fishing up Colby, 

they don’t come home, their augur and bucket

after the wind in drifts sweeps the ice clean

discovered lying separately and alone. 

They get hypothermia. They Skidoo hard,

they crank it open, they forget to duck where 

the trail dips beneath the fat arm of a downed elm.

They go bareheaded. They wear camo

and take hot buckshot to the neck, mistaken

for white-tailed deer. They hike Lower Wolfjaw 

and at the picaresque precipice where the path 

curls out to a rockface over an emerald valley 

they slip on scree, on wet moss, on microalgae. 

They mis-tie their crampons. They chainsaw 

and misjudge the felling cut. They meander near

during the backswing of a double bit axe or maul. 

They hunt with muzzleloaders and blow up. 

They go upriver during highwater spring,

lose the channel buoys ten feet below the hull 

and end up on Class VI rapids. They canoe,

they capsize, rise for oxygen and bang themselves

unconscious on the keel of a tumblehome. 

They stroll out to get the mail on a warm morning

with a melting, six-foot-long icicle poised

from the rim of a tin roof. They whistle

beneath a white pine widowmaker dangling 

by the skin of its bark. They swerve to avoid moose. 

They are crushed when a two-by four-foot brick 

drifts down through space from the grip 

of a log loader rented to construct the Ice Palace. 

They contract cabin fever over a six-month winter

and trudge out to an open field, nock an arrow

along a compound bow and send it straight up 

at a gray strip of constant, confounding sky

that idles briefly before hurrying off 

to another town, beyond the mountains. 

Becca Klaver is the author of the poetry collections LA Liminal (Kore), Empire Wasted (Bloof), and Ready for the World (Black Lawrence). Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Fence, jubilat, Verse Daily, and in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series. Recent publications include the collaborative book Midwinter Constellation (Black Lawrence) and the chapbook Greetings from Bowling Green (Magnificent Field). As an editor, she co-founded Switchback Books, is currently co-editing the anthology Electric Gurlesque (Saturnalia), and has created pop-up projects such as Women Poets Wearing Sweatpants. She is the Program Manager for the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.

The Hanger

I’m sent up          by the county clerk          through the institutional beige 

                  and forest green          of the Supreme Court building          to a room

where          above the counter          a hanger is hooked          into a ceiling panel                 

                  Taped to the bottom wire          is a piece of paper          on which 

                                   written plainly by hand          appears the word

                                                                                                       DIVORCE
                            __________________________________
 

I queue up          grateful for the long line

                                                                             the sudden sense          of stranger solidarity

                  glad for the drab slab          of a building 

                                                   walls thick enough          to absorb          many shocks

relieved and recognized          by that janky sign

                                                                                         like a crass Halloween costume 

                  about abortion          worn by a bureaucrat          in the off season

                            __________________________________
 

I don’t know why          this place holds me better

                  than any strange room          I’ve entered          these last few years

                                   hospital conference rooms          church basements                                  

where I came to see          grief sitting silently          everywhere                 

                  the force of the towers          falling          still trembling                 

                                   through the city          in aftershocks

                            __________________________________
 

It must be          the barebones practicality          the decisiveness         

                  the silent camaraderie          melting me          as we slowly shuffle

When it’s my turn          I hand over the paper          signed and notarized

                  The exchange is fast          and dignified          “the Brooklyn way”

though he tells me          my file won’t be processed          for many months

                  The backlog’s thick          at the busiest court          in the state

                             __________________________________
 

The flyer I saw          above the water fountain          months ago            

                  when I came to file          the separation agreement          read 

                                                                                                       DIY DIVORCE

And though I didn’t expect          that final room          to also feel                 

                  so makeshift          it was true          I was involved                 

in a home improvement project          true          it would take months          or years                 

                  to process          and true          I had barely          three hundred dollars 

                                   to spare          but knew how to do things          myself

Frances Kai-Hwa Wang is a poet, essayist, journalist, scholar, and activist focused on issues of Asian  America, race, justice, and the arts. Her writing has appeared at Cha Asian Literary Journal, Kartika  Review, Ricepaper, Drunken Boat, Knight’s Library. She is a founding member of IS/LAND Asian American Contemporary Performance Collaborative. She co-created a multimedia artwork for  Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center. She wrote “You Cannot Resist Me When My Hair Is in  Braids,” Wayne State Press. She teaches creative writing at Washtenaw Community College. She has a  weakness for a well-crafted argument and a lyrical turn of phrase. Franceskaihwawang.com @fkwang

2019, the call went out for 10,000 tsuru or paper origami cranes.  

Diagonal fold, unfold, turn, diagonal fold, unfold, flip. 

Cranes live for one thousand years. Folding one thousand paper cranes, one for each year of its life,  grants one wish. Senbazuru. 

We folded a thousand paper cranes for Uncle Ray’s 60th birthday and hung them in long strands from  the ceiling to wish him a long life. We folded a thousand golden cranes for Mika’s friend’s wedding to  wish the couple a long happy marriage. We also folded cranes in Chinese and Taiwanese language  school. 

Twelve year old Sadako Sasaki of Hiroshima folded a thousand cranes with a wish to be cured of  leukemia, caused by the Americans’ atomic bomb dropped on her city when she was 2. When she was  not cured, she folded 300 more. Children today fold and send thousands of cranes to Hiroshima each  year. You can see her statue holding a golden crane at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and in  Seattle too. 

Horizontal fold, unfold, turn, horizontal fold, unfold, diamond fold. 

In 2019, families were detained at America’s southern border and children were being separated from  their parents. The Japanese American community stood up and said “Never Again is Now.” 

Tsuru for Solidarity called for 10,000 tsuru or origami paper cranes and received 25,000 from around the  country and around the world.  

Japanese American organizations and Buddhist temples across the country organized tsuru paper crane  folding parties. People folded tsuru at home with their children and grandchildren out of historic  photographs and wrote messages of hope inside. A bride, happily married now for 40 years, donated the  thousand golden cranes she had received as a wedding gift. Here in Michigan, folks at Washtenaw  Community College, Ann Arbor District Library, Ann Arbor Art Center, Detroit Historical Museum folded  too. A box of tsuru was hand carried from Hiroshima.  

Squash fold, squash fold, flip, repeat. 

These delicate paper birds carry heavy wishes on their wings for peace, nonviolence, and hope,  connecting  

∙ the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War 2  (2/3 of whom were U.S. citizens);

Wang, Frances Kai-Hwa, “Kizuna Means Community” 

∙ the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (110,000 to 210,000 dead and 650,000  hibakusha sick with radiation poisoning);  

∙ all the immigrants and refugees from around the world seeking a life free of war and poverty;  and 

∙ the beauty and power of culture, heritage, art and community action.  

Taiko drums pounded — don doro don don — as 25,000 tsuru flew to Crystal City Family Internment  Camp in Texas, where 4,000 people of Japanese, German, and Italian descent were incarcerated during  WWII. Then they flew to the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley. 25,000 tsuru circled the  fence and taiko drums called out to the people inside — ka ka kara kara don — so that they would know  that people outside were standing up for them, speaking out and fighting for them. 

“We intend to be the allies that we needed then.” 

Now with the lifting of Title 42 and COVID-19 pandemic restrictions at the border, many desperate  families are once again heading for the safety and dream of America who sings, “Give me your tired your  poor.” Like our elders, they will risk anything for their children. Tsuru for Solidarity calls on all of us to  remember and to act. This is not ancient history. “Never again is now.”  

Don doron don don ka ka kara kara don. 

It’s Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander Heritage Month and I am struggling with work,  struggling with family, struggling with hope.  

I come out from my COVID cocoon and go down to the library to hear an elder talk about her  experiences in Rohwer concentration camp in Arkansas, her strategies for handling racists and bullies at  Ford, and how she continues to stand up and fight well into her 90s. And courage comes. 

I think of my grandfather, a famous four-star general in Chiang Kai-Shek’s Air Force who flew the last  plane out of China in 1949. After the war, he opened a small sandwich shop in Niagra Falls saying, “I just  want peace.” 

Pull out the long neck, pull out the tail, press the head, open the wings.  

Puff of air. 

Sharon Dolin is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Imperfect Present (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022). A 2021 recipient of an NEA in Translation, her book of translations from Catalan, Late to the House of Words: Selected Poems by Gemma Gorga was awarded the Malinda A. Markham Translation Prize from Saturnalia Books and was shortlisted for the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize. Dolin is Associate Editor at Barrow Street Press and teaches poetry workshops in New York City.

George Szirtes was born in Hungary, came to England as a refugee and trained as an artist. His twelfth book of poems, Reel (2004) won the T S Eliot Prize for which he has been twice shortlisted since. His latest is Fresh Out of the Sky. (2021). His memoir The Photographer at Sixteen (2019) was awarded the James Tait Black Prize in 2020. He is a co-winner of the International Booker translator’s prize, as well as of numerous others. His own books have been translated into various languages including Italian, German, Chinese, Romanian and Hungarian.

Lament for clavier 

The sweet orderliness of hair. The music

of comb and soft brush. The universe

following its own score. Does anyone know

the number of hairs on a nation’s head?
Or a single child’s head? Who does the counting?
The sword? The scissors? The razor? Who tidies

the loose tresses and arranges them into strands

that part and fall across the ears and shoulders?

Who sets the earth on fire? Who slices flesh

Into silence? 

Let us comb that hair and brush it.

Let it be plaited or knotted or swept from the face.
Let there be a counting of heads and hair.
It will be well-tempered music, perfectly tuned,

Emerging from order, brushed as the wind brushes.
 

Dream of Diving

She was half asleep when she slipped

Under the water, and kept sinking

Until she met him about his business

At the very bottom. 
 

This was her sleep and it was what she wanted,

Or dreamt she wanted, and she wanted it

To be so because she thought she could hear

How own voice echoed back to her. 
 

And the voice was sleep or something whispered

In sleep, like the sound of sheets drawn tight

About a body, or water slipping away down a shore

Into its own peculiar element.

But something was wrong as if she had awakened

And time too had woken and started rattling through

The morning, past the body next to her, past

Anything that can lose its name.

Saadi Youssef (1934-2021) is considered one of the most important contemporary poets in the Arab world. He was born near Basra, Iraq. Following his experience as a political prisoner in Iraq, he has spent most of his life in exile, working as a teacher and literary journalist throughout North Africa and the Middle East. He is the author of over forty books of poetry. Youssef has also published two novels and a book of short stories, and several books of essay and memoir. Youssef, who spent the last two decades of his life in London, was a leading translator to Arabic of works by Walt Whitman, Ngugi wa Thiongo, Federico Garcia Lorca, among many others.Khaled Mattawa is the William Wilhartz Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan. Mattawa's latest book of poems is Fugitive Atlas (Graywolf, 2020). He is the editor-in-chief of Michigan Quarterly Review.

Khaled Mattawa is the William Wilhartz Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan. Mattawa's latest book of poems is Fugitive Atlas (Graywolf, 2020). He is the editor-in-chief of Michigan Quarterly Review.

Evening by the Harbor
 

Three gulls dart, 

whirl around hotel antennas 

then speed off toward the sea. 

Evening saunters on the roads, 

in the girls’ steps

and the vendors’ carts. 

But night will come, even to this poor neighborhood.

Night will come, 

and the girls’ steps will drift away,

and the vendors’ carts. 

............ 

............ 

........... 

Three gulls take off.

Where do you think they’ll sleep?

Under A Tree Whose Name I Don’t Know

It may have been an oak.

It was, of course, not a willow,

not a pine

or a cypress, 

or a towering beech tree, 

etc. etc.

Need I also say

it wasn’t a date palm?

.....................

.....................

.....................

Under this tree

the sparrows and me.

Above this tree

the sparrows and me.

Clear sky makes the leaves translucent

and I can see the leaf above 

through the leaf 

below it. 

O tree flowering with birds,

said the Spaniard, Juan Ramon Jimenez.

I say it in German, in my grim warbling.

I'll sit on under this tree,

tree whose name I don’t know,

tree that does not know me.

...................

...................

...................

Only the sparrows feel safe with me.

Rozanna Lilley is a researcher and author. Her essays have appeared in Southerly, Mascara Literary Review, Westerly and Best Australian Essays (2013 and 2014). Her poems have been widely published, including in Cordite, Rabbit, Australian Poetry, Westerly, Stilts and national newspapers, as well as being anthologised, most notably in Best Australian Poems in 2015 and 2023. Her hybrid prose-poetry memoir ‘Do Oysters Get Bored? A Curious Life’ (UWA Publishing, 2018) was shortlisted for Australia’s National Biography Award in 2019. Her first stand-alone poetry book, ‘The Lady in the Bottle’ (London: Eyewear), which revisits the 1960s TV series I Dream of Jeannie, was published in 2023. More details can be found at her author website: https://rozannalilley.com.au

Painted stockings

Perched on the candy pink 

bathtub, her perfect 

stockings take shape

She applies the formula 

(her mother’s secret)

stroke by stroke

Her legs reveal 

life as trompe l’oeil 

seams permanently straight 

Stepping out 

in a patent two-strap

the city clicks & hums

In the typing pool 

qwerty girls knead keys

smug in silk hose 

Four shillings 11 pence a pair 

for broken threads runs and ladders

hammering their h-e-a-r-t-b-r-e-a-k-s

Returning home

in a carriage

she unlocks the waiting door

Scrubs the day away

with penny-a-bar soap

rolling down papery skin

To uncover a tangle

of inky ribbons

imprint barely legible

Mehta was born in Frankfurt, grew up in Bombay and New Jersey, studied in Boston, and now makes her home in New York City. Her second poetry collection Tiny Extravaganzas is out with Arrowsmith Press (2023). Her essay collection Happier Far comes out in 2024. New and recent work is in The New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, and A Public Space. Her writing has been recognized by the Peter Heinegg Literary Award, the Café Royal Cultural Foundation, and fellowships at Civitella Ranieri and Yaddo. She was an editor at A Public Space, PEN America, and Guernica. Her latest project is a poetry cycle connected to The Divine Comedy. She is also collaborating with musicians to invent a new way of working through sound together and is working on a long-term project with the New Chamber Ballet.

Marrow

What a cricket-show on the hillside
crooning to Aeolian winds
cataracting down the Susquehanna. 
Slow summer grooves cuss the shade 
stealing Iroquois light 
and flirt with bees percussing.

You stand among the larch grove 
you planted in anno domini
when you invented operatic growth— 
carbon, karst, soil, silt, rain, love— 
oxygen-eyed larches shine straight up 
sky beyond and liquifying.

Ever this was not a space along 

or inside time, so electric in the kiln, 

fierce their eyes you fire 

rib to lung to heart 

enriching marrow in the bones 

truly and subterranean. 

Generations thumbed to being

graceful in your hands, contours 

you curved from land to long-haired 

long-robed saints medieval 

clobbering every demon who dared to say

we are, for all we love, a hoax.

Here, in your chemistry of glazes,

are green-garden colors 

unresurrectable, but shimmering.

Labor was always ever won uneasily

by women or saints, imperfect porcelain of you, 

each porcelain object that might be true.

The Grammar of Paradiso

We couldn’t linger long, for our time was up.

Years were mossy and we fell into a heap 

mucked up with feeling, and feeling scythes 

chop through us. Years were outsize 

on the palate. Hours turned bitter, then tart.

Augustine said: love god and do what you want. 

But talking became a symptom of everything

perilous; words were everywhere, whirlwinding. 
 

It was easy to be roulette about next year 

sunsetting and sunrising, and to disappear 

into endings. No discord, no duress,

no surprises on the jaw, and no unrest.

Not the raw experience of being tender

too soon, or too late, and sensing you were 

onto something. But living doubt to doubt

was exactly what talking was about.
 

It is all finery of endings, we think, reveling 

in grace, uplift, love. We believe revelation

is waiting for us, but grace is never beautiful 

and it demands more than the finale 

of being human: not peace but varieties 

of experience, not clarity but society,

not writing in Latin but shouting in dialect

beatitudes within. Our senses flame up still.

Transhuman

Vivid consolations persuaded me that being

always on the brink of love was not

divine at all. Turning to indifferences 

is the anteroom of the never. If you fix 

your gaze on objects, it never will suffice.

Nothing takes. We work out quantum truths

greater than time on Earth, 

but not how we become diffuse.
 

We operate in swirling moods of the surreal, 

outer-being seeking inner being

to feed our sense that we are real. 

Vanity to vanity, we race from birth to heaven

demented at the gates, holding virtue tight.

Theological folks say it’s for better or for worse; 

designing doings and goings unscripted 

into scripts is the mystery of essere.

 Beatrice says I am obtuse, and time is inside out.

I arrow to divinity before the bow releases me, 

becoming the moon in the beautiful ways 

sequined fish appear as fractals where light pools.

It is so impossible to calculate beginnings 

at the beginning of time disappearing.

Transhuman on this pearl moon, 

I become wavelengths ricocheting. 

From my lapis lazuli Magellan couch, 

I ask myself how it feels, reading trecento ways 

of believing and turning pages into paradise,

increasingly disoriented that knowledge 

never empties, yet I can’t remember beyond Lethe. 

So many stolen years. From the preface 

to the last canticle, one part more, 

another less; suffering is the maw of experience. 

Andy Young grew up in southern West Virginia and has lived most of her adult life in New Orleans, where she teaches at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. With her partner, Khaled Hegazzi, she translates poetry from the Arabic and founded Meena, a bilingual literary journal, in 2005. Her second full-length collection, Museum of the Soon to Depart, is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press, and she is the author of four chapbooks. Her work has recently appeared in Spoon River Poetry Review, Pidgeonholes, and  The Journal of the American Medical Association. A graduate of Warren Wilson’s Program for Writers, her work has been translated into several languages, featured in classical and electronic music, in flamenco and modern dance performances, and in jewelry, tattoos, and public buses.

Display
     Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, Cairo

After they liquefied the brain
and rivered it through the nose,
     after they perfumed and wrapped
the body at the opening-the-mouth
     ceremony, the pharaoh stepped
     into his new bodiless life.

Things of the body remained:
offerings of figs, a golden goose head,
     a stone version of himself
so he could one day re-enter
     and have a face to look out from.
     But a pharaoh who cannot move

cannot touch a horse’s mane,
the queen’s breast, his ruling scepter.
     He watched the Theban
builders lazing on bricks,
     his second life
     a one-way mirror.

When his mummy was moved
to Cairo, he floated, untethered
     without it, wafting up
the Nile like a hot air balloon.
     Then he found his painted
     eyes staring up at him,

gold body dulled by glass. Rejoined,
he looked up at the faces staring in,
     chewing gum, year after year,
until the millions flooded the streets,
     linking hands around him,
     coughing in tear gas clouds.

British-born poet Mags Webster lives on the lands of the Whadjuk Noongar people of Western Australia. Her poetry, reviews, academic papers and essays have appeared in various anthologies and journals in Australia, the UK, Asia and America. In 2011, Mags’ poetry book The Weather of Tongues (Sunline Press) won Australia’s Anne Elder Award for best debut collection. Her next collection, Nothing to Declare (Puncher & Wattmann) was shortlisted in Australia’s 2021 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. Her third collection, Salt & Sulphur, will be published in 2024.

What stays with me
 

is motorcycle

slicing into night 

is sternum 

paired with spine 

is sideways stare 

is question 

masked as dare

is peppermint tea 

half-gulped

is salt & truffle, 

tongue-rough

pelt of hair 

frantic jazz of fingers  

latch of jaw 

to back of neck, sweet 

serpentine of sweat,  

the paper-throated 

buck of breath, a mesh 

of curls & wet

too many 

cigarettes

& yet, & yet 

you tighten 

to me, skin 

still slick 

from a thousand   

kisses, vows

& passionate lies

such ginger in

this startled tilt

a seasoning 

we can’t wash 

off, we recoil

from its taste 

yet crave each

famished mouthful

Natania Rosenfeld is a writer, independent scholar and Professor Emerita of English (Knox College, 1998-2018) living in the Hudson Valley. Her second book of poetry, The Blue Bed, appeared from Spuyten Duyvil Press in Fall of 2021. Previously, she published one poetry collection, Wild Domestic (Sheep Meadow Press 2015), a critical book, Outsiders Together: Virginia and Leonard Woolf (Princeton 2000), and a chapbook of essays, She and I, (Essay Press, May 2018). My essays, poems and fiction are forthcoming or have appeared in journals including AGNI, Yale Review, APR, Raritan, Gettysburg Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner and Southwest Review, and four essays have been listed as "Notable" in Best American Essays collections. “Beret,” a poem published in Yale Review, received Special Mention in the 2020 Pushcart Prize anthology. In 2018, she was named one of 30 “Writers to Watch” by the Guild Literary Complex in Chicago. She teaches literature courses for adults through the Newberry Library and the Graham School at the University of Chicago. You can learn more about Natania at nataniarosenfeld.com.

In the Presences of Louise Bourgeois

Knobs

protrusions

(suggestive of intrusions)
 

organs: armored, 

veiled

ringed, never fully naked
 

Leg of lamb

I salute you
 

I enter the museum as I do the mountains

or stand by the waterfall—
 

approaching each room as space 

of “human being” [John Dewey]
 

each object a presence

Under the spider
 

alien

difficult mother

This thing of darkness

I acknowledge mine
 

What is it 

to dangle in space
 

(Terror of sex

when you feel alone)
 

The digit/genitals

half sheathed

knobbed ends worn

(hard materials can show

mortality’s wear    we do not

see our own bones)
 

I, too, worn and scarred

Vulva, vagina

unrooted, rerouted

opened, closed, reopened,

scleral
 

White black brown 

gray hives piles pilings

LUMPS 

preserved in mud
 

Yes, lumps 

but wet,

animate


Malformed Dog
Swedish painting, 1690
 

I.
 

So you, too,

lived on this earth

among the billions

of creatures,

and the many

who were also pe-

culiar or hobbled.
 

Did the

painter love you

at first sight,

to include you here, behind

a royal carriage,

absorbed in your 

wholly own

inner world?

Your back arcs over

legs too close together

(front and back),

accustomed

to stones from boys,

kicks from men,

you hide your tail.
 

Still, your eyes 

glint as does

the black

nose at the end of your 

creamy snout,

moist, labile, and alive.
 

II.
 

A funny sight you must

have been, running, like 
 

a narrow three-storied house

zipping along: ba-dum, ba-dum
 

ba-dum. Who says there’s only 

one way to carry on in this world?                             
 

When I first saw you in the palm 

of my hand, I felt I knew you. 
 

Next day, my own back went.

I crawled and cried, yowled 
 

when I tried to stand. Surely they’d 

have shot you if you’d suffered so.                               
 

III.
 

I see now that he painted you

when he himself was sixty-two
 

and guess that he knew a little

about pain and deterioration.
 

Dogs and nobles were his main

subject, with a horse thrown
 

in from time to time. They rode

their steeds and curs hard, and him
 

too, I’m guessing. It happens when

you aren’t top of heap: the curvature,
 

the giving, the bones out of place.
But you: trotting along, you owned it.

Fernando Carrera (Guadalajara, Mexico, 1983) Carrera is the author of the poetry collections Expresión de fuego (Expression of Fire, 2007), Donde el tacto (Where the touch is, 2011), Là où le toucher / Donde el tacto (2015), Fuego a voluntad (2018), Fuego a voluntad / Fire of Volition (2020) and El fuego se conoce por la quemadura, breve muestra 2007-2018 (Fire is Known by the Burn, brief sample 2007-2018, 2023). He has received numerous awards including the National Poetry Prize Horacio Zúñiga de los Juegos Florales of Toluca 2017 and the National Poetry Prize for Young Literature Salvador Gallardo Dávalos 2010, both in Mexico. Additionally, he’s been awarded creative writing grants from the Federal Secretary of Culture and of Jalisco state in 2008-2009, 2010-2011 and most recently in 2022-2023. His work has been translated into numerous languages such as: English, French, Italian, Greek, Albanese, Turkish among others. In the USA he has been published in the International Poetry Review, Latin American Literature Today Review and the Osiris Poetry Journal among others, and in 2020 he was the single Latin American author selected by Pushcart Prize recipient, Ravi Shankar, to be included in Meridian, a prestigious international anthology edited by the APWT & the Drunken Boat Press.

Jennifer Rathbun, poet and translator, is a Professor of Spanish and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Classics and Interim Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Ball State University in Indiana. She received her PhD at the University of Arizona specializing in Contemporary Latin American Literature. Rathbun is the translator of numerous poetry books by Hispanic authors such as Alberto Blanco and Minerva Margarita Villarreal, editor of two anthologies of poetry and author of the poetry collections Precipicio / Precipice (2023) and  El libro de traiciones / The Book of Betrayals (2021).  Rathbun was awarded the 2021 Ambroggio Prize by the Academy of American Poets for her translation of Cardinal in My Window With a Mask on its Beak by Colombian author Carlos Aguasaco. She is a member of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) and is Associate Editor of Ashland Poetry Press.

Two poems for the Drunken Boat Magazine  Fernando Carrera  

Translated into English by Jennifer Rathbun 

Flow Chart 

They say that everything flows, that everything moves all of the time  

Einstein was known to say that everything is a system in relation to another: in everything there  is a trace that flows underneath: vectors that curve, tensors, “if you could see me in my  transparent state, you would see lines, something that never stops curving,” his photograph tells  me–his gray hair. I look at that ruined mop of hair, of cold fire and I imagine clouds made of  vertebrae, bones of air (lines)  

The status of the project remains on yellow, due to the risk of duplicating activities, therefore,  they’re unnecessary. In order to detect the individual points of efficiency based on these  duplications (efficiency is the euphemism to not say the next head that rolls, you think) the  identification and mapping of the processes will be necessary. The point of action will be for the  Project Manager to coordinate each of the experts for the development of flow charts by activity. 

A poem also has tensors, figures and secret alignments 

If it’s natural, it curves—the straight line is a mathematical deceit, illusion of human control.  All straight lines are a fence, a wall. He who crosses great distances will write a curved poem  with his steps  

The definitions of the processes will be the first milestone, please comply with the established  timeline. Otherwise, an "escalation" process will be initiated. A definition has to be simple,  elegant, precise—encompassing the scenario to which it refers in its entirety, without giving rise  to ambiguities. Based on these definitions, input and output metrics will be determined, and  “efficiencies” will be executed towards continuous improvement of the process 

Never a precise point on the surface  

I never know where anything is, I can’t, because nothing rests  

because everything slides down the curved wake of another weight in motion. This is the great  ocean, always open sea. Not the point in space nor the instant in time: the only thing that exists  in reality is the very occurrence To occur—cell in the poem’s flesh; touch on the body of the  storyline: to be nowhere in order to be light in the gaze of the other, of the one who perceives and  says “Here / This” 

Diagrama de flujo  

Dicen que todo fluye, que todo se mueve todo el tiempo  

Ya decía Einstein que todo es un sistema en relación con otro: en todo hay un trazo que fluye  debajo: vectores que se curvan, tensores, “si me vieras en mi condición de transparencia, verías  líneas, algo que nunca deja de curvarse”, me dice su fotografía —su cabello cano. Miro esa greña  de trapeador arruinado, de hoguera fría e imagino nubes de vértebra, huesos de aire (líneas)  

El estatus del proyecto se mantiene en amarillo, debido al riesgo de actividades que se duplican,  por lo tanto, son innecesarias. Para detectar los puntos sujetos de eficiencia a partir de estas  duplicaciones (eficiencia es el eufemismo para no decir la próxima cabeza que ruede, piensas)  serán necesarios la identificación y mapeo de los procesos. El punto de acción será que el  Project Manager coordine a cada uno de los expertos para el desarrollo de diagramas de flujo  por actividad  

Un poema también tiene tensores, cifras y alineaciones secretas  

Si es natural, se curva —la línea recta es un engaño matemático, ilusión del control humano.  Toda línea recta es una cerca, un muro. Quien cruce largas distancias escribirá con sus pasos un  poema curvo  

Las definiciones de los procesos serán el primer entregable, favor de cumplirlo dentro del  timeline acordado. En caso contrario se abrirá un proceso de “escalación”. Una definición  tiene que ser simple, elegante, precisa —que abarque el escenario al que se refiere en su  totalidad, sin dar pie a ambigüedades. Con base en estas definiciones se establecerán métricos  de entrada y salida, y se procederá a ejecutar “las eficiencias” hacia la mejora continua del  proceso  

Nunca un punto preciso en la superficie  

nunca sé dónde está nada, no puedo, porque nada reposa  

porque todo resbala en la estela curvada de otro peso en movimiento. Este es el gran océano, mar  abierto siempre. Ni el punto en el espacio ni el instante en el tiempo: lo único que existe en  realidad es el acontecimiento mismo Acontecer —célula en la carne del poema; tacto en el  cuerpo de la trama: un estar en ninguna parte para ser luz en la mirada del otro, del que percibe y  dice “Aquí / Esto” 

Salat 1 

I’ve always felt a strange attraction 

for empty parking lots 

big sheets of cement alone 

like petrified lakes. Plazas 

inundated with light, burning space 

Like any other East Asian, rich or miserable 

this brief vastness fascinates me 

: the sky’s power on the buildings 

and avenues of a secret city 

No man nor name count for the god 

But, unlike the East Asian, when I see 

the esplanade I don’t think about any of this 

nor about the absolute hand of an empire 

(today called the Communist Party) 

or about formations of perfect katas 

I think about long words, like “insomnia” 

or other even longer ones like “flight” 

Run like a stubborn, crazy drunk 

and with one long jump reach the hill 

on the outskirts of the industrial park 

where I work: Indian transnational 

that, like a large ship, has brought slaves 

who labor twenty-four seven 

Transparent chain of salary 

: the bitter bread we all share 

Four avenues like four rivers 

outline the limits of the vessel 

In the back there’s a small terrace 

where three Muslims bless the Name 

everyday at noon 

I see them ignore me while they wash their feet, hands and nostrils 

They place rocks over a red rug 

that saves them from the world and its impudence to sing syllables of fire 

A name is like an open esplanade  

full of space and possibility 

where life builds walls 

until the river becomes a patio 

whether you chant to God or yourself

Salat: 

means to pray or bless, and it generally refers to the prayers Muslims offer to God or Ala. 1

Salat 2 

Siempre he sentido una extraña atracción  

por los estacionamientos vacíos  

las grandes planchas de cemento solas  

como lagos petrificados. Zócalos  

inundados en luz, espacio ardiendo  

Como un chino más, rico o miserable  

me fascina esta breve vastedad  

: el poder del cielo en los edificios  

y avenidas de una ciudad secreta  

Ni hombre ni nombre cuentan para el dios  

Pero, a diferencia del chino, al ver  

la explanada no pienso en nada de esto  

ni en la mano absoluta de un imperio  

(hoy llamado Partido Comunista)  

o en formaciones de katas perfectas  

Imagino en ella una buena cáscara  

: canchas improvisadas en espacio  

abierto, once jugadores por bando  

un partido donde el cambio de juego  

sea posible, no como en la vida  

Pienso en palabras largas, como “insomnio”  

u otras aún más largas como “vuelo”  

Correr como borracho terco, loco  

y de un salto largo alcanzar el monte  

a las afueras del parque industrial  

donde trabajo: transnacional india  

que, como un gran barco, ha traído esclavos  que laboran veinticuatro por siete  Transparente cadena del salario  

: el pan agrio que compartimos todos  

Cuatro calzadas como cuatro ríos  dibujan los límites de la nave  

Al fondo hay una pequeña terraza  donde a mediodía, todos los días  

tres musulmanes bendicen al Nombre  

Los miro ignorarme mientras se lavan  los pies, manos y orificios nasales  Ponen piedras sobre un tapete rojo  que los salva del mundo y su impudicia  para cantar las sílabas de fuego  

Un nombre es como una explanada abierta  llena de espacio y posibilidad  

a la que la vida pone paredes  

hasta que el río se convierte en patio  sea que cantes a Dios o a ti mismo

Salat: 

significa orar o bendecir, y generalmente se refiere a las oraciones de los musulmanes a Dios o Alá. 2

LUIS H. FRANCIA is a poet, playwright, and nonfiction writer. His staged plays include The Strange Case of Citizen de la Cruz and Black Henry, on Ferdinand Magellan’s 1521 ill-fated landfall in the Philippines. His latest poetry collection is Thorn Grass (2021). In 2024, Beltway Editions will publish his newest poetry collection, The Sahara of I. His memoir Eye of the Fish: A Personal Archipelago, won both the 2002 PEN Open Book Award and the 2002 Asian American Writers Workshop Award. He is included in The Library of America’s Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing, edited by Ilan Stavans.

The Sahara of I
 

Pen, not a ballpoint no, puts

down in place in a pen of a

page likes, peeves, dreams,

hates, detritus—always new 

this old challenge, to 
 

find a person lurking in the

Sahara of I, that one who can

speak differently but unbearably

familiar, emerging out of years

of strangeness, my own
 

Lawrence of Arabia

to approach this oasis, this

genesis, bearing three gifts 

for the Holy Child:

Pen, Paper, Word.

Carine Harb, is a London-based poet and editor. As a young asylum seeker, she began crafting and  performing experimental poetry that delves into the realms of migration, identity, and the intricacy of human emotions. Now an editor at Newsweek, Carine uses her platform to spotlight unique stories, and the often unheard voices of the marginalized.

Sunflowers

One day  

you will return to the home  

that you spent your life running from.  

The land of haleeb w asal. 

And on that day  

you will find home in your mind.  

Your children 

lost beneath rubble 

will be there.  

Even their sandals have made an impression on marble floors – 

How can they be forgotten?  

On that day 

they will wake you at 6 am 

and show you the legion of sunflowers assembled on the street.  

You will remember buying them sunflower seeds  

when they were hungry. 

You will wonder about the seeds in their stomach 

that simmered in drops of saliva for years. 

Nourished in words, 

trapped within a plant pot that is a tongue 

until it tore through their skin 

turning their missile-ridden eyes to petals. 

You will wonder if they are being born 

or if they are being dead.  

On that day, 

you will talk of lineage – 

Not with your lips, but with your roots.  

You will wrap arms around stems and kiss yellow faces. 

Your children will smile 

and talk about  

the legion of sunflowers, 

the land of haleeb w asal, 

and about how quickly 

they 

like the time 

have passed away.

Joseph Stanton’s eight books of poems are Lifelines: Poems for Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper, Prevailing Winds, Moving Pictures, Things Seen, Imaginary Museum, A Field Guide to the Wildlife of Suburban Oahu, Cardinal Points, and What the Kite Thinks. His other sorts of books include Looking for Edward Gorey, The Important Books: Children’s Picture Books as Art and Literature, and Stan Musial: A Biography. His poems have appeared in Poetry, New Letters, Antioch Review, Harvard Review, and many other magazines. He is Professor Emeritus of Art History and American Studies.

Blakelock’s Brook by Moonlight

The moon was Blacklock’s magic,

a pouring of bright light through a lattice

of branches and down upon

a scumbled flow of brook,
 

a broken shine of light on water.

His making was a layering of paint,

a scraping and re-layering, 

again and again and again.
 

Sometimes he’d pause 

to bang out wild piano tunes,

to drink to excess in the Bowery,

to trudge from one might-be buyer
 

to the next and the next and the next,

sometimes selling the paintings 

for a few dollars each, hoping 

the desperate hope—trying 
 

to feed his nine children and 

his beautiful, long-suffering wife.

No wonder then that Blakelock

collapsed, at last, into the craziness
 

that lurked around every corner 

of what was becoming New York City,

as he hawked his wares without success,

once tearing up the money
 

after a “patron” low-balled his offer 

for one his best paintings, 

one of those Blakelock had taken 

years to make and remake.
 

The enchantments of the best paintings

lived on after he was locked away

in a sanitarium and the prices for his works

went through the roofs of the rich,
 

commanding higher re-sale prices 

than the works of any other American artist—

while Blakelock’s family still starved

in a shack in the Catskill’s, 
 

and he lived out his last days 

under lock and key, painting on cigar-box lids

with whatever paints he could find,

struggling to keep rendering enchantments,
 

his moons still with that resplendent glow,

breaking through those traceries of branches,

his brooks still flowing, full of light,

towards places he could never go.

Justin Wymer is a poet and educator from West Virginia. His first poetry collection, DEED (Elixir, 2019), won the  Antivenom Poetry Award. He has received awards and fellowships from Harvard Office for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute, University of Iowa, University of Denver, Academy of American Poets, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He is an assistant professor of poetry and creative writing at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

Breathing Through The Famine

If I carve myself into a drafty idea

will that bring you back. 

If there’s less of me will there be

more of you. I buy tiny mass

produced glasses of tiramisu.

Lemon’s in scrapes I don’t remember

riving. Caramel apple snacking cake’s

the dulled teak of your eyes. 

I take a new pill called Antigrief

and long walks to the door

of the ward in my mind where 

I keep a ledger, a scale, a knife.

Do I want to pare down to the child

who could have saved you 

or is your absence the only way I feel

day unfurl on my shoulders. 

I need a machine to breathe and

there are fewer for the pestilence

that suffocated countless just

before you 

yourself. Tomorrow I’ll be 

straining toward the form

of prayer that’s a wave of starlings

sizzling into a powerline

when sunset overreddens their wings

and the sky’s too bloody for its frame.

I blame myself for keeping you in

my body. I should keep better

appointments. At 4:48 every morning

a halogen headlight like radioactive pine

needles my window, and I look out

as the first gray crowd, bleared and puffy,

sets out toward its ward. It’s the point 

in the rhythm of day when they all

start breathing. I stop 127 times per hour.

Can’t sniff a flower, for the allergies, for

its tampering with my small nostrils and

the adrenaline to my heart, every 2 seconds

to wake me and stop my coffining, so when

you couldn't stop coughing did you think

it was better not to be seen, on the ground,

gasping for the son who never reached for you.

The Joys Between Them

There are men made lost

who before the last drop

cling to any body as a home.

I think they’re happier.

Their joy doesn't need to cool

to be tenable. They don't need

to wait for the day they're infallible

to take a shot at splendor. 

I live inside the breakage

between wanting to be 

and wanting to be held back.

Inside, I live like heldness 

in an underripened quince.

In, under, I break for men I've lost

and I’m the man whose joy's

between them. I embody the shot

between and feel that life, ripe

and open, waiting for a day 

a quince is lent to me, a shot

at feeling held and holding, happier.

Darin Ciccotelli has published poems in BOMB Magazine, Colorado Review, Fence, Georgia Review, Subtropics, West Branch and ZYZZYVA. He received his MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas and his PhD from the University of Houston.  In 2017, he received an Individual Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts. A version of his manuscript, “Unseen Powers of the Delaware Valley,” was a finalist for the National Poetry Series in 2021. He teaches at Soka University of America.

HERE

An ancestral wheat scrambles the coming dusk. The guarded expressions of a waitress 

frustrate customers’ moods. 

Steel sides for a folding chaise longue 

with polypropylene ribbons and thighs bemoaning. The trailered boat slightly dirty— 

there are concerns. 

A page collapses under an oscillating fan. Bed clothes the color of a flu. 

Once more they sustain the load of it. 

Because the dumped shell fragments 

covering a cul-de-sac press their bare feet. They’re driving without shoes. 

Kids rush through calisthenics 

before bed. 

Downward the garden flexes 

with each puce burst on the leaves interrupted to colorless, shot, pissing. 

And animals rove to destroy. 

The outdoor shower shatters quills 

on a rubber mat. 

Each adult improvises and medicates  

and jams his ghost into others’ changing.

RADIATOR 

Winter nails the filmy snow. An eager sound carries through piping snores. 

For what seems like a mission the couch sweats. 

Breakfast marshmallows 

slither and decompose into particles. 

Importance hates the skin 

of the frost. 

It pretends with goblins 

and chauffeurs because 

it no longer remembers.

Andrea Applebee is a writer based in Thens, Greece. Her first book of poetry, Aletheia, was published by Black Square Editions (New York) in 2017.  Her autobiographical work, Mercy Athena, was published in the Cahiers Series from Sylph Press in 2020. A chapbook of poems, Anemones, came out with Magra Press in 2021.

APOTROPAIC 

As a child I collected things
an awl, a pestle, a paintbrush stem 
crochet hooks, nut-picks, record needles 
the tongue of a bell.
shapes dispensed of purpose 
in the slant light on a sill 
they filled me with a concern like love 
which I multiplied by the number of the stars. Who 
else could understand and tend them their lost 
labor, their perfect incompleteness their certainty 
having nothing to do with the living. Later, I found 
that, In rooms of those recently dead by suicide, a 
kind of existence lingers on surfaces as on a note 
slipped under the door, blank except for a 
fragrance. 
They are strangers. I only see them in dreams. 
Don’t worry about me. A soul tasked 
with counting grains of sand 
or emptying the sea with a perforated limpet 
is not more sure of her future. 
My life is not without its secret pleasures.
Lately the hammering begins in the morning 
destroying the interior walls next door. 
A doctor bought the place. 
He took one look at me in the lobby
and asked if there was something wrong with my heart. 
That made me smile.
It has grown too strong for me 
pounding on like a ruthless oar 
rowed by ruthless hands. but 
my mouth is always wet with 
distant music. 

Daniel Browne was born in Canada, grew up in South Florida, and spent nearly twenty years in New York City. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his family. His writing has been featured in Salon, The Oxford American, The Believer, The Bitter Southerner, and 40 Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial, among others. His novel In the Weeds is available from Garrett County Press.

At the Shambhala Center

I took to the zafu knowing

I’d have to pee the entire hour,

my bladder, tight

as a fist,

acting up since the day before,

a sign I’d been fighting 

my son’s virus.

I was returning to my breath

like I’d trained myself to do, slipping

in and out of a voluptuous fugue,

more burned out than blissed out,

when I heard it:

through the thin wall we share

with the environmentalists,

the unmistakable plash

of piss hitting porcelain,

the flush an exhalation.

It was funny, or would have been,

but I still had forty-five minutes at least

till the bong of the singing bowl.

I kept sitting. Call it Right Effort, 

though in truth,

I would’ve taken a break

in a heartbeat 

if it didn’t mean defiling 

the silence to ask 

for the key.

No way, not after the time 

I was forced to take 

my coughing fit

out to the parking lot,

having succumbed to my son’s

last virus.

So, I kept sitting. A good Buddhist

would have let his attention rest

on the cold pressure in his crotch,

investigate it 

as pure sensation

till it dissolved 

of its own accord, but I

passed the time

in blessed distraction, 

roughing out this poem

in my head.

Naomi Rhema Edwards graduated from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Pittsburgh. Her poetry has appeared in publications such as Cathexis Northwest Press, Tupelo Quarterly, Button Eye Review, and her comics have appeared in Palooka Magazine and Red Noise Collective. She lives and works in Pittsburgh. 

For the Animal

How do I somehow 

still 

not know myself?
 

Something in the marrow

says:

you and me

you and me
 

running along the same river.

Let me slip 

into the greenish underwater

and access what I know

from way before.
 

Both of us, in wombs.  

In the inward

are we not

still interior?
 

Or can we get to that interior?
 

*

There was a place we didn’t see

but thought of 

in our sleep.

Its contours echo in the blood.
 

You said, ‘I’ll find the interior.’
 

*
 

My home, my home.

Deep in the heart of--
 

--oh, all kinds of places things can grow.

In sidewalk cracks and empty jars. Lichen filigrees the grave.

A slime takes hold of the valves 

of the heart that it eats.
 

Something in us is hungry.
 

That something is us or 

is that something

something else?

A symbiont.
 

*
 

Sympathy for the animals. You forgot 

you are an animal. You forgot we all came 

from the handful 
 

of drifting debris 

on an exhale.  
 

A murmur, regret.  

Blown over the land,

entangled, not free,

we are not.

*
 

(Years later, when the bar is trying to close,

I insist, 
 

‘we have to progress

from this darkness.

We have to achieve

a more perfect darkness.’
 

But take it, gently,

from my hands.)

Jodie Hollander’s work has appeared in journals such as The Poetry Review, The Yale Review, The Harvard Review, Poetry, PN Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry London, The Hudson Review, The Dark Horse, The New Criterion, The Rialto, Verse Daily, The Best Australian Poems of 2011, and The Best Australian Poems of 2015. Her debut full-length collection, My Dark Horses, was published with Liverpool University Press & Oxford University Press. Her second collection, Nocturne, was published with Liverpool & Oxford University Press in 2023 and was longlisted for the Laurel Prize in nature writing. Hollander is the recipient of a MacDowell fellowship and a Fulbright fellowship in South Africa. She is also the originator of 'Poetry in the Parks,' in conjunction with several National Parks and Monuments in the US. She currently lives in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Horse Swimming

St Croix

When at last their big bodies,

hot and caked with mud,

dip into the Caribbean,

all the horses groan

and moan with happiness. 

The trail ride is over,

and out of the familiar line,

the horses swim together,

bucking with excitement.

Some begin to charge

and race one another;

others simply float,

comfortably with the current

as if in another life

they were creatures of the sea.

Still others get so happy

they shit in the water—

we don’t quite understand,

and yet, in this moment

it somehow all makes sense:

knowing the reins are useless,

I’m holding the bare neck

of this strong joyful creature

plunging through the water,

and laughing in the waves,

when suddenly it hits me:

this business of being human

is utterly absurd.

Born in Mumbai in 1971, Anand Thakore grew up in India and in the United Kingdom. He has spent most of his life in Mumbai. His published collections of poetry include In Praise of Bone ( 2023), Waking In December (2001), Elephant Bathing (2012), Mughal Sequence (2012), and Seven Deaths and Four Scrolls (2017). A Hindustani classical vocalist by training, he has devoted much of his life to the study, performance, composition and teaching of Hindustani vocal music. He received musical instruction for many years from Ustad Aslam Khan, Pandit Baban Haldankar and Pandit Satyasheel Deshpande. He is the founder of Harbour Line, a publishing collective, and of Kshitij, an interactive forum for musicians. He holds an MA in English Literature and is the recipient of grants from The Ministry of Human Resource Development and The Charles Wallace India Trust. He lives in Mumbai and divides his time between writing, performances, and teaching music. His fourth collection of verse, entitled Seven Deaths and Four Scrolls, was recently shortlisted for The Jayadeva National Poetry Award.

WATERHOLE
 

Something in the blood wants to leap,

Here, outside the ICU my father’s in,

His speech now taken from him,
 

By bandages, tubes and pipes.

What wants to leap is like the sound and stroke

Of a bright steel plectrum against a taut tuned string,
 

The hollow russet gourd with its bridge of horn,

Leaf-decked and lacquered in Calcutta in his early teens,

Reverberating with the tiles of a mosaic floor,
 

Laid down at his grandfather’s behest to allure the dead –

An untameable sound, febrile, metallic,

That reaches out not for perfection of pitch or form,
 

But for the undergrowth of forests visited in solitude,

Between sessions at court or five-star hotels.

It is a music that summons the jungle home,
 

Beseeching it to inhabit the domain of time-hallowed meters,

And arched, ancestral walls, once believed indomitable;

Each creepered phrase, each verdurous pause,
 

Urging it to confer, on territories of tone

That have stood like temples,  

Its uncontrollable strength.
 

What longs to leap is impassioned

As the sound of strings he tuned and strummed,

Pulled, plucked and put aside for years;
 

But also, it is as tuneless, aloof and swift,

As the single click of a black-and-white camera,

Heard, against the torrid crunch
 

Of desiccated leaf-beds crumpled by hooves,

Amidst crane-squawk, deer-bark, cricket-hum and monkey-screech,

In the parched interior of a landlocked forest
 

Towards the end of March,

When trees turn skeletal, and all streams for miles around

Run dry, all pools but this one –
 

His breath slowing down,

As he turns from the lens to the thought of thirst,

And rows of antlers sail cautiously into view,
 

Till it is time to gather with those who have gathered,  

Receiving what deer and buffalo receive,

Asking to live, here only for water.
 

NOCTURNE COMPOSED IN A SWIMMING POOL
 

Afloat on my back on a moonless night,

I marvel at how – against the heft and pull

Of all that holds it down and wants it to sink –

The flesh buoys up and grows curiously light.

You who bestow on the sinews such ease

As the heart unblessed may not rise to know –

Water, seeping in silence through my pores,

Tinged with lamplight and cerulean blue,

You do not suffer the estrangement of those

Who sink interred within, yet strive against

The shroud-like outer boundaries of the skin.

Reaching for what’s right here, my arms outstretched,

I float at odds with all I am immersed in.

My suffering ends where these blues begin. 
 

THREESOME
 

So now you call long-distance to remind me

My late friend is not just mine to mourn,

But also yours –

Though things turned sour between you,

And the two of you haven’t spoken in twenty years. 

I understand: you wish to reclaim a lost right to grief,

And to tell me – though, of course, you do not mention this –

That in the great list of things we have shared, you and I –

Tarkovsky, Tolkien, riverfish in mustard sauce,

Boat rides, skinny-dipping, rain,

The same therapist, the same cheap rooms in gimcrack hotels –

We must not now forget to include

A dead man’s insatiable, irretrievable member.

You will want to fondle them, perhaps, 

When you read this, alone in your room 

On your laptop screen with the lights switched off,

The breasts I could never quite bring myself to share –

Though I tried, believe me –

With the recently dead.
 

THAT’S HOW IT FEELS
 

You claimed you preferred the safety of public spaces;

To appear at bookstores, a park, a hotel pool.

I had grown attuned to your frequent assaults on sleep;  

Till late last night you chose to blast the rule,
 

And accost me in a room where only you could see me.

Your eyes held mine with a stare hell-bent on slaughter.

I recall a feverish ripping of shirts, the pressure

Of nails on astonished skin, but little thereafter,
 

Except the sound of the flesh crying out for more.

When you bit my lips I’m certain they bled.

You loosened your grip, then rose and reached for the door. 
 

A salt-lamp quivered in the dark. There, you said,

I told you one day you’ld get what you’ve always longed for:

That’s how it feels to get fucked awake by the dead.
 

FIGURE LOOKING OUT OF CAVE AT RAIN*
 

Sharp torrents of rain, brief splashes of light 

Lash against the edge of a gaping crack:

Seen from behind against a blaze of white,   

A single faceless figure wrapped in black.
 

Sometimes I see a woman standing there,

At home in what descends to greet the eye;

Sometimes a man, who looks up from despair,

Yet lives in fear of rain and light and sky.

Here in the dark he cannot step out of,

The hardness of rock below and above

Reverberates with wrongs he never forgave.

A realm of white light reserved for the brave,

Sprawls beyond the open mouth of his cave,

Where water pours down a rock face like love.

*Based on a photograph by Madhu Kapparath 

Arundhathi Subramaniam is the author of thirteen books of prose and poetry, most recently, the poetry volume, Love Without a Story (Bloodaxe Books, 2020). As editor, her work includes the Penguin anthology of sacred Indian poetry, Eating God. She has worked over the years as curator, critic and poetry editor. A recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award 2020, and shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize for Poetry in 2015, her awards include the inaugural Khushwant Singh Prize, the Il Ceppo Prize in Italy, among others.

Mitti

As a child
I ate mud.

It tasted of grit and peat
and wild churning

and something I could never find
a name for.

Later I became
a moongazer

always squinting through
windows,

believing freedom
was aerial

until I figured that the moon
was a likely mud-gazer

longing for the thick sludge
of gravity,

the promiscuous thrill
of touch,

the licence to make,  
break, remake,  

and so I uncovered
the old role of poets --

to be messengers
between moon and mud --

and began to learn the many
languages of earth

that have nothing to do with nations
and atlases  

and everything to do
with the ways

of earwigs,
the pilgrim trail of roots

and the great longing of life to hold
and be held,

and the irrepressible human love
of naming:

ooze, mire, manure, humus, dirt, silt
mould, loam, soil, slush, clay, shit,
mannu, matope, barro,
tin, ni, luto, fango …

All have their place, I found,
in the democracy of tongues,  

none superior,
none untranslatable,

all reminders
of the anthem

of muck
of which we are made,

except when June clouds capsize
over an Arabian Sea

and a sleeping city
awakens to an ache so singular

that for just a moment
it could have no name

other than that
where sound meets scent

and a slop of matter  
meets a slick lunatic wetness:

mitti.

Just that. Nothing else will do.

Deepanker (1971-2000)

Born in New Delhi in 1971, Deepankar Khiwani lived in Paris for a long time before returning to India. He read Economics at Bombay University and earned postgraduate degrees in accounting and business management. He worked for a consulting and technology company. He passed away in March 2020. Khiwani’s debut collection of poems, Entr’acte, was published in 2006 by Harbour Line. A master of formal, metred verses, Khiwani explored themes of detachment, masquerade, and ambivalence in these poems. His poems were included in many anthologies including 60 Indian Poets (Penguin, ed. Jeet Thayil), The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (Bloodaxe, ed. Jeet Thayil), Both Sides of the Sky (National Book Trust, ed. Eunice de Souza), 50 Poets, 50 Poems (Open Spaces, ed. Priya Sarukkai Chabria), and The HarperCollins Book of English Poems by Indians (Harper Collins, ed. Sudeep Sen). International publications including London Magazine and Fulcrum have featured his work.

Photograph at the Lodhi Gardens
 

I have that snapshot in my album still – 

That pale blue sky, which doesn’t really tell

How hot it was and how you fell quite ill:

You held a book, and smiled hard to look well.
 

I wasn’t posing then, but now I find

This photograph shows more of me than of you:

My eyes drawn to the ruined tomb behind,

I shot you less in focus than we knew.

Catherine Strisik, award-winning poet, teacher, editor; author of three poetry collections; co-founder and editor of Taos Journal of Poetry; Taos, New Mexico’s Poet Laureate 2020-2021; is a Pushcart nominee, and has over 30 years of publications with poetry translated into Greek, Persian, and Bulgarian. https://www.cathystrisik.com

What I Remember, Unholy, is This:

                                                 Dead horseflies’ gliders, triangular

                                                           and translucent, torn −

The mid-day sun tanned me so bronze through

the unprotected window, I abandoned

my tame remains. Even your

whispering was in love

with your momentary love.

And the record player played Laura Nyro last

sex, high-heeled, and awkward.

                                                 torn from their shunned bodies −

Dead horseflies’ gliders, triangular

and translucent, torn from their shunned bodies −

Glukupikron: 13 Impressions
 

1. See how I hide my emotions from even my own wisdom.
    
2. The breast no longer my breast when bandaged in fear. A songbird, flutters alongside
   my sped-up heartbeat. I smell nothing, then the breast is not
   breast of my ego rather breast of
   a body. 
    
3. Two gold rings. I wear one Byzantine style on my right ring finger bought in the heat
   of July in Thessaloniki. The other, square with holes with two small blue topaz worn
   on the middle finger of my left hand. Heraklion some heartache ago.
    
4. Vasovagal. Then the heartbeat and blood pressure slow down. 
    
5. What were any of you doing while I was doing what I was doing?
    
6. When I open my eyes that I’ve successfully hidden in tears I find the clarity 
   of the metal tube that performs miraculous science. I hear the needlework of my soul unravel. 
    
7. The sound:  click click click pop click click pop  pumping out suspicious granular tissue. 
    
8. A cold wet cloth placed on my brow. Breathe in through your mouth. Again Again
   Again. I’m in prayer rearranging the wingspan of last winter’s Blue Heron
   so that I might next time lift off with him. 
    
9. There’s clarity I whisper, my eyes meandering across the stuffy-circulating
   airless biopsy room. Approaching consciousness my mind
   dips in and out of the chasm of coastal paths along the Annisquam before there was 
   indication of salt-like granules, suspicious. 
    
10. Could it be that I inhaled during a migration north, too much salt air, 
    while Northern Cardinals perched? Could it be the infection of milk
    duct 28 years ago, or that truly my own brine held too close to the heart, felt
    closed to the heart?
     
11. Take me with you, holy drift of a mind.
     
12. A breast is just a breast is not just a breast is not just a breast the way I held 
    just yesterday,
    myself, Eros.
     
13. Here, with the softest pillows, lie down with me.

Molly Gaudry is the founding editor of Lit Pub and the author of We Take Me Apart, which was a finalist for the Asian American Literary Award and shortlisted for the PEN/Osterweil. She teaches at Stony Brook University and the Yale Writers' Workshop.

OCTOPUS ATTACK!

Molly Gaudry

Crawling around searching for Shasha’s lost shoe, I think about how cute I still think it is that Godfrey’s four-year-old can’t properly say “Sasha,” and so Shasha she is and Shasha we call her. Godfrey thinks it’s time to for us to start calling her “Sasha,” though, and that just makes me wonder if my opinion matters here at all and whether or not I should voice it, especially when my opinion is that “it’s cute, though.” If I do voice this sentiment and Godfrey looks at me like I’m not being helpful, is that because I’m just the girlfriend? Would he react differently if we were married? I’m thinking now, of course, about the engagement ring in my jacket pocket out in the foyer, and about my longstanding doubts about whether I’m the kind of person who should ever get married to anyone, if someone like me is even capable of being a wife or a mother. But it’s feeling like a good day, even if we are running late and I’ve abandoned all hope of ever finding Shasha’s shoe. “Shasha, when’s the last time you had both of your shoes on? Do you remember?” 

She actually throws both of her hands up in the air like an exasperated adult and extends her shoeless right foot and wiggles it in my face. “Where is it?” 

I go back to crawling and craning my neck and using my phone as a flashlight to squint into the dark corners under her bed. I don’t know when exactly I became the official Shoe Lady around here, the person who buckles the buckles and ties the bunny ear loops, but I remember the first time Shasha emerged from her room and crawled up on the couch with me and stuck her foot on my leg and said, “Can you tie it?” That was our first real physical contact—a major milestone for a kid who’s touch averse and highly sensitive. It was a major milestone for me, too. Because of the way my mother died, which will haunt me forever, that moment on the couch with Shasha was the first time in my life I’d ever let anyone outside of school or work need me for something. Seriously. So even though Godfrey has casually mentioned that maybe I should stop tying Shasha’s shoes for her so she can learn to do it herself, I still do it. “I’m Shoe Lady,” I said, and after I explained what being Shoe Lady meant to me, we agreed I could keep buckling and tying until I was ready to become the person who teaches Shasha how to do these things for herself. “Sooner than later,” Godfrey said, raising his eyebrows at me. “Okay, Shoe Lady?”

“Time to go,” Godfrey says, “we don’t want to miss our appointment.” He’s standing in the doorway holding Shasha’s sneakers, the ones with the light-up soles. “Will you wear these instead?”

I try to stand but it takes a minute because my back doesn’t like being bent over for any length of time, so I wait for Shasha’s answer at a 120-degree angle. She doesn’t look thrilled about wearing sneakers with her new dress, but she can be a surprisingly analytical kid sometimes and I can almost see the gears turning in her facial expressions. New shoes vs. seeing Queenie? She plops on the floor and sticks out her left foot. I unbuckle the strap of her dress shoe and Godfrey tosses me the sneakers one at a time, which I double knot. Shasha hops up and eventually I’m fully upright again, too, and following them to the door, where I actually hear myself say, “Right behind you,” as I stop at the coat rack, trying to decide whether to grab my jacket and bring his ring, or leave it here for the day, out of sight and out of mind.

I am not by nature an optimist. This is because my mom died when I was five. We were in the car when a deer hit us. I don’t know how useful it is to share that I watched her die, slowly and painfully. I will never know if I could have saved her if I’d just gotten out of the car and walked along the edge of that highway until either someone stopped for me or I made it to an exit and a gas station to ask someone for help. I could have even just stood there on the highway pointing to our car in that ditch, and someone might have stopped. I have been told repeatedly that even if I had done any of those things, she probably still wouldn’t have made it, but the question remains unanswered and lifelong doubt, in addition to an irrational fear of death, dead bodies, and highways, is my price to pay for having failed her that day. 

As it always does, the topic of family came up on my first date with Godfrey. Technically it was our third (the first was coffee, and the second was cocktails), but that was our first real time-commitment of an actual date. We were in his car heading back to the middle of Long Island after a long, chilly walk on an empty beach in Montauk followed by a late lunch at Tillie’s. For the record, a walk on a beach is not an activity I will ever enjoy because the chances of something dead washing up onto the shore is very high, at least in my mind, and who wants to walk into that? But as Godfrey handed his keys over to the Gurney’s valet, I slipped my emergency Xanax out of my tiny Altoid’s tin and worked up some saliva and got it down, and then we went and took the walk and everything was fine other than some lumps of seaweed shaped into possible carcasses that made me slightly anxious as we passed by both coming and going, and then we had lunch, and then we were back in his car and heading back. About twenty minutes into our hour-and-a-half drive to my place, he told me he wasn’t divorced, he was a widower, and that even though they were living with Miss Sara, his wife’s mother, he had been on a few dates over the past couple years because he was slowly becoming more comfortable with the idea of moving forward. “What about you? Are you close with your family?” 

Ordinarily, I deflect and say, “It’s complicated,” and people usually take the hint and change the subject. 

Not Godfrey, though. “Why’s it complicated?” 

I didn’t really want to get into it because it’s a terrible conversation to have to have, repeatedly, every time you get to know someone well enough to want to let them in. But I had a choice to make that day in the car, and it’s possible too that the Xanax and the long walk and my omelette and waffle had numbed me into a more receptive state. So I told him about my mom, and how I couldn’t handle dead stuff in real life, and then after all that I said, “That’s why I asked you to drive, too. Thanks, by the way.” I explained how I once slammed the brakes on the highway after passing a dead deer because I panicked and couldn’t breathe and after who knows how many cars blared their horns as they passed me in the other lane, I pulled over to the shoulder and parked, hyperventilating and staring at the deer in my rearview mirror. I couldn’t look away. Just like with my mom. I was frozen in time and space, just staring. Ever since, I’ve stayed off highways. There are dead animals on regular roads, of course, but I’m less of a danger if I tap the brakes going only 30 or 40 miles an hour instead of 80. 

“You should try singing,” Godfrey said. 

“Huut?” 

“What?” 

“Sorry. I think huh and what both came out at the same time there.” 

We laughed, but then he explained. “If you’re driving and you see something in the road and you know you can’t stop because you’d be a danger to yourself and to others, turn on the radio and sing along. It’ll force you to breathe, and it’ll give you something to focus on as you keep on driving. Because you have to keep going, right? You can’t just stay parked there forever.” 

It was absurd, but it made a kind of sense to me, too. Also, because I’m one of those people who screws up all the time trying to solve other people’s problems instead of just listening—although lately I’ve gotten better at asking, “Do you need me to listen or to offer suggestions?”—I really appreciated that on our first date here was this guy just flat out telling me an actual strategy to try out. Later, I learned that although he’s an ER nurse and loves a lot about his job, he gets squeamish at any eyeball trauma that comes in, and if breathing exercises don’t work for him he’ll just start humming in his head to get through it. When I asked what song he hums, he shook his head and said, “I can’t say. It’s terrible.” And then he blurted out, “Eye of the Tiger,” and now anytime there’s eyeball or vision trauma in a movie or on a television show we’re watching, I’ll lean in close and whisper “thrill of the fight” in his ear and usually he elbows me back into my own space. Lately, I can’t help but think about these things we do—these intimate and personalized exchanges that, I don’t know, as these tiny moments in our daily lives just pile up, I mean, if these aren’t proof of our ability to stay, to stay and be happy and last, then what else is? 

This morning, we’re on our way to the Aquarium, and in the spirit of our big adventure, Godfrey and I are both singing along with Shasha as she belts out the chorus to “Wiggle Jiggle Octopus,” which is one of those obnoxious children’s songs from YouTube and basically just repeats the words “wiggle” three times and then “jiggle” three times and then lands on “octopus.” Of course, Shasha can’t get enough of it, and since today is our first day out in public together in a long time we’re really letting loose. Godfrey and Shasha and I are trading off “wiggles” and “jiggles” like some kind of round robin on speed, and the song lyrics make a tiny tornado in the car, individual words circling around and around between us. “Octopus!” we all shout together, and I don’t know how many more of rounds of this I can take. I’m silently counting the number of repetitions in my head when we merge onto I-495 and without even being aware that I’ve been holding my breath, I let out a sigh of relief and stop counting. Just like that. It’s weird. I’m weird. I don’t know how anyone can even deal with me, honestly. Either it’s the Interstate where you’re bound to pass something splattered or torn apart, or realizing, during this particular time of the year, that being on the Interstate means we’re off residential roads, and being off residential roads means not having to see gory Halloween decorations everywhere.

“That’s enough, Shosh,” Godfrey says. 

Miraculously, Shasha stops singing and looks out the window, whispering “I spy” to herself. 

Godfrey reaches over and squeezes my arm. “Okay?”

“Yep.” I squeeze back. “All good.” It’s impossible to hide anything from him, though, so I try to change the subject back to whether or not we’re going to hand out candy ourselves or just leave some in a big bowl and put it out on the porch for kids to take: “So I’m thinking we can just bundle up and sit out on the porch, right? We don’t have to actually hand it out. We can put it all in a big bowl on the bottom step and kids can come and take whatever they want?” 

“Ab,” he says, and I’m both thankful that my subject-change was effective but also worried that it was too effective. In real life, people rarely ever say someone’s name when they’re already talking to each other. Unless they’re about to get very, very serious. “Can’t we just wait and see how we feel about it next week, when we actually have to decide?” 

I want to say yes, because he’s right, this isn’t a now problem. It’s only Sunday and Halloween isn’t until Saturday, and we have a whole week before then, and also it’s not like I forgot about the ring in my jacket pocket, which I reach for now hoping some kind of electric answer will zap its way into me when my fingers touch the velvet box. Predictably, no magic zap. Here’s where I’m at, though. On one hand, it’s too soon to get engaged, and the pandemic forced us to move in together way before either of us would have ever agreed to otherwise, so things have kind of always felt like they’re moving too fast with us. But on the other hand, we have been living together for seven months, and it’s been a great seven months, the best, really, so I don’t know why I wouldn’t just say yes and make our arrangement permanent. “The thing is, though, I just really want to sit out on the porch. Plus it’ll keep the big kids from taking all the candy.” As soon as I say all of this, I regret it. “I don’t want to be difficult. I don’t know why I can’t let this go.” 

“Who cares if they take it? We can refill the bowl.” 

In the back seat, Shasha’s stopped spying stuff and we’re all really quiet. 

“I’m sorry,” I say. “It’s just weird thinking about last year. Going to the store and buying candy like it was nothing.” I pause for a second, and the silence in the car gets louder so I start rambling: “It’s weird to think about how we just came into contact with total strangers for a couple hours and never thought anything of it. Little kids, too, with sticky, candy-covered fingers reaching out for your Kit-Kats and Snickers, and shouting into your face, ‘Trick or Treat!’ all night long, screaming at each other and coughing and sneezing right out into the open air. And their parents, all bare-faced and mask-less, just nodding at you and making conversation about the weather, if they said anything at all. It was so perfectly normal and banal.”

Suddenly it hits me. “Ohhh,” I say. “I just realized what all this is about.” 

Godfrey takes his eyes off the road and turns to look at me. 

“That’s the night we met.”

He smiles like I’ve just said the sweetest thing, but right then Shasha belts out “Wiggle Jiggle Octopus” and Godfrey just reaches and squeezes my arm again and then puts on his turn signal to try and get around the Subaru in front of us. Although I’m getting better at saying what I feel when I feel it, old habits die hard and I’m still pretty avoidant when life makes it easy to be avoidant. I turn around to look at Shasha and say, “Hey, how many legs does an octopus have?” 

She stops singing and says, “Eight!” 

“How many hearts does an octopus have?” 

“Three!” 

Godfrey joins in. “How many brains does an octopus have?” 

“Nine, ugh,” and with that, Shasha lets us know she’s tired of answering questions that she knows we know the answers to and she goes back to spying things through her window again and her voice fills up the car and gives us something to do and pay attention to outside of ourselves. Shasha says, “I spy something purple.” 

Godfrey points out my window toward a burgundy minivan and says, “Is it that car next to us?” 

I think back to last Halloween, to Godfrey in his lavender scrubs and looking tired but standing behind Shasha, who was so cute in her little homemade cardboard truck costume as she held open a pillowcase for me that I gave her a gigantic handful of candy and then reached into my bag to give her some more. “Peanut butter okay?” I asked her dad, who nodded. “OK, how about some peanut butter cups then?” Shasha nodded, so I dropped in one, and then fished around in my bag and found another and dropped that in too. Shasha turned then to look at her dad, which I appreciated, because yeah, I was totally breaking the social contract and being the weird grown up giving too much candy to a little girl and so I blurted out the least helpful thing I could’ve said: “I teach writing.” 

Godfrey tilted his head like, “Okaaay?” 

I hurried on: “So, moments like these, I tell my students to draw attention to the obvious, to whatever flaw there is in their story, because sometimes the easiest and fastest fix is the best fix.” Godfrey’s mouth opened and then shut, which I took as a sign for me to continue. “Like, if I were my own student right now, I’d be telling myself to just have the idiot say what she isn’t saying, which is: I don’t know how to keep you here any longer, and giving your kid more candy seems like a total creeper move, so I’m going to stop that now, all right?” 

“Why’s she talking so much? What’s she saying?” 

By this point, Shasha had stepped backward off the steps until she bumped into her dad, where she was taking refuge, and there I was looking down at them from up on my porch maybe a little too Wonder Woman power-pose menacingly, so I sat slowly on the top step to make myself smaller and said, “Do-over?” and then I looked into the sky and said, “Lucky it’s not raining tonight, huh? My name’s Ab.”

“I’m Godfrey,” he said, and then, patting Shasha’s shoulders, added, “This is Shasha.”

“Hi, Shasha,” I said. 

“Hi,” she said. 

“Nice to meet you, Ab,” Godfrey said, after a beat.

A month later, on our long, cold walk on the beach in Montauk, Godfrey told me, “I can’t believe I came back and gave you my number that night.” 

“You’re just telling me this now?” We’d been texting and FaceTiming for the past month, and suddenly I was really embarrassed and worried about how awkward our drive back might be because it was definitely going to take over an hour to get home. Not to mention I had a ton of grading waiting for me and I wasn’t entirely convinced yet that dating was something I had time for, so if this was headed downhill suddenly it wasn’t even the loss of this guy’s potentially life-changing human company that I was concerned about but the loss of six hours on a Sunday before my Monday-morning senior seminar. “Wait, why did you give me your number?” 

“You were our last stop—and the only person she took candy from all night.” 

“Really?” 

“She’s not good with people. They can be too loud or maybe they smell too strongly of perfume. Or they talk with their hands too much. Basically, anyone who doesn’t look right or smell right or sound right, and it’s over. She’s in occupational therapy. It’s helping.” 

“My parents ran a PT clinic—they had OTs and speech therapists on staff too.” 

“Really?” 

“It’s true.” I relaxed a little and pulled out a pack of Bubble Yum. “Want some?” 

“You know, you’re good at sharing,” he said, before he kissed me. 

This was true, too. I was good at sharing. On the verge of forty, finally out of grad school and finally employed as a professor with a salary and benefits, I decided that maybe it was time to finally own property, so I had done it. I found a three-bedroom condo with central heat and air. For a while, I debated whether I really needed three bedrooms. But after a lifetime of studying and working at a desk or a card table crammed next to my single bed, or working on a lap pillow in bed, I wanted a bedroom to sleep in and an actual office in a separate room. I just didn’t know if my office should also function as a guest room. In the end, I just went for it—three bedrooms, not two. And while I didn’t know who would ever come to visit, I made my decision based on some inkling of a future life I hoped to build for myself. Whoever it was that might need a place to crash, or might come visit me for the holidays, that’s who my third room was for. 

Now, because of the pandemic, it’s Shasha’s. 

In the backseat, she gives up her game of “I Spy” and starts up with “Wiggle Jiggle Octopus” again. Godfrey’s on autopilot and I honestly think he doesn’t even realize that he’s singing along, which makes me laugh out loud, so then, to hell with it, I join in again, too. One hundred and seventy-three rounds later, we pull into a parking space outside the Aquarium.

About four months into dating, Godfrey brought up the whole “what are we?” conversation. Valentine’s Day was right around the corner, and when he asked the question it was snowing. I remember because every time it starts to snow I stand in front of a window and stare out at the flakes floating in the air, and I think morbid thoughts about how we all just die like death is nothing at all, and when I look at snow like that I always wonder if I’ll ever get to see snow falling again or if that’s going to be the last snow I’ll ever see because it was going to be my last winter on earth.  

“So what do you think?” Godfrey said. “Should we say, It’s been nice knowing ya? Or do we want to proceed?” 

The moment was right for a big talk like that. It was snowing and I was in my morbid mood and there he was in my condo handing me a fresh hot toddy, and I turned away from the window and away from my winter thoughts and I followed him into the kitchen where I stirred my mushroom barley soup and checked the sourdough in the oven. “I’d like to proceed,” I said, “but let’s talk about it?” 

So we talked about it, and we came to an agreement. Proceeding meant: we would go out together for Valentine’s Day, somewhere nice; then I should start spending more time with Shasha; Godfrey and I would start meeting each other’s friends; and we’d start taking for granted that we would be each other’s plus-ones. It did not, however, mean: starting, on Godfrey’s part, to expect any parent-like favors from me. “Such as, for instance, picking up Shasha from school even if I can’t, for any reason. Not even if I, like, really need your help, OK?” 

Godfrey was very clear about wanting to be super clear about this, about having boundaries around how much help he needed where Shasha was concerned. “Not that I don’t need help sometimes, a lot of the time, but for now I just need you to be kind to Shasha, get to know her better, so she knows she can trust you.”

“Of course,” I said. “Yeah.” 

Godfrey was quiet. The gears were really in motion there for a minute, and then he said. “Maybe therapy. That’s one thing I can use your help with, getting her to OT on Tuesdays? I don’t think Miss Sara should be driving her all that way, especially in weather like this.” 

Miss Sara was Shasha’s grandmother, and they had been living in her house since Godfrey realized he couldn’t live in his own anymore, not without his wife there too. He’d intended to rent out the house and find an apartment to live in, but Miss Sara insisted that they move in with her instead so she could help take care of Shasha when Godfrey was at work. After thinking about it, Godfrey decided it was probably what was best for Shasha, if she didn’t have her mother anymore to at least have her grandmother, and so he agreed. Early on when we were dating, when Godfrey first told me about his living arrangement with Miss Sara, he said, “It ended up being what was best for all three of us, without her.” 

“Okay,” I said, crouching down to check my bread, which was done, and while I was facing the oven pretending the loaf wasn’t quite there yet I let out a deep, silent breath. In one evening, I’d gone from just a woman who was casually dating a man with a kid, to a woman suddenly in a relationship with a man with a kid and a dead wife’s mother to meet in two days. Her daughter had been an infectious disease officer in the Army National Guard. I write stories for a living. I didn’t know what Miss Sara was going to make of me.

On Tuesday, I drove to Miss Sara’s and knocked on the door. Shasha opened up, and Miss Sara stood behind her with her hands on her shoulders, protective. 

Shasha smiled up at me and said, “Hi, Ab,” matter of factly. 

I said, “Hi, Shasha.” And then I looked up at Miss Sara and said, “Nice to meet you, ma’am.”  

Then, no longer smiling but suddenly completely serious, Shasha kind of shouted at me, “I like dump trucks!” 

That moment, if it had even been headed at all toward something uncomfortable for either of us, ended up being one where we both chuckled in relief and Miss Sara said, “Ab, now you get in here out of that cold,” and I said, “Thank you, ma’am,” and she said, “Shasha, come get your coat on,” and Shasha held out her arms and rotated her way into her little coat as Miss Sara held it open for her, and I said, “We’ll be back by seven, ma’am,” and Miss Sara nodded and zipped up Shasha’s coat while Shasha sang, “Dump truck, dump truck, dumpyyy truck!” and I swear that’s the moment I fell in love with the little weirdo, without any help from the emergency Xanax I didn’t end up taking to help me get through what promised to be an uncomfortable conversation that ended up not being so bad after all in Miss Sara’s foyer, even if there was a giant deer’s head mounted above the door, looking down at me with its wide open glassy eyes.  

It was only about a month later that the pandemic hit, and it quickly became clear that Godfrey and Shasha needed somewhere else to stay because Miss Sara is in her seventies, and Godfrey’s an ER nurse and he couldn’t keep coming and going and potentially exposing his mother-in-law to the virus. That’s where I came in. My condo was more than big enough for all of us. Shasha got the guest room, which was empty because I hadn’t got that far yet, furnishing just one room at a time. But that made it even more perfect, because we loaded up all her stuff and made that room exactly how she wanted it. And she was happy enough with the final result, and so we were happy, too. 

I don’t know how we lose Shasha. The LI Aquarium has all kinds of social distancing protocols in place, which means each viewing area is cordoned off for each family group to stay together in its own little traveling pod. There isn’t even anything resembling a crowd. Ordinarily, it might be conceivable to lose a child in a busy public space like an aquarium, but with limited reservations and family groups sectioned off and traveling together from marked section to marked section, there isn’t any excuse for it, especially when it comes to Shasha who requires a little extra supervision. Not to mention we bought her tennis shoes that light up with every step she takes, for the express purpose of our being able to track where she is all the time out in public. 

 “Has anyone seen a little girl?” I shout, loud and much shriller than I’ve never heard myself sound before. “She’s got a dump truck. Has anyone seen a little girl with a dump truck? She has pink hair.” 

But then one of the other moms waves down at us from the mezzanine and says, “Up here, hon!” and sure enough when Godfrey and I get up there, there’s Shasha, perfectly fine, mesmerized in front of Queenie, the aquarium’s newest octopus. The mom hustles her own family along, which I notice consists of a dad and two Asian kids. Anyway, the kids walk out trading shark facts and their dad follows them as the mom who found Shasha for us turns back and nods at me and I nod back at her and then they’re gone and Godfrey and Shasha and I have the whole Treasure Room to ourselves. 

“Shasha!” Godfrey drops down to her knees and tries to make Shasha look away from Queenie, and when Shasha won’t turn away and look at her he gets a little frustrated. “Shasha! I’m talking to you! Look at me!”

Shasha turns and looks and sees Godfrey’s face and my face too probably and she lets go of her truck, which clunks on the ground, and she starts crying. And then she’s really crying. 

“Shit,” Godfrey whispers. “Meltdown.” 

And I know what that means. “Can I help?”  

He nods, and I bend myself over around the other side of Shasha’s tiny little body and squeeze. Not too hard, but just enough to create some pressure against her back, as her dad presses too from the front. And as I stand there with Godfrey holding Shasha close with her, I just keep thinking about how sharing my condo with them has made it feel like home. Like a home. And I like it. And we’re here, together, everyone’s safe and found, we’re all okay, and it’s just like any other day at the aquarium. The only difference is right now we’re huddled in a three-person tangle of arms and torsos, and Shasha’s struggling to self-regulate between me and Godfrey, who’s shushing her in a low, soothing voice, saying, “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.” 

I’m still trying to understand how the two of them have become completely integrated into my everyday life, and how I don’t mind it at all, being here for them, holding them, looking like a family. I mean, not looking like a family, but just being one. A family. A cute little six-armed family, holding each other in the Long Island Aquarium while the other families that are also here for today’s sensory-friendly morning just walk by us like nothing at all is wrong, which is never the case when this happens anywhere else in public, and it’s really nice to be ignored, to be just another family doing our thing, which at the moment is still deep-pressure squeezing Shasha to help her calm down. 

But she does start to calm down, slowly. She stops crying, her breaths become more even. Godfrey releases my shoulder and slowly raises his right arm and starts waving it in the air like a wobbly tentacle and he says, “Oooh, Shasha, what’s this?” 

Shasha looks over and hiccups and after a hell of a long time of Godfrey wobbling his arm slowly all over the place finally Shasha says, “Octopus [hiccup]Attack!” 

This is my cue to stop squeezing and stand up again, which I can’t because of my back but I don’t care, and I just start crying. I’m getting the top edge of my mask all damp with my tears because for the first time in my life I feel like I’m okay? Because every once in a while something happens, maybe it’s something big, but I think usually it’s something not big at all, like “octopus attacking” your boyfriend's kid one Sunday in October—and the recognition of who you are and who you want to be hits you right in the throat and you start thinking about fear and how you don’t want it to run your life forever and keep you from ever moving forward, right? 

So here I am squishing a little kid who hates being touched by anyone she doesn’t trust, and whose comfort object is a dump truck, and I’m holding her tight and holding onto her dad and both of us are squeezing as hard as we can but not too hard and I’m bent over and kind of face-to-face with Shasha, too, and behind her I can see Queenie’s soft body pulsing gently in a kind of waltz time with the beating of her three hearts and eight legs and nine brains, as she moves away with ceremonial slowness, all solemn and glittery, and I turn my attention back to Godfrey and start smiling behind my mask, and just like that, with a couple of little hiccups and Shasha’s glass tinkle of a laugh, I’m full on sobbing and reaching into my pocket, and they can’t see me smiling but I am, even though I’m crying, I’m just grinning like a fool in love because I’m okay, Shasha’s okay, and the three of us, we’re going to be okay.

Suzanne Dottino is a writer of fiction and plays. Her story, "Angle of Mercy,'' was published in the Bellevue Literary Review and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her plays have been Finalists in Samuel French Short play competition and other plays have been produced in theaters on the East Coast and published in numerous Journals. The themes she explores are marriage, children, family and what lies underneath the facade of normalcy. 
She is currently working on a Graphic novel.

SAFE

By Suzanne Dottino

One Friday afternoon in August, when Helena Butler was driving alone back to New York City from New Paltz, her car broke down on the New York State Thruway. She was twenty-one years old, a pretty girl, who just two years ago had been elected, “Most likely to fly to the moon in their lifetime.” 

Helena was one of those people who preferred the life of thought to that of reality. Her teachers would tap their pencils on her desk, ‘Earth to Helena,’ to which she would ‘awake,’ staring back with her purple/black eyes, shrug her shoulders, and yawn. When she would leave her wallet and keys behind, her actor boyfriend, Jackson, teased her, “My little space cadette. You’re the only one I know who can be here and not be here at the same time!”

But being stranded on the side of the highway in the rain with just three hours to get to Greenwich Village to make it to the opening night of Jackson’s play, her world was very real. She made desperate signals to the cars and trucks that sped past her in the now stormy weather, until finally the driver of a refrigerated truck filled with batteries took pity on her. The driver got out of the car and walked over to her. He was wearing a pair of blue Carhart pants, a dirty cowboy hat and a white cotton shirt that flapped in the wind, like ribbon. He had a beautiful smile and eyes were as bright as cornflowers. The interesting, elongated shape of his boots made her think that maybe he was European. And more curious was that the prints his boots left in the mud as he walked seemed to glow, or maybe it was just the flashing lights of the passing cars? Helena couldn’t tell.  

"Can I help you?" the man asked.

"My car broke down," Helena said. "I don't know what to do. It just gave up on me. I don’t have triple A. My boyfriend’s going to be "–“

The man lifted his palm. "Don't worry," he said, "I'll help you."

The man got into Helena’s car and turned the keys. Your battery is dead, he said. “Oh,” Helena said. That was bad, she thought. The man offered to drive her to the nearest gas-food-lodging exit that was a mere five miles aways to get jumper cables. He helped Helena into the van, all the while he was humming “What a Difference a Day Makes,” the Dinah Washington song her father had loved, and which was playing on the radio on the day her parents were killed in a car accident. Helena was just nine years old and in the back seat of the car when it crashed. Only she survived.  

“You from around this area?” the man asked. 

“Not far from here,” she said hoping her answer was friendly enough. She didn’t want to offend him, but she also didn’t want to get into details or logistics, she just wanted to get back on the road to Manhattan.   

“This weather!” he exclaimed. “It has a vitality to it; it exists, clearly, but you or I or anyone, we can’t touch it.”

Helena laughed, “It touched me while I was waiting on the side of the road! I’m soaked!” 

“I like your answer,” he said. “We understand what you are saying.” 

We? Did he just make a terrible mistake in grammar because English might not be his first language. She glanced at his chin, his hair, his pants while pretending to be looking ahead at the road. Maybe he was from Spain, or France, or Finland? 

He pressed his boot on the accelerator. 

“You know it, too,” he said. 

Did he just wink? 

They drove in silence to where her car had broken down. And in no time the car was up and running. 

"Thank you so much for your help," Helena said, suddenly shivering.  Her body felt sluggish. "I don't know what I would have done without you." 

"You're welcome," the man said. "I'm glad I could help."

The man took the jumper cables, got back into his van, and drove away. As Helena watched him go, she felt a strange sense of relief. She no longer felt like a person defined by loss. Her mind was on fire. She got into her car and draped her arms over the steering wheel, she had never felt more tired or hungry in her life. She bought a large coffee from Starbucks, chocolate covered espresso beans and two pieces of pound cake to keep her awake during the drive. 

When Helena arrived in Manhattan, she miraculously found a parking spot in front of the theater where Jackson was performing. She even had time to stop at the corner bodega to buy him a bunch of opening night flowers. As she waited in the line to pay, she noticed that the date on the New York Post was Saturday! That’s weird, she thought. Today was Friday, maybe the Post had an early edition? With just a few minutes to get to the theater, pick up a ticket and find a seat, she’d figure it out later. 

Helena sat in the front row of the little theater feeling so proud of Jackson as she watched him onstage portraying a brooding artist who finds redemption after selling his soul to the devil. They had met during her freshman (humanities), and his Senior (acting) year at New Paltz college. He had been the anchor in her life that she had needed. She was in awe of how he knew what his life’s calling was and went for it. After the show she found him backstage in his dressing room. He was overjoyed to see her.

"I'm so glad you're here," he said, hugging her tightly. "I was worried about you. It’s been crazy what’s happened to me I called you, but I figured you wanted to spend Saturday hiking, the weather was so good – “

“What? Saturday? No. Oh! The car. Yeah. I’m okay,” Helena said, surprised that he knew about the incident with the car. 

“During last night’s show -”

“- last night?”

“-it was insane. I wish you could have been here. An agent from CAA was in the audience and we went out afterwards and he said how much he loved my performance and that I was a good type, and - ” Jackson pointed to himself and gleamed, “Guess who has a new agent!” Helena was ecstatic. Jackson wrapped his arms around her. “What are the odds that an agent would come to my show on the first of a two-night run at a shit-hole theater. It’s like a miracle! Crazy!”

Helena was looking but not listening to Jackson as he went on about his performance. Instead, she was thinking, what was he talking about ‘last night’, was his opening night on Thursday and not tonight, Friday? Had she made a mistake? It wouldn’t have been the first time she turned things around, but she didn’t want to spoil Jackson's high, and she figured she would sort it all out later. “For you,” she said, handing him the sunflowers, “You were so amazing tonight.”

“You are so sweet,” he said as he ushered her out of the cramped dressing room. “Come. I want you to meet the rest of the cast.” 

The next morning Jackson suggested they start out early as it might be hard to find a brunch place without a reservation on Sunday especially. Helena laughed, “Hon, today is Saturday -” just then Helena noticed a copy of the Sunday New York Times on his neighbor’s Welcome Mat. “Never mind,” she said, hurrying ahead of him. What was going on, she thought, now truly concerned.

Having not found a brunch place they ate falafel sandwiches in Washington Square Park. Afterwards, as they walked around the Village Helena had sudden visions that the buildings, sidewalks, were on the verge of crumbling, collapsing, or burning. She saw copper colored steam rising from the subway grates. She held Jackson’s hand tightly. She felt dizzy. She suggested they get an ice cream cone and sit in Tompkins Square Park. She listened to but wasn’t hearing Jackson as he detailed their plans for the evening. Helena was thinking about how these visions weren’t something she had seen in a movie or read in a book, or conjured up in her imagination, and though there was no concrete evidence to support her feeling, they felt as real to her as the moment of being stranded on the highway, that moment right before the man with the cowboy hat came and rescued her. 

After they made love that afternoon and were lying in bed, Jackson asked what she was thinking about. Helena became animated as she told him about how interesting the man on the road was, and how grateful she was to have met him, at just that time in her life, just when she needed him the most, and how his eyes were like beacons of blue light. Jackson was skeptical at first, but Helena insisted that the man was just some good Samaritan type. 

“Yeah,” Jackson said, “but who was he?”

Helena became frightened, maybe she had done something wrong? “I should have asked, but it was pouring, and everyone else just passed me on the side of the highway." A chill ran through her body, she figured it was just an oncoming cold from having been stuck in the rain last night. She borrowed Jackson’s hoodie. She stroked Jackson’s face and reassured him that she’d never see him again and who cared anyway, she got to his show on time and the battery was fixed. 

Jackson didn't say anything. He pressed his hands on her shoulders and looked at her directly, then he hugged and kissed her. 

“So, do you still think it’s Saturday?” Jackson teased. Helena didn’t want to argue, the whole thing was so unsettling and embarrassing. “Of course not!” she lied and as she looked away. It was then that the mystery of where she had been for an entire day was known to her, not in words, but in feeling only. 

One afternoon a few weeks later, when Helena was back in her apartment, alone, and Jackson away auditioning nonstop in Manhattan, Helena was feeling particularly adrift. She wasn’t looking forward to returning to school in the fall. She had no interest in…anything. She spent an inordinate amount of time worrying about nuclear threats from Russia, China, and North Korea, she thought about the fires ravaging thousands of acres of land across the globe. She thought about people starving to death in tent cities in the dessert, eating terrorist supplied food laced with bird feces or shards of glass. She was so deep in thought she had to put Post-it notes on her refrigerator reminding her to eat. All her past enjoyments of cooking meals from the summer produce from the local farm stands, finding new clothes at the vintage shops in town or buying things from Amazon just to have something to open, were gone. If only there were jumper cables for humans, she thought. 

The following week, during a humid afternoon, when Helena was in her living room trying to read a book, she heard a knock on the door. She went to the door and standing behind the screen was the man from the highway. His presence brought about a spark of excitement in her body that she hadn’t even realized was missing. 

"Hello, Helena," the man said. 

She walked closer. "What are you doing here?" Helena asked.

"I've come to take you away," the man said.

 She was distracted by a pair of blue jays that suddenly dropped from the sky.

 "Take me away?" Helena asked. "Where?"

"To a better place," the man said.

She was scared, but she was also curious. She looked over the man’s shoulder and saw that the prints his boots made in the dirt were glowing. This man’s mark on the world was magnetic, she thought. She pressed her palms against the screen. 

“Where are you taking me?” 

“A place where you'll be safe. You’ve been there."

Helena paused. 

She dropped her hands to her side. The marks her palms made on the screen left streaks that glowed. It was true, she thought, she knew where she had been on the missing Saturday, and she was worry-free. No visions of impending doom. Safe. "Okay,” she said. 

The man took Helena’s hand, and they walked out of the house. The moon shone bright on the walkway. They drove towards the densely forested Catskill mountains.

Helene disappeared into the trees never to be seen again.

Amba Raghavan is a filmmaker and writer, pursuing a dual degree from Tufts University and SMFA. Drawing on personal experiences growing up as a first-generation Indian-American in Nebraska, her work accessibly explores the cultural, identity, and religious conflicts present within the South-Asian diaspora. Currently, Amba is working on the coming-of-age feature film adaptation of her short story, An Extended Stay, which follows a clinically depressed college student who stretches her short vacation in South India into a yearlong “extended stay”, unwittingly embarking on a messy journey toward healing. Her previous work includes Stamina, a short story about the physical and mental manifestations of racial assimilation, and follow the sun and you will be free, an experimental/participatory documentary reflecting on a middle-aged woman’s spiritual journey toward personal liberation.

STAMINA

By Amba Raghavan

I sat at the stairs waiting for my ride to pick me up. I made sure to be ready fifteen minutes in advance, God forbid I leave them waiting on me. It’s their world, and I’m just living in it.

I rested a plastic Walmart bag on my lap, the most inconspicuous receptacle I could find, in which I kept a flashlight, a phone charger, gloves, a scarf, earmuffs, water, and the sandwich my mother made for me.

She had offered to buy some bread and jam, a few days back, when Abby first invited me. “I will pack something. Are you worried they will say something? I will wrap it nicely, no smell will come. You must eat to gain strength and keep up with them. These people, I tell you, they all eat meat. Ok? They eat their bloody burgers and chikk-in and beef, and then have the horsepower to run around all day. We are not like them. You don’t have any stamina. What if you fall in some ditch in the dark?”

“We’re just going to a pumpkin patch, amma,” I pleaded. “Literal two year olds go there. It’s not a big deal.”

She continued, “I know how these Neb-er-ass-kuns are. They will tell you to go and jump in the dead leaves. There will be so much dust and mold, and then you will get a cold. Just inviting trouble. Why people do this nonsense— God only knows. I need all of their phone numbers, and both parent’s contact information.”

“Her dad left. They’re divorced,” I replied. “So it’s just the mom.”

“Vinitha, I’m so worried kanna. I haven’t even met these people. Are you sure these are good girls?”

2

· · ·

Abby’s mother, Mrs. Scott, pulled into the busy entrance. The city was unrecognizable. For years, their most marvelous attraction was a 130 foot water tank that declared “Gretna. The Good Life. Population 5,014.” But this new Fall fair, with promises of “magical memories and treasured traditions”, had managed to turn dusty, old Gretna into the Nebraskan’s Epcot.

Unwilling to undertake the struggle of parking, she turned her hazard lights on and stopped the car in the middle of the line, unbothered by the honking that ensued. Abby jumped out. I waited for Mrs. Scott’s go-ahead, unbuckled my seatbelt, double-checked I had all my belongings, thanked her for the ride, and stepped out of the car.

Before I could close the door, Mrs. Scott called out, “Abby! Make smart choices.” Turning to me, she said, “Vin-ee-ta, hon’, you’re in charge. I know I can count on you to keep these girls in line.” She followed with a knowing nod and sly smile.

I had hoped Abby didn’t hear this. I couldn’t risk being plastered with more tags, especially not one that suggested sycophantic buzzkill. Mrs. Scott’s eyes darted from my bag to my unibrow. After a good, long look, her expression softened, and with a sympathetic sigh, she said, “But try and have some fun, kiddo, alright?”

With a polite chuckle, I answered, “Ok, Mrs. Scott! Thank you again for the ride!” “Oh gosh— always so formal. Didn’t I tell you to call me Eliza? Ok, bye kids!” she yelled.

I closed the door, took a step back, and waved as she drove away.

Mrs. Scott was a relatively good looking woman— for their standards anyway. Abby had once pridefully declared how her mother did pilates three times a week, which to her credit, kept her in nice shape. She didn’t seem like a mother to me. She never looked haggard, or anxious, or

3

burdened. I remembered noting during an overnight stay at their house, years prior, how she served only one home-cooked meal a day: air fried chicken breast and rice flavored with salt, pepper, and McCormick cajun seasoning. When I asked her why the rice was brown and poky, she replied, “It’s wild rice, dear. Better for ya— less calories!” I remembered looking down at the okra curry and white rice my mother warily packed in advance, glistening in all its molten ghee-filled glory, and I wondered why we didn’t concern ourselves with calories.

When I turned around, Abby was nowhere to be seen among the swarm of toddlers dressed as pumpkins, entwined high school couples, and gossiping soccer moms. Though inclined to stay put and recruit the help of an adult, like the safety police from elementary school taught us, I didn’t want to seem pathetic. Moreover, I refused to confirm Abby’s most recent postulation that I only had “book-smarts”, something she likely fabricated to placate her ego after receiving only an 82% (compared to my 94%) on our biology exam two days before. Or perhaps this had less to do with individual skill sets, and more to do with certain, apparent, physical attributes. I made a decision then and there to not conform to such baseless claims, and act like a normal teenager for once. I pulled myself together into a narrow frame, clutched my sister’s old Coach crossbody, held my breath, and entered the busy crowd, making my way to the ticket booth.

“Hi! Welcome to Valla’s Pumpkin Patch & Apple Orchard, where everyday is guaranteed Fall Family Fun! Which pass would you like to purchase today?” the chipper blonde at the counter asked me.

What was she so happy about, sitting in her dinghy wooden booth at six P.M. on a Friday night in 40 degree weather? “Hi, I’d like one night pass, please,” I said.

4

“Alrighty, that’ll be $39.99, attractions and refreshments not included,” she replied with a glued grin.

“Forty dollars?” I exclaimed.

If this was the cost for just one night of “fun”, then sorry Mrs. Scott, I didn’t want it. I reluctantly handed her the two Jackson bills my father left for me on the dining table this morning, and started to walk away.

She called out once more, “Thank you so much! And would you like to support our amazing Griffins by donating $5 to the Gretna East High School varsity footb—” “No,” I interrupted with a rare conviction, knowing full-well about their prized athletes, seeing right through their superficial “need”. I held my head high as I marched past her, through the red barn, barrels, and haystacks, under the string lights, onto the farm ground. From this point on, the main road split into three. One led to the four acre Corn Maze, the second led to the Pigtucky Derby Pig Races, and the third led to the Haunted Farmhouse. Unsure of which path to take, I asked myself what would a girl who had divorced parents, exercised for fun, and had at least two crushes at any given time do? Unable to even remotely relate to this persona, let alone anticipate its impulses and follow in its footsteps, I remained unmoving at the crossroads.

· · ·

After a few minutes of getting eyeballed by pedestrians for anxiously walking in circles, I picked up my phone to call Abby for the fourth time. That’s when I heard two familiar voices to my right. I followed the sound of shrieky, girlish chatter, until I reached the familiar sight of fluttering red, white, and blue. Standing so relaxed and carefree under the banner of their people, were two girls, pale as can be. My Abby and her Peyton.

5

Abby had planned a few days prior to invite Peyton, her friend from cross country. They were both runners, and could sunburn in less than two hours outside, which I suppose was enough of a connection to bond over in a single week. Of course, it had taken me a whole year of carefully planned conversations and listening only to Charlie Puth for Abby to even call me her friend.

“Oh my god, I forgot to tell you,” Abby said. “So Chris said hi to me in the hallway during passing period yesterday!”

Engrossed, Peyton replied, “Girl— he’s literally obsessed with you.”

“Right! And those squat drills Coach makes us do actually came in handy, cuz I dropped my pencil, and bent down reaaaal slow to pick it up. And Chris just. kept. staring,” Abby said, reenacting the scene for her friend.

“OMG stoooop! You’re so craz— Oh look, Ve-ni-da’s here! Hey!” Peyton screamed. “Hey, where were you? We were waiting, for like—” Abby turned to Peyton, and whipped her head back around to face me, “—forevurrrr!”

“I’m really sorry guys! I was being kinda slow, and didn’t know where to go,” I blurted. “But…I— I tried calling you, Abby, '' I added, casually examining my surroundings, while trying to steady my voice.

“Ohhh, my bad lol,” Abby said, grinning at a new text from Chris.

“You guys. It’s getting dark already. Let’s go,” Peyton yelled as she grabbed Abby’s arm, and ran up the hill. “Last one to the haunted house has to buy everyone caramel corn!” I attempted to run after them, but my body refused to cooperate. With each forced stride, my feet hit the ground with a blow, shocking my kneecaps, exposing the jiggle of my stomach to the world, while the Walmart bag, hooked on my arm, flung back and forth into my face. Though

6

the brisk October air left my skin dry and numb, I could feel the splatters of wet spit on my chin and puffs of warm air on my upper lip from heavy exhalations. I watched them running up ahead, arm in arm, gliding above the ground in perfect form, their already petite frames becoming smaller in the distance.

· · ·

When I finally caught up to Abby and Peyton at the haunted house, they were in line talking to three boys in front of them. I didn’t like this. When I finally joined them, Peyton looked at me with a certain awe, like when you find a nice pencil in your bedroom that you completely forgot went missing years ago. Abby’s gaze was fixed on the tallest boy. He had moss green eyes, a rather lean physique, and wore his baseball cap backwards, exposing the beginnings of a receding hairline. The other two were not tall, but not short, and had stocky, almost chubby builds, common features of the white Nebraskan male demographic. One wore pants so baggy they dropped below his Calvin Klien band, and the other hid his face behind long skater boy bangs. When Peyton introduced me, Skater Boy shot a quick glance in my direction through his veil, while the other two, engaged in some awkward, ugly form of roughhousing, murmured a disinterested “hey”.

“Sooo, what school do you guys go to?” Abby asked in some synthetic voice. “West,” they barked in unison.

“Cool! We go to North,” she said. “What grade are you?”

“Sophomores,” they shouted, taking the term “outside voices” quite literally, it seemed. “Oh! We’re freshmen!” Abby squeaked. The Tallest immediately dropped the headlock he was holding Baggy Pants in, and walked toward her with renewed interest.

7

The group started talking about sports, school, and how they would never use algebra in real life, so it was basically pointless. I tried to join in a few times, and at one point went on a short rant about my research on military conscription, siviilipalvelus, and Zivildienst for debate team, partially because those were the fanciest words I knew, and thought their grandeur might help assert my presence, but also because I was nervous and had never held a conversation with teenage boys before. I received no fantastic response. Peyton and Abby were briefly caught off guard; Tallest, Baggy Pants, and Skater Boy pretended like they didn’t hear me.

The crisp evening air turned humid, which meant the hair I had so painstakingly straightened, strand by strand, had become a bird’s nest. When Mrs. Scott picked me up earlier that day, the first thing she said to me was, “Oh my gosh, Vin-ee-ta! I never realized how pretty

you are.” That was new for me, and I was not ready to let it go. I spent the next thirty minutes or so, silently standing behind the others in line, preoccupied with my thick, wiry, jetblack frizz, and whether or not they were secretly repulsed by it. By me.

· · ·

After enduring maybe fifteen different versions of: “Bro, this is so DUMB”, and eight renditions of: “Like, I just can’t be scared, dude. I’m a freaking God,” I finally made my way out of the haunted house. I had never been more grateful to breathe in that fresh cornhusker air. At some point between the Ghostface hallway chase and the satanic sacrifice in the attic, they had unanimously decided among themselves that our next destination would be the Barnyard Challenge Course and Zip Line. I hated the idea of participating in anything athletic, but was relieved that the boys may finally release the pent-up testosterone, or adrenaline, or whatever it was that had triggered their sudden lycanthropy.

8

It had gotten colder, and was almost pitch black outside, with only some scarcely scattered Jack-o’-lanterns lighting the vast acreage. Abby, Peyton, and I trailed slowly behind, watching the Tallest, Baggy Pants, and Skater Boy howl in the moonlight and chase each other down the hill.

“You guys!! This is so perfect— there’s literally one for each of us!” Abby said. “I’ll take Aiden, obvi, cuz his green eyes compliment my blue eyes!”

It was clear, then, why Abby had failed art class last year in eighth grade.

“And PeyPey, OMG! You and Josh!” she added, oblivious to Peyton’s visible disgust. “You two would be SO CUTE together.”

Abby continued. “And Vin-ee-ta—”

Peyton started whooping “ooOOooh” and winked at me.

“—For you….Sam!” Abby concluded triumphantly, gesturing toward Skater Boy. They both ran behind me and gripped my arms tightly. They started nudging, pushing, and shoving me in his direction. Each time I squirmed or tried to break free from their painful grasp, they dug their fingers harder into my flesh. I wanted to cry, but knew there would be no coming back from that.

My anguish soon turned to anger, and suddenly, unable to swallow anymore of this nonsense, their stupid obsession, and their bloody ignorance, I screamed, “LET GO!” “Whatever,” Abby scoffed. She let go of me and pranced down the hill in pursuit of her delusions.

Peyton just stared, unsure what to say or do. After some hesitation, she turned away, and ran after the others.

9

After catching my breath and some scrambling deliberation, I knew what I had to do. Given I was stuck in that place, with those people, for another four years, the best option was making peace. So, like the many others before me, I swallowed my pride, held my head low in embarrassment, and walked onward in search of my friends.

· · ·

At the Zip Line, young children and teenagers were lined up, anxiously waiting for a turn before closing time. I could not relate to their anticipation, because I saw it for what it was: a sorry excuse for a ride, the sole afterthought in this whole extravaganza. How the owners could only afford, even after charging $10.50 per candy apple, just a rope tied to a frisbee “seat”, gliding across another rope six feet off the mulch, was beyond me.

We sat on a bench closeby, waiting for Baggy Pants to finish his turn. The smell of burned flesh wafted our way from the Teepee barbeque across the field.

I stared straight ahead, any original curiosity or excitement for the pumpkin patch, for this time, with these girls, gone. My head felt light, and my stomach gurgled with a formidable rhythm. Over the course of the evening, my mother’s peanut butter and jelly sandwich had been squeezed into a pinkish brown pulp under the stressed grip of my sweaty hands. I was slipping away into another world, when I felt a familiar poke on my arm. Peyton was looking at me nervously, with a forced, toothy smile. She suggested I try out the Zip Line and offered to hold my belongings. I never disliked Peyton; she was not obnoxious, or loud, and had never tried to hurt me, at least not intentionally. There she was, extending an olive branch, trying to move on for the sake of our friendship, and my face burned up. All I felt at that moment was regret for my juvenile sulking, and shame for putting a damper on their fun. I needed to let go, to be more lighthearted and easygoing like them, and that Zip Line was my last chance.

10

I got up and walked toward the orange-clad worker who helped me onto the frisbee. With false courage, I tried to balance my chubby thighs on the disc, sat up straight, smoothed down my fluffy hair, and gripped onto the poky jute rope for dear life. The attraction was fifteen feet long, and sloped ever so slightly, just enough to excite the young ones. By the time I reached the other side, I felt thirty years older. I thought my weight might have slowed down the contraption, and hoped the others didn’t have to witness that. The Gods must have been in a giving mood, because by the time I walked back, the only thing left waiting for me was an empty red bench.

Abby, Peyton, Aiden, Josh, and Sam were nowhere to be seen. They had left and taken my Walmart bag with them. One-by-one the Jack-o’-lanterns went dark, the workers cleared things away, and ushered customers out. People passed by me like smudgy streaks, blending into a blur of white. I tried to isolate the sound of shrieky, girlish chatter in the frenzy, to no avail.

I knew I had to start moving, searching; do something, anything. But when I tried to lift my foot off the ground, a sharp twinge shot up my calf. The few muscles I had, seized, and started yowling in repeated canons, as something inside stabbed away with a sharp silver fork, shredding them to pieces like pulled pork. Unable to hold myself up any longer, I fell to the brittle grass with a thump. My tight shirt had rolled up a bit, just enough to let everything I was sucking in fall out. But it didn’t matter. I didn’t have the stamina, to go any further, to keep up, to keep chasing after. So I just sat there, rocking myself back and forth to the pathetic throbs of my defeated, wailing body.

Rick Moody is the author of six novels, three collections of short stories, and three works of non-fiction, including, most recently, a memoir entitled THE LONG ACCOMPLISHMENT. He is at work on a new collection of stories and teaches at Tufts University.

A Copper Beech

1. Let my weakness nonetheless speak some of the names of grief for you, which must sound to you like the cricket song sounds to us, poignant in dazzling ephemerality. 
2. And so, with the limited powers at my command, I imagine all the ages of you flickering into being at once, as from some battery-powered flashlight purchased at the hardware store down Warwick Ave., the light browning out as it goes. 
3. Or: like light through the somber burgundy canopy of April, at dusk, the smell of the ocean easterly, the light across the crushed rock in the backyard, the buoying up the weeds. 
4. All the ages to you are instants, are the one age unfolding, performing the drama of time.
5. You exceed all interpretations of you. 
6. When Plato argued (in “Timaeus”) that trees were not capable of self-locomotion, he was catastrophically wrong. (“Wherefore it lives indeed and is not other than a living creature, but it remains stationary and rooted down owing to its being deprived of the power of self-improvement.")
7. The root ball under my backyard attests to your capacity for self-locomotion. Down there all is longing and reaching out and grasping.
8. And: in the wind you cavort and lament and wave and whisper in that joy of natural motion, in that condition of change that is this world and above. Still and not still, subject to change, and changing others in turn, immemorial and instantaneous.
9. Four or five hurricanes or tropical storms barnstorming up the coast we fretted over you, imaging dark futures, only to see you instead now in your final struggle with a nematode? If we saw five such storms, you have seen how many? Two hundred and fifty?
10. We worked hard at learning to say your name in Japanese, even though you come from Europe: ぶなの木. Because as we learning about your illness we were learning Japanese, where the trees have immemorial poems written about them. 
11. Basho says: 木を切りて本口見るや今日の月 (ki o kirite/motokuchi miru ya/kyō no tsuki). I caused a tree to fall, and when I looked in my yard at its fallenness, I saw today’s moon.
12. Some possible origins for the European beech trees of New England: Falmouth, England, 50.1526° N, 5.0663° W; Plymouth, England, 50.3755° N, 4.1427° W; Gravesend, England, 51.4419° N, 0.3708° E; London, England, 51.5072° N, 0.1276° W; Cowes, England, 50.7628° N, 1.3005° W; Weymouth, England, 50.6099° N, 2.4546° W; Amsterdam, Netherlands, 52.3676° N, 4.9041° E; etc.
13. At first your end will be a striping, as with certain military decorations, for a having-lived, a having-seen, for a having-been here with the humans. Like all scarifications, at first a sign of strength, a kind of character. And only later the stripes will be a thing the grieving parties will discuss.
14. The woodpecker that took possession of that one scoured-out spot on your front produced such an outpouring of wood dust when last we were there. Was it taking advantage of a weakness, a future it somehow knew was to come? Is the woodpecker the sign of the transition into the next stage?
15. The mast season is the time when you dropped all your barbed casings, and within these, all the beech seeds. Some years were more torrential than others. It took about three years to understand in full. I loved the years of overflowing fertility, and the sound of seed casings percussing on the deck.
16. A neighbor said the year before her tree died there was a voluminous last year of seed pods, and then nothing.
17. We hatched about a hundred saplings one year, dug our own sand and soil, and then somehow a mouse, or some other forager, some pest, got in there, where we had lined up these saplings, in paper cups, and killed half of them. The saplings must taste good. "(Apparently the Neanderthals ate them, after toasting.)"
18. Some two or three saplings, of those we hatched, survived into the second year. Both times, in August, there was a big die off, and striping, when all we wanted to do was to preserve this bit of you. To carry the message of the copper beech, as the early interlopers, tree enthusiasts brought you forth from the old countries. 
19. All we wanted to do was to plant a few more of you the Northeast, like Johnny Appleseed did with his tree of choice. 
20. Let the copper of the copper beech be no longer a color of Europe but a color for everyone, everywhere.
21. “Nematode” is such a good word, so alien and luminous and strange, at least, until you are confronted with its power. The word “nematode” is longer than a nematode is. 
22. “Entirely itself,” Marie Howe says of the copper beech in her poem, before attempting to climb it. No description could be more exact. 
23. Who transports hence the nematodes? The woodpecker, the blue jay, the squirrel, the kid in the backyard attempting to climb the beech tree, the action figures—Marvel, etc.—that we used to lodge in your branches? During the pandemic we (summarily) hanged many action figures in the crook of you.
24. All that is small, crabbed, fearful, insular about Rhode Island is flushed away in the grandeur of the beech trees dotting its municipalities. In the sun they reach out across the limitations, surviving even the initials carved into them, in, e.g., India Point Park.
25. A grief for you is a not-living-in-the-present, a celebration of your life is a not-living-in-the-present, but it is to be subject to time, under your diminished canopy. 
26. You know nothing about the colonies, and the colonial will-to-power, only that the sun and the sandy ground here suit you. The colonies, the states, the political parties, the recessions and depressions, the rising and falling, the closing down of empire, the rise and fall of the Europeans, all like cricket song.
27. “First page/of literature/in Sanskrit/on beech/the runic tablets/on beech,” says C. D. Wright in her book on the subject, and, later, “The nuts are a touch toxic, yet edible.”
28. When God wants to instruct a child in eternity, God makes first a flash card with the image of a beech. 
29. In May, it’s like you’re on fire, with the purple of your early leaves almost a laughable conflagration, an advertisement for fecundity. Let May come around again. Let May be the beginning of your performative year, even if it’s your last. 
30. These lines indicating that we will not forget. 

Mark Crimmins's first book, travelogue Sydneyside Reflections, was published by Adelaide’s Everytime Press in 2020. His flash fictions have been published widely around the the United States and overseas, appearing in over sixty journals, including Columbia Journal, Tampa Review, Cagibi, Atticus Review, Portland Review, Kyoto Journal, Queen's Quarterly, Flash Frontier, Pure Slush, Apalachee Review, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, English Studies in Latin America, Expanded Field, Spelk, TheNewerYork, and Flash: The International Short Short Story Magazine. 

RHAPSODY ON A BAD PANINI

You are eating a panini as terrible as your first table was wobbly, here in the bowels, not of culinary mercy but of the Montreal Eaton Centre, not the chicest place to hang out, but this, too, is Montreal, this food court down here in the mall-rat paradise of the Underground City. You’re actually eating very horrible fries with this really horrible panini, so, together, you Christen it Un Repat Combiné Horrible. You look in anger at the second half of your panini. In line, still desperately hungry and headache-disoriented, you thought to yourself: Right—Panini is one of those foods nearly impossible to fuck up! You would have been better off licking the gobs of discarded poutine oozing down the outside of the garbage can nearby. You’ve eaten half your sandwich, and now you eat your words or your word-thoughts, sound-images, whatever. 

           If you made a film version of this culinary episode, you would call it Reflections on a Horrible Panini or perhaps—more Nouvelle Vague!—Reflections of a Horrible Panini. You would model the film on Last Year at Marienbad and do all the clever things the two Alains —author Alain Robbe-Grillet and director Alain Resnais—did, except even more flamboyantly You would focus on the subjective experience of the panini itself, and the film would end with a huge, digitally enhanced battle sequence in the Grand Canyon between Gobzylla—who would wear a tight-fitting “Je Deteste Panini” T-shirt twenty stories high—and a giant version of the panini, with spindly French fry arms and legs and an enormous wobbly mushroom head.

           Yes, yes, yes!

          And to show your respect for Montreal, the site of the film’s conception, you would have the world premiere take place at the Cinema du Parc, after which you would have a CD or MP3 release party at Foufonnes Électriques for the soundtrack, which would be released by Relentless Records. The soundtrack-promotion tour, Le Panini Apocalyptique, would be orchestrated by Mistress Barbara and Kid Koala, who would spin heavily scratched and sampled Montreal techno on sixteen Technics turntables and blast a million watts of sound from a newly imported Dynacord sound system built to specification at the old location of The Omen nightclub in Frankfurt and shipped up or down (or both!) the Saint Lawrence in a giant custom-built supercargo tanker named the Mazui Panini Maru and staffed entirely by Harajuku girlz fluent in Joual. 

           Oh yes. Oh yes! Yes. Yes! Yesyes!

          This will be followed by the first volume of your memoirs: The Horrible Panini Years. Better still: an inspirational best-selling self-help book written in the combined styles of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Helene Cixous (yet still eminently accessible to anyone over ten years old) entitled How I Turned Eating a Really Horrible Panini into a Quintoquadragintillion-Dollar Empire Located on an Islet of the Philippine Sea, Where Everyone Got Rich by Singing Manchester United Fan Songs, and—More Importantly—Where Suffering Was Abolished, Along with Death Itself, at Least for a While, or Eighty Days, whichever Came First.

          Yes, you will turn it around, this horrible panini experience, transforming the negation into a negation of the negation: out of the abyss of the horrible panini will crawl forth, proud and terrifying as a molten moon, the dragon of your recovery from the sandwich (if such with good conscience it could properly be called), belching from the fuming nostrils of its gastric discontent the fire and brimstone of your belly’s Gotterdamerunging rejection, and thus all would be well that ended well, if well it ended or ended it did.

           Yes, you think.
           Yes! Yes! Yesss!

Dilruba Z. Ara is the author of internationally recognized novels: A List of Offences and Blame, alongside a collection of stories titled Detached Belonging. While her novels, stories, translated work and poetry serve as touchstones for scholars worldwide, her visual art adds a multifaceted view into the depths of her creative soul. Born into a distinguished family in Bangladesh, Ara embarked on her literary journey at the age of eight. She is multilingual and adept in writing three languages, with her works published worldwide. Currently based in Sweden, she imparts her expertise in both Swedish and English.

The Sacrificial Animal

Dilruba Z. Ara

If Orhan had parted the jalousie slats by his bed, he would have had a picture-perfect view of the garden, stretching from his window to the ivy-covered parapet at the other end of the roof. But this morning the warmth of the bed, in combination with the sound of pelting rain on his windowpane, had a stronger hold on him. He stirred and pulled the kantha quilt over his head.

Roses, daisies, tuberoses, jasmines, carnations, and other flowers whose names he did not know, thrived in succession in that garden, lending unpredictable sequences of shades and scents at intervals. Sometimes, Orhan would walk his fiancée amongst the flowers via live video messages. On other occasions, he would record his experiences and email her before having his breakfast – a cup of tea and two pieces of toast. Then he would flick through FB entries, answer messages, read news headlines, before starting on the series of poems he had been composing over the last few months.

Though Corona was raging in his neighbourhood, he had managed to achieve a certain calm in his rooftop sanctuary. From the onset of the epidemic, like everyone else, he watched and listened to news around the clock – the scenes from Italy and Spain, Britain and China had all got the best of him, leaving him with an undefinable fear. And, like most people, he had stopped meeting with friends, attending social gatherings, or visiting shopping malls, which he found a much easier call than commanding himself to regulate his online time. However, after several weeks’ struggle, he had finally managed to compress his news viewing to an hour, which he considered would suffice to keep abreast of fresh details.

Not only did this one hour feed him the ever-increasing number of deaths, the global impact of the pandemic and the advice of the Health Ministry, it also reinforced his fear of the virus, to the level that he began to suspect his own hands and wash them time and again. But last night, during that time span of an hour, the news about Covid 19 was overshadowed by the death of a man named George Floyd, which had pinned Orhan to his seat. Instead of keeping his hands away from him, he had clasped them together, trying to accommodate the strange emotions the video had stirred in him. It was utterly dissimilar to the emotions he felt when he heard of people dying from the virus, or when he watched scenes from various hospitals. As soon as the news was over, he switched to YouTube and replayed the video several times, trying to understand what it was he was watching. A man was being throttled to death by another man in a country like America, in a time when the word death, without exception, reminded one of Covid.

This rainy morning, as Orhan lay there in his bed, his mind floated to George Floyd, and along with him to all black Americans. About their existence in a nation where they are forced to deal with the tension of dual identity: black and American. What about the white Americans? Do they also feel this sense of duality? Or does the colour white equate to transparent, and only those individuals who are born with such skin can claim to be authentic Americans? Orhan’s eyes were closed, but he recollected the scene with intense clarity, wondering about the size of the policeman’s knee, the weight of it, about the pain and anguish that Floyd was experiencing during those moments he was not only trapped in the agony of death, but was also being stripped of his dignity as a human. George Floyd – a knee carrying the whole weight of another grown man on his neck, his shaven head, and cheek pressed on hard asphalt, his nasal blood making a pattern on the tarmac, writing history.

Before moving into this room, Orhan had been an obscure artist, but now his name was starting to show up here and there. He was active on social media, he contributed regularly to newspapers and magazines, he wrote columns, and, before Corona’s advent, he frequently attended book clubs. He met like-minded people. He felt satisfied in the role of a true artist, whose only mission in life was to be recognised as a poet. As a teenager he read Bengali poets, as a university student he read Asian poets, world poets. His knowledge of English was sufficient for him to be able to enjoy poets like Keats, Shelly and Byron. At a younger age his dream was to perfect his English, but at university, he was hooked on Chinese literature after having read a translation of a poem by Li Bai. Therefore, he set his heart on mastering Chinese and started taking lessons as soon as he arrived in Dhaka. Dhaka offered so much, gave so much. He would write epic poems about Dhaka. He would write about its beauty and charm, its magic and its realism. He would make this city his home, until his last breath.

His shift to Dhaka had not been sudden. He had been in search of a position in Dhaka since the day he had become legally adult and was prepared to do any odd job that would provide him with enough free time to write. And when, after several stumbling blocks, he was offered a position as a supervisor for this block of flats, he accepted that position more than happily. In exchange for his services, he would get free meals, a furnished room with an attached bath, electricity, Wi-Fi and a decent salary. His afternoons and evenings would be his own. Apart from that, he would be free on Fridays and all national holidays. Orhan moved into his lodgings within a week of the initial exchange of emails and the follow-up interview on Skype.

Even though it was nothing unusual for any striving young artist from the countryside to move to the capital, the prospect of making a rooftop room his home, in one of the busiest commercial roads of the city, was very much so. It was an area that was changing every day. Old houses were being demolished, high-rise buildings were shooting up, skylines were constantly shifting. Small shops were disappearing, making space for fancy boutiques or more high-rises. There were Burger King, Nando’s, Subway, Karaoke bar – names that he had previously seen only on foreign films and series. Cars crowded the street; sassy young people walked freely, wearing branded outfits. Eye-catching girls came riding motorbikes. University students gathered at Star Kebab’s during lunch breaks. From his first arrival here, Orhan would often sit on the ledge of the roof and look down on the street whenever he had a chance. In those days, the street was always pulsating, but now, since the outbreak of Covid, it was virtually empty. So now when he sat there, he often looked up at the sky. During those moments he felt closer to heaven – if there was such a thing as heaven. From the thirteenth floor, the sky seemed nearer than the street. 

The ground floor of the building was a women’s boutique, which the affluent frequented. The second and third floors were let out to business enterprises. The rest of the floors were accommodated by company staff – Europeans and Bangladeshis. Orhan’s employer, Mr. Soul, lived on the twelfth floor, together with his wife, Ma’am Rose. Orhan’s office was downstairs, a cubicle in the middle of the huge boutique. Before Orhan knew, he was doing full-time secretarial work as well as keeping account of the revenues from the flats and the boutique. Ma’am Rose and Mr. Soul said they valued an honest person like him, which is why they entrusted him with money matters.

Mr Soul was often away at his various businesses. Ma’am Rose sometimes accompanied him, sometimes not. Their twin daughters – the same age as Orhan – worked in Silicon Valley in the States. They regularly visited Dhaka during summer vacations, Orhan was told, but this year the virus had come between parents and children. By this time, Orhan had been here already a year.

Rain was still pouring down in buckets. A deep peal of thunder was rolling. Orhan shifted in his bed and puffed out a mouthful of air under the blanket. Still, he did not feel like leaving the bed. He kept thinking of Floyd and his fate, and was unexpectedly appreciative that, in death, Floyd had given him a window to make use of his artistic vein in a different way from what he had been doing for weeks. The theme of Corona was already beginning to lose its allure for him. Everyone was writing about it, talking about it, whereas Floyd’s death had forced on him other concerns. It was a fresh insight into what the world was like, what humans were like. Some men were always more equal than others, even in the face of death, no matter to which society they belonged. The powerful always trample on the powerless. I must grab my unprocessed feelings before they fade out, he told himself, and shoved his quilt away to reach out for his iPad. Lying on his back he started to tap on it. His fingers moved quickly, words poured out from his fingertips like the rain pouring down outside – he felt curiously free from the sense of isolation and anxiety that had been creeping in on him since lockdown. Some thirty minutes had passed and Orhan was deep in thought, when a text from a friend popped up at the bottom of his iPad:

Hello! Just finished reading The Plague. Shall we have a video discussion on it when you have time?

Orhan had been hearing of The Plague since the pandemic broke out but had not read it yet – he did not want the disease to come to him in the shape of a book. He would rather read it when the air was pure again, when Covid was beaten. He texted back:

What is more dangerous: Covid 19, or we humans?

What?

Orhan smiled and was about to tap his answer when his mobile buzzed. He reached out and took the set from his night table. The CLID read Ma’am Rose.

“Good morning, Ma’am.”

Orhan was still holding the iPad with his left hand.

“Morning Orhan, I need you to accompany Soul to the United.” The voice was urgent.

“United Hospital?” Orhan sat straight up in bed. He put down the iPad.

“Yes. He has been running a temperature for a few days now. He has to be tested for Covid.”

“I see, Ma’am.”

Orhan frowned. His eyes darkened. Floyd’s image disappeared. Orhan had been keeping himself in quarantine, sticking to Ma’am Rose’s directives. Roughly five weeks ago she had read out the rules to him through the door phone when Orhan had gone down to the twelfth floor to be briefed on his tasks for the day. Ma’am Rose, standing on the other side of the closed door, had advised Orhan not to leave the roof until he was told otherwise. His meals would be sent up on to the landing and if she needed any help with official works, she would email or call him. He must not on any account flout the rules. Before Orhan could say anything, she had hung up.

Orhan’s gaze had moved up and down the high and wide door. Above the door there was a sizeable metallic construction of the Holy Qur’an attached to the wall. The open pages displayed the first five verses of Sura Yasin – the thirty-sixth chapter– the heart of the Quran, the most important section. The pages were gold and the letters were penned in black calligraphy. Orhan had never seen Qur’anic verses being displayed on the entrance door before coming to Dhaka. Reciting it every day was said to help one solve the problems of this worldly life; it abolishes multiple fears of the heart and opens up the door to thousand blessings and benefits. It brings ease and peace to a dying person. Standing on the landing, he had murmured to himself that the book needs to be buffed up, the brass is losing its shine, the letters need to proclaim their power.

That was the last time Orhan had climbed down from his rooftop lodging. To pass his time, he did sit-ups, gymnastics, weight training, and walked on the roof among the flowers or sat on the patio, read, wrote, ate and slept. Of course, he had not been able to meet up with his fiancée, nor had he been able to socialise or visit his family or friends for months now. But then, he was not the only one who was living like this, he reminded himself when he missed human company. He had video chatted with his fiancée every day, shared meals with her in front of the webcam, and once a week they watched the same series on Netflix. Orhan counted his blessings; he had more space than an inmate. And Covid, though reaping lives far and near, seemed to him a distant phenomenon. He was living at a safe remove from the virus-infested world down there, listening to music, reading and writing, breathing clean air, keeping his body free from harm to enable his artistic mind to thrive. The virus could not touch him. He was safe, even though it had made him a prisoner on the roof.

But what now? He must go to the hospital. He shook his head again. The frown on his forehead deepened. From Italy and England, virus carriers had come and polluted Dhaka’s air with their invisible threat. People, other than those with Covid symptoms or life-threatening issues, were urged to avoid hospitals by any means. But he was being asked to go there to have a vicarious experience as a carrier of the virus. Why doesn’t Ma’am Rose accompany her husband? If Mr. Soul is contaminated, then she must be contaminated too – they lived under the same roof. Why is she asking him to accompany her husband – a possible bearer of the dangerous virus? Is it not her duty, as his wife? It is not that she is devoutly Muslim and shy of men. She doesn’t cover her head and travels abroad herself – so why not to the hospital to support her husband? Why should he replace her? He was not their slave, nor their relative; they were practically strangers. It was not only an absurd directive, but also unethical. What gave her the right to ask him to perform a duty that he had not been hired for? Orhan felt anger seething within him. But he knew he could not refuse her in his position. Though he was neither a slave nor a relative, he was powerless.

“Get ready. He will go down soon.”

“I can walk to the hospital and meet up with him there.”

“A car ride will be more comfortable for you.”

“I have not been outdoors in weeks; a walk will do me good.”

“No, you must accompany him in the car.” Ma’am Rose continued, “I have spoken with Dr. M. He will see to it that Soul gets special treatment. You will not face the crowd.”

“Ma’am...” Orhan’s voice sounded feeble in his own ears.

“As soon as the tests are run, you are coming back.” Suddenly, Ma’am Rose’s voice had switched to being sweet and beseeching. “Orhan, we have always been good to you and treated you as our family member. Wouldn’t you accompany your father if he were ill? If my children were here, we wouldn’t ask you.”

Orhan was still fumbling for an excuse to avoid the situation. Then he remembered his mother telling him that his lungs were weak and that he should not catch a cold. But before he could say anything, Ma’am Rose went on to speak of the moral obligations of a good Muslim, and for a good effect she also threw in some Arabic phrases and reminded him how important it was for every Muslim to help another in need. Then she hung up, giving him no chance to speak. In Orhan’s mind, the image of the Holy Qur’an on the top of the entrance door to Mr. Soul and Ma’am Rose’s abode flashed now. Putting up a pious image for one’s benefit is becoming trendy among the well-off. But is God blind? Of course not, otherwise the brass would not be losing its shine.

Orhan got up and walked over to the washroom. Behind him, on his iPad, the lines on George Floyd shimmered for a moment before the machine went onto sleep mode. He let the tap run and reconsidered whether to leave quietly, shut the door behind him, make his way down and go home to his hometown. But people were not allowed to travel between cities and parishes. Armed forces were guarding the check posts. What am I to do? What am I to do? Should I call my parents and seek advice? No, no, I can never burden them now. And Ma’am used the phrase moral obligation. Moral obligation? That was a heavy phrase.

He brushed his teeth, shaved, got dressed, took his mobile and wallet and grabbed his box of masks and a bandana he had bought but never had to use before. When he was ready, he stood on the threshold, taking stock of the room. For a minute, his glance lingered on a Li Bai scroll alongside his Master’s Certificate above his desk, and then he turned. Outside the rain had ceased, but the rooftop was still wet, and flowers and leaves were still heavy with rainwater. Orhan did not stop to look at them, but on his way down he stopped in front of the entrance door of Mr. and Mrs. Soul’s apartment. His eyes lifted to the Qur’an. The brass was darker than the last time; a thick film of dust had distorted the verses. For a second, Orhan was amused by the antics of human nature; the cleaning agency was not less twofaced than their clients. When I come back, I will have to clean it up.

The main street was still empty. The boutiques, the restaurants, the convenience shop were closed. A single crow walked on the road, its shadow walking by it. Standing on the sidewalk, Orhan took in the scene. Along the wall of the opposite building, a builder was walking on a scaffold. His radio was on full blast. Orhan turned his face to look up at his own room, though he knew it could not be seen from this side of the building. He only saw the vine-covered iron barriers along the edge of the roof. As he lowered his gaze, he spotted Ma’am Rose’s eyes. He emitted a small sigh behind his mask, nodded, and walked towards the car on the driveway. Chauffeur Charon was there, dusting the car. It was black and big.

“How are you, Charon?” Orhan asked as he approached Charon. “When did you get back from your village?”

“Last night. Ma’am called.” He did not look at Orhan and sounded exhausted.

“I see.” Orhan nodded a few times. Charon needed his salary to feed his extended family. If he had failed to come, he might have been sacked straight away. But how did Charon manage to dodge the check-post surveillance? I need to speak with him before it is too late, Orhan told himself and took another step towards Charon, when Mr. Soul emerged leaning on the shoulder of the in-house errand boy. Orhan stepped back, and Charon stood instantly upright, holding open one side door for Mr. Soul.

Orhan waited a little before turning his back to the building to get into the car. He seated himself next to Charon. They drove along the road, turned left keeping Star Kebab on their right, out onto Road 11 and then left towards Gulshan bridge. Orhan regarded the street. A handful of people were out, dayworkers and a few rickshaws. To the left of the bridge were fancy, high-raise flats and on the right was the dramatically clashing Korai slum. The car moved on to Gulshan Road. Ambulances drove past one after another, hooting sirens. This was the first time since Orhan had come to Dhaka that he had seen a clear road for ambulances to pass at that speed.

Orhan’s thoughts were interrupted when Mr. Soul suddenly commenced coughing. It was a dry, persistent cough, and the rasping sound of it threw Orhan into a state of uncontrollable fear. He was now acutely conscious of his own helpless state, as well as dismayed by his own lack of ability to speak up for himself. He twitched in his place and held his breath under his facemask, wishing desperately he could escape from this anxiety of being forcefully confined in a space together with a person who might be carrying the virus. He wished he could gather his courage and grab hold of the steering wheel, forcing Charon to pull over. Instead, he gasped behind his mask and turned to Mr. Soul over his shoulder. Charon’s hands were steady on the wheel.

“How are you feeling, Sir?” he asked.

Mr. Soul smiled faintly and replied: “Exhausted!” His voice was hoarse.

“The road is free; we will get there soon. Hang in there, Sir!” He looked out of the window on his side. They had stopped by a red light, and a lorry carrying livestock coming from the opposite direction stopped alongside his window. There had been rumours that people were using cattle trucks to hide under the animals to cross police checkpoints. These animals seemed confused, riding in a standing position on a man-made vehicle, and perhaps also sheltering some self-proclaimed evacuees unbeknownst to them. Ah! Charon perhaps used a cattle truck like this. No, no, I could not do that. Never. No way. I am not an animal. But where are these animals heading to, to a sacrificial ground? Or to a butcher’s knife? People still need foodstuffs, even during a pandemic. Mr. Soul coughed again. Orhan wound down the window and put his head out. The cows watched him.

What are they watching? Do they know that a man like me will soon be slashing at their throats? In a flash, Orhan remembered George Floyd’s eyes. What kind of visual picture Floyd was registering on his way to the other life? How did the world appear to him from down there, from under that killing knee? Did he see how people had become spectators on the sidewalk, did he see the birds in flight above him, if there were any birds? Or were his eyes, instead of taking in images, busy signalling panic, as it appeared on the video? How did he feel, not able to breathe? How did he feel, dying in a trap like an animal? What is the difference between an animal’s breathing and a human’s breathing? Or, for that matter, a flower’s breathing? Was there any difference, at all? I can’t breathe! Twelve letters, a perfect closure for any living entity – then the curtain drops. The world – the audience – holds its breath, watching the extent of man’s cruelty. Tears were trickling down from the eyes of the cows. Orhan swallowed a clump of saliva and turned away.

Private cars were lined up in the driveway to the hospital, dropping off patients, some alone, others in twos or threes. Arrows and signposts were directing the place for the Covid test. A disharmony of coughing and sneezing engulfed Orhan as soon as he got out of the car. He walked side-by-side with Mr. Soul, cutting that sound. Mr. Soul was walking at a much slower pace than usual and making efforts to breathe deeply in between his bouts of coughing. Doctors and nurses, dressed in their protective gear, walked past them hurriedly. It was like a scene from a science-fiction film. Suddenly, Orhan felt tired. For the first time, he was now fully aware of being dragged into a situation from where he would not be able to escape. Until this morning, he had been missing the sound of human voices, but now the sounds exhausted him. They irritated his nerves. He hated those sounds.

Mr. Soul was an influential businessman, so his tests were run as soon as they reached the designated area, and immediately after that, he and Orhan were ushered into a small room where they were asked to wait for Dr. Murad – Ma’am Rose’s next of kin. They sat there as far as possible from each other and waited. Orhan in silence. Mr. Soul coughing at times. Dr. Murad made his appearance after a quarter of an hour, also fully dressed in protective gear and several layers of masks under his vizor. Standing in the doorway, he excused himself for being late and said: “Soul, I have arranged a cabin for you to rest until we know the results. Take the lift up to the top floor and register there.”

“Thank you!” Mr. Soul turned to Orhan: “Orhan, text Charon to return home and to wait there until further notice.” He coughed on his handkerchief and stood up: “It will take a couple of hours before all the results come. You go to your room and make yourself comfortable.” Dr. Murad said as he backed away from the doorway Mr. Soul stepped out of the room to follow Dr. Murad’s lead.

Orhan walked behind them. His anxiety walked with him. His feet felt numb. He had to command them to walk in an even pace. The doctor looked over his head towards him for a second and then looked away.

The lift brought them to the top floor where the Corona unit was. On the sliding glass door to the entrance was written “Covid patients”. At the reception desk, two nurses were ready with papers. The formalities were done very quickly, and then they were directed to the cabin.

It was a sizeable en suite room, furnished with modern medical equipment. Apart from the bed, there was a flat TV on the wall, a coffee table, an armchair, and a couch along with a large window at the far end of the room. Mr. Soul entered, hung his coat in the closet in the small hallway, and disappeared into the bathroom on the right to change into patients’ dress. During those few minutes when Orhan was alone, he took off his shoes, put on hospital slippers and walked up to the huge window overlooking Gulshan lake. The clouds had burst again, rain-bombing the surface of the lake; Orhan could not make out the other side of the lake. A thick sheet of rain hindered his vision. The weather was tear-filled. He opened the windowpane, breathing in lungs full of rain-drenched air before closing it again. Then he sat down on the couch and closed his eyes.

The results came after three hours. Positive! Mr. Soul must stay at the hospital; since he had already had the symptoms for a few days, everything might start deteriorating now. If things got serious, he would have to be transferred to ICU. The next few days would determine the severity of his infection. “He must therefore stay under constant observation”, added Dr. Murad on the phone.

Mr. Soul thanked Dr. Murad and turned to Orhan:

“Get your Madam on the line. I need to speak to her.”

When Orhan connected them. He heard Mr. Soul saying between bouts of coughing.

“Yes, it’s positive, and Orhan will be staying with me. No, you must not come here under any circumstances. Hospital is teeming with Covid patients.”

Orhan’s ears pricked up. He was supposed to be with Mr. Soul until the test was run. What is happening now? I have never even entered the living room of this couple, and now I am to spend nights in the same room as Mr. Soul. Nobody has ever cared to ask me whether I am willing to be Mr. Soul’s sickbed attendant? But Orhan was not surprised. He was, however, to understand that no words of protest were expected of him. Orhan struggled to speak up, but no appropriate words came.

Mr. Soul exchanged a few more words with Ma’am Rose, called his daughters in the States, and then took a sip of water, half sitting on the bed. At that moment, a nurse entered with a tray in her hand. She clipped a pulse oximeter on one of Mr. Soul’s fingers, checked his temperature and helped him have some tablets. She looked strong and fearless in her Covid outfit.

When she was ready, she turned to Orhan.

“Hello!”

“Hi.” Orhan nodded, overcoming his distaste.

“Give him two paracetamol every six hours and check on his oxygen saturation level, it should not go below ninety.”

“Pardon?”

“We are running short of medical staff. Now that you are here, you had better give us a hand.” She stood straight.

Am I to be exploited by the hospital as well? Orhan murmured to himself behind his mask. Suddenly, it was all too obvious to him why Dr. M did not try to stop him from entering the zone for Covid patients. I am being used as a dumb animal. It was about time I reacted – a little longer and I might myself become a Covid patient. Orhan shook his head – perhaps I have already become a carrier of the virus, it is too late. I can’t leave this place and spread the disease to others – the virus must be multiplying within me. The air of the room began to feel stifling, intensifying his discomfort. He trembled, struggling with a reflex to get to his feet and run. But he remained immobile and sweat broke out on his forehead. There is no need for exaggerated anxiety at this point, he scolded himself, get a grip, Orhan, you crossed the boundary the moment you got into that car with Mr. Soul. Now you are in the front line. Fight it like a soldier does in a battlefield.

“Is he your father?”

“No.” Orhan shook his head.

The nurse was quiet for a moment. Then she asked:

“Have you then already had Covid?”

“No.”

“I see,” she continued. “Can you step out a minute, please? As I said, now that you have been exposed to it, you had better stay with him and help us. I need to brief you about the routine.” She walked out of the room. Orhan left the couch and, keeping his distance from the bed, his back grazing on the wall, he went out into the corridor. The moment he closed the door, the nurse took two steps backwards.

“I will get you a hospital gown, gloves and masks. Make sure to take his temperature every hour and check on his oxygen saturation level and pulse every thirty minutes. Fill in the chart hanging by his footboard. You can call us from the room in case of emergency.” She paused to give him a chance to speak, but Orhan was silent.

“Very well.” She handed him a card and said: “You have free access to the patient’s cafeteria and washing facilities.”

Orhan looked at the ID card; it read Attendant.

She added. “There is a special lift from the Corona unit to the cafeteria – use that one.” She paused, and then added, “I have given Mr. Soul some sedatives. Try to keep him awake until the lunch trolley comes. You can have your meals sent to the room along with Mr. Soul’s. Just let us know what you would prefer.”

Orhan was thinking – he would need his pen and writing block, his iPad, his laptop, to not fall into boredom. Food was the last thing on his mind, even though he had not had his breakfast. What do I need more – my underwear, shaving tools, change of clothes? Even before he was ready with his thoughts, his mobile buzzed again. He lifted it to his ear and nodded to the nurse:

“I’m sending Charon with Soul’s stuff. Let me know what you need, I will have them sent to you,” Ma’am Rose said on the phone.

“Thanks, Ma’am, I will tell Charon what I need.”

“By the way, you will find a copy of the Qur’an in the bag. Recite Sura Yassin by Soul’s bedside every night before he falls asleep.”

“Yes, Ma’am. Anything else?”

“No, not at the moment.”

Orhan stepped into the room, slumped down on the sofa and covered his eyes with the back of his lower arm. Mr. Soul was watching TV.

After lunch, Mr. Soul fell asleep. Orhan collected his and Mr. Soul’s stuff from Charon and returned to the cabin. He wrote down random thoughts on his laptop. He tried analysing the nature of his shock and fear. Fear of death was closing on him, but still it seemed surreal because the shock had a greater impact. He switched on Facebook. One of his friends had written:

“Whales are dancing along the coastline of Cox’s Bazar; nature is reclaiming itself; the air is being cleansed – the hand of God working!”

Orhan had a faint smile on his face. God! Mr. Soul and Ma’am Rose are the agents of God in my life. They have orchestrated a plan whereby my life would be put in danger. God-fearing Mr. Soul and Ma’am Rose! Who will walk out of this room alive, me or Mr. Soul? The very thought sent a shiver through him. No, no, Orhan shook his head, I must not allow myself to get sentimentally obsessed with the thought of death. Everyone does not die of Covid. People do survive. Soldiers do return from battlefield. And I am still young.

Orhan had hardly managed to collect his bearing when Mr. Soul began to cough and brought Orhan back to reality with twofold fear. He jerked the blanket over his face. Three minutes should suffice for the virus to sink he told himself. Three slow minutes. Where he got that idea from, he did not know, but he was certain that the virus always settles against a solid surface, after floating in the air for three minutes. He needed to hold his breath as long as he could.

After a while, Mr. Soul’s coughing subsided, and he switched on the TV to surf the news programmes. From under the blanket, Orhan heard about the death toll, the lockdowns, WHO’s recommendation, along with the updates on George Floyd’s death and its aftermath in the world. Death and death. Lockdowns and a procession of dead bodies. Orhan fished out his earplugs from his pocket and put them on.

Mr. Soul said:

“It’s a dangerous disease, Orhan.”

“Yes, Sir.” Orhan kept his eyes closed. He was annoyed that the sounds still made their way to his auditory system. He put his palms on his plugged ears.

“Where are you, Orhan?” Mr. Soul raised his voice: “I can’t see you.”

“Ah, sorry Sir!” Orhan sat up on the sofa. He took off his earplugs. His eyes still closed. “I dozed off, Sir. Sorry!”

“Are you following the news? It’s targeting the older generation,” Mr. Soul continued. “I wonder what will happen to the world, there will be a void, you know Orhan, when all experienced, highly skilled intellectuals are gone, young people will have a hard time to rebuild the world without sagacious guidance.”

  “Excuse me, Sir, but the virus doesn’t discriminate against anyone. It’s a democratic disease.” He opened his eyes.

“Well, look at the statistics, mainly elderly people are dying. Young ones might die only if they have any underlying disease. But I fear I might not see my own bed again.”

“Be strong, Sir!” Orhan tried to console him while keeping his own fears within himself. He pushed away the crumpled blanket from his lap.

“We are all doomed to die, but it is distressing when you know when you will die.” Mr. Soul looked at the TV screen, there was again a replay of Floyd’s last minutes. “Such a fuss about an individual’s death when millions are dying!” Mr. Soul switched the TV off and turned on his side to cough. It was dry and persistent, accompanied by shortness of breath.

Orhan now sat straight, his handkerchief pressed tightly with his gloved hand over his mask; the sound of the name George Floyd had penetrated his Corona fears with strengthened momentum. Before long, he had surrendered to his thoughts again. Did Floyd know that the recording had gone viral? Did he know that his name would become a part of American history, only because his death happened to be video recorded? Would America, a land myth-spun with words like democracy and equality on the map of the civilised world, really care about the death of a man like Floyd if it had not been filmed? What about other countries? And Orhan himself, would he be reacting like this if it had not been video recorded? For sure, if Floyd had been choked by Covid and was filmed, the world would not be reacting like this. Orhan would not be reacting like this, because the air would have been squeezed out of Floyd’s lungs from inside as it was doing to men and women alike, disregarding race and status. Not like this. Not by another human, as with Floyd. But both had to do with breathing. Oxygen. Life. Orhan had a vague feeling that there was a resemblance between Floyd’s gasping for breath and a Corona patient’s gasping for breath, and also a distinction: in one case a bug was the killer and in another a human. But dying from Covid seemed less excruciating in comparison with how George Floyd had experienced his death.

He got up and took out the miniature Qur’an; a strip of a red silk band between two pages marked Sura Yassin. He sat down with the book by Mr. Soul’s head and recited the verses aloud. In the middle of the night, Mr. Soul’s condition grew worse. This time his body shuddered, the attacks came in succession, stopped, like the screech of a braking train. He groaned with each attack and assumed the foetal position, helplessly trying to keep himself steady. An oxygen mask was put on him. The following nights were terrible. He had severe chest pain. The coughing was worse; the oxygen level kept dropping because of respiratory distress. His breath withdrawing from his lungs was revealed as panic in his eyes, his lips were bluish, his vitals stopped responding to medication. Within a couple of days, it looked like ten years had been added to his age. He could barely move himself. The nurses and doctors kept in contact with Orhan, giving him instructions to monitor the oxygen level and meet his other requirements. When needed, Orhan would carry Mr. Soul to the washroom, change his clothes, shave him, trim his nails, brush his teeth and tuck him into bed. The ICU beds were all occupied, so he was to be treated in his cabin. To help him get some sleep, sedatives were injected and during those hours, Orhan would also doze off on the couch. He informed his family, friends and fiancée that he was busy with an important manuscript and would like not to be disturbed.

On the seventh day, Mr. Soul showed small signs of recuperation. His saturation level rose from seventy to seventy-five. Dr. M. urged him to try to breathe at intervals without the machine, which he did with tremendous effort, breathing heavily through his mouth, to begin with. Orhan kept note of his recuperating process, while his own hands trembled from fatigue and anxiety.

On the morning of the ninth day, the test came in negative. In the evening, Mr. Soul sat up on his bed and switched on the TV. Nothing was new, people were dying alone without families next to them, sealed corpses were being carried by volunteers early in the mornings to be interred in special Corona burial sites. Mr. Soul shook his head with boredom and kept on zapping channels until he hit on CNN. He leaned back on a pillow and concentrated on the news. It was all about Black Lives Matters.

Orhan, his eyes moving from the TV screen to Mr. Soul, wondered what he must be thinking, and felt sudden irritation at the phrase Black Lives Matters. Why on earth are they connecting the fact of colour to life? What has colour to do with life? Shouldn’t the slogan be Every Human Life Matters? Why should we humans allow ourselves to be defined in terms of such attributes, perpetuating a dichotomy between human significance and human existence? Aren’t we all equals to God? Mr. Soul would claim to be a civilised man. He must profess to oppose police brutality, to believe that ‘black lives matter’, indeed that all lives matter.  But where is the truth of it? He has ruthlessly exposed me to a situation from which I will probably end up experiencing the same kind of death agony as George Floyd during his last minutes. Gasping for breath. Respiratory failure. Like Floyd, I will be needing someone to pull me up into the abundance of oxygen. Allow my heart to continue beating. Rescue me. Orhan had never felt his social ranking more keenly than now, the stark resemblance between his own and Floyd’s powerlessness.

On the eighteenth day, when Mr. Soul was to be discharged, Orhan had a splitting headache, and had lost his sense of taste and smell. He, however, keeping these warning signs to himself, went down with Mr. Soul. It was raining. On the muddy driveway earthworms crawled on their bellies. Holding aloft an umbrella borrowed from one of the guards, Orhan helped Mr. Soul to the car. Ma’am Rose was sat in the back with a spray of cut flowers in her hands.

She wound the window down slightly and said aloud from behind her face mask:

“Orhan, you look pale. Have yourself tested before you come home! Give us a buzz if it’s positive; we will make sure that you get treatment in a hospital which is affordable.” She pressed herself back against the seat and added with a louder but sweeter tone: “Ah, yes don’t forget to say your prayers and read Sura Yassin.”

Then she turned to Mr. Soul, handed over the flowers: “Soul, thank God you’re coming home alive. I’ve donated a huge sum to the Mosque to schedule a cow sacrifice now that God has spared your life. Alhamdulillah’ All praise belongs to Allah!”

Matthew Blasi's fiction and creative non-fiction has been widely published, and his first novel, Sweet Muffin Ranch, was released in September, 2023. He lives in Shreveport, Louisiana, where he works as an Assistant Professor of English at Centenary College of Louisiana. He can be reached at his website: matthewbrandonblasi.com

The Many Seasons of Furbiss
 

             Furbiss got the call on a Monday. Her idiot brother was getting married.
             “It’s a miracle,” said her mother.             
             “It’s a warning,” said Furbiss. “He relapse?”
             Her mother sighed heavily. “You can’t just be happy, can you? It’s something to
celebrate. He gets to be a husband.”
             “He’s gotten to be a lot of things,” said Furbiss. The list was long. Addict, thief, swindler, and the kind of puke who sold timeshares. But there was more than a mote of truth in what her mother had said. Happiness eluded Furbiss, then and always. It wasn’t a matter of effort so much as a constant disconnect. She had been well and truly happy three times in her life: When she quit smoking, when she divorced George, and when she quit smoking again. She could be content from time to time but never in the serious, pre-packaged way her mother conceptualized whatever the hell “happy” was, and certainly not the way everyone else seemed to conceive it, which was like a sore they liked to pick, pick, pick, delicious in its agony. No, Furbiss was happy with her animals, her little house, her on-again, off-again friends at the bar and the marina. She promised her mother she would attend when–if–the wedding went down and hung up. 
             Out on the porch, one long gray cat stretched in a rattan chair, then barfed up a hairball. It sat in a spreading yellow pool. The cat stared at it. So did Furbiss. She took it as an omen.

             Furbiss lived in Black Point, Florida, a pimple due west of Fort Lauderdale. The city was so named for its founder, a Belgian who had fought for the Union in the Civil War. Way it went was as follows: Assigned to a cavalry division, the Belgian spent most of the war racing his horse between outposts to deliver messages. He was not prepared for much in the way of violence, and so when violence found him it did so with awful, perfect, acuity. One minute he was astride his horse, uncomfortable with the late summer heat and the awful humidity in south Georgia where the Union was but lately pressing into the Confederacy’s southernmost holdings, and the next a hot wetness had taken his foot. He looked down and there beside the muscled flank of his horse was his boot in the stirrup, a hole shot cleanly through the leather and the underlying flesh within. A neat fount of blood followed. The Belgian fell from the saddle and howled. From the nearby tree line emerged three filthy rebels in tattered, ragged uniforms. Their bones showed through their skin. They seemed mere haunts, poorly armed with a single rifle between them.
             While the Belgian writhed and fumbled for his pistol, the haunts loomed above him and took turns spitting on him. They mocked his pained cries, his well-fed face. They kicked him and started to unbutton his coat. The whole time, his hand that gripped the pistol had been wedged beneath him, hidden, and thus when he drew it forth and shot them all point blank they died with the same expression as when they had been born: stupid.
             From that day forward the Belgian hated the South, its wretched Southerners, and all things Dixie. After the war he took a job as a surveyor and, when sent to Florida to lay out a town, took revenge upon his deceased and defeated adversaries by naming the town after the injury that had taken three toes off his right foot–Black Point. That was the first part of his revenge. The second was his refusal to lay out the city in a grid. No street would be truly straight, no avenue laid so that it wouldn’t close back on itself. His goal was confusion, frustration, and eventually rage in any and all who dared inhabit his village of madness. He stayed and presided as the town’s first mayor, elected three times despite an unending tirade of insults toward his bewildered (and often lost) constituents. 
             Furbiss loved the story of the mad Belgian. She passed his statue on the way to the marina, the only quaint thing about the downtown circle that, in truth, was more a crooked spiral. She, too, hated the town, but it was the one place in the state where housing remained affordable and her job at the community college wouldn’t allow her to live otherwise. She taught history three times a week to bored freshmen who preferred their phones to her lectures, and Furbiss found she no longer cared. In years past, she had fought for their attention with crafty, innovative lessons designed to awaken their minds to history’s wonders. Now she merely arrived to class, often late and disheveled, and sometimes smelling of strong drink, and gave tests that almost no one passed.
             What was Napoleon thinking, I mean really thinking?
                  A. Very little                            
                  B. Oatmeal
                  C. Gettin’ randy for the old musket fire
The dean of the college had already given her a stern talking to and told her to improve on most everything such as her appearance, her performance, and to stop coming to work wreathed in the stink of gin. Furbiss listened blithely, meekly, cursing the man inwardly. His name was Perfo Benoit and he claimed to be the son of Italian tomato farmers, a claim Furbiss was as likely to believe as she was to shit gold bars. He was small and pretended not to know. In his hard, bright shoes he stood several inches below her. She could often see herself reflected on his bald pate.
             It was Furbiss’s belief that Perfo had, let us say, a thing for her, though there existed little in the way of firm evidence. He was cordial but distant at work, professional to the utmost, but he lingered too long in his looks. More than once she had caught the man’s gaze fixed on her ankles. Scant evidence to be sure, but to Furbiss’s mind sufficient.
             At the marina, she found her only close friend, the proprietor of the business, Pep Lee. The woman was engaged in the sale of a boat to a customer. The boat was in hock to her for back rent owed on a spot on her lot. The owner–about to be former–stood nearby, tears in his eyes, pleading with Pep not to sell his beloved watercraft.
             “It’s all I got,” he blubbered.
             “All you had,” said Pep. She was shaking hands with the new owner, collecting the cash in hand.
             “I put that Mercury on myself. My kids and I, we use it to fish.”
              Pep spat. “What’s this crying? The country might be free but my marina ain’t. Get.”
             Furbiss paid little mind, though. The new owner was Perfo, counting out bills into Pep’s hand, dressed in shorts and linen. She had never seen the man’s pale skinny legs before and shuddered. When the transaction was complete, Perfo came over and gave an embarrassed shrug. “I had believed that to be you,” he said. “It occurs that we’ve never met outside the institution.”
             He wore sunglasses, prescription. The kind where the tinted lenses flipped up when necessary. Good Christ, thought Furbiss. The man was a freak.
             “Didn’t know you fished,” she said, aware that she cared nothing about fish or the conversation but was otherwise at a loss as to how to extricate herself from more freak talk with a man whose legs resembled PVC pipes.
             “Learning,” said Perfo. “The price was too excellent.” When Furbiss didn’t say anything, he said, “After my wife passed–it’s been a few years now–I decided to learn new hobbies. I admit to being a poor fisherman but I remain dedicated.”
             Out in the yard, the boat’s former owner had slithered away and Pep was helping her crew get the craft on Perfo’s trailer. It looked new, the trailer, with glossy paint and polished wheels. A stark contrast to the aged, faded boat that squatted above it.
             “That’s going to need work,” said Furbiss. She pointed at the boat.
             “I know,” said Perfo. He was squinting in the sun, the tinted lenses up because–who knew?
             “So,” said Furbiss. “Fishing. And boat repair.”
             “There’s a term for it,” said Perfo. “Caulker?”
             “Shipwright?”
             “Mender?”
              When Perfo and the boat were gone, Pep, without asking, pulled two chairs before the boat house door, then produced two cold beers. They sat in the shade, Furbiss and Pep, and watched the Black River slap the shit out of the reeds. The water was up and mad after big rains the last few days.
             “Collin's getting married,” said Furbiss.
             “No shit?”
             “I give it fifty-fifty.”
             “At the altar or after?”
             “Both.”
             Pep nodded. “Long odds,” she said. “You’re gonna win.”
             “Not once,” said Furbiss.
             “But this time,” said Pep.

             When the town got to be too much and Furbiss got fed up, she went out into the streets to breathe the bad humid air and find her way to the bar. She liked Bert’s the best, a dilapidated shack set back from the road and without a proper parking lot unless you counted the flattened lengths of weeds and grass. It was the first and oldest bar in Black Point, and the first black-owned business, and the first and only bar in town still under the lackluster care of its original proprietor. Old Bert himself, haloed with his head of white hair, was behind the bar seven days a week, at times so stoned on his own inventory that he hardly acknowledged, much less rang up, whatever Furbiss ordered. Bert had wisdom borne of age. He was seventy three and tight on rye whiskey and had, like Furbiss, given up smoking–twice. He’d been in Vietnam with Gramps Rud, a cantankerous old man for whom the wheelchair ramp had been custom built in the 80s. Bert and Gramps got tight in the evenings and played darts. They regaled their customers with stories about every person, living and dead and fictitious, who lived in Black Point.
             Today, Bert was behind the bar and bossing around his new orderly, a drunkard who used to coach college football, some creep named Sandy Preston. Likely from Black Point, thought Furbiss as she sat down and poured herself a rye. Likely never left. Like all true Southerners, this Preston dork had two first names and half that number in brain cells. He ambled about with a broom, with a plunger. He did quiet, minor things.
             “Heard about your brother,” said Bert. He was suddenly there, perched against the bar, and perfect. The wisdom shone in his eyes.
             “Didn’t hear it from me,” said Furbiss. 
             “Word gets round, something, something. You ring that up?”
             “Do I work here? Ask the light bulb you hired.”
             Bert grinned. “He’s under your skin. The marriage.”
             “Today and every damn day. Ring up two while you’re at it. Then two more if you get the time. And don’t mention my brother. He gets every opportunity in life to skunk it up and when he does just that, folks pat him on the back.”
             They both knew what Furbiss was referring to so neither required much in the way of explanation. Collin had been given every opportunity, face-planted into every pratfall, sunk to every shitty depth. He always managed to crawl back and reinvent himself and always expected everyone to take the new Collin seriously, to treat him like the first off the assembly line. Meanwhile, every mistake clung to Furbiss’s skin. Every morning she woke to three things: the sun cutting through the vinyl blinds, the yowling of hungry cats, and the familiar tang of regret on the back of her tongue. Collin getting married? The family making a fuss about it? It made Fubiss sick.
             “The many forms of pity,” said Bert. He was pouring the ryes and sloshing a few more on the bar what with his bad hand. He had to wave over the flunky to finish and mop up.
             “Pity,” scoffed Furbiss. “Just happy to have expectations met.”
             “Maybe this time is different,” said the flunky. What was his name? Sanderson Preston. Sounded like the kind of freak that wore fishing shirts on dry land.
             “I ask you?”
             Preston shrugged. “Didn’t ask anybody.”
             “And remembering that is your Christmas bonus.” Furbiss was steamed. She considered dashing the man’s face with her rye and having a go at him with the rolled up towel, a snap to the thigh to shut him up but good. But temperance won out. All the women in her life wanted peace, tranquility. What Furbiss wanted was to sit and drink and think until one or the other began to encroach upon the other. Then she would just drink or think or sit, and leave the rest to another day. And now Collin would delve into the smoky armpit that was marriage. Furbiss had been married once, to George, a man both incomparably kind and dull. They made it three years before Furbiss pulled the plug, asked the man to kindly pack his things and leave her house. There had been no fighting, no nastiness, no infidelities. Furbiss has simply woken up one morning and realized that whoever had married George had not been her. It was some other Reb Furbiss, someone who, in a moment of incredulity, had the gall to think that hitching her life to someone else’s would produce anything other than banality. She saw it in the bills that arrived, jointly accusatory, and in the phone calls that asked for mister and misses so and so. She heard it when certain people, the kind of people who thought going to church exonerated them from voting, said the word, “husband,” as if their teeth were rough concrete.
             “What’s a lady got to do for another rye that doesn't involve violence?” said Furbiss to anyone and no one. “And a smoke. Bert, you holding?”
             “I quit,” said the aged proprietor. “And so did you.”

             Furbiss had quit many things in life, she reflected on the plane. She quit marriage by quitting George. He had taken the news rather well until he didn’t. Then he was in a rage, calling her at odd hours, demanding an explanation more substantial than, “Our mutual doldrum.” Furbiss asked him to consider whether it would be all that different from staying married, from the awful inside knowledge dredged up anew every time their gazes alighted upon one another that life-long love was a carnival barker’s pitch, nothing more, and that they were aging beside one another, two in-need mummies who had yet to be serviced. Didn’t he see it, that wary shifting of the eyes whenever they smashed their bodies against one another long enough for one or the other or none to achieve some sad climax? 
             Eventually George got it. Or he didn’t. Either way he stopped calling and signed the papers.
             Furbiss had quit smoking–twice–and good Christ on a popsicle stick, think on that! She had grown up in an era where you could smoke on a plane before and after takeoff, and in bars and restaurants where shoulder-high barricades separated those who lit up from the freaks who didn’t. She could smoke in taxis and buses, in waiting rooms–doctor’s waiting rooms, for crying out loud. No one thought smoking was healthy. They just preferred it to maiming each other.
             She even quit her family–mostly–and her own name. Her mother, a barnacle of a woman sick for Jesus and the South, had christened her Reba in honor of a country singer she had never seen in person, much less met. Her mother went to a church where more than one woman had pledged themselves to Christ and forsaken most everything, even candy. Good oxygen was a premium for these people.
             Finally, Furbiss had quit her brother, Collin, whose mission in life amounted to self-destruction. To that end he had been wildly successful, ruining three businesses, getting on and off drugs four separate times, a gambling problem, and even a relationship with, good God, a woman from Texas. There was no justice on Earth and the fact that Texas existed was proof. 
             Now the idiot brother was getting married. Cleaning up. Furbiss had enough mini bottles of whiskey to almost make the plane seat comfortable. Ten thousand feet in the air, her phone rang. It was Perfo.
             “I want to congratulate you on your brother’s forthcoming wedding,” he said.
             “Tell him,” said Furbiss. But she was curious. Why was the man calling her? What was his angle?
             “It’s in Knoxville, I understand. My birthplace.”
             “It has mountains, I suppose.”
             “Splendid ones.”
             “And breweries. And yuppies. Is this about canceling classes?”
             “I’ve given the wrong impression. Too often. Could we talk when you return? Over dinner?”
             Furbiss fought to control her face. The dean was asking her out while she was hurtling ten thousand feet above the Earth, drunk as a skunk and contemplating the imminent doom for which her brother was writing vows. Was this an appropriate time? Was the act itself remotely appropriate? Was she remotely interested? She could not tell. But the call had dropped and airplane mode was certainly a thing.

             Furbiss arrived at her brother’s house and was shocked to see it clean and tidy. No piles of dirty clothes everywhere. No stink of unwashed man. The wife to be was very pretty if you liked to imagine a cardboard box in clothes, and Collin was ruined on himself. Hair slicked and cut too short. A fake tan. HIs teeth, so white it hurt Furbiss to look when he smiled. And there was mother, sitting on a beige sofa, absolutely aglow. 
             “Reba, honey, you look tired,” said her mother.
             Furbiss threw her luggage down. “Nonsense. Had a great gym on the plane. Does anyone smoke? Where’s the liquor?”
             “Sister,” said Collin. He had actually stood and held his hand out in–supplication? A shock of annoyance went down Furbiss’s spine. “We don’t drink,” he said. “Anymore.”
             “At all?”
             “Not a drop,” said the betrothed.
             “Is it a Jesus thing?”
             Collin wore a smile that looked like a dishrag stapled to a face. “The Lord doesn’t say much about it but our pastor does. Please. We don’t want conflict in this, our happy time.”
             There arose a clamor at the heart of which, Furbiss was shocked to learn, was herself. Mother was unhappy and Collin was trying to broker peace and the bride–Melanie? Mekaby? Morganys–remained quiet and smiling, a cultist in the midst of a serious acid trip.
             Furbiss fled to the rental car and drove to the area around the university where she could find people like her, people sucking hard on thin air in the elevation, people whose lives had frayed because of those with whom they shared blood. How could she be kin to those freaks, she wondered as she sat in a bar and got into the rye. How could they be who they were being? Puffed up on themselves, on their pastor, on a quiet dry life. The sofa, she thought, and recoiled in horror. Beige. 
             Perfo had texted her in the meantime. Apologies for the awkward conversation but the offer stands if you’re so inclined. 
             She wanted to ask the man if being dean meant he got to skip college, but decided against it. No point in getting fired, not while she was in Tennessee, away from her home and her cats. Furbiss was not idealistic. She had a mortgage and liked to cook on the weekends. She liked to buy expensive costumes for the cats that only succeeded in enraging them. Not idealistic at all. Not quite practical, either. So she called Perfo.
             “What’s the deal?” she asked. “The boat. The tomato story. The texts on the plane and staring at my ankles. Are you hot for me?”
             “I admit that my manners have not been flawless. That withstanding, if I have incurred a, let us say, incredulity, in the manner of a rudeness, in the manner of…”
             “Hold on,” said Furbiss. “Are you drunk?”
             “I’ve had a cordial or three. And vodka.”
             “And you complain about me and gin.”
             Furbiss heard the unmistakable clink of ice in a glass. Then Perfo said, “I make marinara from scratch that will bend your eyeballs.”

             At the wedding, Collin’s best man gave a speech. What a ghoul, thought Furbiss. A gray, wizened man in ill-fitting polyester. He practically fellated the microphone before passing it to the bride’s father, an excellent candidate for shock therapy. The man went on and on about the joys of marriage and emphasized, no fewer than eleven times, how hard it was going to be, how difficult it was to build a life with someone, especially someone with a past, but if they kept Christ in their hearts, and oh God, she couldn’t take any more. Then he said it again. “A man with a past.”
             At that Furbiss sat up. It was one thing for her to crack on her kin. They were hers. The torment was, if not evenly distributed, mutual. But it was something else for some Knoxville money hussy to ride in on his unblemished mare and declare Collin’s taint to a roomful of people who cried at puppet shows.
             Furbiss stewed in her anger. She drank and thought fondly of cigarettes.
              Then Collin stood up. He said, “My sister is here, Reba, and she knows better than anyone that marriages are hard and that when they go astray it can be hard not to lash out at everyone else who might find joy.”
             “Hur, hur, hur,” the bride laughed. She seemed ready to melt into her gown.
             “I pray for her,” said Collin. “And for everyone who hasn’t found happiness.”
             “Hur, hur,” said the bride.
             Furbiss stood and threw her shoe. It struck Collin’s head. Collin struck the cake. No more hur, hurs from the chucklehead.
             In the rental car, down one shoe, Furbiss floored it to the house, gathered her things, then floored it to the airport. They tried to call. They texted. Then they stopped. Furbiss felt an inkling of peace when she passed through security. She discarded her lone shoe in the trash bin, then changed in the bathroom. She had expected the rage. What she had not expected was shame–for her brother, for her family, for the bride, for herself. They thought they had lucked out, discovered the trick to good, clean living. A little religion, a little clearance aisle self-help, a little public airing out. Collin had grievances. Furbiss had them, too. But there was a certain level of underhandedness in bringing out the dirty laundry at a wedding.
             She called her brother back and barked at his voice mail. “I don’t know what I expected and it still got worse. What did I do to you? Here I’ve been drawing breath to hear your thirteenth redemption arc and for what? I grew up with you. I’m older.”
             And then there was nothing more to say. She was curled in upon herself in an airport bathroom, her guts in a knot, asking herself why it hurt the way it hurt. Because we’re stupid, Furbiss told herself. No one was going to wake up every day happy, least of all Collin, and certainly not when he rolled over and beheld a wife as meaningful as a wooden palette. And she, the chuckling wonder? What would she feel when she woke to find herself next to the human equivalent of a gangplank?
             But why? Why was he her brother and she his sister and there blood between them and a beating heart the size of Detroit?
             On the plane ride home, Furbiss got drunk and passed out. She woke to find the plane cleared out, the last of the passengers none other than her. Alien, such an environment. A human place devoid of all that is human. On the offramp, a strange sadness took hold. It didn’t have to be like that, any of it, all the time. Not them, not her, not anyone. She’d had seasons–the marriage, the cigs, the rye whiskey. They all did. Seasons were all they had. Spring, life, summer, heat, and the long hard fall into sentimental Fall, the cold, the quiet, the lying still. She saw the tarmac through the airport window, saw the marshallers waving planes here and there, up and down. What they needed, she thought, was one of those. A marshaller. Someone to guide them in. 
             Black Point steamed her, a hundred plus with the humidity. At home, her cats were happy to see her, and the catsitter, one of her undergraduates, was asleep on the couch. Furbiss nudged her with a knee.
             “Drink?”
             “Is this a trick?”
             “Good question.” Furbiss had the bottle, two glasses, a little bowl of ice. They had ryes, several, in fact, and sat on the screened in porch in time to catch a sun shower whip the front yard. It came with a heck of a lot of wind. Palm fronds bent low, then sprang back, upward, onward.

             The next day her mother called. “None of that was necessary,” she said. 
             “On that, at least, we agree,” said Furbiss.
             “Your own brother’s wedding. Not even strangers would act so badly.”
             “Listen here,” said Furbiss. “We are strangers. I knew who he was and now I know who he’s going to be. Does he know me? He doesn’t even know himself! But he sure as shit knows what I ain’t.”
             “Is that everything? You got it out? Reba, no one wants conflict.”
             “That’s not even half true. Everyone wants it. He sure did. And he got it. Heck, I wanted a taste, too.”
             “Ever since your divorce, you’ve been–” 
             Furbiss hung up. Before she could silence her phone, her brother called.
             “Mom called you,” he said.
             “Was that your idea or hers?”
             “Come on. Hers.”
             “Had to make sure.”
             “I have a mark.”
             “Then you got something in common with your Savior.”
             “On my face. I’m serious.”
             “So am I. Who gave you the stones? My business is my own. You think I don’t live with myself? I ain’t perfect. But neither was George. Neither is anyone. Neither is you.”
             “You’re right,” said Collin. “I said the vows. I have to live with myself now. I have to live with everything I am and have been. Let me ask you. Could you?”
             “Ask me in a year.” Furbiss hung up, so mad she could scream. But she didn’t. Instead, she silenced her phone. Hell of a thing for people to bash their heads against whatever life put in front of them, knowing–knowing–the relative fragility of the mushy matter between their ears. Oh, they would say Furbiss was a misanthrope who had never fully recovered from whatever apocalypse they imagined a dissolved marriage to be. They could imagine no worse scenario. And she could. A matter of scope, not perspective. Seeing well past the tree line.
             At the college, Perfo was notably absent. Then he was there, in her classroom, just as it was clearing out. “I sense that perhaps your trip was not a happy one, cut short as it was.”
             Despite herself, Furbiss was touched. An act of genuine politeness had that effect. “My brother would have made an excellent donkey,” she said. “You’re from Knoxville? And you left?”
             “There wasn’t much there when I was young. The living was cheap and small.”
             “I quit.”
             “Here? Now? I had a feeling.”
             “If I hustle, I can beat rush hour.”
             “There is thankfully little of that in Black Point. Was it me? Am I the villain?”
             “Of your own story or mine? Don’t get overconfident. I want to talk to Bert. Maybe tend bar. I want to try the private sector and learn to hate myself. Mostly I just can’t teach the same class for another year or ten.”
             “I wish there was more on offer,” said Perfo. He gestured about the room in a way that incriminated the desks, the chairs, the college. Furbiss understood. Then the man took a paper from his coat and unfolded it. Furbiss recognized it as her own, an article she had recently published on Assyrian folklore. “A remarkable piece. I wanted to celebrate. Can I walk you to your car?”
             Furbiss held the door. “First round’s on you.”

             Three months later Furbiss got the call. Her mother, voice warbling like a parakeet. They’d found them both, husband and wife, stiff as boards, out of their minds on chemicals. The house was a mess. The beige sofa slashed to pieces.
             There was no note, no explanation, no nothing. And somehow Furbiss had always known it would be that way. Loud in its quietness.
             Later, much later, Furbiss would sit on the porch with a rye and remember her and Collin as children, and in particular the time they had dared each other to race across the house and slide on their knees across the horrific shag carpet. The point had been to see who could endure the worst rug burn and Furbiss, sure of herself, threw everything she had into the competition. She went full speed, legs pumping, and soon had hideous, bleeding swaths in the middle of her legs. But her brother had lost control and gone head-first into the coffee table, had broken his nose. He had sat up, the blood running down his face, nothing if not happy. 
             He said, “I win.”

Jerry Sticker was raised in Southeast Texas. One of his short stories was recently nominated for the Pen/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. He’s been awarded residencies at VCCA-France and Studio Faire (France), and is working on a novel set in Rural Texas about a Jesus- and Napoleon-obsessed man. He lives in New York City.

ANNA

By Gerald Sticker

This body in a coffin was not the man I thought it would be. Instead a young woman occupied that propped-up box before me. The woman’s mother came up to me, some stranger who happened upon the right funeral home but the wrong viewing, and insisted I join her at the funeral. She said her dear daughter looked exactly like me. Which admittedly was true. I did not intend on going, thinking my presence might only extend the mother’s suffering. Plus, I already had plans, which were to miss the other funeral. The next day, I found myself standing in a cemetery and wearing, by the mother’s request, a dress matching the green the young woman in the coffin wore. The preacher said Anna swam and swam until she reached the shores of heaven where she continues to swim along its rivers and across its oceans and where no disease will ever catch her and take her away from us.

All that swimming made me swoon. I pictured Anna backstroking across the watery sky while we stood sweating down here in the heat. I looked upon her sky pool with envy and let out a sigh. More than a few people glanced back at me. For a moment, I felt myself rising above the grey gravetop angel on whose stone feet my hands firmly grasped. Imagining myself to be an angel, I unfolded the entire span of my wings and told Anna to let me join her on her swim around the hot sun shining down on those leaflets blazoned on the front with her face and filled with prayers and songs beating frantically below. Yes, there was a strong, unsettling resemblance. Besides this picture on the leaflet, all those pictures at the viewing, the ones of her eating cantaloupe with the swim team, stirring something on a stove, hugging a large pecan trunk, poking a jellyfish with a piece of driftwood on the beach, wearing camouflage and standing next to a horse, could have been me. 

After the funeral, I drove outside the city and down long country roads to where the mother lived, where I saw her figure in a black dress and long, cape-like sweater atop a horse that resembled the one from the picture. The mother was looking up at the darkening sky of a late winter afternoon while the horse had a front leg lifted and frozen in place, both stock-still, like some equestrian statue placed commemoratively in front of a large stable and near the dirt drive that led back to an older house, ivy-marbled and built on a bend in the river. Upon seeing me, she pointed out one of the large oak trees along the bank, which were the vestiges of vantage points for the early settlers. She said her daughter had climbed up on one of them once and fell and wore a full leg cast for the first couple of months of the second grade. They called her Peggy Leggy Annie. Sally, the mother, told me that Anna loved to go camping with her brother on the property and that the French had once set up a small colony here. Jean Lafitte slept in a tent right here--there would be the emphatic horse’s stomp at the spot she pointed--and a couple of Lafitte’s men were eaten by the Karankawa who, she said, did not dislike the taste of French. You sometimes heard their talk floating in the air, she said, as I followed beside her and the horse, a mare with a charcoal mane and a base coat the color of a light-polluted night sky with a large swath of Milky Way splashed along the flank and a scattering of what looked like tiny child-drawn stars sparkling from the croup all the way down to the back hooves.

“They’re real,” she said, as we made our way to the water. 

“What’s that?” I said.

“The voices,” she said. “We hear them right before bed or early in the morning. Comes through the windows.”

She lifted her head up and seemed to be sniffing the air. Her pale face showed a dutiful expression, lighter than before. She had blondish white hair and the same green eyes as the daughter. As me. She could be my mother. Which, if you asked my mother, she might have said, jokingly, you can have her. 

“What are they saying, these voices?” I said.

“I don’t speak French,” she said. 

“I do. What’s it sound like?”

“Mippy Pete. Luka Fashi,” she said with a whispering hiss, sucking the words into her mouth.

“Like names,” I said.

“That’s right,” she said. “They repeat them. You have any ideas, Natalie?”

Nonsense I thought. Mippy Pete was nothing the dead would say, and they don’t sound like a song played backwards. This was just nonsense, all of it, my being here in the first place, with the horse now snorting at me, while others from the funeral were arriving, driving by behind us, calling out from their cars, asking questions disregarded by the woman as she eagerly awaited my answer. Here was my chance to run the other way. But maybe there was some French to be had if you twisted the phrases some, and if you allowed that she must have misheard this air talk.             

“Ma pepite. Louisiane vas-y,” I said. 

“Means?” she said.

“Let’s go to Louisiana, my nugget.”

She dismounted the horse and led it by the reins to the edge of the water. She stopped near a wooden pier and spent a good bit of time staring out. A boat motored slowly by. The man gripped the brim of his cap and tugged down on it, while the other toggled the rudder of the flatbed’s small engine. She watched the boat head upriver then twitched the reins.

“Come girl,” she said.

In her face you could see the powerful struggle to keep up this small respite from the sorrow, to uphold some ritual of keeping it all together at a post-funeral dinner, to regain control over it all--and this, her house, was the most comfortable place to do such a thing. At least until they’ve all gone. Then her expression could fall soon enough into the well-worn, sorrowful grooves through which it had coursed over the last several days.

“Sorry if I’m keeping you.”

“It’s okay,” I said. 

“But you have another funeral to go to.”

“I’m avoiding it.”

“But don’t you have to go?”

“It’s my ex-husband.”

“Oh, that’s a tough one,” she said.

“His mother informed me. Right before she called, I was hoping he’d die. Feel kind of bad about it.”

“Oh honey, if we died every time someone had a thought, none of us would be here.”

As she said this, a large pickup truck pulling an old red horse trailer came around the drive and stopped at the stable. Two men got out and leaned against the truck.

“I’m afraid we’ve sold Cecile down the river,” she said to me.

The horse started to grunt as we moved closer to the men. She let out a shrill trumpet-like sound and then backed up a few steps when one of them approached. The woman pulled down on the reins to stop her.

“Don’t you worry, she’s gonna be well taken care of,” she said. “You can pet her.”

She took my hand and put it on the neck of the horse and dragged it downward across the coat. Here there were also the child stars, more faded than those on the hind legs, like strange hieroglyphs drawn on a smooth cave wall, one that responded to the touch, the animal lowering her head and sniffing around my hair, my face, my neck, while the two men took the reins and led the horse up a ramp and into the trailer.

She told me as we walked to the house that Anna had met the men a few weeks before and sold the horse and that she was only acting on her daughter’s behalf. Having me there would have fulfilled, to some degree, the finer terms of the transaction, namely that Anna would have wanted to give up her animal in person. 

“Talking about bad thoughts, we got into a fight the night Anna died. I feel like it’s my fault,” she said. “Her body was seen not far from the bank where the neighbor’s daughter found her. She was floating on her back, arms outstretched as if she were still alive. No way it was the water. She became a good swimmer because she was afraid of drowning. One of my sisters drowned during a flood. Anna never lost a swim meet. She had to stop when, you know, that’s a wig she’s wearing in the coffin. The chemo was too much, and…she asked me for a seahorse and a saltwater aquarium, but I can’t stand anything boxed in like that. I got her a real horse instead. She loved that horse, but it also seemed to watch her with those big eyes, which disturbed Anna. I guess one night she wanted to take Cecile out for a ride. But I told her no. Off she went in my car instead. No, she didn’t drown, they said. She swam the last of her life out.”

She stopped and took a deep breath and looked down the drive. Her hands shook as she took a pack of cigarettes out of a small pocket of her sweater. I picked up a cigarette that fell on the ground and reached out to give it to her. She clasped my hand tightly with both of her hands. 

It was the same way she had taken her daughter’s hand and held it at the viewing. I wasn't even aware you could do that to a body in a coffin, that you could lift an arm as high as the mother did, that a hand and fingers could be made this supple. This was the hand of a swimmer that seemed still very much full of life, that body and its arms moving freely about in a higher, deeper pool somewhere, and stopping only long enough for the mother to bend over and press her lips lightly on the mouth and pause there, like a kiss at bedtime.

I remembered waking up that morning I was supposed to go my ex-husband’s viewing and thinking that no body in its right mind would want to be buried where that funeral home and cemetery were. A body would do whatever it could to get out, even if it meant calling upon the gods to help. Which you could tell driving down the roads that led through the sunken parts of town, that some deity sent his or her great flood every now and then to claim a lucky few and carry them off. You could see high-water marks in the wavy chalk lines left along the lower sides of houses, some with boats or motorhomes or trucks, wrecked and left to rot in the front yard, where people with the weary and weathered look of sailors, coveting a drier world than this, stalked through, often flanked by a muddy toddler and a shabby wolf-colored cur that circled and howled at the edges. My ex-husband had grown up on one of these sloppy backwater streets and was not in his right mind when he died, or at any other point for that matter, so these parts enshrouded as they were in thick riparian mist must have been exactly where he always wanted to be.

His viewing I found out had been the day before I walked into that small chapel with its windows of harlequin-patterned stained glass and entered Anna’s world. Only the front pews had anyone sitting in them, with a few people surrounding the coffin. No one noticed me as I sat down in a back pew and picked up a blank index card next to me. I found a small pew pencil and wrote this: Please don't take my dead body here. When I looked up, it was Sally walking toward me, her mouth wide open as if she were going to swallow me.

What Anna’s mother was swallowing now was gobs of wine in her kitchen. She was introducing me to relatives and friends of Anna.

“We met because she came later…what happened, Natalie?”

“My ex-husband was the warm-up act,” I said. 

“Aren’t they all,” someone said.

“I guess I missed his viewing seems like on purpose.”

“And that’s why you’re here,” Sally said. 

“Do I look like…her?”

Everyone said yes.

“It's happened before,” I told them.

“What do you mean?” Sally said.

“Once I was on the subway train in New York. The opposite train came by and stopped. We stopped, too. There I was looking out, looking at my train, at my car, at me. So I thought, until I realized it wasn’t my reflection. This person who was me was waving at me.”

The story was true but what was the point of my bringing it up? No one there took it as anything special. They only nodded and politely smiled. That girl on the subway was not Anna. In their eyes, there were only two, Anna and me. Or one, Anna herself. I started to feel uncomfortable. Maybe that was the point, that it did not feel great having some long-lost twin who had cancer and had to swim the life out of herself or drown or whatever it was. I began to wonder whether the resemblance made me susceptible. I wondered if we were the types to have this happen to ourselves, to do something like this. 

“Are you okay?” someone next to me said, her hand on my shoulder.

“Yes, yes, where’s Anna’s mother?” 

“Does anyone know where Sally went off to?” 

A small group, each with expressions of concern, surrounded me. One of them took my hand and led me out of the kitchen and into the large living room where people were mingling in front of the back windows looking out along the river winding and hugging the house. Others were shifting around a large banquet table with pound cakes and finger foods and fried chicken, brisket, beans, gumbo. We found Sally standing near the table, her gaze sweeping across the room. When she saw me, she picked up a picture frame that was on a nearby credenza.

“She was about ten here,” she said, handing me the frame and pointing to the photo in it.

“My hair cut was cut the same,” I said.

Someone began to play the piano in the living room. 

“You look pale, Natalie,” she said. “Come with me.”

She led me upstairs and opened a door at the end of the hallway and turned on the lights. Everything in this room was neatly in place, no loose papers or paper clips or pennies on desk. No loose socks or shoes or clothing on the floor. The other thing you couldn’t help but notice was the bright green walls, a color too young for Anna, a recent project since it smelled of fresh paint. There was nothing hanging on the walls except a big wooden clock, a slice of a tree trunk with sticks for hands. Sally pointed to the bed and told me it had clean sheets.

There was an old dresser with a polished mirror, a velvet green chair, a large oak desk, and an old lamp with a light brown shade. I walked over to the window, which was opened but screened to keep the bugs out. The tan curtains were drawn and framing the dark silvery river. There again. You could not get away from the river or its faint smell of mud and clay and the vapors of boat engine gas that floated above it until a good gust came. I could see the tiny light from a boat passing downriver, the same people we’d seen earlier, this time without hats.

“You can stay here any time you like,” I heard her say behind me. 

“Thanks, I’m feeling better,” I said. 

I turned and took a step to leave the room. The sickly green walls and green bedspread and all this brown furniture began to swirl about me. The smells of wood polish and paint took grew stronger while the sounds of a piano played very badly downstairs grew louder. 

“Stay here and I’ll be right back,” she said. 

“Oh yes,” I said and sat down on the bed. 

When she came back, we talked about my ex-husband. We talked about how he very nearly shot me. He had taken me quail hunting and the little spaniel scared up a covey out of some mesquite bushes. He shot and feathers flew in my face. I screamed and, yes, it seemed like attempted murder. We did not have a tranquil relationship. But he said the angle and trajectory of his gun were way off. He drew this down on paper and showed me that he had another six or seven inches he could have swiveled before shaving the side of my head with a bullet. 

David would take me on these apocalyptic night hunts for hogs and rabbits at the end of a long ranch road where the land had old oil tanks not used in years, squeaky oil derricks, land not far from the earliest oil wells in America. David told me there was the ghost of an oil driller, one-armed and still mad about not getting his fair share of money for the discovery, wandering around the land. My ex-husband also had this theory that these wild pigs we hunted were the reincarnations of all the unquiet dead who got a raw deal in life, ghosts of people who died too soon, who died without fulfilling whatever.

The conversation stopped. Sally looked at me and then out the window. The implication that Anna could have become one of these unfulfilled pigs seemed to pervade the space. If I were implying this about her, then was I also saying because of our resemblance that I was one of these lost souls scraping about and tearing up the land? Was I pointing the gun at myself? Had my ex-husband really shot me as a pig in disguise? The room seemed to grow tinier by the second as if to contain all that squealing going on in my head.

“There’s…yeah…no, I mean…,” I said. 

“It’s okay,” she said. “I know what you mean.”

I’m not sure how long I looked at her before leaning back on the bed. When my eyes opened, the room was full of sunlight and the windows were open. I could hear boats racing by. The small lamp was turned on and Sally was sitting in a chair near the bed. She did not have the weariness of someone who had sat all night if that’s what she did. She was delighted to see me wake up.

“What happened?” I said.

“You needed to sleep,” she said.

“Was I telling you about--” I said. 

“Yes, about the quails,” she said. “And the pigs.”

“That was not my theory,” I said. “I never shot any of them.”

This was a lie. Truth was I never wanted to shoot a thing after hearing this wacky theory. I stopped eating pork.

“It’s okay whether you did or didn’t,” she said. 

“I was wondering,” I said. “If we could take a drive somewhere?”

“To…where?”

“Where the ghosts are going,” I said.

“The French ones? You heard them?”

“Yes, I think so,” I told her. “They’re on their way to Louisiana.”

That same day we took her car. After a couple of hours, we crossed into that swampy state. We drove from town to town and crossed many bridges. On one long bridge, we looked out over the heavenly waters and spotted in the distance not far from the shore what looked like the tiny figure of someone swimming.  

Peter Zilahy’s award-winning books have been adapted into theater shows, radio plays, and a wealth of other media, inspired songs, and even flash mobs during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, where The Last Window-Giraffe was Book of the Year. Zilahy is a versatile artist, whose work has been shown at The Kitchen in New York City, Ludwig Museum, Berliner Ensemble, Volksbühne, and The New Tretyakov Gallery, among others. He has performed on Broadway, lectured all over the world, was a Kluge Fellow at The Library of Congress, and a fellow of Akademie Solitude, handpicked by Nobel laureate Herta Müller. Zilahy joined Anthony Bourdain in Budapest for an episode of CNN’s Parts Unknown.

h

három puszi=three kisses

háború=war

harag=anger

halál=death

hatalom=power

híradó=news bulletin

hazudnak=they’re lying

The demo for the dictatorship began with ten thousand posters of Slobodan Milošević being handed out. The bashful dictator’s arsenal of mimicry and the stations of his hair loss can be traced on historical snapshots. The twenty-fold enlargements of his passport photos indicate the bearings of his supporters. The North is benevolent and paternal, yet not suave; the East is strict, yet understanding, not expecting unnecessary sacrifices; the South is steely and implacable, a victorious military leader marching at the head of his troops; while the West is a dreamy dickhead caught off guard by the photographer, lips puckered as if blowing a kiss. The salient quiff of hair on the crown of his head gives the distinct impression of a glans. Oil and watercolour paintings that are being carried around by a creative group among the sauntering throng like a travelling exhibition are testaments to the nexus of authority and coiffure. Artists who have accepted the iconographic consistency of baldness have created uniquely personal pieces that depict the man as a political animal in lyrical tones. The perpetual shifting of the images is part and parcel of the spatiotemporal enjoyment of the portraits. A viewer has to work for his artistic pleasure, unlike in the traditional museum space, where his gaze would quickly slide past, leaving the hapless artwork, in all its stationariness, to fend for itself. The pictures do not depend on the rigid lines of a wall or museum room but fit organically into the totality of the street and the demonstration. The viewer must pursue the picture, jumping up and down among heads, avoiding placards, thus becoming subsumed into the group. The cyclic motion of the pictures is an avant-garde gesture that adumbrates early cinematography—a sign to the recipient that the pictures per se cannot represent a subject for analysis, but they need to be considered as collectively forming a composition. In this manner, the Venus de Milo and Milo Muppet communicate with a gigantic image of a Gargling Milošević that bears a hair-raising resemblance to Kojak, interacting with a petty-realistic charm that belies the mundane realities of war.

ű

űr=space

űr=blank

űr=nothingness

I went out for cigarettes, but the pedestrian street had been blocked off. Parallel police cordons stand back to back, a few feet of no-man’s land between them. In the no-man’s land there’s a cigarette kiosk, just out of reach, as though magnified through a plexiglas shield darkly. Several things then happen simultaneously. I get a craving for nicotine, and I long for the kiosk lady, who is stranded in a commercial vacuum. Only her head and chest are visible, like a magazine cover. She doesn’t move and foreign bodies accumulate around her. Before our very eyes the Belgrade riot-cops are giving birth to their most stylish installation todate. They carve an arbitrary slice out of the city, not to use it but to create a show-piece. The area under surveillance becomes an exhibit from which all protesters have been cleared. The empty pedestrian street is a statement, providing an emphatic counterpoint to the single spot into which the protesters are crowded. The riot cops are not part of but a border to this virtual world. They mark out an ideal space, henceforth liberated from the status of being a public area, its molecules now vibrating on a different plane. At the centre of this Cordon Art stands the unattainable object, and within it the kiosk lady, floating in a consumer vacuum, unable to sell so much as a box of matches. And into this vacuum that is waiting to be filled a lone protester pours his desire. He gazes with yearning at the Rousseauesque little garden in the urban miasma, with its treasure-trove of cigarettes, cigars, colour film, slivovitz, glossy magazines, chocolates, chewing gum and sweets. As consumer power grows within the crowd of protesters, the symbolic space under police protection transforms into an anti-capitalist performance — a lonely cigarette kiosk orbiting in space. Then a balloon wobbles into the air space and lands in the public vacuum on the far side of the cordon. The balloon adds a new dimension to the emptiness of the empty space with the problem of how hermetically it can be sealed off. The empty space is filled with an empty space.

There is nothing inside the balloon, yet it’s full.
 

Reading Dragonfly Wings
A Conversation with the Author after an Evening at WhiteBox Gallery in New York City

Peter Zilahy’s award-winning The Last Window-Giraffe is now available in its first US edition, complete with a foreword by Marina Abramović. To celebrate, Peter met with writer Tobias Carroll at the downtown Manhattan gallery WhiteBox to give a richly entertaining, multifaceted talk about the book and its history. The Last Window-Giraffe has been translated into 22 languages, and its unique form combining playful imagery and alphabetizing content, as well as its historical context that remains so relevant today, was a major subject for the talk.

The interview began with a short story about a Q&A in Ukraine, one of the many countries the book has played an important role. The event was held at a large venue with a couple hundred people, video projection, music, and artwork. Yet at the technical end, the electricity shut off as a result of a city-wide blackout, resulting in a cozy candlelit Q&A. “It was a perfect divine intervention, by the way the lights were still out when I came back a week later.” Peter stressed the importance of intimacy in literature. “Reading a book should be considered an occasion, you may dress up or dress down as you please. I prefer taking a bath with a good book.”

In Ukraine, his novel was used as a manifesto and a manual of sorts, which had long been espoused by the publishers of the book after journalists lauded it as such. But Peter was only able to confirm this much later when a postgraduate student from Oxford University called to discuss that aspect of the book with him. “A lot of students had a copy, because it won the Ukrainian Book of the Year Prize, so when the Orange Revolution broke out, they were simply using it as a manual for the protests. Life was imitating art.” According to the Oxford researcher, the book and its content had been regularly coming up in interviews with the students, concrete evidence for the book’s doubling as a manual.

The problem of translation is singular to this book, as it is based on the Hungarian alphabet, which contains 44 letters, but there are ways to tell whether a translation turns out well. According to Peter, “Usually, a good translator has a number of very detailed questions about very specific things and hearing the right questions, you immediately feel in safe hands.”

“It turns out that European languages, and many non-European ones too, are based on the alphabet, so the book stands up in all translations. After all, it’s a dictionary; it works in Cyrillic, Greek, and other alphabets too.” Peter was wondering what the book might look like in Chinese or Japanese: “They have no alphabet, so it couldn’t work in the same way, and they’d have to invent a different structure that carries the stories.”

Certain translators have their own lore, with the Italian translator being the only one that Peter has never met in person due to his usual work being classics, with their authors already long dead. On the other side of the spectrum, the Dutch and Russian translators met and fell in love after exchanging emails and giving tips to each other on how to translate the book. Soon they moved in together, got married, and they’re still together today. 

The form of the book remains one of its most enduring aspects, and also the most revealing. Peter reflected on its inspiration: “This book is about protest and dictatorship and in a sense, in dictatorships we are all treated as children by the regime… so the idea came naturally to use the form of a children’s dictionary to talk about dictatorship.” Artistically speaking, the book cycles through a variety of images, much influenced by Peter’s own experience with filmmaking and visual art. The Last Window-Giraffe is also heavily influenced by centuries of hand-painted books and their own history, and this book hearkens back to that tradition. “I wrote this book, that is also partly about history, with also the history of books in mind… And that history is very pictorial.”

In discussing the particular images utilized in the book, Peter noted the variety they utilize, ranging from pictures of soccer players to currency to political cartoons, as well as how the font mimics that of some particular Hungarian children’s books. This is also how the form began to grow, stemming from smaller essays and the images associated with them, and how they began to coalesce and mix together in creating a bigger picture, growing organically to the 44 letters of the Hungarian dictionary. Peter added one more for a healthy 45.

The cover was another important element of the new edition. The original cover 25 years ago had “boots of riot police and there's a butterfly flying nearby referring to a piece in the book about the butterfly effect.” The new version has a dragonfly on it, taken this year by Peter himself, and “on the wings, there is a giraffe, it's a geometric pattern, you cannot make this up.”

When Peter was asked about his relationship to the book and how it has changed over the years, he said that “the window-giraffe is an animal, it’s alive… it's even more relevant today because of the war and all the things that we are going through. It's either that or the world adapts to my book. It still speaks to the people. It’s still getting published after 25 years. That’s a long marriage. People who’ve been together for that long hardly ever divorce, so we are fine.”

Since the book is partly about the former Yugoslavia, it remains perennially important with its particular emphasis on ethnic and religious conflict. Peter noted “we have seen the war in Syria, and now in Ukraine, it’s uncanny how similar some of the stories are. Unfortunately, this makes my book never go out of fashion.”

Near the end of the talk, Peter was asked about the role of creativity in oppression, which was likely my favorite exchange of the interview, a rich discussion of the contrasting notions of time in capitalist democracy and communist dictatorship. “In capitalism no one has time, your cleaning lady, your kids, everyone is so busy you have to make appointments. Time is a commodity, so everybody’s time is precious, while in a dictatorship there’s a certain timelessness. Your life is not worth much. You’re not important, so you have all the time in the world… You can learn Swahili, or Japanese, you can go knock on the door of your friends at 2:00 AM, nobody will be mad at you, because they are just as unimportant as you are. You couldn't call them anyway, because most people had no telephones. It is easier to forge a community when you are all against something, yet you can’t only be against something, because you’re risking becoming a parasite of the regime no less than the cronies. You then cease to have an individual existence.”
 

By Samuel Haecker

Brenna Dixon holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University where she teaches composition, fiction writing, and business writing. She is originally from Florida and she served as Artist-in-Residence at Everglades National Park in 2014. Her prose has been published in Southeast Review, Terrain.org, Burrow Press Review, and other journals. 

What the River Takes and How You’ll Never Get it Back

Quetzal and I picked our way down the clay embankment, past the sign screaming at us to BE AWARE. BOATERS SERIOUSLY INJURED BY JUMPING STURGEON. 

“Look at you, Ms. Rebel,” he said. “Sneaking out and shit. Shouldn’t you be doing homework?” He grinned and slung a tan arm around my shoulders.

Suarez crouched over Carrine on the shore, ran his hands over her faded yellow hull. 

"Dude, I don't think it's going to ride," said Suarez. He stood back and squinted at the jet ski.

"What do you mean 'ride'?" I asked. "There's no way it's fixed yet. We found it three weeks ago."

"She's got a point," said Suarez.

Quetzal bent to look it over. "She's fine," he said. "I did the spark plugs last night."

He walked a circle around the jet ski, bending every once in awhile to poke at something, as if examining the Carrine—the one with owl eyes and straight teeth.

"I already checked it," said Suarez.

Quetzal stood. "Today," he said. "I'm going to feel up a sturgeon. Fishing contest’s coming up." 

Quetzal always made everything into a grand announcement. 

“You’re resorting to feeling up fish now? Because Carrine won’t let you get under her shirt?” I crossed my arms and leveled Quetzal with my eyes.

He took three quick steps toward me, dug around in his pockets, and handed me his pocketknife. 

"Hold this," he said. "I don't want to lose it. And don’t be jealous."

I rolled my eyes. "Yeah. Right. That’s it. I’m jealous. The DNR comes through every twenty minutes, Quetzal," I said.

"They're switching shifts right now. No worries."

He stripped off his shirt, wheeled Carrine around, and shoved off into the water.

"Idiot," I muttered. 

Suarez sat in the grass. "Tomorrow he's going to want to touch ten of the damn things."

"I swear his brain's an incubator for stupid sometimes," I said. I sat next to Suarez and he moved over so our knees wouldn't touch.

"Incubator?" said Suarez. He raised an eyebrow at me. "What are you, a farmer?"

"Shut up," I said. "I'm studying for the SATs."

"That's not till the end of the year, goody-goody."

I flipped Quetzal's knife open then closed.

"Yeah, well, when I pass and you're stuck working at Lowes, I'll be sure to write from UF."

Suarez rolled his eyes. Quetzal crisscrossed the water, coming close enough to spray us.

"Quetzal!" shouted Suarez. "You're never going to touch one if you don't cut that shit out!"

I checked my watch. In half an hour my mother would poke her straight nose into my room, see me gone, then look for the rowboat, see it gone, and brainstorm a new way to ground me.

Quetzal killed the motor and sat in the center of the river, waiting. I twisted his shirt around my hand. 

"Did you bring a flashlight?" asked Suarez. 

I shook my head. "No."

In the fading light, a sturgeon leapt past Quetzal, hanging in mid-air for full seconds before crashing into the river. The second one got close enough to knock the handlebars on the way down. The jet ski rocked on the water.

Suarez sat back and laughed. "I predict a face-plant." 

Quetzal leaned far over the water, stretching his fingers out and away.

"Holy shit," said Suarez. "He's going to do it. He's seriously going for it."

"He's just trying to impress Carrine," I said. I closed my eyes. The last rays of sun warmed my cheeks. “He even named our—our—jet ski after her, Suarez.”

"Carrine's not even here," said Suarez. "Plus, she's a cock-tease."

"Yeah, well," I said. "All I know is he's wearing button-down shirts now." 

"Whatever. Are you watching this?"

I opened my eyes. A sturgeon flung itself out of the water and twisted in the air.

"Look at that thing," said Suarez. "It's got to be at least eight feet long."

Quetzal reached and reached.

"He's going to fall off," I said. I poked holes in the mud next to me. 

The sturgeon collided with him, slammed into him with the sound of a head smacking concrete. Quetzal and the fish tangled together, limbs and fins. They hit the water as one. 

"Fuck," I said. "Oh, fuck."

We waited a minute.

"Suarez, he's not moving.” 

"I know," he said. 

He ran a hand through his curly hair. "He better not be playing around." 

We plunged into the river.

The night before the funeral, Señora rowed out to my family's houseboat. The weight of our boat shifted, then stabilized, as she stepped aboard. My mother watched from the porthole while I tied off her rowboat.

"Hello, Jae," said Señora. "May I sit with you?"

"Sure," I said. I sat on the edge of the deck, my toes dangling inches from the water. Señora tucked her legs beneath her skirts.

"My mom's probably listening through the glass," I said.

Señora smiled. "It’s what mothers do."

I brushed a moth off my shirt and watched it fly toward the porthole light. 

"I want to ask you something," said Señora. She looked me in the eye.

"Okay," I said. 

'Would you speak tomorrow? For Quetzal?"

I picked at a sliver of deck wood. We both stared out toward the white limestone banks.

"Not Suarez?" I asked.

She shook her head. "No. Quetzal trusted you." 

My stomach clenched.

"Because of Hawkinsville?" I asked.

"Of course," said Señora. 

I tossed splintered pieces of wood into the water. I knew we were both thinking of Amelia. Of the way her ashes floated over the Hawkinsville City steamboat's creaking wreckage.

"I don't think I'd do a good job," I said.

"I'm sure you'd do just fine," Señora said. Wisps of long, dark hair escaped from her bun. She let them fall in her eyes before tucking them behind her ears. 

The boat rocked beneath us.

"I'm failing public speaking. The last time I spoke in front of a group of people I passed out. In front of my whole class."

Señora was quiet for a moment. "Oh, honey."

"My mom doesn't know yet," I said. "Please don't tell her."

She laid a thin, brown hand on my knee. My skin looked so pale beneath her fingers. I shrugged and managed a half-smile.

"I don't think I could talk about Quetzal in front of a bunch of people."

Señora hugged me tight. She smelled like cinnamon. My throat tightened and my eyes burned.

"You can," she said. "Everyone there loves you and loves Quetzal. There will be no judge."

A sturgeon broke the water in front of us, sailed in our direction, and fell short. It hit the side of the boat with a loud thump. Señora gasped and pulled me back against the deck. Her grip stung my wrist. I twisted loose. She took my face in her hands, her back straight against the boat wall.

"Are you alright?" she asked.

Her dark eyes, normally squinted from smiling, sat wide and unblinking in her face.

The door slammed open and my mother's frazzled head peered out the door.

"What was that?" she asked.

"Sturgeon," I said. "Everything's fine."

"You're okay?" she asked. She twisted her hands nervously.

I nodded. "I'll come inside in a minute, okay? We'll have tea."

My mother cut her eyes over to Señora. "I'm sorry about your son," she said. She disappeared inside.

Señora crossed herself and kissed my forehead. We leaned against the outer wall of the boat, our legs tucked close to our bodies. The water went still again. 

"Jae," said Señora. She took my hands. "Please speak tomorrow. It would mean so much."

I thought about all the times she'd fed me tostones and pork, all the times Quetzal stuck up for me.

"Okay," I said. "I'll try."

She kissed my cheeks. “Thank you.” 

Señora stepped into her rowboat and settled behind the oars. She sat straight and tall as I untied her and pushed her off. I leaned over the side and searched our hull for cracks. My mother's face hovered in the window.

I stood at the funeral pulpit and counted faces. Seventy-six people watched me learn the impossibility of delivering a eulogy for my best friend. Construction workers banged on the roof of the church. Fine white flakes fell down the front of my black dress and dusted the podium. Suarez watched me from the first pew, rolling his tie around his fingers then letting it loose.

Palm fronds brushed against the stained glass windows and sent a tightness up my throat from the pit of my chest. The A.C. unit turned on, buzzed for several minutes, and clicked off. Someone coughed toward the back. My dress clung to my legs in the heat. 

I tapped the mic once. No feedback. I stared at the words on the paper, words that meant Quetzal was gone. When the doors creaked open, everyone turned.

"Sorry. Sorry," whispered the girl in the grey dress.

Carrine took my empty seat beside Suarez.

"I was sitting there," I said. The words echoed across the church before I could think to stop them. 

"Oh," said Carrine. She scooted over a little. 

Señora smoothed her dress over her knees. The tips of my fingers went numb and my head went swimmy. I stared at Carrine and tried to see in her what Quetzal saw. 

Thin blonde hair.

Slim grey dress.

Knobby knees.

Obnoxious eyebrows.

"Quetzal was kind," I said. The words felt stale on my tongue.

I clutched Quetzal's eulogy in my fist and sweated through the paper. Carrine started crying—big ugly sobs. Overdramatic sobs.

"Quetzal," I said, louder. "He—“ 

"Jae," said Señora and my stomach went nauseous. Red candles burned around Quetzal's casket, a hunk of the Spanish moss he loved so much curling across the wood like a woman's hair.

I wiped my palms on my dress. 

"Quetzal loved his little sister," I said. My fingers tingled and my vision blurred. I closed my eyes and kept them closed. I focused on the pulpit’s flat wood against my palms. 

"I miss him," I said.

Heels clicked up the steps to the pulpit and then Señora's hands were on my shoulders.

"Come down, honey," she said, her voice thick.

I opened my eyes a sliver and stepped down from the pulpit. I handed Señora Quetzal's eulogy.

"I'm sorry," I said. 

She hugged me tight, her thin body pressed against my own. I wanted to curl up under the pew until every last person was gone.

After the funeral I dreamed about faces: Quetzal's blank eyes peering up from the darkness of his wooden box. Señora's face, drawn down with mourning. The smell of dirt all over my hands. I woke at two in the morning, sweaty in my sheets, my stomach in fist-sized knots. The boat floor swayed beneath me. My mother coughed in her sleep on the couch. I made tea and tried to forget the Suwannee’s dark water. 

The river blessing was a week after we buried Quetzal. I found a spot in the grass near the grill tent and waited for Suarez. Quetzal loved the river blessing as much as he loved the spring Red Belly Festival.

"Only difference is at the river blessing, you don't have to catch your own food. Just bring burgers instead of bait for fish," he told me once. Until I met Quetzal, I'd never been to a river blessing. 

People filtered past wearing jeans and sneakers. Suarez sat beside me in basketball shorts and Jordans. 

"No one's going to swim this year," I said.

Suarez shook his head. "Check out all the signs they put up."

BEWARE: STURGEON signs stood every three feet along the riverbank. 

"I want a burger," said Suarez. He stared up at the smoking grills. "You want one?"

"I'm not hungry," I said.

He sat back and picked grass. I pulled Quetzal's pocketknife out and flipped it open.

"You still have that?" asked Suarez.

I nodded. "Yeah." It felt warm and heavy in my palm. I placed it in the grass between Suarez and I. It burned between us.

"How's SAT studying going?" Suarez asked. "Learn any more big-ass words?"

"Auxiliary," I said. "And esoteric.”

"This blows," said Suarez.

Around four, Father Rawlins stepped up to the water. He didn't lift his clerical robes to reveal board shorts. No one yelled "Hey, Pops!" and tossed him a beer. He simply stood ankle deep in the river and stared out at the rolling sturgeon. 

"We bless this river as our fathers and mothers did, and their mothers and fathers before them, and before them, and before them," he said.

I mouthed these words along with him as I had a dozen times before. They slipped easily from between my lips. Mosquitoes bit my mosquito bites. I slathered mud along my limbs. Father Rawlins let a palmful of water slip through his fingers. In the middle of the river, sturgeon leapt and splashed.

"This river has been good to us always," Father Rawlins continued. "It has quenched our thirst and fed our commerce and filled our bellies."

Señora Williams sat in a chair at the edge of the water, her legs tucked beneath her skirts. Every so often she set her glass down and shook condensation from her hands, but mostly she kept her eyes on the pines and palms and scrub lining the opposite bank. Quetzal's jetski was gone, towed away to the junkyard across town.

Carrine stepped out of the crowd. She wore a white sundress and a pearl ribbon in her hair.

"Today the river blesses this young woman," said Father Rawlins. "Today God gives her new life."

Father Rawlins spread his arms out and beckoned Carrine forward. She stepped between two signs, waded into the water until the hem of her dress soaked through. Father Rawlins led her into deeper water. He pushed her under. Two of our classmates threw a football back and forth over a beached DNR boat. People at the grill tent turned their heads toward the river then resumed their conversations. A sturgeon leapt a few yards from Father Rawlins then fell back through the surface.

Carrine emerged dripping from the river. Father Rawlins followed. A few people clapped. Father Rawlins took Señora's hands, bowed his head to hers, and blessed her.

Señora held his hands in silence.

I picked a clump of Spanish moss apart one strand at a time, and watched Carrine wring out her hair. She picked her way toward us through the crowd. All along the way, people placed hands on her shoulders, fingered her hair. When she reached us she sat with her back to the river.

"Hi," said Suarez.

Carrine ignored him and stared at me. "You're not going to apologize?"

"For what?" I asked. My gut twisted.

"You know what," she said. "The funeral. Quetzal was my friend, too."

"Is that why you baptized yourself?" I asked. "In his memory?"

"You don't know anything about me," Carrine said. She shivered. I could see her bra through her dress, lacy, probably mail-ordered from Victoria’s Secret.

"I don't need to know any more than I already do."

"Jae," said Suarez. "You know it's not her fault."

My face flushed. I wanted to smack him.

"She was always mean to him," I said. I turned to her. "You were always mean to him. Even after Amelia died. And don't pretend you didn't know. The whole town knew."

I picked up Quetzal's pocketknife. "I have to go."

*

I slipped on flippers and a snorkel mask near the U.S. 90 bridge. Without a scuba tank I'd have to hold my breath. I waded into the river and swam to the middle. Every so often a sturgeon launched itself out of the water and my heart beat a little faster.

I ducked my head under and kicked until I could just see the top of the wreck. City of Hawkinsville. The old steamboat had been Quetzal’s last obsession. Before the sturgeon. I'm not sure why he never told Suarez about our dives.

The boiler area was our favorite. I dove, held my breath hard, and squinted into the sun-greened water. There were the algae-covered boilers, round and fuzzy, and there was the bit of railing where Quetzal scratched his sister's name. I kicked deeper. My lungs burned. I surfaced for air. I think what fascinated Quetzal was the fact that such destruction could be buried under so much still water. 

Cars whizzed across the bridge.

The sun beat on my head.

I gripped the pocketknife tight, breathed deep, and dove.

I kicked my way down through the layer of warm water and entered the cold. Goosebumps peppered my skin. I moved along the railing, quickly, hand over hand, searching for Amelia's name: AMELIA WILLIAMS, 2 YRS. The scratch marks were old and deep, grown over with algae. She would have been six now. I scraped the green away with my knife and cleared a patch beside her name.

I'd never held my breath this long before. It hurt. Carefully, I cut Quetzal's name into the rotting metal. Then: 16 YRS. I stared at the lines until I saw black spots. I kicked for the surface. When the sturgeon slammed into the back of my knees, for a second I thought it was Quetzal playing around the way he used to—sneaking up beneath me like a shark or an alligator, using his fingernails as teeth.

I flailed into deeper water. Beneath the surface, shadow shapes bent and swayed with the current, dampened at the edges like oversaturated watercolors, rubbed like Quetzal’s charcoal drawings. My breath bubbled up in fat, shifting globs. My existence became a whorl of mud. I watched tiny specks float against the sunlight.

I held my breath until my lungs burned again. Water filled my ears, deadened my thoughts. 

A calmness.

The muffled rush of the current.

A pale face floated nearby and I swear I saw Quetzal's dark eyes attached to thick aquatic lips, lips perfect for bottom-feeding. Thick whiskers brushed my face. I thought to kick.

Up, I thought. Up, up, up.

On shore, I threw up streams of water, inhaled, breathed deep, tasted that humid Floridian air like it was key lime pie, sweet and sour and delicious. 

At school people avoided me. Whole sections of the cafeteria cleared out when Suarez and I sat down. We were outcasts. 

"It's because of me," I said.

"Yeah, maybe," he said. "You were kind of a bitch to Carrine."

I bit harder into my apple.

Carrine started the rumors about Quetzal when he was alive, so I knew it must have been Carrine who started the rumors about his death: Quetzal steered the jet ski into the sturgeon on purpose. Quetzal jumped off in the middle of the river, wearing weights. Quetzal's body was found half-eaten by alligators because Suarez and I didn't tell the cops in time. Because of her, our classmates whispered about us, whispered about Quetzal. Bullshit.

I got sick of everyone's pity. People who didn't avoid me stared at me, patted me on the shoulder. A girl I hadn't spoken to since grade school hugged me in front of Target. At home, my mother made my favorite foods because it was just the two of us, because first it was my dad and brother in the car accident and then it was Quetzal. Eating mashed potatoes felt like swallowing a wet blanket. I missed Adobo seasoning and sazon. 

"Eat more," my mother said.

I wished Señora would talk to me. We never ran into each other anymore.

On the two-month anniversary of Quetzal's death, I snuck out and rowed for Señora's house. Deep water swallowed my oars. Ibises flocked to my left, dipped their beaks in mud for food. A great blue heron croaked and took off from an old oak. Far off down the river, red and blue lights glowed from the top of a DNR boat. I dragged my rowboat up the bank and knocked on her door before I could think too much about it.

Señora came to the door in a deep green shawl, the mascara around her eyes a little smeared.

"Jae," she said.

I hugged her. "I'm sorry for messing up my speech."

She laid her cheek on top of my head, rubbed my back.

"Come inside," she said. "Sit."

Señora scooped arroz con pollo onto a yellow plate and placed it in front of me. I downed the whole thing—warm, salty, rich—in under a minute. I was starving.

"Eat more. You're too thin," she said, putting more food on my plate. 

Her small home overlooked the river. I hadn't been over since Quetzal's wake. 

Señora filled the coffeepot with dark grounds. 

"I read your eulogy today," said Señora. "He loved you, too, Jae. You were his best friend."

"I miss him," I said.

Señora was silent for a moment, wiping her hands absently on her apron.

"He was a good boy," she said.

"I went to Hawkinsville," I said.

Beans sputtered in the pot and Señora reached to turn the burner down.

  "Come look," she said. She pointed to the ibises roosting in the trees on the riverbank closest to the window.

"Do you want to know something?" she asked.

I nodded.

"Birds are only beautiful to us because they are beautiful to each other," she said.

“Quetzal told me that once,” I said.

Señora smiled. “You know. You should really call me Dina.” She took my hand. “Now tell me how my Amelia is doing.”

She poured coffee and I drank.

I found Suarez by his locker the next day talking to Carrine again.

"We're going fishing," said Suarez. "We're going to catch a sturgeon. We owe it to Quetzal."

"You're going fishing with her?" I asked.

Carrine scrunched up her nose and slapped me hard across the face.

"What the hell?" I yelled. My face stung. 

"You don't know anything about Quetzal and me," she said. "You don't know. So stop acting like you're in some special little club."

"You barely knew Quetzal," I said. "All you did was make him chase you."

Carrine's face crumpled.

"Oh come on," I said. "Are you really going to start crying again? No one's buying it."

"Jae," Suarez said. "Cut it out."

I couldn't stop. I hated her even though I knew I had no right or reason to hate her.

Someone slammed the locker next to me and we all jumped.

"I have class," said Carrine. She disappeared into a classroom down the hall.

I turned to Suarez. "What the hell? She hit me."

"You're acting like a psycho." He crossed his arms over his chest.

The late bell rang before I could find the words to explain the hole I felt swallowing my insides.

"See you at lunch," said Suarez. "In the library."

Suarez, Carrine, and I sat between the back bookshelves and pored over articles and photos and books about the Gulf sturgeon. We learned the grey-brown of their prehistoric bodies, the peach of their pectoral fins. We memorized their solid armor—the skeletons they wore outside their bodies. We discovered their lack of teeth and the way they bottom-feed by suction. 

Suarez looked up from an old fishing guide.

"They're listed as threatened. It's illegal to catch and kill them." 

Carrine slid a photo into the middle of our circle. "Look at this," she said.

I ignored her, but after a minute I had to look.

The photo showed a young woman sitting in a wrecked boat, her face swollen, her eyes blacked and bruised. Blood trickled from her hairline. I flipped it over. Suarez looked a little pale.

"What?" said Carrine. "I'm just saying, that's what sturgeon are capable of."

"Quetzal looked worse," I said.

Carrine bit her lip. "I didn't know it hit him in the head. I thought it just knocked him over. That he drowned." She twisted her hands in her lap. Had she not hit me in the hallway, I would've felt bad for her.

"Yeah, well," I said. I stared at the back of the photo. "We can't do anything illegal. We graduate in May. College applications ask about that kind of thing."

"Seriously?" said Suarez.

"I can't stay here my whole life," I said. “Not in a place where people like her exist.”

The bell rang. We left the pile of books on the floor.

After school, I slung my backpack and a bag of groceries (milk, bread, chicken breasts) into the rowboat and set off for home. My mother hardly left the boat anymore, so I wasn't surprised to see her sitting on deck in a swimsuit. I tied off and lugged my bags up. 

"What are you reading?" I asked.

"Do you really want to know?" she asked.

"Yeah," I said. Lying on her beach towel, my mother looked almost normal. Like she wasn’t a woman with a dead husband and a dead son.

She held up her book: The Search for Certainty: Phenomenology, Logic, and the Philosophy of Mathematics.

"Oh," I said. “Didn’t that guy you used to teach with write that?”

Mom locked eyes with me for a moment. “Yes, but he’s dead now.”

I headed for the door. A jagged hole a little shorter than me opened into the side of our home. 

"What happened to the boat?"

Mom looked up from her book, eyes sleepy with sun. "Sturgeon.”

I dropped my bags and stepped over the broken board edges. There, in the dim living room, lay a five-foot sturgeon. I leaned down and touched its back. The scutes felt dry and rocky beneath my fingers. I followed its body to the head. Its gills fanned in and out, searching for breath. I grabbed it by the tail and pulled back toward the opening. The fish whipped its body to the right, then the left, a giant writhing muscle. I lost my grip and fell onto the edge of the hole. A nail dug into my arm. I bit back a yell and stood. 

"You okay?" asked my mom.

"I'm fine," I shouted back.

I walked over to the sturgeon. It lay on its side in the sun, one fin waving in the air. Warm blood trickled down the back of my arm. I stared at the fish's soft, white belly.

I kicked it.

"Stupid," I said.

I kicked it again. And again. I kicked until my leg was tired and my arm was too sore to lift and the sturgeon wasn't moving anymore. Its gills lifted twice more then went still. I nudged it with my toe. Nothing.

"Shit," I said. "Oh, shit. Oh, no."

I bent over the fish and felt along its side. It didn't move. I fumbled for my cell phone.

"Meet me at the bend, okay?" I told Suarez. 

"You okay?" he asked.

"Just meet me there in fifteen," I said.

I hung up and stuck my head outside the hole. My mother flipped pages. I dragged the fish into the sun and dug some rope out of a kitchen cabinet. The sturgeon's body scraped against the deck. I shoved it to the edge of the boat and over. It floated. I hopped in the rowboat and pulled the sturgeon toward me.

"Jae?" said my mother. She peered over the railing at me. 

"I'm getting the fish off our boat," I said. I wrapped coils of rope around its bony body and through the oarlocks. The fish swiveled its eye around at me. My stomach lurched.

"I'll be back before dinner," I said.

I stretched the oars out into the water. My arms ached from the added weight of the sturgeon. I hoped that moving through the river would filter water through its gills. I hoped it would live. It had to live.

I allowed myself to think of my father. Just this once. To think of the chant he taught me when he sat me behind the oars as a kid.

When I die, please bury me deep.

Just place two oars down by my feet.

Don’t cry for me. Don’t shed no tear.

Just pack my coffin with rowing gear.

I breathed air into my muscles and cut water till the middle of the river where I paused to check that the sturgeon’s gills were still moving. I splashed water over my burning shoulders. The slow current barely moved us off course. Here and there a sturgeon rolled the surface. An osprey wheeled above, chirping.

“Alright, fish. You and me,” I said. I stretched my fingers over the oar handles and dragged us forward. 

When I reached shallower water, I untied one rope and then the other. The sturgeon floated to the surface. I sat on the edge of the boat and dropped anchor. The boat tipped dangerously close to the water under my weight. I jumped in. The sturgeon's pale belly floated above me. I surfaced and wrapped my arms around it. The fish twisted a little in my grip, but not enough to fight away from me.

I pulled the sturgeon through the water with me. Its body stretched nearly the length of my own. Its whiskers trailed against my arm. The water stung my nail wound. The sturgeon's muscles tensed and my heart sped up. It wasn't strong enough to move. 

Suarez waved at me from shore. Carrine stood with her hands on her hips.

"What are you doing?" shouted Suarez. He waded into the water. Carrine stripped to her bikini (her stupid skinny body) and followed.

“Why’s she here?” I asked. “Go home, Carrine,” I told her.

“She was with me when you called,” Suarez said.

I glared at him. I wanted to punch him. The fish squirmed.

“Just help me, Suarez.”

Carrine came to the edge of the water.

"Wow," she said. "It's a sturgeon."

"No shit, Sherlock," said Suarez. "What happened?"

"It hit my house," I said. And then I started to laugh. I couldn't stop. It came up out of me unbidden. "A sturgeon hit my house, Suarez."

He laughed, too, and treaded water beside me, ran his hand along its side. Its gills took in water every so often. It swished its tail a little.

"It's moving, you guys," said Carrine. She looked nervous.

"We have to get it strong enough to swim," I said.

"If we do that it's going to hurt you," said Suarez.

"We'll be careful," I said.

"You helping, Carrine?" asked Suarez.

She took a deep breath and plunged into the water. "Yes."

"Let's pass it around. Maybe that'll help," I said. I pushed the sturgeon out in front of me a little then shoved it toward Suarez, forcing it to swim the little it could. Suarez swam out to meet it where it stopped. He pushed it toward Carrine.

“Don’t kill it,” I told her.

“You’re such a bitch,” she said. She pushed the sturgeon at me all wrong and it careened off to the side.

“See? See what you did?” I said.

I swam after it and caught it by the tail. I tucked it under my arm so that its gills brushed open and closed against my skin.

"Wake up," I told the sturgeon. "I'm sorry."

I passed the fish back to Suarez. Suarez passed it to Carrine and she to me. We pushed it back and forth, back and forth, until with a burst of energy, the fish sped into me, knocking the wind out of my chest. I choked. Gasped. It hovered in front of me. I turned the fish around and shoved it toward open water. It shot off then stopped. "Suarez, push it again," I said.

Suarez swam out and shoved the fish. It bolted and sunk beneath the surface before reappearing again.

"It's too far," said Carrine

I swam out to the sturgeon, approached it carefully. Its scutes looked brown in the water. It looked me in the eye. I pushed it. 

"Go away," I said. 

It thrashed at the surface, rolled, then came to rest in front of Carrine. She shrieked. “It almost hit me.”

I swam at the sturgeon again, but it was gone before my third stroke. Suarez floated on his back. I ducked under the water and squinted around for the fish, saw nothing but Carrine’s long, pale legs hovering feet above the muddy bottom. Underwater, her feet could’ve been my own.

Brenna Dixon

brenjdixon@gmail.com

bjdixon@iastate.edu

Buddy the Python

It had been a mistake, Lyla thought, to buy the snake. They’d named it Buddy—she and Kyle together—Buddy the Python. Admittedly they’d been a little drunk and trolling Craigslist for awkward missed connections when they’d come across the one about “the guy with the hot arms and the freaking awesome snake.” 

“Metaphorical snake?” Kyle had asked.

Lyla’d rolled her eyes.

But the next day, hung over from too much tequila, they’d sipped coffee and hidden out stakeout-style at SW 305th and Krome—the intersection listed on Craigslist. Kyle watched one side of the street and Lyla watched the other and eventually the snake guy had emerged from the Sabor Tropical Supermarket they went to once in awhile for green plantains and fresh sofrito.

“Huh,” Lyla said. “He does have nice arms.”

Kyle groaned and slipped further into the passenger seat, too hungover for his usual witticism. “Go live with him then.”

They’d been having problems. 

“I’m going to ask about his snake,” Lyla said. She’d grinned even though the sun chewed through her sunglasses straight into her brain. 

She caught the snake guy when he got to her side of the street. Up close the snake guy was shorter than he’d seemed—maybe 5’7” to her 5’4”—and oddly enough he was dressed in a suit. A nice suit, one not wrinkled at all. The python wrapped itself around his shoulders, casually, like a cape or a cloak or, well, a boa.

“Hi,” Lyla said. “Nice snake.”

“Yep, he’s a good one,” said the guy. He kept staring over her shoulder, past her, like he was looking for something. Or someone. His forehead furrowed with thought. Lyla guessed that he was in his mid-to-late thirties.

It was then that Lyla decided to be someone else. She was often wanting to be someone else. This inclination had gotten her into trouble as a child and had carried through to adulthood. She’d met Kyle, for example, on a day when she’d been pretending to be more lighthearted than she actually was.

“So,” Lyla said, drawing her finger along Snake Guy’s sleeve, trying to ignore the queasy pit in her stomach. “I saw you the other night.”

This got his attention. He quirked an eyebrow at her. “Yeah? Where?”

“Here. I thought you were so—” She twirled a finger through her auburn hair. The gesture felt unnatural to her, so she told herself she was being a Brittney for the time being. All the Brittneys she’d ever known had been hair twirlers.

“Do you want my snake?” the guy blurted. A bus roared by.

“Uh,” Lyla said. She glanced down at his zipper, thinking of what Kyle’d said the night before. About the metaphor.

The guy looked confused then turned a deep, deep shade of red, maybe even maroon, before jumping in to correct her. “No. No. I have a girlfriend. I mean this snake.” He lifted his shoulder a little. The snake’s tongue flicked in and out. Lyla decided she wanted to be the kind of woman who would own a Burmese python in her thirties. 

And so she and Kyle ended up with the snake formerly known as Crackers, presently known as Buddy the Python, and the stupid thing had taken over their apartment.

At work Lyla pretended to love spreadsheets. She pretended to revel in the clacking of keys. Sometimes she would make it a point to tap out the rhythm of “Another One Bites the Dust” or “War Pigs” as she placed numbers in each tiny, perfect rectangle. No one ever caught on.

At lunch with her work friend, Tanya, she pretended to think about marrying Kyle, about having or adopting babies with him because this kind of conversation was the only kind of conversation Tanya ever wanted to have. And when she got home in the evenings, Lyla pretended to be someone who didn’t mind the fact that Kyle had recently relegated their spare room—the office where she’d previously hacked away at her poetry and he’d whiled away Saturday afternoons putting together terrariums that sold well on Craigslist—to Buddy.

“I did some research at work,” Kyle said from the couch. Buddy lay across the back of it.

Lyla put her bag down near the door and sat in the old purple chair across from him. “Yeah?” she said. 

Kyle nodded. “After I finished shelving the new James Patterson books some kids came in looking for books on gators for a school project, so I was in the reptile section anyway. Look.” He handed her a stack of library books from the coffee table.

Lyla set them in her lap and opened the first book. How to Enjoy Your Python: A Complete Pet Owner’s Manual. She closed it and turned the stack spine-up. There were at least a dozen books of similar titles. “What did you learn?” she asked.

Kyle reached behind him and scratched the top of Buddy’s head. “That we were right to give him a room of his own.”

“Ah,” said Lyla. She liked the snake. She did. But she hadn’t been prepared for the frozen mice and the shedding and the musk. Kyle had taken to Buddy like white on rice, never once objecting to her impulse adoption. Snake Guy had simply given Buddy away, no questions asked. In hindsight it seemed a little weird.

Lyla stood. “I’m going to get some dinner going. Burritos.”

“Okay,” Kyle said. He flipped on the TV and turned to Animal Planet.

Lyla watched from the kitchen as she opened a can of black beans and chopped peppers and sautéed onions. It was a special on tree snails and how people, years ago, had come through and collected them for their lovely, swirled shells. She chopped green onions and imagined men trading for whichever of the lovely cream and white and brown shells they didn’t already have. After the program ended, she and Kyle ate burritos at the kitchen counter, in silence, while Buddy wound around the legs of their chairs, over and under and through, linking them with easy muscle.

On Tuesdays Lyla and Tanya ate cheap tacos from the food truck on the corner. Sometimes they had tamales. Today they didn’t. Lyla bought three pork tacos instead and sat across from Tanya’s mushroom quesadilla. She sipped a tamarind soda.

Lately Tanya had been inviting Susie-from-two-cubicles-down. Susie was a talker. She liked to bake pies, she hoped she’d find the courage to talk to Matt in accounting, she thought she might dye her hair ombre. Lyla was glad to have Tanya to herself today.

“Kyle and I got a python,” she said. It was the first true thing she’d ever said to Tanya.

Tanya raised a heavily penciled eyebrow and sunk her teeth into a wedge of quesadilla. “Why?” she mumbled between bites. Then: “Do you think I should have asked Susie to lunch, too?”

Lyla squinted up at grackle clamoring in the palm fronds. “The python seemed like a good idea.” She bit into a taco, chewed, swallowed. “We figured it would be good practice for the baby.”

Tanya hawked, choked. Chugged from a lemonade. Fluttered bright pink nails against her chest.

“Your what?” she gasped.

Lyla smiled—the small, quiet smile she’d cultivated exactly for the delivery of fake marriage-and-babies news to Tanya. “I just found out yesterday,” she said. “I haven’t even told Kyle yet.”

“Wow,” Tanya said. “What’s he going to say, do you think? Will he propose? Oh my god, what if he proposes?”

Lyla wondered, if the situation were real, what Kyle would do, what she would do. 

Back in the office Lyla felt the news spread like a small, persistent breeze and wondered if she hadn’t gone too far.

Buddy was large to begin with, and within a few months of owning the snake, he’d grown to ten feet in length.

“Yeah.” Kyle nodded excitedly, pointing at yet another library book. “There was a study done in the nineties that said Burms can grow to ten feet in their first year.”

He was calling them Burms now, like a herp enthusiast.

At least he was enthusiastic about something, Lyla thought.

“That’s great, babe,” she said. She spooned curry over rice and then ate a mouthful of the concoction. “But we don’t have the license for a snake this big. Is he even chipped?” She’d done her research, too, and she was beginning to regret her impulse adoption, beginning to understand, maybe, why the snake guy had been willing to give Buddy up in the first place. The bills for just three months of his upkeep cost more than Lyla made in one.

Kyle shrugged. “Nah. Doesn’t matter. He’s never going to get out, so how would anyone know?”

Lyla thought of the many news articles she’d come across during downtime at work. Articles about toddlers smothered by wayward snakes with irresponsible owners—owners like them, she admitted. And articles about pythons snaking their way up through some unsuspecting elderly woman’s toilet, curling up around the plunger like a heart attack waiting to happen. 

“But what if he does?” Lyla asked. “What if Buddy gets out of the room? It’s not exactly secure.”

Kyle closed his book and leveled his brown eyes at her. “Lyla. You brought the snake home. We’re responsible for it, okay? Plus, he’s pretty good company.” Buddy sat coiled in the corner by the TV, basking, Lyla assumed, in its warmth. “And we keep him in the office anyway. How’s he going to get out of a locked room?”

Since Lyla had told Tanya she was pregnant, every day at work felt like tip-toeing around landmines of good intentions. She walked in one morning to find a copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting on her desk. Congratulatory cards and sympathetic chocolate (“work-day cravings are the worst!”) arrived on her desk. Tanya brought her a decaf latte one morning. Lyla hadn’t realized people at her job actually liked her. She hadn’t taken anything she said there seriously. When her boss called her in to talk about maternity leave, she realized—she had to miscarry, or get her period, pretend she’d simply lost track of her cycle.

A couple months later, Lyla woke to find Buddy knotted beneath the sheets at the foot of the bed. At first she’d thought that maybe it was Kyle playing footsie. They’d had a particularly bad fight the night before—something that started with a dirty fork on the counter and ended with income inequality—and after these kinds of fights Kyle would sometimes try to schmooze her into a better morning mood. Once, before Buddy, they’d fought about whether or not to move to a better neighborhood in a good school district for future children (he was in favor; she wasn’t so sure) and she’d woken up to breakfast in bed. Neither the school district conversation nor the breakfast had happened since.

But now there was Kyle, still asleep in the half-morning light, and Buddy tickling her toes with his flicking tongue. “Hi, Buddy,” she said. She was careful to slide out of bed slowly so that she wouldn’t startle him into striking. Even the most docile of Burms, she knew, would think food before foot.  And if Buddy bit Kyle? Oh well. He deserved it for not listening when she’d voiced her concerns about Buddy’s room.

It was Saturday and Lyla dressed quickly in skinny jeans and a loose tank top. She wanted to look nice, but not like she was trying for something. She stopped at a Starbucks for a cinnamon dolce latte and parked at the intersection of Palm and Krome. She would wait.

Around eleven, Snake Guy crossed the street, slipping in and around half-clad tourists on their way to the beach. He wasn’t wearing a suit this time—just cargo shorts and a Guy Harvey shirt with sailfish splashed colorfully across the chest. Lyla got out of the car and ran to catch him. She didn’t even need to pretend to be someone desperate.

When they were sitting at a nearby Cuban deli, Starbucks coffee long-abandoned, café de leche and a plate of guava pastries between them, Lyla asked her question:

“Why did you get the snake?” 

The man eyed her dubiously. “You’re paying for this coffee and stuff right? Because I don’t even know you.”

“Yes. And I’m Lyla. You are?” She tapped her foot beneath the table, impatient.

“Todd,” said Snake Guy. He took a sip of coffee and ripped off a corner of pastry.

“Okay, Todd,” said Lyla. “So why did you get the snake?”

Todd shrugged. The deli filled up around them, bustling with to-go orders and sit-downs playing checkers and at least three different languages. “I was bored,” he said. “I work in a cubicle doing payroll. I didn’t have a girlfriend at the time. Then one day, on my lunch break, I see this guy selling lychee and baby Burmese pythons out of the back of his truck. Five bucks a pop.”

Lyla chewed her pastry. She wondered if Kyle was up and at the library yet. Or if he was getting foot stitches at the E.R. She didn’t check her phone.

“Okay,” she said. “So why’d you give him to me?”

Todd, she noticed, had muscular forearms—probably because of Buddy. A tattoo of the number seven peeked out from under his sleeve. He also wasn’t quick to answer.

“Look,” said Lyla. “It’s been, what, six months, seven? since you gave me the snake? And I didn’t ask the right questions. I’m just trying to ask the right questions.”

Todd nodded. “Okay,” he said. “I got a girlfriend.” He spread his hands wide across the table, splaying each of his fingers out like the legs of a starfish.

“You got a girlfriend,” Lyla said.

Todd nodded. “Yeah.”

She could tell by the way his face lit up that he really cared about his girlfriend. Lyla wondered if Kyle’s face did that when he talked about her. If he talked about her.

She liked the grey threaded through Todd’s hair and the way his eyes crinkled when he smiled. She could see why a woman would want to date him.

“Your girlfriend doesn’t like snakes?” Lyla asked.

Todd laughed. “No,” he said, smiling. “Not so much. The morning I ran into you, she made me take him out of the house. Said she’d leave me if I didn’t.”

Lyla stared at the embroidered art on the wall behind their table. Primary colors wound their way around and through each other to form a small house on a far shore with a light in the window.

When Lyla got back to the apartment, Kyle was gone and Buddy was still curled up in the bed. She read the paper, did the crossword and Sudoku, had some leftover curry and a stray piece of sourdough. It was a feeding day for Buddy, but she couldn’t lift him herself—he was almost 150 pounds by her best guess—so she tapped his nose with a stick so he’d know it was feeding time, and put a thawed-out rat in her favorite sheets. Buddy stretched himself out, tongue flickering, toward the rat. Mouth wide open, he sank his teeth into the poor dead mammal. This was the part of snake ownership that fascinated Lyla most—the lengthening of muscle beneath rippled skin, beautiful patches of caramel and cream and mahogany brown, the deliberate movement, wrapping of coils, the faux choking of something already dead.

Kyle didn’t come home that night or the next day or for three weeks after. He didn’t pick up the phone. He hadn’t left a note. Friends and family hadn’t heard from him, had no idea where he’d gone—or so they said. Lyla hadn’t managed to lure Buddy back into his room and she couldn’t trick him into the 32-gallon plastic trashcan the internet had said he’d fit in. She couldn’t move the snake, not even to release him into the Everglades—something she knew was strictly prohibited anyway—and neither Todd nor Kyle answered her texts.

Buddy grew and grew, first to twelve feet then to fourteen, but she didn’t have it in her to let him starve and she was too afraid to call animal control. She’d seen the shows. They arrested people for stuff like this. Every day, it seemed, when she came home from work it was to some new hell: snake shit on the couch, a shed skin in the bathroom, an ignored, limp rat in the middle of the kitchen.

Sometimes Lyla imagined her life six months into the future—never any more. Kyle would come back to collect some of his stuff. He would reach down to scratch Buddy, say, “Hey, fella,” and then he would turn to Lyla—Lyla who, she admitted, even in her fantasies, wouldn’t yet have been able to corral Buddy so that someone could come change the locks. So Kyle would use his key to come in and say, “Hey, babe” like he was just returning from a quick run to the store. Maybe he would even be carrying a gallon of milk to play it off. He was that stupid. And then, Lyla imagined, Buddy would coil around Kyle’s ankles, snapping bone and twisting him to the ground. He would wrap around her ex-boyfriend so that all she could see was his brown tuft of hair. She wouldn’t throw vinegar or hot water or anything at Buddy to stop him. She would let him, just this once, be the demon monster so many people thought Burmese pythons were.

Dead to Me Review: Beyond the Drama and Black Humor

Does the end justify the means?

In the Netflix series Dead to Me, released in 2019 and ended in 2022, Liz Feldam explores this
idea through a dramatic storyline, full of crime and unexpected twists, while dipping into the
complexities of friendship and unconditional love.

The series begins in media res, with a grieving Jen, starring Christina Applegate, after her
husband has tragically died in a hit-and-run. Suddenly, Jen finds herself struggling with
balancing her new life as a single mother of two kids and her job as a real estate agent while
copying with an ongoing investigation with no leads and little support from the police. Amid this
chaotic scenario, Jen decides to attend a support group where she meets Judy (Linda Cardellini),
an eccentric but kind woman with whom she easily bonds. However, after spending more time
together, Jen realizes Judy has not been completely honest about her life. At the same time, the
audience learns that Judy was the person responsible for the hit-and-run that caused Jen’s
husband’s death. From that moment, the friendship between Jen and Judy is tested challenge
after challenge as new lies and secrets unfold.

Far from the dark and mysterious tone that usually accompanies this kind of plot, Feldman
embarks on the public in a humoristic TV series where the intricacy and motivation of the
characters are more important than their actions. As we learn more about our protagonists
through the use of flashbacks, what first started as a story with clear victims and victimizers
turns into a puzzle impossible to solve. A huge part of this is due to the script's construction,
which undoubtedly draws elements from Greek tragicomedies where the protagonists are
condemned to suffer and subject to divine intervention. Throughout the development of the 3
seasons that compose this series, it becomes harder for the audience to decide whether or not the
tragedies surrounding the protagonists are their fault or the result of destiny. The casting of the
show also does a great job both playing their roles and characterizing the emotions of their
characters, especially those of guilt and grief. The audience easily empathizes with them
preventing them from wishing them wrong.

Dead to Me also explores deeply the issue of mental illness and coping mechanisms. On the one
hand, we have Judy, who deals with depression but tries to remain positive about life, believing
in the greater good. However, her childhood trauma and fears of abandonment often make her
lose agency over her life, getting involved in tangled relationships. Jen’s mother-in-law, Lorna,
deals with her grief and guilt through substances, while Jen’s anger issues lead her to make
impulsive decisions throughout the series. Yet, despite touching on several serious issues, the
show is effective in maintaining its comedic tone throughout the series. The depiction of a
dramatic crime case in the paradisiac setting of Laguna Beach, along with the use of bright
lighting and cheerful jazz as soundtrack helps to create an ironic and almost absurd atmosphere
that keeps the series from falling into a thriller.

Although the plot twists in Dead to Me can become a bit tiring and unrealistic in seasons two and
three, the storyline remains interesting enough throughout its development to make it a
binge-worthy show. Packed with a unique script and stellar performances that have made the
show worth several Emmy nominations, Dead to Me is an easy show to recommend. It is a series
that not only entertains but comes as a thought-provoking show that challenges the viewers to
explore the spectrum of human emotions and the bonds we make with others. In the end, whether
or not the end justifies the means, Dead to Me leaves the audience with a new perception of what
is morally correct, and the burdens that one overcomes while making our way through life.

Raising the Bar: Baldur’s Gate 3

Baldur’s Gate 3 is a game that defines a generation. On August 3rd, 2023 Larian Studios released this titan of a game that swept the world by storm. The game is set in the world of Dungeons and Dragons, a beloved tabletop game known for the freedom it gives its players. Larian sought to design this game around that same concept of freedom. They aimed to give their players the ability to steer the plot in whatever direction they desired and to do so in whatever way they could imagine. Were they able to achieve this lofty goal? 

Well, yes. In Baldur’s Gate 3, Larian gives the players the frame and lets them fill it however they want from beginning to end. Let’s start with character creation: there are 11 races, 31 subraces, 12 classes, and a whopping 46 subclasses to choose from in character creation alone. Players can choose to set off on their adventures as a stealthy and cunning rogue, picking pockets and cutting throats along the way; a paladin bound to an oath, wielding the divine power to smite their foes as long as they don’t break their oath; a bookish wizard, who uses their massive intellect to rain hellfire down from above; and even a mighty barbarian, who use the power of big muscles and being really, really mad to cut people in half.

If making your own character seems too complex, or you just want to experience the game from a different perspective, there are also six preset origin characters to choose from. These characters each have their own unique stories to follow and mysteries to uncover that are tied in throughout the plot of the game. As for the origin characters you don’t choose, they become your companions in your adventures in and around the city of Baldur’s Gate.

(Two characters I’ve made)

But that’s just the character creation. Once you’re satisfied with your character’s looks and abilities and finally decided on how many freckles they should have after a long hour of inner debate (yes this is actually something I’ve done), you are launched straight into the world. Here’s what you know: you were captured by creepy evil squid people called mind flayers, they put a tadpole in your brain that will kill you in the most painful way possible before turning you into one of them, and you really want to get it out because… well, I shouldn’t have to explain that. And no, none of that is a spoiler because you literally learn it within the first five minutes of the game!

In your quest to get that nasty little wriggler out of your head you meet all sorts of people, ranging from goblins writing rather vulgar love poems to literal gods who can and will kill you if you say the wrong things, go all sorts of places, including Hell itself and a world made of shadows, and, of course, the grand city of Baldur’s Gate. What you do in these places and how you interact with these people is entirely up to you. You can be an evil little monster and run around killing anything that moves, you can be a saint with a heart of gold who helps everyone in need, or you can be anything in between.

Certain choices you make throughout the game irreversibly change the world, locking out content that would’ve potentially been available had you made a different choice. Your decisions in this game have weight and consequence. The environment and the people living in it respond to the decisions your character makes, resulting in an evolving world that feels real and full of life. You wanted that gnome and his buddies to help you out with a secret mission? Well too bad, he remembers that you left him tied to a spinning windmill a couple weeks ago. What goes around comes around.

Considering all of that and the fact that the game is separated into three acts, the average time to complete this game comes out to roughly 80 hours. The game takes roughly 60 hours playing just the main story and ignoring all side content, and roughly 150 hours to complete both the main story and all side quests. There are a total of 17,000 different endings. Some of these vary in minute details such as relationships with certain characters, but others have world-altering differences. When compared to other popular RPGs released in the last couple years such as Horizon Forbidden West and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, which are both around 30 hour games, the size of Baldur's Gate 3 is truly mind-blowing.

Now that we’ve gotten the massive size and detail of the game out of the way, let’s talk more about the freedom Larian gives you. Picture anything you could possibly want to do in a video game. You can do that in this game. Blow up a wall with a massive fireball? Sure! Throw the puny goblin off a cliff? Sure! Stack a hundred boxes on top of each other to get to the top of a tower? I don’t know why you wouldn’t just use the stairs, but sure! While there obviously isn’t absolute freedom, it’s still a game after all, you and your party are able to do just about anything you can think of in Baldur’s Gate 3. Like I said before, Larian gives you the frame to fill but it’s entirely up to you what you fill it with.

So far I’ve only said positive things about the game, and I want to make it clear that there are still some areas of the game that could be improved on. The game is so big and open ended that there are bound to be some bugs. I haven’t encountered anything game breaking, but I have found a few: conversation markers over people with nothing to say, enemies that forget they’re dead and stand back up, and buildings where apparently the walls have eyes and it’s impossible to hide. The way that the multiplayer works can also be a bit frustrating at times like when you’re locked out of interacting with certain characters because your friend beat you to it, or cutscenes that are rudely interrupted by your friends skipping it or killing the person you’re talking to. That said, these are really rather insignificant issues that I did not mind too much while playing the game and in no way detract from its overall quality. 

What I would consider the biggest problem with the game, though, is the barrier to entry. Like I said earlier, Baldur’s Gate 3 is a game based on Dungeons and Dragons. As someone who has known about and played D&D for years, that was perfect for me. I came into the game already knowing about the setting and the mechanics that the game followed. For someone else, though, I can see how learning about the game could be difficult at first. 

The most challenging part of that is understanding the mathematical nature of the game. Everything is decided by rolling dice which are then modified positively or negatively by each character’s stats and abilities. Rangers might be better at tasks that require dexterity, like stealth, while druids might be better at tasks that require wisdom, like medicine. Luckily the game has recommended settings for beginners and most die rolls happen behind the scenes, only telling you whether you succeeded or failed. While the game does a good job of teaching new players how the system and its many features work, it is something that players inexperienced with D&D or other similar games should be aware of before diving in.

Larian sought out to accomplish what had previously been considered impossible in the gaming community, and proved that it was possible. They succeeded in making a game that gave almost full control to the player, complete with a massive world and fleshed out characters that keeps their community coming back for second, third, fourth, God knows how many playthroughs. Personally I’ve played more hours of this game than I’d like to admit (well into the triple digits), and I still have yet to see everything that this game has to offer. I’m wildly impressed by Baldur’s Gate 3 as well as Larian’s active response to player feedback, and it is the only game I have ever played that I would give a perfect 10/10. There’s a reason it won game of the year.

My name is Julie Do, and I’m a student majoring in biology at Tufts University. Alongside science, film has consistently played a huge role in my life, with my favorites including “A Matter of Life and Death,” “Indiana Jones: The Last Crusade,” “It’s a Wonderful Life,” among many others. It’s an absolute joy exploring various cinematic genres and diving into the nuances of storytelling, and I've had the wonderful opportunity to serve as the film editor for the literary journal “The Drunken Boat.” 

Marie Antoinette Unveiled: Tufts' Theatrical Gem Blends Historical Opulence with Modern Intricacy

By: Julie Do

In a transformative journey through time, Tufts University's Balch Theatre became the canvas for an audacious and oddly insightful portrayal of the infamous Marie Antoinette. Directed by Noe Montez, this unique production unfolded from October to November, showcasing the collaborative talents of Tufts students. The play, a creation of David Adjmi, delves beyond the historical facade, inviting audiences to reimagine Marie Antoinette, played by Tess Kaplan, in a modern light. The main cast also includes Wylie Doak as Louis XVI, David Palamar as the lamb, and Sam Dieringer as the guard.

Transporting ourselves back to the 17th century feels like navigating an alien landscape, devoid of the familiar contemporary language that peppers our conversations today. Envision a world where people converse with pomp, stifled laughter escapes through rigid lips, and dismissive waves punctuate social interactions.

Now, consider the prospect of reimagining Marie Antoinette, a historical figure entrenched in the past, as a modern individual complete with the sass, wit, and idiosyncrasy of a modern millennial. And there you have David Adjmi's spin on “Marie Antoniette,” offering an ostentatious yet deeply compelling glimpse into the heart of royalty itself.

Marie Antoinette, a name ensconced in the glittering tapestry of luxury and a political figure entwined in controversy and opulence. Her life, a labyrinth of political responsibilities that often left her bewildered, maligned by her own people, and her legacy reduced to the grand prize of her own head. Yes, that Marie Antoniette.

David Adjmi skillfully delves into a narrative that transcends the historical account of Marie's reign over France. Instead, it evolves into a profound exploration of the intricate nature of her character, tracing her inexorable descent into a vortex of instability. It's a nuanced equilibrium of humor, historical reflection, and tumultuous affairs that renders the play exceptionally effective in telling Marie’s story.

What elevates the play is its capacity to surpass the superficial narrative. Yes, we know Marie Antoinette's reputation as a neglectful and inconsiderate queen, fixated on opulence rather than the welfare of her people. How does the playwright skillfully extend this narrative? By endowing Marie Antoinette with a sense of humanity.

The idea of assuming the role of a queen at the tender age of 19 is presented as a concept that we find both intriguing and, frankly, incomprehensible. If we were to pluck a 19-year-old TikToker and thrust them into the realm of monarchy, the inevitable chaos that would ensue becomes all too vivid.